From the moment that the war with Nazi Germany began, the Soviet media represented it as history in the making – history made by brave, steadfast, and self-sacrificing Soviet people. Just two days after the German army crossed the border, Smena, the newspaper of the Leningrad Komsomol (Young Communist League), reported that efforts to chronicle the war and to place it in the narrative of Russian and Soviet history had already begun. The Leningrad movie studio Lenfilm announced plans to produce short war documentaries and promised that the first five or six films would be released in ten or twelve days. Meanwhile, workers at the State Public Library planned an exhibition on the war against Napoleon – the original Fatherland War – that would also include material on the German invasion during the Civil War. In December 1942, an exhibit on “The Komsomol in the Fatherland War” commemorated the ongoing conflict in which “life becomes history.” The display of family photographs, diaries, letters, commendations, and blood-soaked Komsomol cards attested to the epochal importance of the war and to the historic significance of everyday life in wartime.