Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, 4 (Fall 2014): 767–97. Forum: Patriotism and Its Discontents in World War II The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society Defeatism, 1941–42 OLEG BUDNITSKII In October 1941, David Kaufman, a Moscow student and aspiring poet, wrote in his diary: “Te Civil War was our fathers. Te Five Year Plan, our older brothers. Te Patriotic War of ’41, this is us… . Te people of our generation, from diverse walks of life, now have but one path: everyone to the front. Here are heroes, cowards, and ordinary people. Nobody is excluded from the war. If I must write, I will write about how this sense of duty came to govern us. Tere is only one feeling that should be instilled in people from the cradle: duty.” 1 Kaufman, later published under the pseudonym David Samoilov, would become one of the most beloved poets of the Soviet intelligentsia. His generation was raised under Soviet power and did not know or recognize any other. He belonged to a cohort of educated, urban young people, many of whom rushed to recruitment ofces on 22 June 1941, fearful of missing out on the war. On that very day, when so many young enthusiasts were rushing to sign up as volunteers, Olimpiada Poliakova, a resident of the town of Pushkin, outside Leningrad, wrote in her diary: Could our liberation be at hand? Whatever the Germans may be, they can’t be worse than our own. And what are the Germans to us? We’ll live somehow without them. Everyone has the sense that, at last, the thing we have awaited for so long but did not even dare to hope for—although we did hope for it very much in the depths of our consciousness—has fnally arrived. Without this hope it would not have been possible to live. And there is no doubt about the coming German victory. Lord forgive me! I am not an enemy of my people or my homeland. I’m not I thank the two anonymous reviewers and Kritika’s editors Stephen Lovell and Paul Werth for their valuable comments and suggestions. 1 David Samoilov, Podennye zapisi (Moscow: Vremia, 2002), 1:140.