Soviet mass song (massovaya pesnya) is built on easily-sung major-key melodies and a strong marching pulse, scored for solo voice answered by large choirs, brass bands and military ensembles. Most are bright and forward-looking, but the wartime repertoire of the Great Patriotic War (1941-45) includes deeply lyrical minor-key gems. The thick male-choir and military-band sound gives the unmistakable feeling that the state itself is singing. Composers Isaak Dunayevsky, Matvei Blanter and Alexander Alexandrov mass-produced songs for film and radio; the Red Army Choir (Alexandrov Ensemble) acted as their loudspeaker.

In the 1930s, under Stalin-era socialist realism, the state deliberately cultivated a song genre. The decisive stretch was the Great Patriotic War: 'Sacred War' (Alexandrov, June 1941, written in the first week of the war), 'Sinii Platochek (Blue Handkerchief)' (Klavdiya Shulzhenko, 1942, sung to soldiers at the front), 'Tyomnaya Noch (Dark Is the Night)' (Mark Bernes, 1943, from the film Two Soldiers), 'Katyusha' (Blanter, 1938). These songs were built for propaganda but the lyrical depth of the wartime settings gave them a second life as post-war standards.

Listen first to Mark Bernes's soft, spoken-word delivery on 'Tyomnaya Noch'. He doesn't sing out; he reads. That restraint saved the song from being disposable propaganda and made it a standard eighty years later. Contrast with the Red Army Choir's 'Sacred War', where a hundred-plus bass-baritones drive the same phrase like hammers — the grand tragedy the state demanded of its music. Klavdiya Shulzhenko's 'Sinii Platochek' plays a woman waiting for a lover to return — a soloist's part inside a war-mobilisation song. In Japan many of these tunes ('Katyusha', 'Million Roses') are heard as 'Russian folk songs' and were sung through the post-war Utagoe choral movement — although they are in fact state-composed pieces with named professional composers and specific release dates.

Mark Bernes, 'Tyomnaya Noch (Dark Is the Night)' (1943) is the ideal starting track for the wartime lyric side. For the heroic side, the Red Army Choir's 'Sacred War' (1941). Klavdiya Shulzhenko's 'Sinii Platochek' (1942) shows the female-soloist wartime lyric. 'Katyusha' (1938) is still sung every year on Victory Day (9 May) across Russia.

Matvei Blanter, composer of 'Katyusha' (1938), received a first-class state decoration from Stalin. The song's title 'Katyusha' — diminutive of the female name Ekaterina — became the wartime nickname for the BM-13 multiple-launch rocket system, reportedly because the launch noise resembled the song. 'Million Roses' (Pugacheva, 1982), often heard in Japan as another 'Russian folk song', actually belongs to the later Soviet estrada generation, not to the wartime-and-earlier mass-song lineage — Japanese reception collapses both under one 'Russian folk' label. Mark Bernes died in 1969 and is buried at Novodevichy; his grave still receives regular flowers every Victory Day.