Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (27 page)

The failure of the official press to forewarn its audience was com-
pounded by the collapse of the infrastructure of the Soviet state in the first months of the conflict. The precipitous retreat of the Red Army sparked panic throughout the areas near the front. Local party bosses struggled to shift factories eastwards and labour discipline fragmen- ted.
^{93
In some places the mechanisms through which official informa-}
tion was communicated disappeared overnight. In Ivanovo
oblast’
agitators simply stopped visiting the factories. As a result, workers were forced to rely on informal word-of-mouth communication and they began gathering thirty minutes before their shifts to have unofficial discussions about events at the front.
^{94
What was published in the}
Soviet press communicated depressingly little to its audience. Retreats

^{91
Luzhkov and Gromov, eds.,}
Moskva Prifrontovaia
, 67.

^{92
HIP. A. 23, 468, 6.}

^{93
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 37, d. 545, ll. 7, 9, 31–4, 45.}

^{94
Livshin and Orlov, eds.,}
Sovetskaia povsednevnost’
, 41–5.

62
Being Soviet

were masked in euphemisms and major defeats were ignored. During
the first months of the war, Soviet film-makers rarely filmed action at the front. Instead they filmed manoeuvres and mock battles in which the Red Army emerged victorious, and presented them as genuine action. Contemporary audiences were not fooled.
^{95
As M. Sviridov}
explained in a 1941 letter to Lozovskii, the deputy head of Sovinform- buro, the failure of the official press to provide the kind of information people wanted contributed directly to the spread of rumours.
⁹⁶

‘News hunger’ peaked in the early crisis months of the war and
probably contributed to the general collapse of morale during the long autumn of 1941.
^{97
The first few months of the war were char-}
acterized by wild rumours and speculation, as Soviet citizens resorted to
bricolage
in an attempt to plug the gaps within official narratives. In July 1941, rumours circulated in Arkhangel’sk that Leningrad was now indefensible, Murmansk had already fallen, and that two transport ships carrying Red Army soldiers had been sunk in the White Sea.
^{98
Muscovites rumoured that the Germans had already entered the outer}
suburbs during the city’s days of panic in October 1941.
^{99
The Soviet}
state recovered some of its poise during the defence of Moscow in late 1941, and events at the front line received detailed coverage once the tide had turned at Stalingrad. Nonetheless, news hunger remained a feature of Soviet life during 1943–5 as the USSR strained for victory.

Rumours were even more important to Soviet citizens during
wartime and they seem to have passed them on with even less regard for the potential risks involved. Respondents to HIP commented:

At that moment one did not have to be too careful about what one said.
I openly told my friends that I didn’t think Stalingrad could hold.
¹⁰⁰

My watch-repair man openly told me of his resentment about the course of
the war . . . The majority did not bother to conceal its feelings of anti-soviet contempt.
¹⁰¹

^{95
Kenez ‘Image of the Enemy’, 108–9.}

^{96
Let. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 30, l. 39.}

^{97
Merridale,}
Ivan’s War
, 78–9; M. M. Gorinov, trans. R. W. Thurston, ‘Muscovites Moods, 22 June 1941 to May 1942’, in Thurston and Bonwetsch,
The People’s War:
Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Chicago 2000), 108–31;

^{98
Sv. GAOPDiFAO f. 296, op. 1, d. 985, ll. 19, 29, 30.}

^{99
R. Braithwaite,}
Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War
(London, 2007), 247.

^{100
HIP. B6, 144, 4.}

^{101
HIP. B6, 382, 1.}

Perfidious Allies? 1941–45
63

Fig. 2.2
N. Denisov and N. Vatolina 1941. ‘Don’t Chatter!’ This famous wartime poster warns that it is a short distance from chatter and gossip to treason.

It might be tempting to describe this candid exchange of views as a
product of the wartime ‘relaxation’. However, whereas trade, cultural, and religious policies were consciously made less repressive, the growth of the rumour network reflected the failure of the official information networks during wartime. The Soviet state did not plan to allow for more rumour. On the contrary, official brochures and posters warned that rumour mongers were unwitting agents of the enemy (see Figure 2.2).
^{102
It simply could not contain the proliferation of unofficial information}
after 1941.

^{102
Inf. Livshin and Orlov, eds.,}
Sovetskaia povsednevnost’
, 18–9.

64
Being Soviet

The most successful category of rumour that circulated throughout
the USSR during wartime, related directly to Official Soviet Identity and concerned the Soviet relationship with Britain and America. Rumours about the Germans were few and far between. Even if some individuals had initially greeted them as liberators, the experi- ence of occupation rapidly turned most Soviet citizens against them.
^{103
The relationship with Germany was clear and comprehensi-}
ble; the relationship with the wartime Allies was full of ambiguities that fuelled a vast body of speculative rumours throughout the period 1941–5.

