About exploits, about valor, about glory
The Great Patriotic War is a tragic page in the history of our Motherland. Our people, at the cost of huge losses, defended their homeland from the enemy. The annals of the Great Patriotic War named the names of thousands and thousands of heroes who defended the freedom and independence of our Motherland. It is to them that songs are dedicated, which have become the most beloved and dear among the people.
Holy war
On June 24, 1941, the newspapers Izvestia and Krasnaya Zvezda published a poem by V. I. Lebedev-Kumach, which began with the words: "Get up, this is a huge country, stand up for mortal combat …"
These poems demanded persistent work from the poet. The drafts stored in the archive indicate that Lebedev-Kumach more than once rewrote and refined individual lines and stanzas, sometimes replacing whole quatrains. Apparently, the idea of these poems came to the poet in the pre-war period. According to E. Dolmatovsky, a few days before the treacherous attack of Hitler's hordes, Lebedev-Kumach, under the impression of newsreels showing the Nazi air raids on the cities of Spain and Warsaw, entered the following words in his notebook: "Black wings do not dare to fly over the Motherland …"
The poem was read in the newspaper by the head of the Red Banner Song and Dance Ensemble of the Red Army A. V. Alexandrov. It made such a strong impression on him that he immediately sat down at the piano. The next day, having come to the rehearsal, the composer announced:
- We will learn a new song - “Holy War”.
He wrote the words and notes of the song on a slate with chalk - there was no time to type! - and the singers and musicians copied them into their notebooks. Another day - for a rehearsal with the orchestra, and in the evening - the premiere at the Belorussky railway station, a junction point, from where in those days combat trains were sent to the front.
Immediately after a tense rehearsal, the ensemble's group left for the Belorussky railway station to perform in front of the fighters leaving for the front line. Here it is necessary to clarify that the full composition of the team in those days was no longer. Three groups immediately went to the front, and the fourth, led by A. V. Aleksandrov, remained temporarily in Moscow to serve military units, hospitals, radio performances and learn new songs.
In the waiting room, a platform was made of freshly rounded boards - a kind of stage for performances. The artists of the ensemble climbed this platform, and they involuntarily had a doubt: is it possible to perform in such an environment? In the hall - noise, harsh commands, radio sounds. The words of the presenter, who announces that the song "Sacred War" will now be performed for the first time, are drowned in the general hum. But the hall gradually calms down …
The excitement was in vain. From the very first bars, the song captured the fighters. And when the second verse sounded, absolute silence fell in the hall. Everyone stood up as if they were singing a hymn. Tears are visible on stern faces, and this excitement is transmitted to the performers. They all have tears in their eyes too … The song died down, but the soldiers demanded a repetition. Over and over again - five times in a row! - sang the ensemble "Sacred War".
Thus began the path of the song, a glorious and long path. From that day on, the "Sacred War" was adopted by our army, all the people, and became the musical emblem of the Great Patriotic War. It was sung everywhere - at the forefront, in partisan detachments, in the rear, where weapons for victory were forged. Every morning after the strike of the Kremlin chimes, it sounded on the radio.
In the annals of the Patriotic War, there are many heroic episodes telling how this hymn song entered the battle. One of them dates back to the spring of 1942. A small group of Sevastopol defenders took up defense in a cave carved into the rock. The Nazis fiercely stormed this natural fortress, pelting it with grenades. The forces of the defenders were melting … And suddenly a great song was heard from the depths of the dungeon. Then there was a strong explosion, and fragments of the rock filled up the cave … The Soviet soldiers did not surrender to the hated enemy.
