Russians’ Favorite Victory Day Songs

Europe's history is long and bloody. 67 years after the last horrible world war that killed over 50 million people, history has been written from all sorts of viewpoints and studied and archived, including on social media, for general use and instruction. Watching documentaries about WWII and the stories of its participants, aged men and women with vivid memories and burning emotions 60 years after the fact, I catch a refrain in every story. Fear. Fear of an unimaginable scale. Also death, and horror, and grief. For decades. On May 2, 1945, Berlin falls to the Soviets. Stalin's government announced the victory early on May 9 after the signing ceremony in Berlin. This date has become the most sacred day for all the ex-Soviet nations who fought in the war. Even now, it is being used in Russia yet again as a political tool to instill the kind of patriotic unity and spirit that helped the Soviets move forward and build a powerful empire. The final episode of the war begins with a major April attack by the Allied troops on the eastern and western fronts. Stalin is in a hurry to end this agony in time for his May parade. Thousands of small tragedies happen in the meantime. Death, spread far and wide by SS battalions across all Europe and USSR, is pushed back into German land, and for the first time in the war, the German soldiers and their families are forced to fight for family and homeland as fiercely as the Soviets did against them. War suddenly becomes real for them. They fight desperately for Berlin, but soon, with the exception of a fanatical few, who believe they are actually winning the war, the desire to survive outweighs patriotism, loyalty and illusions. It is ugly. Some 70 000 Germans surrender and 350 000 die. It is deadly for the Allied Forces, too, as well as paradoxical as the Nazi state's residents get to experience aggression no worse than the one their soldiers had been meting out on other nations. In war, humanism is of last concern to humankind. Enter the sexual excesses of Soviet soldiers in Berlin, prompted by revenge, having seen and heard of the humiliation inflicted by the Germans in the occupied Soviet lands. Enter the acts of brutality sanctioned by Hitler and his war machine against his own citizenship, including throwing Hitlerjugend, children 12-16 years of age, against the heavily armed troops of the Allied Forces, and ordering the murder of his own German officers and soldiers - involuntary "culprits" for one or other misfortune. According to documentary footage, Berlin's German soldiers and civilians in these last days of the war faced a single and quite easy choice - who to turn themselves in to: the Soviets, who would send them to Gulag in Siberia, or the Americans who would send them to POW camps? Even more absurd on the backdrop of the brutal war seems the Germans’ instinct of self-preservation as they scurry by the thousands into the direction of the American soldiers. Brutal is the description of the cruel death of thousands of German refugees, women and children, in tunnels that are flooded after being bombed. Death and human meanness is prominently featured in all archival footage. Every single day until May 9, 1945, death is measured in thousands of expired human breaths. What goes around, comes around. The fatigue from the war is immense. When cannons stop booming, people feel relieved. Fear, however, will not retire and will stay rightfully there, inhabiting their days and nights. The psychological traumas will never be erased from the memory of the afflicted. Valentin Tyupikov, my husband’s grandfather, volunteered to go to the Ukrainian front at the age of 19 following an accelerated officer school.

He was entrusted with a squad of convicts and loaded on a train heading for the war front. In the first hours of their trip, he handed his prisoner soldiers the money he was given to feed them. At each station, the prisoners would get off and return with chicken, or eggs, or bread. When they arrived at the front, they returned the money to him. Then, they repeatedly saved the life of the young officer in exchange for their sinful lives, one by one. His grandfather did not like to talk about the war, but the war was a stapler of Soviet TV programming, and Soviet composers and film artists created beautiful art about it. The heartfelt "Tiomnaya noch (Dark night)" from Leonid Lukov’s film "Two soldiers" is still the ex-Soviets’ favorite war song. It is performed by Mark Bernes, a talented singer and actor, who became the sex symbol of the Soviet cinema in the 50s and 60s. Rumor has it that the first pressings of the LP record of this song were scrapped, as the recording studio technicians wept, and their tears fell onto the disc matrix. "Tiomnaya noch" is a personal confession of a soldier to his wife who puts their child to bed alone, waiting for him with teary eyes, confident he will return home alive. Here are three other war-themed songs close to the heart of many people from the ex-Soviet nations. “We Won't Haggle over Price” from the movie "The Belarussian Train Station" written by Bulat Okudzhava and performed by Anita Tsoy: The official Victory Day song: One of the most popular and beloved of all war-themed songs “Smuglianka Moldovanka (Black-Haired Moldovan Girl)” from the movie “Only Old Men Go into Combat" : Valentin Tyupikov fought in the battle for Berlin. He then finished the war in Prague. Occasionaly, Valentin would overcome his reluctance to talk about the war to tell a funny story to his grandchildren or drop a comment. He did tell them, however, that the first combat kill was the hardest, for all others, there was vodka. In his nightmares, he kept storming a hill, and never, till the end of his life, shared the story behind it. The story of the capture of Berlin is told in detail with archival materials in several films uploaded on You Tube. Be warned that the footage is shocking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw7G0IcCKRM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1d3FJeAhd8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0VOO5x0MNY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H7eNUpBy7Q Finally, the song “Papirosen” (“Buy cigarettes”) was very popular in the USSR after the war, and particularly in Jewish Odessa, Ukraine. It was written by Herman Yakovlev after seeing hundreds of children living on the streets of the Nazi-occupied Polish city of Grodno. Belomorkanal (White Sea Canal) cigarettes, shown in the video as being peddled by the children, are the cheapest brand of cigarettes in the lands of the former USSR, and to date very popular and sold in their original package design. These cigarettes are named after the canal linking the White Sea and Lake Onezhsko built between 1931 and 1933 by Gulag prisoners. During its construction, between 50 000 and 200 000 workers died. The song is performed in Yiddish and Russian. In 1994, on a frosty Christmas day in Munich, an older German heard me speak Bulgarian and approached us demonstrating his Russian. Minutes before that, a young Frenchman had joined our company. We asked our new acquaintance where one could eat a tasty soup in the city, and he took us to a restaurant run by a friend of his and treated us to a delicious glass of gluckwein, hot wine with spices. He told us that after the war he worked as an engineer in the Soviet Union for five years, constructing railways. He was very animated and enjoyed our lunch together, although the Frenchman sat sullen and distracted, and did not want much contact with the benevolent German. Our host was most likely one of those five thousand German prisoners who, unlike many other of his compatriots, were able to stay alive and return to Germany. Somehow, 60 years later and despite the abundant, easily available and heart-wrenching video archives, WWII keeps defying any reasonable narrative, and has become ever more obscure and sinister, memorializing the evil embedded in human nature and the mad desire for survival and reconciliation. Even with a glass of gluckwein on a nice Christmas day.