Crowds listened restlessly, hands in pockets, thoughtfully pinching noses or abstractedly raising fingers to mouths as shocked minds came to terms with the import of the speech.
‘This unheard-of attack on our country is an unparalleled act of perfidy in the history of civilised nations. This attack has been made despite the fact that there was a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, a pact the terms of which were scrupulously observed by the Soviet Union.’
Some individuals stared straight ahead, while others looked about to assess the impact the depressing speech was having on their fellows. Tense faces, pursed lips and shifting glances, manifested the sense of foreboding increasingly apparent to grim-faced audiences straining to catch every word.
Ina Konstantinova declared, ‘I can’t describe my state of mind as I was listening to this speech! I became so agitated that my heart seemed to jump out.’ She, like countless others, was caught up in a patriotic fervour. ‘The country is mobilising; should I continue as before? No! I ought to make myself useful to my Homeland.’ She wrote fervently in her diary, ‘we must win!’(2) Lew Kopelew, a Ukrainian studying in Moscow, was initially euphoric. A committed socialist, he admitted later:
‘I was so stupid, I was pleased, because in my view the announcement seemed to presage a “holy war” in which “the German proletariat” would join us, and Hitler would immediately collapse.’(3)
His reasoning was based on the fact the German Communist Party in 1933 had been the largest voluntary communist organisation in the world.
Others expressed emotion in terms of pain. Jewgenlij Dolmatowski, later to become a Soviet Second Lieutenant, said, ‘I tell you, seriously, it caused real anguish, a feeling at the pit of the stomach’. From that moment on he was inspired to serve his country. Kopelew was similarly convinced. ‘My Homeland must be defended, and eventually Fascism come to a reckoning,’ he concluded. As a fluent German speaker he suspected he might be considered suitable for recruitment for parachute missions deep into Nazi Germany. ‘Stupid idea, eh?’ he ruefully admitted to his interviewer.(4)
These impacts, however, were the very emotions to which Molotov’s speech sought to appeal. ‘The whole responsibility for this act of robbery’ the speech continued, ‘must fall on the Nazi rulers’. There was a characteristic socialist input which gave some credence to Kopelew’s opinion:
‘This war has not been inflicted upon us by the German people nor by the German workers, peasants and intellectuals, of whose suffering we are fully aware, but by Germany’s bloodthirsty rulers who have already enslaved the French, the Czechs, the Poles, the Serbs, and the peoples of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Greece and other countries.’
There was scant comprehension, this early, the pitiless ideological methods the German armies would employ to prosecute the war. The attack was nevertheless clearly an aggression, a transgression of civilised behaviour. It must be stopped.
‘The government calls upon you, men and women citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally even more closely round the glorious Bolshevik Party, around the Soviet Government and our great leader, comrade Stalin. Our cause is good. The enemy will be smashed. Victory will be ours.’(5)
With that the crackling speakers became silent. They later broadcast martial music. The declaration left people shocked and in some respects humiliated. There had been the Non-Aggression Pact. No demands had been made on the Soviet Union, the Germans had simply attacked. Maria Mironowa, a Russian actress, gravely recalled the impact of the surprise announcements:
‘Suddenly the streets were flowing with people. Uncertainties were at the forefront. Nobody knew what to do next. I didn’t know whether I ought to go to the theatre, carry on, or not go in. There were only a few people in the audience, practically nobody. In spite of all this no one comprehended how awful the war was going to be.’(6)
Sir John Russell at the British Embassy in Moscow declared, ‘the shock was all the greater when it did come.’ It was like a work of fiction.
‘I had been out that particular night somewhere and I came home rather late and turned the radio on, and I got onto I think it was Rhykov or Kiev or somewhere like that. Accounts were going on of bombings and attacks and things which I thought was like an Orson Welles programme, like when he bombed New York [as part of an H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds interpretation] you remember? Then when we checked around we found it was real.’(7)
Elena Skrjabin, listening to Molotov’s radio broadcast with her mother in Leningrad, suspected the effect of the transmission was not quite that intended. ‘War! Germany was already bombing cities in the Soviet Union’. She felt Molotov ‘faltered’ and the speech ‘was harshly delivered as if he was out of breath.’ The atmosphere conveyed suggested something dreadful threatened. People caught their breaths with a start as the news was announced. On the streets she saw:
‘The city was in panic. People fell upon the shops, standing in queues, exchanging a few words, buying everything they could get their hands on. They wandered up and down the streets lost in thought. Many entered banks to withdraw their deposits. I formed part of this wave attempting to take roubles from my savings account, but I came too late, the cashier was empty.’
A palpable feeling of crisis reigned. ‘Throughout the entire day,’ Skrjabin felt, ‘the atmosphere was tense and unsettled.’(8) A day before, journalist Konstantin Simonov had been summoned to the Party Broadcasting Committee and instructed to write two anti-Fascist songs. ‘With that I decided that the war, which we all basically expected to happen, was very close.’ He worked throughout the morning of 22 June until disturbed by a telephone call at 14.00 hours. The first thing he heard on lifting the receiver was, ‘It’s war.’ Instructions followed to join the Soviet Third Army in the central sector near Grodno. He was to join a Front newspaper organisation. Unbeknown to him, it already lay within the shadow of the German advance. Uniforms were then issued. During the hectic fitting process he recalled, ‘we were all very lively, perhaps too lively and certainly nervous’.(9)
Like the civilian population in Germany, the impressions of that fateful first day are indelibly stamped on Russian memories. Vladimir Kalesnik, a student living in halls of residence, was caught unawares as his door was flung open and a voice cried, ‘It’s war. It’s war get up!’
‘We thought it was a joke, a game. We got going and were ordered to the Commissariat. We went in and every man received about ten call-up conscription and mobilisation orders. They had to be personally delivered. It all came so unexpectedly.’
Caught up in the patriotic fervour of the moment, young Kalesnik was not mature enough to comprehend fully the emotional implications of his work.
‘As I handed them around I noticed how nervous the family became. I was astonished when men and wives began to weep. At the time, I thought them cowards. But I could never foresee how brutal and awful this war was to become.’(10)
Vladimir Garbunow living in the Urals remembered that Sunday ‘was summer-like and warm, and we were not thinking about a war at all’. On his way home he saw people gathering in the streets listening to loudspeaker announcements. War had begun. Garbunow, like Kalesnik, was too young to comprehend its significance.
‘It hadn’t made us uneasy and we were not afraid. Hmm – now we are at war… The grown-ups wept and remonstrated among themselves… it was clear to them this was bad news. War would bring hard times, but we didn’t understand.’