74. Day, February 20, 2022
Our friend will be carrying an early war Red Army backpack on his back - one like this:
Copies of newspapers will be sticking out of this backpack at the top, as Konstantin Simonov repeatedly describes in his war diary that he and his colleagues always took the latest hot-off-the-press newspapers from the editorial offices with them on trips from Moscow to the front.
These newspapers were of course handed out to simple "frontoviks", but delivered to the political deputies ("commissars") of the troops visited; in the Red Army it was common for these newspapers to be read (out) together during breaks in combat and at the same time to be used for ideological training.
So first the question: Which newspaper should I choose?
The best known was of course the party newspaper "Prawda" - and the most famous issue of "Prawda" was the following - everyone who lived through the summer of 1941 in the Soviet Union knows it!
Here is the story of this issue...:
When the Hitler Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 without a declaration of war, Stalin had sent his intimate, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, ahead.
Molotov spoke briefly on the radio...
... addressed the
"comrades" in the old-fashioned way and called on them to
"crowd even more closely around the banner of the party of the working class".
The following quote from Stalin himself has been handed down from that day:
After Defense Minister Semyon Tymoshenko and Chief of Staff Georgy Zhukov explained the situation to him, he said, more muttering than exclaiming:
"Lenin created our state and we shit on it."
The host himself was not heard from in public for days and spent the time at his dacha in Kunzewo near Moscow...:
Rumors soon circulated among the population that Stalin was sick, dead, arrested and more.
Then the bang:
On July 3, 1941, Stalin spoke on the radio!
And he struck a tone that people had not heard from him before:
"Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Fighters of our army and fleet! I turn to you, my friends!”
Stalin no longer speaks of the party, but consciously refers to the history of Russia by now speaking of the
"Great Patriotic War", taking up a formula that Tsar Aleksandr I had coined in 1812 as Napoleon's Grande Armee invaded Russia.
Stalin went on to say:
"This is a war of the entire Soviet people, a decision about freedom or slavery". The remedy is a mass enlistment of soldiers and a scorched earth war:
"Not a single locomotive, not a single wagon, not a kilogram of grain, not a liter of fuel must be surrendered to the enemy."
At the same time Stalin also admits that in the first border battles there were heavy losses, defeats and retreats of his own troops.
At the same time, the master of the house also issued a warning to his own population: anyone who obstructs the defense faces a court martial, including
“whiners or cowards” as well as
“panic mongers and deserters”.
Historians, regardless of ideological boundaries, agree that it was above all the tone and the facts of the speech that were not glossed over, which suddenly unleashed an enormous will to resist in the population.
The speech was simultaneously printed in full in Pravda...:
That, in short, is the story of the "Prawda" issue I chose.
It's also important to me that the newspaper had a different format back then - it was clearly smaller than it was in the 1970s, for example...:
So today I set about making a stack of mini editions of this July 3, 1941 issue of "Prawda" - and I printed them out on "environmental paper" because paper "whiteners" weren't invented until after the war...:
So much for today.
Cheers