For many people the war was a time of liberation from fear of the regime. It was a time, perhaps the only time in their entire lives, when they were forced to act without regard for the political consequences of their actions. The ‘real horrors’ of the war focused all their attention, while the potential terrors that awaited them at the hands of the NKVD somehow seemed less threatening, or easier to cope with in the general struggle. During the conversation recorded by Hedrick Smith, the Jewish scientist recalled an incident from the war years:
I was in Kazan in my room sleeping… and in the middle of the night someone from the Cheka came and woke me up, and I was not afraid. Think of it! He knocked on my door in the middle of the night and woke me up and I was not afraid. If some Chekist had done that in the thirties, I would have been terrified. If it had happened after the war, just before Stalin died, it would have been just as frightening… But then, during the war, I was absolutely unafraid. It was a unique time in our history.77
To an important extent, the new sense of freedom was a product of the regime’s relaxation of political and even religious controls after 1941. Children born to ‘enemies of the people’ especially benefited. If they were willing or qualified to work in areas that met an urgent wartime need, their spoilt biographies were much less of an obstacle than they had been before the war. Though not official policy, it was common practice for pragmatic officials to turn a blind eye to the social background of applicants for jobs and student courses that needed to be filled.
Yevgeniia Shtern was born in 1927 to a family of Bolshevik officials in Moscow. Her father was arrested and shot two years later as a ‘German spy’. Her mother was sentenced to five years in the labour camps of Kolyma. Yevgeniia was sent to live with her grandmother in the Altai region of Siberia. In 1943, she returned to Moscow and lived with her aunt. The teachers at her school, where she was allowed to study as an external student, recognized her capabilities and protected her. One day in the summer of 1944, Yevgeniia was passing by the university when she saw a notice inviting high-school students to apply to the Physics Faculty of Moscow University. She had never liked physics, she was not good at it, but she recognized the opportunity to enter Moscow University, the most prestigious university in the Soviet Union. Encouraged by her aunt, she decided to try. ‘I was just sixteen,’ recalls Yevgeniia.
In the questionnaire [which she was obliged to fill out as part of the application process] I did not mention that my parents had been arrested. I wrote that my father had been killed… I think that they would have taken me in any case, because there were not enough people wanting to study physics, and at that time, in 1944, there was an urgent need for physicists.78
The war years offered similar opportunities to Antonina Golovina, the ‘kulak’ daughter who learned to conceal her social origins. Antonina’s ambition had been to study at the Institute of Medicine in Leningrad. She applied in 1941, but while her high-school grades were certainly good enough for her to be accepted at the institute, she was refused admission probably, as she believes, on the grounds of her suspicious social origins. The outbreak of the war ended her dreams of Leningrad, which came under siege. Antonina worked as an assistant teacher in the village school at Pestovo and then in 1943 applied to Sverdlovsk University. An old school friend, who was a student there, had suggested that she might get in because Sverdlovsk needed doctors and the university had relaxed the rules of admission to the Faculty of Medicine. Despite her ‘kulak’ origins, Antonina was admitted to the university. She soon emerged as one of the best students in the faculty. She had the full support of her professors, who kept the secret of her social origins. ‘For the first time in my life I was allowed to progress on my own merits,’ she reflects. After the siege of Leningrad was lifted, in January 1944, Antonina applied to the Leningrad Institute of Pediatrics to continue with her studies. She did not have a passport to live in Leningrad, and her ‘kulak’ origins would normally have disqualified her, despite the warm letters of support from her teachers at Sverdlovsk. But Leningrad desperately needed pediatricians to care for the tens of thousands of sick and disturbed children orphaned by the siege. In the words of the official who recommended Antonina’s admission to the institute, it would have been ‘a sin to reject such a student at this time’. Without a passport to live in Leningrad, Antonina could not be officially registered as a student at the institute, so she became one of fourteen ‘illegals’ (all from ‘alien class backgrounds’) studying
The regime’s concessions in the religious sphere also had wide-ranging effects. The relaxation of controls on the Church led to a dramatic revival of religious life from 1943 to 1948 (when most of the concessions were reversed). Hundreds of churches reopened, attendances increased, and there was a revival of religious weddings, baptisms and funerals.
Ivan Bragin’s family had strong connections to the Church. He counted several priests among his relatives, and his wife, Larisa, was the daughter of a priest. Those connections were rigorously concealed in the 1930s, when the family was dispossessed as ‘kulaks’ and sent into exile in Krasnokamsk: Ivan and Larisa did not go to church; they did not wear crosses; they hid their icons in a chest and hung a portrait of Stalin above the doorway where the icons were traditionally displayed. They encouraged their children to join the Pioneers and participate in anti- religious activities in order to avert suspicion. But after 1944 the family began to return to religious ways. The children were all baptized in a nearby village church, which had been reopened in 1944 after the villagers collected money for a tank. Larisa brought out her most precious icon from the chest and fixed it in a corner of the room, where it was half-hidden only by a curtain. She crossed herself before the icon when she entered or left the room. ‘Gradually,’ recalls her daughter Vera,
we began to celebrate religious holidays, and Mama told us about them. She would prepare a special dish, although that was difficult during the war. She always said: ‘We have food on the table, so it is Shrovetide. And if there is none, then it is Lent.’ We celebrated Christmas, Epiphany, the Annunciation, Easter, Trinity.80
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the war years was a new freedom of expression. People spoke openly about the loss of relatives, they related feelings and opinions in a way that would previously have been unthinkable and they engaged in political debates. The war’s uncertainties, including the uncertain survival of Soviet power, had removed the fear of talking about politics and even criticizing the regime.
Vera Pirozhkova recalls returning to her home town of Pskov in 1942: ‘Everyone was talking openly about politics and without any fear.’ She records an argument between two sisters: one aged twenty-two, the wife of a Red Army officer at the front, the other, seventeen, who was an ‘ardent anti-Communist’. When the elder sister denied any knowledge of the labour camps, the younger one was scornful: ‘You didn’t know?’ she said. ‘The whole country knew about the camps, and you didn’t? You didn’t want to know, you hid behind the back of your officer and pretended to yourself that everything was fine.’ On another occasion, the younger woman criticized her older sister for claiming not to know about the problem of unemployment, even though a number of their relatives had not been able to find jobs before the war. ‘How could you not know? Unless after your marriage you completely forgot about your family and did not care how poor we were.’ Before the war, comments Vera, when the older sister’s husband had been living with the rest of the family, no one would have dared to speak so freely, if only from the fear that he might report them.81
Food queues were a particularly fertile breeding ground for political discussion and complaint. Anger and frustration united people there and gave them courage to speak out (which is also why the queues were frequented by informers and police). ‘Anti-Soviet views are openly expressed when supplies run out,’ reported one group of informers from various lines outside Moscow shops in April 1942. An old man in a queue for kerosene was heard to say: ‘The Party-parasites are everywhere. The bastards! They have everything, while we workers have nothing but our necks from which to hang.’ To which a woman added: ‘And that’s why we are in a mess.’ In another Moscow queue the following conversation was reported by informers:
DRONIN [a soldier]: It would be better if we were living now as we lived before 1929. As soon as they
