Music, Culture and the Church in the German-Occupied USSR

Abstract

Cultural life in the Soviet territories occupied by the Third Reich is a topic that is yet to be considered in any detail by musicologists. This chapter therefore represents a first step towards uncovering previously uncharted territory, concentrating on musical activities between 1941 and 1943 in Smolensk and surrounding regions and also in Minsk, Pskov and Yuzovka (now Donetsk). The intention is to illustrate how the propagandist cultural policy of the German authorities was exploited by the Russian intelligentsia seeking to resuscitate traditions of pre-revolutionary culture, including the revival of choral music associated with the Russian Orthodox Church which had been forbidden by the Soviet state. Reconstructing a comprehensive survey of the state of musical culture during the German occupation of the Soviet Union is inevitably constrained by the poor survival rate of archival material, the main and sometimes the sole source of information being 140 collaborationist newspapers published up to the middle of 1942 in nine languages including Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian and fragmentary documentation that is available in the Smolensk municipal archives. Nevertheless, preliminary conclusions drawn from this data provide us with a key understanding of the post-war musical development of the Russian diaspora which was supplemented by USSR citizens who had left the country after the German occupation.