"Holy war" sounded in many countries around the world. Once the Red Banner Song and Dance Ensemble of the Soviet Army. A. V. Alexandrova was on tour in Canada. This song was not included in his concert program. But on May 9, in honor of the Victory Day, the artists decided to start the concert with the "Holy War", although they did not feel much confidence that the song would reach the audience: they were too far from the events of the Second World War. The success was overwhelming. The next day, local newspapers reported that the Russians had celebrated Victory Day with a song with which they began the long and arduous road to Berlin, to victory. In this they were right! The author of "Sacred War" A. V. Aleksandrov once wrote: “I have never been a military specialist, but I still have a powerful weapon in my hands - a song. The song can strike the enemy as well as any weapon!"
Near the village of Kryukovo
This song was written by Sergei Ostrov and Mark Fradkin in memory of the feat of the Red Army soldiers, who at the cost of their lives kept the last frontier before Moscow.
In November-December 1941, two German fascist groups, one of which had previously operated in the Volokolamsk direction, and the other in the Klinsky direction, broke through to the area of the village of Kryukovo. The battle was accepted by the soldiers of the 8th Guards Division named after I. V. Panfilov, the Second Guards Cavalry Corps of General L. M. Dovator and the First Guards Tank Brigade of General M. E. Katukova. They fought for every house and every street …
When the enemy occupied the villages of Peshki and Nikolskoye and approached the village of Lyalovo, the command post of the Soviet 16th Army was transferred to the Kryukovo station. On November 30, Soviet troops launched attacks along the entire defense front of the 16th Army. Especially fierce battles were fought in the area of the villages of Kryukovo and Peshki. The village of Kryukovo passed from hand to hand 8 times. The enemy made Kryukovo his stronghold. The enemy turned the stone buildings into pillboxes; between the buildings, German tanks dug into the ground were in ambushes. The Nazis sought to break through the defenses of the Soviet troops and at all costs and reach Moscow.
In early December, the troops of the 16th Army of Lieutenant General K. K. Rokossovsky stopped the enemy's advance and went over to the defensive. In the area of the Kryukovo station, the fighting did not stop for a minute. The 354th Infantry Division defended the Leningradskoye Highway and the northern outskirts of Kryukovo.
The fierce battle began at 10 am on December 7th. Shrapnel of shells covered the entire earth. At the Kryukovo station, Soviet troops lost thousands of soldiers and officers, but by the evening of December 8, the enemy was broken. The best parts of the enemy were defeated and put to flight. Thanks to the massive heroism of Soviet soldiers, the German fascist groups were unable to break through to Moscow.
Marshal Rokossovsky later called the battles on the Zelenograd land "the second Borodino". At the entrance to Zelenograd in June 1974, the Defenders of Moscow monument was unveiled. On a roadside mound, erected on a mass grave, in which more than 760 people rest, a gray obelisk rises. Three closed forty-meter bayonets symbolize the resilience of three military units - tank, rifle and cavalry. At the foot of the obelisk there are three steles, one of them is inscribed: “1941. Here the defenders of Moscow, who died in the battle for the Motherland, remained forever immortal."
A poem called "The Ballad of Fidelity", based on which the song was written, was published by Sergei Ostrov in 1971. The music for it was written by a well-known composer in our country Mark Fradkin. After its creation, the song was given by the authors to the ensemble "Samotsvety": Mark Fradkin insisted on this. After the split of "Samotsvetov" in 1975, "At the village of Kryukovo" was recorded by the group "Flame". It was in this performance that the song sounded in the final concert "Song-75", where it was sung by the former soloist of "Gems" Valentin Dyakonov. At the author's concert of Mark Fradkin (in 1984), the song was performed by Joseph Kobzon.
At a nameless height
The events that are sung in this song are not invented. All this was in reality. Where the Kaluga Region adjoins the Smolensk Region, there is the village of Rubezhanka. And there is a height not far from it, indicated on wartime maps as 224.1 m.
