Lyubov Nikolayevna Kurakina orated above the din. Her husband, a former Party member, has already served two years on a charge of counter-revolution. Her Communist sympathies were shaken by her husband’s arrest, but last night, under the roar of the anti-aircraft guns, she forgot all her earlier resentment. With conviction she extolled the invincibility of Soviet Russia. .
Anastasiya Vladimirovna, our former landlady, sat on a large trunk, smiling sarcastically. She made no attempt to hide her hatred of the Soviet government and sees in this war and eventual German victory our only possible salvation. In many respects I share her views, but that smile irritates me. Two sentiments entered the controversy: the wish to believe that Russia will not be destroyed, and the realization that only war offers any actual possibility that we will be freed from the terror of the regime.1
Skryabina was not the only Leningrader to have mixed feelings about the German attack. Everywhere, anger at Nazi aggression combined with anger at the government’s evident unpreparedness for war, and among some, like Skryabina’s reckless neighbour, with the feeling that German occupation might be a price worth paying for the end of Bolshevism.
When Likhachev returned to the city on Monday he found it sombre and quiet. In the university’s Russian Literature department — housed in what had once been the customs house on the eastern point of Vasilyevsky Island, now called ‘Pushkin House’ — people were unusually talkative, though they ‘looked around’ as usual before speaking out: ‘Everyone was surprised that literally days before a very great quantity of grain had been sent to Finland — it had been in the papers. . A. I. Grushkin talked most, making fantastic suggestions, but all “patriotic”.’ At the Kirov Works informers recorded the reactions of ordinary workers. Speakers at a public meeting were predictably resolute: ‘I cannot find words to describe the unthinkable treachery of the Fascist dogs’, declaimed one. ‘Our duty is to unite around the government and Comrade Stalin, to forget about ourselves and put all our strength into working for the front.’ But in private, people were angry and frightened:
Comrade Martynov was overheard saying in private conversation: ‘See, we feed Hitler our bread, and now he has turned against us!’ E. P. Batmanova declared that she had heard that Hanko [a Soviet naval base west of Helsinki] has been taken by the Germans. Party members present rebuked her harshly, and explained to other comrades that such conversation is harmful and in the interest of enemy elements.
The following day ‘canteen director Comrade Solovyov delayed lunch. . because of problems with transport. Among those waiting the following conversation was overheard: “It’s only the second day of the war, and already there’s no bread. If the war goes on for a year we’ll all die of starvation.” ’2
Overwhelmingly, though, the public mood in the first few days of the war was one of genuine patriotism. Even before orders for general mobilisation went out on 27 June, queues of would-be volunteers formed outside local Party offices, military recruitment centres and factory headquarters. Altogether, some 100,000 Leningraders volunteered in the first twenty-four hours of the war, well before officialdom had had a chance to call them up.3 By Thursday 26th the Kirov Works was able to report that it had received over nine hundred applications for entry into the works militia and 110 new applications for Party membership. The district recruitment office had received over one thousand requests, from women as well as men, to be sent to the front.4 On the day war was declared eight-year-old Igor Kruglyakov went with his father and uncles to the Karl Bulla photography studio on Nevsky Prospekt, to pose for a family portrait. The next day, he remembers, ‘we went over to the Petrograd Side, to accompany my father to the military commission. I remember that voyenkomat, the courtyard was surrounded by buildings all the way round. There was a little checkpoint and he was quickly registered somehow or other. He went off that same evening.’5
Over the following few weeks, Party workers organised highly choreographed but nevertheless semi-voluntary drives to raise defence funds. At the Kirov Works, older ‘veterans of labour’ appealed to their colleagues to donate jewellery, money, bonds and other valuables, as well as one or more day’s pay. So many items were donated that factory treasurers soon asked that they be delivered directly to the banks. Refusing, at a public meeting, to accept a Party official’s invitation to forgo pay would have been hard. But as the historian Andrei Dzeniskevich — one of the first to mine Leningrad’s wartime archives in the newly free early 1990s — points out, only genuine concern could have induced somebody to ‘give up gold earrings or a single silver spoon, the existence of which nobody else knew about’.6
This wave of patriotic volunteerism also engulfed the city’s intelligentsia, the social group, aside from army officers and senior Party officials, hardest hit by the repressions of the previous five years and thus with the most reason to hate the government. Despite the vast differences of context, the itch for action, among the young at least, was not dissimilar from that which propelled the jingo-fed schoolboys of Edwardian England into the trenches. ‘Hello Irina!’ an eighteen-year-old wrote to his girlfriend that June,
I am going to witness something extraordinary and significant — I’m off to the front! Do you understand what that means? No you don’t.
It’s a test of self — of one’s opinions, taste, character. And that’s not a paradox. Perhaps I’ll be able to understand Beethoven’s music better, and the genius of Lermontov and Pushkin, once I’ve been to war. .
Well, there’s no time to write. Now I’ve got an advantage over you. I’m going to plunge into the vortex of life, while you’re destined to keep on swotting away at your books. Am I overdoing it about the books? It’s alright; maybe we’ll see each other again one day. I hold your hands and squeeze them tight — Oleg.7
Older Russians, for whom the Soviet Union was a foreign and hostile country, felt a new identification with their homeland. ‘In the dismay of the first few days’, as the then thirty-nine-year-old literary critic Lidiya Ginzburg later put it, educated Leningraders
wanted to be rid of loneliness, an egoism which intensified fear. It was an instinctive movement. . the eternal dream of escape from self; of responsibility, of the supra-personal. It all found absurd expression in an odd feeling of coincidence. The intellectual now wanted for himself the thing that the community wanted from him.
Startlingly, people trained by necessity to disguise and hypocrisy, to never speaking their minds except to their oldest friends, suddenly found themselves sincerely in tune with the popular, state-approved mood. ‘Those not liable for call-up’, Ginzburg remembered, ‘urgently wanted to do something — go to the hospital, offer their services as an interpreter, write an article for the paper, seemingly without wanting to be paid.’ Officialdom did not always know what to do with them. They ‘fell into a machine totally unadapted to such psychological material. With customary rudeness and mistrust. . it threw people out of some sections and dragged them into others against their will.’8