Memories of the WWI got largely in the shadows of later revolutionary events. Initially, the war had been taken in the wide public circles as a patriotic one. Later the patriotic moods stirred up by the war weakened and the moods in society changed. Negative role had been played by defeats in 1915, by the fall of Emperor’s and its court prestige, deteriorating provisions of the army and Russia’s cities, by growing anarchy, looser discipline of the troops under impact of ‘defeatist’ propaganda by radical socialist parties. However, out of scholarly focus remain cardinal shifts in peasants’ way of life caused by war and asking for scholarly scrutiny. The paper presents and analyses data of a sociological study ‘War and Kostroma village’ in winter 1914–1915.