Leningrad

kept saying that his work was extremely important, and asking to be dismissed. The same happened with Nikulin and Denisov from the Geology Institute. They have been sent back to their workplaces, where measures will be taken. Party member Taitz declared ‘If the regiment can’t use me according to my profession of engineer-metallurgist I don’t want to be in the regiment.’ The liberals from headquarters, instead of giving him the necessary rebuff, let him go back to his factory. And not until 11 July did the zamkom [deputy commissar] of the regimental political department start taking necessary measures.13

Reports on would-be draft dodgers were an excuse for coarse anti-Semitism:

Sverdlin, a volunteer in the 3rd Sapper Battalion of the 2nd Sapper Regiment, a Jew, previously worked in a food shop. He applied to become a volunteer, but suddenly realised that the division was a fighting division and about to be sent to the front. He became distressed, announcing that when he joined the opolcheniye his wife had tried to hang herself, and had only been saved at the last moment. He was dismissed. . In the artillery Communist Brauman burst into tears because he was afraid to go to the front. . Komsomol member Peterson wanted to leave the opolcheniye

, but things were made clear to him and he was sent to work in the kitchens.14

But such backsliding was rare. Most people either itched to fight, like (Jewish) Frenklakh and Alshits, or found it easier simply to go along with the crowd. ‘It was an unequal choice’, as Lidiya Ginzburg put it, ‘between danger close at hand, certain and familiar (the management’s displeasure), and the outcome of something as yet distant, unclear, and above all incomprehensible.’15

Having created their people’s army, the authorities treated it with deep suspicion. Born of a genuine grass-roots movement rather than by Party diktat, its members showed an unwelcome tendency to organise themselves, and to offer suggestions and criticism. Particularly hard to marshal were the thousands of intelligentsia volunteers. Of the 2,600 men of the 3rd Rifle Regiment of the First Division (recruited from the institute-packed Dzerzhinsky district), about a thousand, the Political Department apprehensively noted, were ‘highly cultured types — professors, scientific workers, writers, engineers’ — who needed to be ‘planted’ with educated officers whom they could respect. Requests to be used according to a specialism — radio engineers asking to become signal officers, mining engineers asking to become sappers — were nonetheless to be treated as ‘manifestations of cowardice’, and the regiment was subsequently stripped of ‘moaners’ and ‘unstable elements’. In both of the first two opolcheniye

divisions, volunteers initially chose their company commanders and ‘political leaders’ — the battalion-level entertainments officers-cum-propagandists-cum-informers known as politruki — by informal ballot,16 a perilously democratic practice that was swiftly stamped out on Stavka’s orders. The Political Department’s best efforts, though, could not persuade them to initiate ‘socialist competitions’ with other units, or to adopt military formalities. ‘Here are two examples’, lamented one politruk,

from the Zhdanovsky and Kirovsky regiments. He used to be an ordinary worker and is now an officer. In his unit he has two of his former foremen — and of course, it’s difficult to drop the [familiar] Sasha, Vanya, Petya. Or take the following incident. A commander gives an order and says ‘Repeat it.’ And his subordinate replies ‘Sasha, why do I have to repeat it, do you think I’m stupid?’. . We have to force our commanders to be stricter.17

Volunteerism, the Party bosses worried, might also mask treachery. Thirteen ethnic German and Estonian ‘foreigners’ were discovered to have signed up, as had an ex-Trotskyite, a White Finn, and several Spanish and Austrian Communists. All were dismissed from the opolcheniye, and their details passed to the NKVD.18