Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia: Edited by Richard Stites

Fifty years after the end of World War II, this book focuses on a little-known aspect of the Great Patriotic War: its cultural and emotional impact on the Russian people. Stites offers the most recent scholarship on the Russian cultural offerings of the wartime period in the rear areas, on the homefront, on the battlefield, and over the airwaves. Coverage ranges from the Moscow press to frontline correspondents in the field; from entertainment brigades at the front to amateur and spontaneous composition of songs and poems by fighting men and women; from symphonic representations of a country facing extinction to literary classics revived, adapted, republished, and read over the radio; from the stages of Moscow to folk ensembles performing on the battlefield; from the politicized organization and censorship of entertainment to the reception of cultural outpourings in the hearts and souls of ordinary Russians at war. Contributors are Jeffrey Brooks, James Von Geldern, Peter Kenez, Louise McReynolds, Argyrios K. Pisiotis, Harlow Robinson, Robert A. Rothstein, Rosalinde Sartorti, Harold B. Segel, Richard Stites, and Nina Tumarkin.