Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (45 page)

‘The woman was taking her small children to Helsinki to join her
husband. She expressed doubt regarding the wisdom of her going, lest the family be caught in Helsinki by a new war.’
^{38
Listeners at agitational}
meetings often openly expressed their concerns. ‘Will there be a war?’ was one of the most popular questions asked at such meetings in the early post-war months.
³⁹

War rumours as dissent

It is clear that at least some of these war rumours were spread with
subversive intent. Despite the
svodki
’s tendency to assume that all rumours were anti-regime and to ascribe them to ideologized hate groups, the content of some of the rumours from this period cannot be understood in any other terms. Nina Velikova of Crimea
raion
was recorded commenting in 1946 that, ‘It is necessary for there to be a war . . . Do you understand that if there is a war there will be an exchange of power?’
^{40
Whether or not this particular comment was}
accurately reported, the overwhelming evidence is that at least some Soviet citizens spoke in these terms. The Secret Police did not have to be

^{35
Inf. GAARK f. 1, op. 1, d. 2414, ll. 67–129.}

^{36
Sv. Ibid., l. 6.}

^{37
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 37, d. 36253, l. 3; d. 37006, l. 6.}

^{38
Mem. Barghoorn,}
Soviet Image of the United States
, 254.

^{39
Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op. 88, d. 705, l. 73; GAARK f. 1. op. 1, d. 2550, l. 7.}

^{40
Sv. GAARK f. 1, op. 1, d. 2550, l. 25.}

Panics, Peace, and Pacifism 1945–53
135

paranoid or excessively creative to infer that there were some individuals
who were hoping for liberation from outside.

Anti-Soviet nationalist movements were the most prominent em-
ployers of rumour as a language of subversion. The western borderlands, occupied in 1939–41, were a kind of ‘Wild West’ in the early post-war years, where nationalist partisans controlled large portions of the coun- tryside. Up to 100,000 Lithuanians, 40,000 Latvians, 40,000 Ukrain- ians and 30,000 Estonians fought the Soviet regime, and Soviet power only stabilized in the region in the summer of 1947.
^{41
These active}
fighters, as well as the many more sympathizers who supported them, were a fertile constituency for war rumours after 1945. Slegushkina, a
kolkhoznitsa
from Starobel’skii
raion
was recorded saying ‘Now all the bread is being removed to Russia and Ukraine will starve again . . . A war is inevitable, indeed without it, it will be impossible to live, and Ukraine will die under the rule of Russia.’
^{42
Partisan propaganda from the time}
also makes clear that they were hoping for external intervention. A leaflet published in Latvia in May 1945 claimed that, ‘All the people are hoping that England and America in the near future will decide the case of Latvia on the principles of the Atlantic Charter . . . The Allies will never leave the Latvian people to the Bolsheviks.’
⁴³

Various nationalist partisans also affirmed in later years that they had
been hoping for liberation at this time. Valdur Raudvassar, an Estonian partisan, remembered that hopes were particularly high in the earliest post-war months.

No one bothered to study too much because everyone thought that war would
break out soon for certain. Everyone thought that either the Americans would come to our aid or that the Germans would come back. So all the schoolboys kept hoping for and preparing to go to war.
⁴⁴

Whilst it is necessary to retain a cautious approach to individual
comments, Secret Police, state prosecution, and agitators’ claims that nationalist partisans were key vehicles for war rumours do not seem

^{41
W. C. Clemens, ‘Comparative Repression and Comparative Resistance: What}
Explains Survival?’ in O. Mertelsmann, ed.,
The Sovietisation of the Baltic States, 1940–
1956 (Tartu, 2003), 23; M. S. Pyskir, trans., A. Savage,
Thousands of Roads: A Memoir of a
Young Woman’s Life in the Ukrainian Underground During and After World War II (Jefferson NC, 2000), 28.

^{42
Sv. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 517, l. 36.}

^{43
Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op. 122, d. 94, l. 92.}

^{44
M. Laar, trans., T. Ets,}
War in the Woods: Estonia’s Struggle for Survival 1944–1955

(Washington, 1992), 148. See also: HIP. B7, 188, 16–25.

136
Being Soviet

entirely fanciful. Government authored reports claim that Polish and
Ukrainian nationalist groups, in particular, were relying on Anglo-Saxon support for a revision of the Soviet imposed post-war national bound- aries. Their underground newspapers greeted the Crimean and San Francisco Conferences as disasters, gloomily noting that if the Anglo- Saxons continued their line of cooperating with the USSR then it would represent ‘the end of Poland’.
^{45
However, they did not give up hope.}
Report writers claimed that nationalist pressure had influenced the behaviour of A. I. Nikore, a Komsomol agitator in Polushna village, Buzhorskii
raion
. In February 1946 she stated that, ‘The Soviet power will not be here for long. Therefore, I do not want to and will not explain the constitution and the situation about the elections. When the govern- ment has changed I don’t want them to say that I was a
komsomolka
and

an activist.’
^{46
It was not until the summer of 1947, that a combination of}

Soviet punitive operations and the entrenchment of the international
situation rendered the mythology of an overseas rescuer increasingly irrelevant.
^{47
Until that point, however, war rumours offered the promise}
of liberation, and were a key aspect of the linguistic artillery of anti- regime nationalist groups in their struggle against the state.

