The Magical Chorus by Volkov Solomon

Author:Volkov, Solomon [Volkov, Solomon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

The enemy burned down his house,

Killed his entire family.

Where can the soldier go now,

Who will listen to his sorrow?

The tragedy of a country that lost tens of millions of lives in the war was expressed in that song with such power and simplicity that it became one of the best epitaphs for the period. But the song was not played then; it waited fifteen years on the shelf. Stalin attributed the victory over Hitler to his own military genius and did not want any reminders of the horrible price the people paid for it.

Stalin’s superman attitude toward his citizens was reflected in a strange episode described by former Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas. In the spring of 1945, after a dinner at the Kremlin in honor of visiting leader of Yugoslavia Marshal Tito, Stalin screened a 1938 film by Efim Dzigan, If Tomorrow There Is War, which was awarded one of the early Stalin Prizes.

If Tomorrow There Is War, described in the opening credits as a “battle film on newsreel materials,” painted a fairy-tale picture of a swift, easy, and bloodless victory in the then-hypothetical clash with the Nazis. In the film, the war that the Germans try to win with poison gases ends with them crushed in just a few days, and the German proletariat rises to support the Soviet Union.

Djilas wrote in astonishment that, after the screening, Stalin said to his Yugoslav guests, “It’s not too different from what really happened, except there was no poison gas and the German proletariat did not rebel.”7

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