Some fell silent, others turned their attention elsewhere. Still others ignored the situation, The most popular singers of that era were Kozin (soon to be arrested) and Iur'eva, honey-voiced crooners of love songs. In the cinema the most popular offerings were Pyr'ev's sweet musical comedies. Movies such as Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Liberation (Osvobozhdenie) (1940), which chronicled the 'reunification' of Western Ukraine (otherwise known as eastern Poland) under the terms of the Soviet-German Treaty, or Vasilii Belaev's Mannerheim Line (1940), about the Soviet-Finnish war, quickly passed as embarrassingbows to government campaigns.
Sergei Eisenstein provides an illustration ofan artist who continued to identify with the state, yet wished to maintain artistic integrity. When anti-German feeling was at its height, he directed his classic Aleksandr Nevskii (1938), which chronicled how in 1242 that Novgorodian prince unified the Russians and repulsed the invasion of the Teutonic Knights. The climactic battle on the ice of Lake Peipus is one of cinema's great action scenes, and the film score composed by Sergei Prokofiev offers one of film's greatest collaborations between composer and director. Unmistakable analogies between the Teutonic Knights and modern Germans, Nevskii's Novgorod and Stalin's Soviet Russia made the film an effective piece of propaganda. The unfortunate shift in foreign policy that followed within a year made the film politically obsolete, and it was removed from circulation. Soon after the signing of the pact, Eisenstein was commissioned to direct Richard Wagner's Die Walkiire, the apotheosis of the German spirit, at the Bol'shoi Theatre. Meant as a gesture of cultural friendship, the production left German representatives at the 1940 premiere offended by its aesthetic innovations, 'deliberate Jewish tricks' as they called them. The German invasion soon erased the controversy. Wagner was removed from the repertory, and Nevskii was once against released to Soviet screens.[41]
Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War came from an ability of society to rally around the war effort, to tap into deep wells of patriotic faith, to unify itself behind the state and its leader Joseph Stalin. Soviet culture played an integral part in this enterprise. The first rallying cries issued from the pens of the young journalists, artists and songwriters who had made their careers during the purge era. The venom that they so deplorably unleashed against their compatriots seemed entirely appropriate when directed against Fascist invaders. The war seemed to liberate writers and artists who had previously operated inside Soviet cultural rules, to give them a subject matter appropriate to their style, allowing them to access once unacceptable cultural idioms. Most remarkable in this regard was the widespread use of Christian symbols as a source of Russian national identity. Only one day after the German attack, Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, erstwhile lyricist of orthodox Soviet songs ('Life's Getting Better and Happier Too', 1936; 'The Common Soviet Man', 1938), and General Aleksandr Aleksandrov, director ofthe Red Army Chorus, wrote and recorded 'Holy War', a stirring march that served as anthem for the war. Political cartoonists such as Boris Efimov, who had cut his teeth on anti-Trotskyite caricatures for Pravda, and Kukryniksy, a trio of cartoonists who had begun publishing cartoons in i933, immediately drew anti-German posters that were distributed throughout the country. They continued to do so throughout the war, and remained the most effective graphic propagandists in the country. A similar development took place in journalism, where older political journalists such as Boris Gorbatov, Ilya Ehrenburg and Aleksandr Korneichuk were joined by recent graduates such as Konstantin Simonov in creating an effective brand of wartime journalism. In the earliest months of the war, when the mass media at their worst were pretending that the war effort was going well, these journalists made the perilous journey to the front, addressed the obvious catastrophe and yet offered their readers hope and courage. Ehrenburg proclaimed German barbarity to be the sign of a cultural rot that could not defeat Soviet civilisation. Simonov travelled to western Russia, witnessed the caravans of soldiers and common people streaming east before the German tanks and wrote poems of heartfelt grief. His 'Wait for Me' (Zhdi menia) and 'Smolensk Roads' (Ty, pomnish', Alesha, dorogi Smolenshchiny) were recited as prayers throughout the war and after.
Newspapers, posters and popular songs, which could be generated quickly and distributed throughout the vast country, were the most effective means to rally the people in the first year of the war. Most of the Soviet Union was accessible by radio and print. Radio proved a particularly effective medium. Soviet broadcasting switched from the wire-fed system that had allowed the state to control content and cut off outside broadcasts, to shortwave broadcasts that could reach over enemy lines to the occupied territories. Journalists could report developments on the front immediately, allowing breathless listeners to follow the heroic defences of Stalingrad and Leningrad. Soldiers could hear the latest recordings of their favourite singers singing 1930s classics or new hits. Mark Bernes sang his beloved 'Dark Night' (i942), Klavdiia Shulzhenko her romantic 'Blue Scarf' (1941) and Leonid Utesov recorded his satiric 'Baron von der Pschick' (1942). For all the popularity of Soviet-produced culture, however, listeners on the front and at home most avidly followed readings of Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace (Voina i mir). The Russian defeat of a foreign invader through persistence and endurance offered a comforting analogy to the present.
The desperation and raw emotion of the first year, which gave birth to short genres with an immediate response to the surrounding world, and a direct route to the emotions of readers and listeners, gave way to more substantial artistic forms later in the war. This was due to the fact partly that artists and writers had more time to work and plan, and partly that cultural institutions that had ceased to function recovered their footing. Censors that had ceded their functions to editors and administrators in the early months of war once again became an effective barrier to unorthodox expression. Arts-funding organisations once again received the political guidance they needed to operate. The Bol'shoi Theatre in Moscow, and the large theatres in Leningrad could again offer the classics of drama, opera and ballet. Productions boosted morale in the big cities where they were performed, and throughout Russia where they were broadcast. They infused Soviet citizens, foremost Soviet Russians, with a pride in their culture at a time when national pride constituted the core of public morale; and they offered proof that civilisation could survive in the face of Fascist barbarity.
The confidence in final victory gained by the summer of 1943 gave Soviet life an unprecedented legitimacy. Soviet culture, commissioned by party and state, accomplished its design. Inspired by Marxism-Leninism, devoted to the cause ofthe working people, obedient to their representative, the Communist Party; committed to a single message, and receptive to artists of all circumstances of birth: such were the ideals it embodied. Soviet artists and writers had an immediate relationship with their audience that might have been the envy of artists throughout the world. Oddly enough, it was only the German invasion that made the vision of a cultural monolith come true.
Conclusion
Russian-Soviet culture was fundamentally different after fifty years of social and institutional change. An institutional framework based on the autocracy had given way to private and informal institutions, which were then swept away by the October Revolution. Soviet cultural institutions came into being only slowly, hindered first by financial constraints, then by a shortage of knowledgeable cadres and later by unpredictable ideological shifts. The centrality of social mission to art, an article of faith to the intelligentsia that had been tested by modernism and market-based popular culture, was institutionalised in Soviet times and made obligatory. The modernist impulse so strong in the early years ofthe century, which had enriched Russian artistic culture and had responded to the revolutionary spirit, was ultimately rejected for the aesthetic of socialist realism. It is important to understand that Soviet popular culture was often genuinely popular, and that the political orthodoxy unpalatable to other cultures and other times did not always bother the intended audience. Many products of Stalinist popular culture were beloved by Soviet audiences long after their political context had faded. Soviet classics enjoy great popular support even today, now that the Soviet Union is a distant memory.
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