The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society: Defeatism, 1941–42

In October 1941, David Kaufman, a Moscow student and aspiring poet, wrote in his diary: “The Civil War was our fathers. The Five Year Plan, our older brothers. The Patriotic War of ’41, this is us. . . . The people of our generation, from diverse walks of life, now have but one path: everyone to the front. Here are heroes, cowards, and ordinary people. Nobody is excluded from the war. If I must write, I will write about how this sense of duty came to govern us. There is only one feeling that should be instilled in people from the cradle: duty.”¹

Kaufman, later published under the pseudonym David Samoilov, would become one of the most beloved poets of the Soviet intelligentsia. His generation was raised under Soviet power and did not know or recognize any other. He belonged to a cohort of educated, urban young people, many of whom rushed to recruitment offices on 22 June 1941, fearful of missing out on the war. On that very day, when so many young enthusiasts were rushing to sign up as volunteers, Olimpiada Poliakova, a resident of the town of Pushkin, outside Leningrad, wrote in her diary:

Could our liberation be at hand? Whatever the Germans may be, they can’t be worse than our own. And what are the Germans to us? We’ll live somehow without them. Everyone has the sense that, at last, the thing we have awaited for so long but did not even dare to hope for—although we did hope for it very much in the depths of our consciousness—has finally arrived. Without this hope it would not have been possible to live. And there is no doubt about the coming German victory. Lord forgive me! I am not an enemy of my people or my homeland. I’m not a degenerate. But you have to look the truth straight in the eyes: all of us, all of Russia, fervently desires the victory of the enemy, whoever he may be. This accursed regime stole everything from us, even our feelings of patriotism.²

Clearly, Poliakova’s claims about “all of Russia” wishing for the victory of the enemy are grossly exaggerated, as are Kaufman’s touching words about the spirit of duty animating his entire generation. What is clear is that, more than 20 years after the revolution, Soviet society was still not homogenous: a significant part of it would have been happy to witness the disappearance of the Bolsheviks.

Historiography

The war was to be the most serious test of the Stalinist system’s durability, becoming, in the words of Robert Thurston, “the acid test of Stalinism.”³ The nature of public opinion about the Soviet regime and the outbreak of the war continues to be one of the most important, and consistently controversial, questions for the history of Soviet society during the war period. Meanwhile, the year 1941 constitutes an important chronological boundary for scholars of Stalinism. According to Stephen Lovell, among historians “the war is usually recognized as traumatic and important, but ultimately is granted the status of a cataclysmic interlude between two phases of Stalinism: the turbulent and bloody era of the 1930s and the deep freeze of the late 1940s. . . . Nonmilitary historians do not quite know what to do with the war.”⁴

Historians whose work relates to the history of Soviet society during the war years have starkly different assessments of popular attitudes toward the state and the war. In the literature of the early 1950s, one already finds the idea that the defeat of the Red Army in 1941 and the vast number of prisoners taken at that time reflected the unwillingness of Soviet soldiers to fight for the regime.⁵ According to Martin Malia, Soviet soldiers in 1941 “felt no ardor” for the defense of the Stalinist system, and “even clearer signs of collapse appeared among the civilian population.”⁶ In accordance with authors who argue that Red Army soldiers in 1941 were forced to fight under threat of reprisals, Mark Edele and Michael...