Categories: uncategorized
Date: 01 May 2007 16:18:05
Happy International Workers Day!
I was browsing through Wikipedia, as you do, looking for something else entirely, and my attention was caught by a reference to the official US Army Song. I'd never heard of it (unlike the Navy & Marine songs which just about anyone who has ever watched old war films on TV must recognise). So I looked around a little and ended up chasing links for all sorts of military music, until I ran slap bang up against the Armchair General (which could be called the Tankie's Friend) which has lots of Russian Civil War and Great Patriotic War songs (many are in fact links to Sovmusic or hymn.ru).
So I listened to some. At first almost as a joke, something to do, have a laugh at the overblown Stalinist language, so at variance to what was really going on. But I ended up with tears in my eyes. Yes, there are tinpot generals and synthetic heroics. There are also plain ordinary love songs, as wall as surrealistic absurdities like the one about the weapons-grade samovars, or "I am a Yak Fighter Plane". I ended up with tears in my eyes of course. All those people really lived through all that. Some of them meant what they sang.
The Russian Revolution and Civil War, along with the Great War (of which they are a part in some ways), are the great tragedies of our modern European civilisation. And they are tragedies in ways that the Nazis weren't. Nazis were (and are) unambiguously enemies of civilisation and culture and decency and freedom and law and art and music and life and hope and peace. They were the bad guys. The Communists were meant to be the good guys. And it turned into oppression and war and torture and death. They themselves thought they were the good guys, at least at first. Rosa Luxemburg supposedly could hardly believe what she heard about Dzershinsky and the Cheka. (that there were Western leftists who still belived in Leninsm and Stalinism as the last great hope of mankind in the 1920s, or even the 1930s just shows how little attention some of them were paying. Until 1942 of course when Hitler made it come truem, and they were our best hope). What the Nazis did to Europe was like having your kids shot by a burgular. What the Soviets did was more like being raped by the policeman you called in to investigate the crime. Both very wrong, but the second is more tragic, in the dramatic sense.
A lot of the songs on Armchari General are links to other web sites, particularly Sovmusic a deeply cool site of apparently unreconstructed Stalinists. And The history of the Russian National Anthems an exhaustive set of recordings of every version each of the half-dozen or so songs that have been a Russian national anthem in the last century or so, as well as other pieces opf music that quote them, or from which they may have been derived (including the UK and Danish anthems) and a whole heap of Tchaikovsky and Glinka and the anthems of each of the SSRs.
Our UK national anthem is so boring compared to most. But Russia had half a dozen before they settled again on the one you know from watching the Olympics on TV, mostly borrowed, all better than ours. The first one is the oddest, because it is our national anthem, it started as God Save the King translated into Russian, with the disparaging comments about Scots removed and a few Slavic twists to the melody. You'll have heard it if you ever listen to any Russian orchestral music at all, their composers quote it repeatedly, most famously in Tchaikovsky's 1812 where it is the main theme played against Marseillaise. I don't know what makes Russian music sound Russian - some memory of Orthodox liturgy maybe. But whatever they did to the tune changes it from one of the most boring anthems there is into something that makes your hair stand on end.
After the Revolution they briefly flirted with the Marseillaise (which sounds weird in Russian) before settling on that other French song Internationale which doesn't. That's a song with a strange set of connotations. I didn't feel at all happy about it for a while, not until Tianamen Square, when the demonstrators sang it and redeemed it. Once again we can look people in the face while singing it ourselves. But it isn't a trivial song. Its not a joke.
Neither is Avanti Popolo, though it can sound like one. I tend to associate it with drunken parties at Labour conferences (though I've sung it at a drunken party at a Liberal Conference I gatecrashed once in the happy days before they had armed guards at such affairs) and particularly with Neil Kinnock in 1984. Or was it 1985? It seems so long ago now. Its always been a uniting song rather than a dividing one on the Left. Apart from the last word, which varies according to taste :) Somewhere today, someone is singng it.
I got downloads from AWS the impressively gigantic Italian anti-war site with links everywhere. (Navigation is hard though. Things often aren't where you would expect. There are loads of MP3s and video clips, many linked to on other sites, but lots of the links and some of the files are duds. And its hard to tell which links are recordings and which not so I ended up looking at the html source... and then gave up. But there are hundreds of songs, many with alternative translations into different languages.)
And then I was off on one, building my little itunes playlist of vaguely left-wing songs.
A few more repositories of lefty lyrics:
Free Peace mp3s has some great newer songs. Check out Soylent Gringo! XPDNC has lots of links to union and labour stuff , not just music. There are union and left songs at Radical songs and unionsong.com (Lyrics, links, but no downloads that I could find).
Protest Records has a mind-bendingly braindead "interface" and New Songs For Peace is a UNESCO front! Some fun music at both though.
Avanti Popolo!
And here, extracted from itunes, is part of that lefty and anti-war playlist. Mostly found from those websites listed above (though some from CDs I have)
And yes, I do see that there is an incongruity between the Anthem of Soviet Union and The Green Fields of France