These songs are the record of our speculative forays into the dreamspace which has grown up in the cracks between the social myth of the Heroic partisans and the ugly reality of the war; in mapping that territory, it was not our intention to pursue any specific political agenda or champion any particular group or concern. The history of the Soviet partisans in the Great Patriotic War, like most war stories, is complex and often contradictory. We believe that it is vitally important, at these intersections of heroism and atrocity, to retain that complexity and resist the reductive impulse which impoverishes our myths and denies the varied humanity of the men and women on all sides of the conflict. These songs seek neither to glorify nor to condemn, and while they do not have anything so crude as a “message,” we hope that they do contain some echo of truth.
Great stuff.