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Another of magnitizdat's themes is the contrast between the Soviet Union's technological advances and the wretched living and working conditions endured by many citizens, including the veritable army of shawled grannies who still sweep the street of today's Russia. Mikhail Nozhkin, a young movie actor turned balladeer, sings of Auntie Nyusha, the tireless, smiling cleaning woman who sweeps up the messes of others. She is avoided by an immaculate bureaucrat, who fears he would dirty his clean hands if he touched her. While others want pensions and vacations, she never stops working. "Reactors are roaring, rockets are flying and radar surrounds us," goes the song, "but Auntie Nyusha just keeps on sweeping, just keeps on dusting, just keeps on cleaning up—after high-ranking ministers, after plain workers—from morning till night."
Not all the songs are so somber. Many poke good-humored fun at life's petty annoyances—some universal, some strictly Soviet. In a young husband's complaint, Nozhkin sings in an easy, confidential tone of how he and his wife bought a summer dacha and an expensive German shepherd to guard it: "The dog doesn't sleep because it's guarding the dacha, and I don't sleep because I'm guarding the dog." "I work like a horse and get paid like a donkey," he adds. "All day long I run from the nursery, to the doctor, to the market. At night I dream of my bachelor days and don't want to wake up."
Hcmd-to-Hcmd Combat. Like America's Negro spirituals, many of Russia's ballads draw their inspiration from the experience of slavery. In the fearful days of Stalin, the bitter, poignant songs of prisoners, which wafted beyond the gates of the slave labor camps, were known and hummed by millions of Soviet citizens. Although the Stalinist terror has since subsided, the memories endure. In magnitizdat, Russians sing of their struggle to maintain integrity in a society that all too often has brutalized its citizens. The stanza of one famous song begins: "Our own war is a hand-to-hand combat between honor and evil—something people don't usually write songs about. We had our ribs broken many times and some of us were blinded. Yet for us honor means more than broken bones and sightless eyes, or even a piece of bread."
One of the most celebrated of the modern Russian songwriters, Alexander Galich, is himself a longtime veteran of prisons and camps—his admirers call him "the Solzhenitsyn of song." In his unmusical but strangely compelling bass voice, Galich sings of the complicity in Stalin's crimes of people who kept silent out of cowardice or self-interest. "We all know silence can be profitable," he sings, "It's golden, after all. It's easy to join the ranks of the rich. Very easy to join the leaders. So easy to join the executioners. Just keep quiet, keep quiet."