“Songs and Laughter Were Heard”: Frontline Songs and Poems in the Folklore of The Great Patriotic War

Abstract

During the Great Patriotic War, performances of music and songs were an important part of soldiers’ lives in the Red Army. This study examines how these songs functioned in unofficial aspects of the lives of frontline soldiers. There was a “cult of folklore” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, which meant that the depiction of folklore in film and literature was an official policy. However, the fact that such performances featured in officially sanctioned artistic works raises the question of how much was propaganda and how much reflected actual practices. To answer this question, I looked at all the references to the performances of songs in over seventy Russian-language diaries and volumes of letters written by members of the Soviet military. I did not use journalism to avoid propaganda, nor memoirs to avoid the problem of the transformation of memories over the years; instead, I used sources written during the war itself that reflected the everyday lives of soldiers.