But the historians drew confidence from history, notably the War of 1812, when the Russian people had been able to defeat a technologically superior invader. I was struck by how they made this decision as early as fall 1941, when the Soviet Union seemed to be teetering under the German assault. They also wanted to create an archival record for posterity. These historians hoped that the published interviews would mobilize readers for the war. From 1942 to 1945, they interviewed close to 5,000 people – most of them soldiers, but also partisans, civilians who worked in the war economy or fought in the underground, and Soviet citizens who had survived Nazi occupation. The interviews were conducted by historians from Moscow who responded to the German invasion in 1941 with a plan to document the Soviet war effort in its totality, and from the ground up. The testimonies were too truthful and multifaceted for their times, and Stalin forbade their publication, not least because he alone claimed full credit for the victory at Stalingrad.
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