Anglo-American forces also bore the hopes of individuals and groups
opposed to collective farming in this period. The wartime tales that the government had bowed to allied pressure and agreed to end the system morphed into post-war stories about allied threats to invade if they were not abolished after 1945. In mid 1947, I.F.Sh. explained to his friend in Leningrad
oblast’
that although life was now hard, ‘the Americans will

arrive and the
kolkhozy
will no longer exist and life will be good’.
^48
The

body of evidence is significantly thinner, but government sources also
suggest that religious groups were important conduits for war rumours in the first post-war months. Prayers for religious liberation are frequently recorded, often fused with nationalist aspirations for the Catholic minorities in the borderlands. Ukrainian Uniates in Bulkhovtsy village

^{45
Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 333, l. 24; Sv. TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 1449, ll.}

23, 31; d. 890, l. 56.

^{46
Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op. 122, d. 183, l. 36.}

^{47
For a discussion of the punitive operations, see A. Weiner, ‘Nature, Nurture, and}
Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism’,
American Historical Review
, 104.4 (1999), 1135–41. For the borderlands more generally, see K. Brown,
A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet
Heartland (Cambridge Mass., 2005); E. Zubkova,
Pribaltika i Kreml’ 1940–53
(Moscow, 2008).

^{48
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 36799, ll. 5–8.}

Panics, Peace, and Pacifism 1945–53
137

gathered systematically to pray ‘in order to spoil the elections and so that
the Anglo-Americans would arrive quickly’.
^{49
The religious language of}
apocalyptic transformation that had dominated the anti-
kolkhoz
protests of the 1920s and 1930s had been replaced by a more earthly day of reckoning for the Soviet government after World War II.
⁵⁰

The idea that an external invasion would bring freedom was a clear
example of resistance, in the sense of stepping outside of the Soviet ‘habitat’ and invoking an alternative order as a means of opposing Soviet power. Invasion narratives undermined the stability of the Soviet state, casting doubt on its capacity to last. They were a particularly potent weapon at a time when the government was articulating an official identity which presented the USSR at the heart of a collaborat- ing community of Great Powers. Soviet administrators railed against war rumours as ‘scandalous’, ‘pessimistic’, or ‘defeatist’. The rumour of Anglo-American invasion was a powerful linguistic shorthand for the dream of social transformation in the first post-war months. Such rumours functioned as a language of resistance that punctured and inverted the rhetoric of Soviet power.

War rumours beyond subversion

However, the transmission of war rumours in this period did not rely
exclusively on their subversive capacity. They were too successful to have functioned purely as a language of resistance. War rumours were certainly recorded more regularly in regions that had an active anti- Soviet underground, but that may tell us as much about the anxieties of local administrators as about the comparative spread of invasion stories. The idea that the Anglo-Saxon powers were about to invade was a highly successful rumour throughout the USSR in the first post-war months. Such rumours were transmitted by peasants, workers, and intellectuals in urban and rural communities, and thrived in regions that had no organized anti-Soviet underground.
⁵¹

^{49
Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 507, l. 268.}

^{50
See: Viola,}
Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivisation and the Culture of Peasant
Resistance (Oxford, 1996).

^{51
Sv. RGASPI f. 17, op. 88, d. 693, l. 2 (worker); Sv. f. 17, op. 125, d. 425, l. 39}

(peasant); Int. Il’ia Lvoevich, May 2004, Moscow (intellectual). Inf. GAARK f. 1, op. 1,
d. 2550, l. 19 (rural) Sv. RGASPI f. 125, op. 425, l. 4 (urban).

138
Being Soviet

War rumours were so successful and so believable that Soviet citizens
regularly acted on them. Hoarding, of either food or money in prepara- tion for a future conflict, was extremely widespread in the first post-war months.
^{52
An NKVD}
svodka
in October 1946 recorded Fomin, a metalworker, stating amongst his colleagues that, ‘The raising of prices on food in all likelihood is a result of the forthcoming war . . . now we need to create reserves in order to not be caught out like in 1941.’
^53
A
respondent to HIP told his interviewers that he, along with a group of fellow soldiers, had set aside a supply of petrol, in preparation for their flight once the war began in 1947.
^{54
Others planned their physical}
movements on the assumption that war was coming. One group of students at the FZO no. 30 in Voroshilovgrad decided to go home in December 1946 to avoid being separated from their families by war, others travelled to the Crimea so the war could swiftly pass them by and they would be in the English occupation zone.
^{55
Large numbers of}
Soviet citizens due for repatriation from Central Europe also resisted being sent home because they expected a war to break out at any moment.
^{56
In May 1945 and March 1946 traders at the L’vov market}
began refusing Soviet roubles and insisted on payment in dollars or pounds, as roubles would become worthless after the Anglo-Americans arrived.
⁵⁷