Suzanne Ament's compelling study of popular song in the wartime Soviet Union is an important contribution to our understanding of Soviet culture during and since World War II, drawing on substantial archival research as well as oral history to shed light on the affective power of song and the role it played in communication between the Soviet state and its citizens. Ament's research entailed collating a large body of songs created during 1941–1945 and reconstructing a roll-call of the composers, poet-lyricists, and administrators who worked together; throughout the book the extent and detail of her knowledge of repertoire and personnel is striking. Chapter 1 presents an interpretation that is perceptive at the level of each song, stretching to fascinating details about variant versions, alterations to lyrics in light of the progress of the war, and even the songs that simply never caught on. It also constitutes a convincing chronology of how themes and moods shifted over the course of the war. The relentless panegyric mode of early wartime compositions, featuring anthems praising Stalin and Soviet institutions, may have had little appeal for a population experiencing occupation and evacuation, Ament suggests. Certainly, she demonstrates that a few weeks into the war songs began depicting more personal subjects—a soldier's farewell or a girlfriend's faithful vigil—and accommodating feelings of uncertainty and sadness. From this point onwards songs also provided humdrum and human depictions of life at the front; eventually, lighthearted ditties were able to delight audiences by celebrating the army's progress westwards. Chapter 2 turns to the wartime careers of those writing these songs, and Chapter 3 the systems underpinning song production. We learn that songs are sometimes remembered by their creators as arriving in near-magical instances of inspiration, but in these chapters Ament is at pains to draw attention to more worldly aspects of this work, including censorship and remuneration, and the techniques employed by institutions, including the Composers’ Union and the army to ensure that the song repertoire benefited the war effort. As a whole, this first section explains convincingly the potential that Soviet composers, poets, and cultural policymakers perceived in song as a means of communication that could console as well as galvanize singers and listeners.

The book's middle section takes the logical next step in demonstrating the centrality of song to the war effort by examining means of distribution and the organization of live performances. As well as looking at recordings, radio, and film, Chapter 4 also discusses songs in print, paying due attention to the fact they were also composed in order to be sung widely. Chapter 5 focuses on the experiences of brigades of rank-and-file performers as they toured and performed on the front lines and in hospitals and factories: more than one voice quoted in this book refers to the difficulty of singing when in tears, and at the close of the chapter we are left to wonder, with Ament, “just how these people continued to perform in the face of such threatened and real personal tragedy” (198).

Throughout this work the emotional dimension of song remains central, but never more so than in chapter six, which recounts the ways in which civilians and soldiers remembered songs featuring in their lives. Ament's decision to structure her study according to the different aspects of songs’ production, followed by their dissemination, means that by this point the reader has encountered many of her exemplars several times, and it is instructive—and, indeed, moving—to meet them again in the words of those who heard them and were comforted, or who found themselves singing them spontaneously in response to events. Chapter 7 is a relatively brief discussion of the continued significance of wartime songs in Russia. If this final chapter does not quite fulfil the study's stated ambition to discuss this legacy up to the present moment, it does suggest interesting avenues of further investigation. It may be that situating this question in such a lengthy period of examination resulted in a missed opportunity. A feature of Ament's work that seems to me unique is the timing of her interviews, carried out mainly in 1991. When she interviewed the composer Tikhon Khrennikov, for example, he was still Secretary of the Composers’ Union, an organization that would cease to exist along with the Soviet Union itself; another composer present at the interview “had never seen Khrennikov in such a frame of mind, or telling such ‘human’ stories” (202). I would love to read more from Ament on the dynamics of wartime songs’ meaning during the dying stages Soviet rule, when the war's (living) memory played a very different part in public discourse from the one it has in twenty-first-century Russia. The fact that this period is not discussed in detail here, though, by no means detracts from the achievement of her book, which will prove extremely valuable to those researching and teaching World War II and Soviet popular culture.