The success of the official press: the Grand Alliance and Soviet greatness

The available evidence indicates that many Soviet citizens clung to the
newfound wartime alliance with Great Britain as a source of hope during the dark days of 1941. The American novelist, Erskine Caldwell, was visiting a Soviet collective farm in 1941 when the news of the British Pact of Mutual Assistance was announced. When the farmers heard the news their faces broke out into smiles, ‘The great British Army, they told me, and the great Red Army—together we will crush fascism.’
^{104
V. I. Nikitin, a Soviet railway worker, drew strength from}
the fact that that, although the situation was grim at the front in November 1941, ‘our cause is just, the people are united and the USA and England are united with us in alliance’.
^{105
Nonetheless there were}
also some who regarded their new-found allies with suspicion and doubted the sincerity of ‘Churchill’s empty words’.
^{106
Even during}
the desperate early months of the war, there was a diversity of opinions concerning the credibility of the wartime alliance.

This range of reactions to the Allies typifies popular responses to the
Western powers throughout the war. The ‘popularity’ of Britain and America ebbed and flowed rapidly as the news changed. Werth describes how ‘suddenly England seemed to have become wonderfully popular’ in his train carriage when the news of a 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne

^{103
Int. Fischer,}
Thirteen Who Fled
, 75. See Berkhoff,
Harvest of Despair.

^{104
Mem. E. Caldwell,}
Russia At War
(London, 1942), 8.

^{105
Mem. V. I. Nikitin,}
Dnevnik Voennogo Zheleznodorozhnika
(St Petersburg, 2004), 35.

^{106
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 11369, l. 3; Sv. RGASPI f. 17, op. 88, d. 41, l. 18.}

Perfidious Allies? 1941–45
65

circulated in June 1942.
^{107
It is not possible, nor particularly interest-}
ing, to track these day-by-day fluctuations in ‘popular opinion’. However, it is possible to examine the imaginative frameworks, or
mentalit
^´
e
, through which Soviet citizens interpreted the relationship with their wartime Allies.

Pravda
’s growing focus in 1942–3 on the possibility of an allied invasion of mainland Europe had a profound influence on the manner in which ordinary Soviet citizens understood the Grand Alliance. Reports gathered as early as November 1941 note that the citizens of Leningrad were ‘exceptionally interested’ in the question of the Second Front.
^{108
This interest in the Second Front lasted throughout the period}
until it was finally launched in June 1944. At a gathering of propagan- dists in Arkhangel’sk in August 1942, Andreev, a Communist agitator at the Polar Institute, noted that ‘In recent times, apologising that it is “not your topic”, at every lecture without fail they ask a question about the Second Front. This question occupies the foremost place.’
^{109
Out of}
forty-three agitators’ reports from January 1942 to June 1944, that list the questions asked at lectures, only three do not mention the Second Front. Some of the lists state that this issue was raised at every single public meeting.
^{110
The Second Front was also a key topic of private}
conversations in this period. A series of eighteen Interior Ministry NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs)
svodki,
recording the mood of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in Ufa between August 1942 and June 1943, reveal a repeated focus on the question of the Second Front. In October 1942, it had even become an ‘hourly topic of conversation’.
¹¹¹

The overwhelming evidence suggests that the vast majority of these
non-combatant civilians were not only interested in the question of the Second Front, but shared the assumptions of the official press that it would play a vital role in the eventual defeat of fascism. An anonymous cartoon sent to
Krokodil,
just after Molotov’s Anglo-American visit of May 1942, pictured a field of destroyed Nazi forces. A Soviet plane rains bombs on them labelled, ‘Talks between the USA and England’,

^{107
Mem. Werth,}
Russia at War
, 368.

^{108
Gusev, et al.,}
Mezhdunarodnoe polozhenie
, 18–19.

^{109
Inf. GAOPDiFAO f. 834, op. 2, d. 203, l. 39. His comments were echoed by}
three other agitators at the same meeting. ll. 42, 43, 44b.

^{110
Inf. A significant number of these lists can be found in: RGASPI f. 17, op. 88, dd.}
113, 119, 122, 255, 310, 326.

^{111
Sv. TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 125, ll. 1. 25; d. 685, ll. 1–180.}

66
Being Soviet

‘Second Front in 1942’, and ‘Agreement with the USA’. On the horizon
a new day dawns with the words ‘Second Front’ in the clouds.
^112
When
the long-awaited invasion finally came, there was jubilation inside the USSR. In Smolensk
oblast’
, agitators reported that, ‘After the news the mood of the collective farm workers improved; they began to talk more cheerfully and even the work in the fields improved.’ The
kolkhozniki