Based on the book of the professor of St. Petersburg University V.L. Pyankevich - diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews of the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad. In the catastrophe of the siege, the townspeople were mortally lacking not only food and heat: the information hunger was no less painful and fatal than food. The lack or unreliability of official reports forced us to rely on informal news: rumors, conversations in queues, word of mouth of self-organized crush. Tosses between despair and hope, generated by the unknown, constituted the reality of each day of an infinitely long blockade. The book is devoted to the study of informal communications, the mechanics of emotions and human behavior in a catastrophe.