“The war in West has already started...”: Conversations in 1939 in the barracks, prisons and queues

Abstract

The subject of the study is the reaction of the Soviet population to international events in the fall — winter of 1939–1940. On the basis of reports and memoranda of local departments of the NKVD in the Perm region the author undertakes an attempt to reconstruct the range of opinions about the radical turn of Soviet foreign policy: the “liberation march” to the West, the SovietFinnish War, cooperation with the German Reich, etc. The article also analyzes estimates and judgments about the beginning of the process which was easily recognized as a new great European war. Particular attention is paid to prison conversations about the war. The blockade on information in Soviet prisons and jails was never complete. Prisoners awaiting sentence or under investigation were well aware of events in the outside world, discussed them with each other, expressed sharp criticism of the new direction of Soviet foreign policy. The content of prison debates about war was largely infuenced by the atmosphere of uncertainty: a mixture of hope and despair, fatigue and frustration characteristic for people who had been held for more than a year in the investigative jails of the NKVD, who had suffered through the excruciating investigation, who had morally suffered, and who had gradually liberated themselves from the mental oppression of the “Stockholm Syndrome”. In the workers' milieu everybody was actively discussing the threat of a Soviet-German armed confict. There were suggestions that after defeating Poland Hitler would attack the Soviet Union. NKVD informants reported expressions of doubt in the local queues regarding the correctness of the decisions taken by the top Soviet leadership and the ability of Soviet leaders to “fght” Hitler. People did not believe Molotov's reassuring statements about the abundance of food in the country, and started to stock sugar, salt, matches, and soap. The author comes to the conclusion that the Great Terror turned out to be unable to destroy habitual disputes on political issues among Soviet citizens and did not change their traditions of co-interpreting reality both in prisons and barracks.