The Soviet Song Heritage of World War II: From Inertia to Intention

Abstract

The article is devoted to the song heritage of the Great Patriotic War. As the most accessible and democratic type of art, mass song became a particular form of remembrance of this historical period that is so tragic for Russia. An immense number of compositions was created by the song composers during the war and after its end. A number of works had appeared before 1941 (for example, Matvey Blanter’s Katyusha and Jerzy Petersburgski’s Sinii platochek [The Blue Kerchief], but still carry strong associations among the general public particularly with the Great Patriotic War. The details of the creation of songs in each of these periods differed strikingly from each other, which could not have been reflected in the genre of the mass song, as a whole. A breakthrough moment in the development of the genre turned out to be the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which happened in 1956, after which the broad process of deconstruction of the longstanding “song Staliniana” started. The article analyzes the conditions of the birth of mass songs in various years, and examines the works that are symbols of the Soviet Union (Svyashchennaya voina [Holy War] and the National Anthem of the USSR by Alexander Alexandrov), as well as selected works from the Soviet cinematograph from the time period between the 1930s and the 1960s, where the song played an important meaning-generating role.