A dictionary of the terms used by real Soviet soldiers at the Eastern
Front.
The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people against Nazi Germany,
known in the West as the Eastern Front of WWII, continues to attract a number of
military historians from different countries around the world. The frontline
veterans' reminiscences occupy a prominent place among most important documents
of that time. In contrast to official documents, these recollections reproduce
the so-called truth of the foxholes, the genuine spirit of the war.
Along with their honesty, the WWII veterans' reminiscences are full
of idiomatic expressions, specialised terms and abbreviations peculiar to that
war, and special dictionaries appeared in print and later on Internet web sites.
Unlike most of the Allied countries, no war jargon dictionary has been published
in Russia. This glossary is intended to
begin to fill that gap.
Several sources of the Red Army serviceman's slang were peculiar to
the Soviet experience. The upheaval of the 1917 October Revolution and following
Civil War, and the fundamental changes wrought by the political and social
reforms and campaigns in the 1920s-1930s affected the Russian vocabulary
substantially. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Red Army soldiers and
officers came from rural households, and brought their local idioms and
expressions into the trenches, also enriched the war vocabulary. Another set of
figurative expressions arose as a result of Stalin's terrible purges of the
1930s, when people created euphemisms to avoid saying words like search, arrest
and execution. Such expressions came into general circulation and also
contributed to Russian wartime slang. Some words also appeared under the harsh
conditions of the USSR far rear, where civilians
struggled under conditions of hard labour and malnutrition. Lend-lease items
entered the soldiers' parlance, often in the form of nicknames. Finally, any
army has its traditions and slogans, many of which were revived in the Red Army
during WWII.
