Songs of the October Revolution

No matter what belated curses were sent to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, no matter how rampant demonic, satanic forces were announced by some pseudo-historians, the October revolution, but still the book of the American journalist John Reed was called “Ten Days That Shook the World”.

It is the world, and not only Russia. And the songs were sung by others - invocatory, marching, and not decadent-tearful or romantic-languid.

"He raised his club to his enemies!"

One of these things, as if anticipating, blessing and historically anticipating a social upheaval, has of course become "Dubinushka". Fyodor Shalyapin himself did not disdain to perform the songs of the October Revolution, for which he, in fact, suffered - the greatest order of Emperor Nicholas II was to "remove the tramp from the imperial theaters." The poet V. Mayakovsky will later write: "Both the song and the verse are a bomb and a banner." So, "Dubinushka" and became such a song-bomb.

Refined aesthetes frowned and hastily silenced their ears - just as the venerable academics used to turn away in disgust from I.Repin’s painting “Barge haulers on the Volga”. By the way, in the song we are talking about them, a silent, formidable Russian protest, which then resulted in two revolutions with a small interval, leads from them. Here is this great song performed by Chaliapin:

Looks like, but not one person!

The style and lexical structure of the songs of the October Revolution have a number of characteristic features that make them recognizable:

1. at the thematic level - the desire for immediate action, which is expressed by imperatives: we will lay, we will go, we will get stronger, fly and etc.;
2. frequent use of common "we" instead of the narrowly personal "I" already in the first lines of popular songs: "We will go boldly into battle", "Boldly, comrades, in step", "we all went out of the people", "Our locomotive, go ahead", etc. ;
3. a set of ideological stamps characteristic of this transitional time: "work is the ruler of the world", the dawn of a new life, the "callous hand" of the proletariat, "the last mortal combat", the strength of the fighting spirit, the "realm of freedom", the desire to fan the "fire of the world" and so on;
4. sharp ideological demarcation on "our" and "strangers", on "our" and "not ours": "white army, black baron" - "The Red Army is the strongest of all";
5. energetic, marching, marching rhythm with a significant, easy to remember chorus;
6. finally, maximalism, expressed in the willingness to die as one in the struggle for a just cause.

Both finished writing and rewriting ...

Song "White Army, Black Baron"written hot on the heels of the October Revolution by the poet P. Grigoriev and the composer S. Pokrass, first contained a reference to Trotsky, which then disappeared for censorship reasons, and in 1941 it changed with the name of Stalin. She was popular in Spain and Hungary, white emigrants hated her:

There were no Germans ...

The story of the song is interesting. "Young guard"whose poems are attributed to the Komsomol poet A. Bezymensky:

In reality, Bezymensky was only a translator and a non-medal interpreter of the original German text of the poet Julius Mosen in the later version of another German, A. Aildermann. This poem is dedicated to the memory of the leader of the uprising against the Napoleonic tyranny of Andreas Gofer, which took place in the distant 1809th year. The original song is called "Zu Mantua in Banden". Here is the version of the GDR times:

From the verses of the First World War "We heard, grandfathers" another song of the October revolution has grown - "Boldly we will go to battle". In the White Volunteer Army, they sang it too, but, of course, with different words. So there is no need to talk about one author.

Another story with the German prologue. A revolutionary Leonid Radin, who had been imprisoned in the Tagansky Prison in 1898, sketched out a few quatrains of a song that soon gained fame on the first line - "Boldly, comrades, in the leg". The musical basis or "fish" was the song of German students, members of the Silesian fraternity. The Kornilovites and even the Nazis sang this song, “shoveling” the text beyond recognition.

Sing anywhere!

The October Revolution put forward a whole galaxy of talented commanders-nuggets. Some served under the tsarist regime, and then the Bolsheviks demanded their knowledge and experience. The bitter paradox of time is that by the end of the 30s. only two remained alive - Voroshilov and Budyonny. In the 1920s, many sang with gusto. "March of Budyonny" composer Dmitry Pokrass and poet A. d'Aktil. It is curious that at one time they even tried to ban the song as a folklore wedding. Well, that time thought better of it.