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The Great Patriotic War Although by 1941 the USSR had spent over a decade preparing for war, the Nazis' launch of Operation Barbarossa on June 22 of that year caught the society unawares. Stalin had suspected that rumors of imminent attack were the work of Nazi counterintelligence and was determined not to succumb to provocation1 This explains his instructions to Pravda to quash rumors of new tensions in the Nazi-Soviet relationship in the days and weeks before the invasion . It also clarifies why Stalin attempted to rein in the Red Army even after the first bombs began to fall, still convinced that the invasion was nothing more than aggressive saber-rattling. In the wake of this surprise attack, a surge of genuinely patriotic emotion swept through Soviet society, discouraging the appearance of even gallows humor related to the war. Although defeatist rumors began to appear during the fa ll of 1941,2 jokesters generally seem to have respected social and political taboos that warned against commentary that could be understood as demoralizing or disloyal. Ultimately, most of the humor that circulated between 1941 and 1945 was quite tame in comparison with the jokes of the interwar period, barbs being restricted to innocuous targets such as the command staff's loss of initiative and the poor quality of military hardware. Perhaps the only real wartime innovation in Stalin-era political humor was the emergence of a cycle of anti-Semitic jokes deriding Jews for their reluctance to risk life and limb in defense of the USSR. Precipitated by the Soviet news media's emphasis on "Russianness" and its underreporting of Jewish contributions to the war effort, these jokes explained the apparent absence of Jewish heroism by alleging that draft-age Jews were sitting out the war in Central Asian evacuation. Fueled by the war's atmosphere of austerity and suffering, everyday chauvinism combined with epithets such as "Tashkent partisan" to give rise to widespread anti-Semitic sentiments that would persist deep into the 1940s3 1 Sekrety Gitlera l1a stole u Stalil1a - razvedka i kOl1trrazvedka a podgotovke germal1skoi agressii protiv SSSR, mart- iiul1' 1941 g.: Dokumel1ty iz Tsentral'l1ogo arkhiva FSB (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995), 10-11. 2 Tsentral'nyi arkhiv FSB, published in Moskva voel1l1aia, 1941-1945: Memuary i arkhivl1ye dokumel1ty (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995), 49-50; RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d . 85, I. 79; HPSSS, no. 13, schedule A, vol. 2, 42. 3Brandenberger, Natiol1al Bolshevism: Stalil1ist Mass Cuiture al1d the Formation ofModern Russial1 Natiol1al Identity, 179-80; see also Arnir Weiner's discussion of the "Tashken t 1 34 PO LITICAL H UMOR UNDER STALIN B 1941 ro4Y Ha Kl1T coneTCKOM BAaCTl1. CAe4YIOlL\MM )l(aAyeTO!: - Y MeH}l Cep41\e 60AbHoe. - Y BOpOllll1Aona Ta K)I(e, a OH CAY)K l1T KpaCHoM ApMMM. AOXOA,l1T Ol.lepeA,h AD enp e.H, KOTOPhI M Bee npeMJI BHl1M3TeAbHO np"CAYWI1BaAor: - 51 HAMOT. - HW-lero, KaAl1HI1H BOH KpyrAhIM HAMOT, a CAY)I(MT coneTCKOM BAaCTI1 .... Ha BOeHHbII1 Kopa6Ab np116blBaeT nonOAHeHl1e 113 MOPJIKOB 3arraca. 0

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