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That they would do so was certainly the expectation of the Nazis, whose pre-war confidence that invasion would immediately spark anti-Bolshevik revolt took a while to wear off. In particular, they vastly overestimated the importance of Russian anti-Semitism, every minor indication of which got top billing in SS and military intelligence reports. Their Russian-language propaganda was also startlingly inept, simultaneously denouncing the ‘Jewish-Stalinist’ Soviet government and boasting of the invincibility and ruthlessness of the Wehrmacht (‘Finish your bread, you’ll soon be dead’ was one slogan; ‘We bomb today, you die tomorrow’ another).1 Army intelligence began to correct itself in the autumn, admitting that though the ‘Jewish question’ was ‘increasingly actively discussed’ by Leningraders there was ‘no evidence of organised or active resistance to the Communist authorities’. Leaflets air-dropped over the city, it was noted, were not being passed from hand to hand, but hidden away for future use in case Leningrad was abandoned. Another report twelve days later concluded that although the public mood was febrile and anxious, the ‘Red government, with the help of terror and vigorous propaganda, holds the population strongly in hand, and at the present time an organised rising against the enemy cannot be counted on’.2

The SS’s intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), persisted in its wishful thinking for longer, passing on every gloomy rumour and anti-Semitic anekdot. (One, according to the SD, had Russian prisoners of war refusing to obey German orders to bury Jewish POWs alive. ‘Upon which, the German soldiers ordered the Jews to bury the Russians. The Jews took up their shovels without hesitation. Thus the Germans were able to demonstrate to the Russian POWs the true essence of Judaism.’3) By the middle of winter, however, both services had begun to realise that the brutality of the Nazi occupation was only stiffening Russian resistance. ‘Earlier on,’ the SD reported in February, ‘deserters made the distinction between Nazis and Germans opposed to Hitlerism. But now they call all Germans “barbarians who must be destroyed”.’4 By May 1942, when intelligence on Leningrad was rolled into reports on the occupied territories in general, all hopes of a rising had been abandoned.

The Germans were not wrong, though, in thinking that Leningraders were angry. Gauging overall public opinion is hard, but the diaries show Leningraders raging as much against the incompetence, callousness, hypocrisy and dishonesty of their own officials as against the distant, impersonal enemy. Among the best evidence for what ordinary people thought of their government, paradoxically, is the records kept by the regime itself. Unlike other dictators, Stalin and his satraps never made the mistake of believing themselves beloved — on the contrary, they saw plots under every stone. Paranoia aside, the reports Zhdanov received every few days from the head of the ‘instructors’ department’ of the city Party Committee were remarkably sophisticated, collating overheard snatches of conversation into quite rounded summaries of the issues preoccupying Leningraders at any one time. The age, sex, ethnicity and socio-economic status of each speaker were noted, but only if criticisms were overtly political were his or her details passed to the NKVD. Military censors, intercepting private letters to the front, tracked the percentage containing ‘negative communications’ (it rose from 6–9 per cent at the beginning of January 1942 to 20 per cent at the month’s end5). Letters from members of the public direct to Zhdanov were similarly grouped by subject matter, and totals calculated monthly for each type.6 Though the orders to sort out this or that problem that Zhdanov issued in response to this mass of data often went unfulfilled, he never went uninformed.

Support for the authorities rose and fell in line with ration levels and progress at the front. The wave of patriotism that engulfed Leningrad on news of the German invasion was short-lived, giving way to fear and contempt in the autumn, when the city seemed about to fall and the bosses fled by plane. ‘We can’t think of Napalkova’, the archivist Georgi Knyazev wrote of a colleague on 29 November 1941,

without loathing. It has come to light that the very day before she left she was haranguing some exhausted ‘whining intellectual’, saying that every Leningrader must be on the alert, prepared to repel the enemy, and so on. In the few hours before her flight she never even hinted to anyone that she was abandoning Leningrad, her colleagues and her fellow Party members. The case is especially painful because Napalkova joined the Academy’s Party branch after so many people had unjustly been accused of disloyalty and expelled. . That’s how people who go around talking grandly about self-sacrifice, bravery and heroism fix themselves up.7