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Confronted with the Propaganda State, where secrecy was erected as a principle of government, with official visions of a “radiant future,” Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s developed its own information channels, at the forefront of which “rumors” played an essential role. Among these rumors, the ones that were the most consistent and widespread, especially in the countryside, were the ones about a forthcoming war ending with a liberating defeat and the collapse of a political system that had turned war against its own society into a mode of government. Reports by the political police on the “public spirit,” now declassified and available, make it possible to assess the various “defeatist” and “apocalyptic” rumors – bona-fide mirrors, wrote Marc Bloch, “in which the collective consciousness contemplated its own features.”