Just before dawn on 22 June 1941, more than three million troops – the Germans and their allies – rolled across the Soviet border from the Baltic to the Black Sea. At noon on that lovely summer Sunday, Leningraders gathered around public loudspeakers to hear Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov inform the country that Kiev, Zhitomir, and Sevastopol' had come under surprise attack. While Soviet propaganda had long predicted a war with the capitalist West, many Leningraders, like other Soviet citizens, remembered scarcely believing what they heard – although what they heard was hardly the full story. Molotov explained neither the extent of the debacle nor the reasons that Soviet forces were unprepared. The broadcast itself remained a vivid memory, clearly marking a rupture in the life of the country and of individuals. It was, as the literary critic Lidiia Ginzburg remembered, a “combination of the intensely personal (the loudspeaker prophesying each one's fate) and the epochally important.”

As the war became an everyday reality for Leningraders, the radio and newspapers remained vital components of their experiences. Within twenty-four hours, the news of the invasion prompted some hundred thousand Leningraders not subject to immediate mobilization to volunteer for service in the home guard (opolchenie).