Verse was easy to learn, pleasant to recite and valuable because it compressed emotion to an intensity that seemed normal in war. As well as memorizing other people’s work, the men themselves wrote rhymes and aphorisms. Their letters home were full of poems: creaking rhymes of love and homesickness, stirring patriotic odes. Caught in the spirit of the times, some wrote about the red flag or the Communist Party. The more romantic took their cue from famous published work. Simonov’s ‘Wait for Me’ fathered hundreds of wartime love poems, while others turned to the Russian landscape or to heroic deeds for inspiration. Those who could not write would memorize and develop the short folk poems, chastushki, that peasants had been composing for generations. The politruks wrote some of these, adapting the folk themes of fate and motherland to the current world of Stalin and the party. But chastushki were as catchy as limericks. The men composed thousands of them, with themes that ranged from grief and thwarted love to the irregularity of field post. ‘Tell me / in God’s name / if my dear is alive / in Stalingrad,’ ran one. The news was often bad. ‘From far away a brother writes, / dear little sister, / they killed before my eyes / your own beloved.’ ‘I’ve had a little letter,’ sang another, ‘that the censor has gone over. / He died heroically / but it doesn’t say any more.’25
Chastushki were the nearest folklorists would get to the coarse humour that soldiers loved. In her old age, Krupyanskaya, the famous wartime ethnographer, told one of her colleagues that the censors had forbidden her to record erotic, satirical, subversive or criminal lyrics. She was not permitted to write down words that denigrated national minorities, including Jews, and the songs she collected would not be published if they lacked a patriotic theme.26 This strict political correctness guaranteed that she would overlook a large part of reality. The songs and aphorisms that have made their way into Soviet textbooks about soldiers’ lore are prim, polite and Stalinist. Their sentiments were truly part of wartime idiom – people really believed, in some part of their brains, in the ultimate triumph of virtuous communism – but they offer little clue about the way men coped with their tough, dangerous lives. Humour, much of it obscene and most very dark, was central to the front-line way of life.
One problem for outsiders wanting to know more – whether wartime ethnographers or historians writing today – was that the men’s language was meant to exclude strangers from their own close groups. Among themselves, the men larded their sentences with expressions that were so profane that few are willing to repeat them to this day. In its developed form, obscenity amounted to a parallel language on the scale of cockney rhyming slang. The word for it – and the object of many of the crude sexual jibes – was mat, mother. No outsider could follow mat’s staggering twists. A real man not only swore, he used ‘three-storey mother’, piling the profanities in stacks. It was crude, creative, visual and exclusive; strictly for the lads. Little – if any – of it has made its way into the histories of Stalin’s war.
It is the same with soldiers’ humour. Lev Pushkarev was embarking on a research degree in ethnography when the war broke out. He decided to use his time in the army to collect material for a dissertation about the soldiers’ culture. The NKVD quickly found his notes. At first, they wanted to suppress them all, but when they had established, by writing to his university department in Moscow, that he was a genuine scholar, they agreed to let him keep a record of some of the words, the decent ones, to the men’s songs. He came home with a briefcase stuffed with polite ballads and rhymes. Laughter, however, was a different matter. Pushkarev had also been collecting jokes. The NKVD seized his notebooks of these at the outset, and he was forbidden to collect any more. Humour, which sustained so many people and which reflected their authentic, spontaneous voice, was deemed to be too dangerous for record. There must be a file somewhere in the bowels of the Ministry of Defence that contains examples of the men’s uncensored talk. Till that is opened, there is only memory, or failing that, the screeds of poisonous anti-Semitism that German intelligence officers collected from captive soldiers and filed for future propaganda use.
Today, the veterans find it hard to remember the things that used to make them laugh. So much was instantaneous, based on the foibles of an officer, non-Russian or newcomer to the unit. Sometimes, too, there is a hint of shame. Some soldiers hesitate to recollect the way they used to mock specific ethnic groups. Jokes based on bodily functions, too, might have seemed funny once, but now these men are old. ‘I’m not sure I can tell you those,’ people would say to me. It was easy, however, to laugh at the enemy. By 1943, the Germans were alleged to be so desperate for conscripts that they would take men with almost any disability. ‘But I can’t be fit,’ a soldier tells the Berlin medical board. ‘In Russia they shot off both my legs, both arms, both lungs, and even gave me a bad back.’ ‘In that case,’ the doctors reply, ‘nothing can happen now that hasn’t happened to you already.’27 This kind of thing was suitable for satirical newspapers, but the warped landscape of the Soviet state was fertile ground for humour of a more subversive kind. If the military police got hold of you, the men knew all too well, the charges would be absurd and the procedures byzantine. ‘You have to prove,’ the wags explained, ‘that you are not a camel.’28 Another story comes straight from the world of politruks and spies. One evening, an officer is telling a joke to his men. They are all laughing except for one, whose glum expression does not change. The officer calls the politruk over to find out if the man is all right. ‘Have you had bad news from home?’ the politruk asks. The man has not. No one in his unit has died recently, either, and he is not feeling frightened or unwell. ‘So why aren’t you laughing?’ the politruk enquires. ‘I’m from another regiment,’ the glum man says. ‘That’s not my commanding officer.’29
Laughter could lighten the heavy atmosphere of propaganda. At times, it also helped to dissipate the cloud of fear. But its other effect was to bind groups of soldiers together, cementing the front-line friendships that sustained each man in this world of extremes. Stalin’s regime was suspicious of groups. All through the war, spies from the Special Section were detailed to pry whenever unsanctioned new friendships formed, but trust was crucial for team-building. Effective tactics demanded that men knew and relied on their mates. Reluctantly, for they despised most sentiment, the country’s leaders began to mimic their enemy.30 From March 1942, units in need of new blood were withdrawn from front-line service before they were allowed to receive reserves and replacements. Ideally, the new formations were supposed to train together for some weeks before they faced real danger as a group.31 This was not always possible, but it was known to work. Team-building was a trick the US army would not learn till after 1945, when it looked back on the mistakes and lessons of this war’s campaigns.32