Russia at war 1941-1945

regulating prices in the kolkhoz markets, and their introduction was, in fact, to be a first step towards the abolition of rationing two years after the war, after a further series of price adjustments and the monetary reform.

But whether commercial restaurants and shops were an economically sound proposition

or not in the long run, by the middle of 1944 they certainly created a somewhat frivolous illusion of "back to normal" and post-war prosperity. And that at a time when a very, very hard war was still being fought.

There were other signs of frivolity and escapism. The famous chansonnier and diseur Alexander Vertinsky, after spending more than twenty years as an idol of the Russian émigrés in Paris, New York and, finally, Shanghai, turned up in Moscow. His recitals of

"decadent" songs drew immense crowds, including hundreds of soldiers and officers.

Although he was never reviewed or advertised in the press, posters announcing Vertinsky recitals were stuck up all over Moscow, and the story went that he was the protégé of high-up NKVD officials who loved him after years of confiscating thousands of his

gramophone records which travellers had tried to smuggle into Russia! Another theory was that he had been a Soviet spy while posing as an émigré. The fact remains that his songs, with their quaint exoticism, were thoroughly escapist and wildly popular in the Moscow of 1944.

Both songs and films were tending to become escapist. The most popular song hits in

1944 were two songs by Nikita Boguslavsky from a film called The Two Pals— The Dark Night and Kostya, the Odessa Mariner already referred to; both were later to be denounced as examples either of escapism, or of "tavern melancholy"— kabatskaya melankholiya.

The Russian people in 1944 liked to think that life would soon be easier, and that Russia could "relax" after the war. The "lasting alliance" with Britain and the USA had much to do with it. In the middle of 1944 Konstantin Simonov, with his genius for scenting the mood in the country, produced a play called So It Will Be, in which officers home on leave were seen preparing to settle down to a pleasant, easy life in a nice Moscow flat, where even that proverbial bully, the upravdom, the manager of the block of flats, was a personification of kindness and efficiency. "The wounds of war, however deep, will soon heal," one of the officers said. And another, after something of a crise de conscience, decided that his wife and child, who had been missing for years in German-occupied

territory, must be considered as finally lost, and that he might as well start life again with a professor's sweet young daughter. It was the very antithesis of the Wait for Me mood of Simonov's 1941-2 poetry. In 1944 the cinemas were showing American films, among

them a particularly inane Deanna Durbin film, for which thousands queued for hours.

Some Party members were full of easygoing ideas. One very tough Party member

remarked to me in 1944: "We also have our softies in the Party—people who think of the future of Anglo-Soviet and American-Soviet relations in terms of the Britansky Soyuznik

[ The British Ministry of Information weekly which sold about 50,000 copies in those days.] with its sickly rubbish about '400 Years of Anglo-Russian Friendship'. It is high time they read some Lenin."

Even some notoriously tough party members were not quite immune against this relaxed atmosphere. Thus, in the summer of 1944, with the Second Front in full swing, the writer Vsevolod Vyshnevsky remarked at a VOKS [ Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.] party (maybe he would not have made the same remarks anywhere else):

When the war is over, life in Russia will become very pleasant. A great literature will be produced as a result of our war experiences. There will be much coming and going, with a lot of contacts with the West. Everybody will be allowed to read

anything he likes. There will be exchanges of students, and foreign travel will be made easy.

It was even widely suggested that light reading would be encouraged. Thus, there was a scheme for starting a library of thrillers and detective stories in Russian—mostly

translated from English— under the general editorship of Sergei Eisenstein, that great lover of Western thrillers.

The first serious warning against these "Western" and "bourgeois" tendencies came from a certain Solodovnikov, writing in the official Party magazine Bolshevik, in October 1944: