I had posted this in the Russia forum but it seems to have got lost there. I find both the sad, intimate song and the heroic one very moving.
Today is Victory Day in Russia and most other former Soviet republics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLJ2_2BVNFk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYkHT9CwSY with English subtitles
Of course so many of those soldiers never returned home...
A more heroic one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAvgDhI01_A
That second one was written two days after the invasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_War
I'm just reading Leningrad Siege and Symphony, about Shostakovich, and the siege which lasted most of the war. It is unbelievable that they never saw it coming, as Stalin had numerous warnings of troop movements on the border. Still, the last shipment to Germany crossed the border four hours before the planes started bombing and tanks rolled in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Is_the_Night_(Soviet_song)
The parentheses break the link, but there is a link to the song there.
Victory Day Parade 2018 in Moscow (Full Video)
Record Million People Take Part in Immortal Regiment March in Moscow To Mark V-Day
The 'Immortal Regiment' in Toronto Gathered 8,000 People
Hm. Is this the first time he has gone there for this celebration? Or is this just really interesting timing, given Trump's announcement?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/09/russia-shows-off-new-missi...
Rewriting History: Red Army's Role in Liberating Europe Censored (and vid)
Thanks so much for opening this thread, lagatta.My dad was a conscript in the Red Army. He survived. But more importantly, that meant he never lived under Nazi occupation, where everyone in his family, and my mom's, perished (except her, miraculously). She was hidden by Polish Catholics (different ones at different times) who risked their lives to hide Jews, until the Soviets drove the Nazis out of her region in 1944. My late parents, and their children, made it only because of unimaginable sacrifices of the Soviet people and of heroic non-Jews in the region who stood up against fascist savagery. I can't fathom it all to this day.
Yes, I just heard from a friend in Buenos Aires. His family were Polish Jewish from Warsaw, obviously educated middle-class because they spoke more Polish than Yiddish (like Rosa), and every last one of both extended families were murdered by the Nazis except for his father and mother. I don't know how they got out of the ghetto - probably before it was sealed off and someone could pay for it, but who knows? I think the reason every other family member died was because they were probably taken to Treblinka, not Auschwitz. No chance of survival there as it was a slaughterhouse only, not a slave labour camp.
Then a generation later in Argentina... he had to go into hiding for long periods. Hate to think of how worried his parents were. But once again, many of his friends were murdered by fascist scum.
I was hoping you'd come along on this thread as I was thinking of you. Another friend, a progressive Israeli who left there for obvious reasons, had a grandfather who lived through similar experiences. You might enjoy reading The Truce by Primo Levi, (La Tregua in Italian, La Trève in French), the sequel to "If this is a man". Primo was sent the wrong way after the shambolic last days of Auschwitz and the liberation by Soviet troops. It is a picardesque roundabout journey through Eastern Europe and the European parts of the Soviet Union. And at times very funny.
By the way, Mark Bernes, the handsome soldier who sings the nostalgic song about his wife and baby, was Ukranian Jewish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Bernes
I may have posted this here a few years ago. If you haven't seen it, it is worth looking through both pages:
http://www.allworldwars.com/Soviet%20War%20Paintings.html
I have to say that as powerful as some of this art is I cannot help but feel ambivalent about it. I get that it (as with the history I am reading now) was important in helping people not give up. On the other hand, comparing it with what I know of my own family's experience, and that of friends it just seems like putting varnish on something that was butchery and failure by all our nations.
It might be different if some of this wasn't still being used to sell war on both sides, and if this struggle was actually over.
I do think the Russian people keeping it together when other nations did not is, like the similar critical role played by the Chinese, sadly underrecognized. But commemorative days like this remind me that there really hasn't been any victory any more than there was 100 years ago.
Smith, you know that I'm no fan of Stalin or Stalinism; my emphasis in terms of this topic has always been the role played by the Soviet people(s).
By the way, there are quite a few similar paintings at the Canadian war museum in Ottawa.
Here's a (hopefully) working version of Smith's link above:
http://www.allworldwars.com/Soviet%20War%20Paintings.html
Thanks U.
I know where you stand on this lagatta, and sorry if it seems like some of the usual flak that goes on here. It isn't. I am more pointing out that it is hard to look at those honest expressions without thinking of the ways in which they are co-opted, and those aspects of war which no one wants to commit to music or canvas.
And that these conflicts haven't actually stopped.
Most of our war paintings that I have seen focus on soldiers, and men. That is part of what struck me about this series - that even 80 years ago they would think of that.
There are actually quite a lot of women in those pictures - young, middle-aged and old. They are soldiers, workers and farmers as well as worried wives and mothers of young children, older mothers of the soldiers, heartbroken (and frightened) young widows with small children.
There are some female war workers in the Canadian war paintings, but I think fewer than in the Soviet ones here. Because the war was right there, and targeted civilians as much as troops.
A friend and professor, dead now, did a lot of his doctoral study and research in Moscow. He was Sicilian, and terrified of freezing to death there. He was very surprised at how overheated flats and classrooms there were, as if people had never recovered from freezing for years.
This may be a post-Soviet choice, but I don't see anything exhalting Stalin.
