80 years since the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. The Presidential Library’s materials illustrate eyewitnesses’ accounts

Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union 80 years ago on June 22, 1941. The Great Patriotic War, terrible and bloody, which brought huge sacrifices to our country, began.

Unique materials of the electronic collection of the Presidential Library Memory of the Great Victory such as official documents, photo and newsreels, wartime periodicals, books, articles, biographies, memoirs of participants in military battles and home front workers, their personal documents tell about that Sunday.

One of the sections of the collection is devoted to the periodicals of the war period, which became a reflection of the era. The newspapers Leningradskaya Pravda - June 22, Smena - June 24, 1941, and others published the text of a radio statement by the USSR People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov: the territory of our Motherland. <...>

On July 3 Leningradskaya Pravda published a radio speech by the Chairman of the State Defence Committee, Joseph Stalin: “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Soldiers of our Army and Navy! <...> A serious danger looms over our Motherland. <...> First of all, our people, Soviet people should understand the full depth of the danger that threatens our country, and abandon complacency, carelessness, the mood of peaceful construction, which were quite understandable in the pre-war period, but pernicious at the present time, when the war radically changed the situation".

From the first day of the war, front-line reports, later included in the collection Messages of the Soviet Information Bureau (1944-1945), described in detail the state of affairs at the front: "At dawn on June 22, 1941, regular troops of the German army attacked our border units on the front from the Baltic to the Black seas and during the first half of the day were restrained by them. In the afternoon, German troops met with the advanced units of the field forces of the Red Army. After fierce fighting, the enemy was repulsed with heavy losses. <...> On June 22-23, we captured about five thousand German soldiers and officers. According to the updated data, on June 22, a total of 76 enemy aircraft were shot down, and not 65, according to the summary of the Red Army High Command for June 22, 1941".

Periodicals reported official information on the situation on the battlefields. About the same, how people, so different, but united by a common misfortune, took the overwhelming news of the beginning of the war, they told in their memoirs themselves.

Corporal Boris Lerman, who studied at a vocational school in 1941, recalled in his notes The Fate of the Siege man and the Soldier (2016): “And then a bolt from the blue. June 22, Sunday, we were sitting in the dining room and dined. <…> At this time, the craftsman Tolya came late for lunch and said that the war had begun. It took me a while to realize what the war was, where the war came from, what kind of war".

The future geologist Irina Neustrueva, in her memoirs about the siege childhood Impossible to Forget (2018), wrote: “The news of the outbreak of the war found my mother and sister at our dacha on the shore of the Gulf of Finland ... near the confluence of the Chernaya Rechka into the Gulf of Finland. We returned to Leningrad in a lorry that was packed with women and children, the adults stood, the children somehow sat down. When the war began, I was 5 years old..."

Here are the memories of the first months of the war in Leningrad Vera Khomko, which she wrote down after the Victory, in 1946: “June 22, 1941. War has been declared! We learned about this at the Lisiy Nos station, when we went to visit my sister's dacha. We were sitting on the train...Carelessly spitting with seeds from cherries ... ... The whole day passed under the impression of a declared war and a presentiment of close separation from her husband and family"

Colonel-engineer Ivan Pintsov in his book So It Was (2008) said: “On June 20, 1941 we passed the last exam for the 8th grade, and in two weeks we had to leave for the summer camp. <…> On June 22, 1941, at 4 o'clock in the morning, the war against Nazi Germany began. With the categorical nature of youth, we began to convince each other that the war would not last long...We regretted that we would not have to take part in this war".

Irina Filippovich, evacuated from besieged Leningrad in February 1942, conveys the atmosphere of those days in her Memoirs (2008): “I jumped out into the street and was immediately surprised: passers-by froze, turning their heads in the direction of the loudspeakers, cars skidding, trams were empty, - and from the loudspeakers the voice of Molotov ... At first I could not understand anything: either some calls or threats to "enemies of the people" ... - then someone nearby quietly said: "War".

All people - civilians, soldiers at the front as well as partisans - bore the hardships of this war on their shoulders. The electronic collection of the Presidential Library Memory of the Great Victory dedicated to their feat continues to be replenished, including the true memories of witnesses and participants in the events of the war years.