How many of them, such nameless skyscrapers, sometimes turned out to be a serious obstacle in the path of our troops, who were liberating their native land. Several times our soldiers went on the attack, trying to knock out the Nazis from this height, but to no avail. And it was necessary to capture her at all costs. This combat mission was undertaken by a group of soldiers of the 718th Infantry Regiment, consisting of eighteen fighters, Siberian volunteers, led by Lieutenant Yevgeny Poroshin. At night, under cover of darkness, they crawled close to the enemy fortifications and, after a fierce battle, captured the height. And then they heroically held her back, bleeding, but not giving up.
The soldiers, who repulsed one enemy attack after another, needed at least a short respite in order to change and reload machine-gun and submachine gun disks, take a sip of water from a flask, and bandage their wounded comrades. And then one of them, Nikolai Godenkin, decided to divert the enemy's fire onto himself. In a bloody and tattered tunic, he rose to his full height and went straight to the Nazis.
His right hand was broken, and therefore he held a machine gun in his left hand, firing from it on the go. So he walked fifteen to twenty meters. He seemed to be walking for a very long time. On this way, he was wounded several more times, but even while falling, he managed to take several steps forward.
“For the first time I heard about this battle from the editor of the divisional circulation, Nikolai Chaika, when I served in the newspaper of the 2nd Belorussian Front,” recalls the poet M. L. Matusovsky. - The story amazed me. Later I also met the heroes who survived. And I remembered all this again, when in the early 60s director Vladimir Basov invited me and composer Veniamin Basner to work with him on the film "Silence" based on the novel of the same name by front-line writer Yuri Bondarev. Basov asked us to write a song that, as it were, focused in itself the fate of the front line of the two main characters of the picture. A song that does not amaze with the scale and scope of events. And then I remembered this fight. In the history of the Great Patriotic War, it is only a small episode, but how great is its significance!.."
The poems were written, but the music did not go well with them. “When the third version of it,” the composer later said, “was rejected by both the poet and the director of Silence, Basov, and the senior music editor of Mosfilm, Lukina, I despaired, I wanted to give up this work altogether. But Basov, after listening to my doubts, said that there was still time and asked to continue the search. Angry, I was driving home to Leningrad, and suddenly on the way, in a train carriage, I felt a completely new melody … There was nothing to record it, nothing on - so I sang to myself all the way so as not to forget … This melody, which was born to the sound wagon wheels, we hear in the picture, which was released on the screens of the country in 1964. The artist Lev Barashkov sang the song behind the scenes.
But after the film, many wonderful singers sang it everywhere. And, perhaps, the best and unsurpassed performer of it was the People's Artist of the Soviet Union Yuri Gulyaev. Now, when you hear this song, you can't even believe that it was composed in the post-war period. So it seems that she is from there - from the war.
The song of Matusowski and Basner drew attention to the fate of its real heroes. It turned out that after the battle for the height, only two survived … One of them - Gerasim Ilyich Lapin - was stunned and wounded in that battle. Buried in earth from a shell burst, he lay until dark, and then crawled to his own … Another defender of the height - Konstantin Nikolaevich Vlasov - was wounded and taken prisoner. He fled, hid in the forest, and then fought in a partisan detachment …
Both of them lived to see the day when a monument was erected at the site of their battle and the death of their comrades. Next to him is a dugout, above which the same "burnt pine" from the song rises. Closer to the road is the museum. Cars passing by slow down and give long beeps …
Cranes
In the Caucasus, there is a belief that soldiers who fell on the battlefield turn into cranes. In 1968 the song "Cranes" was published on the verses of Rasul Gamzatov (translated by Naum Grebnev) and music by Jan Frenkel. Performed by Mark Bernes. The song is dedicated to the soldiers who died during the Great Patriotic War, whom the authors compared to a wedge of flying cranes.
R. Gamzatov wrote the poem "Cranes" in his native language, in Avar. The theme of cranes was inspired by a visit to a monument in Hiroshima to a Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki, who suffered from leukemia following the atomic explosion in Hiroshima. Sadako Sasaki hoped that she would be cured if she made a thousand paper cranes using the art of origami. In Asia, there is a belief that a person's desire will be fulfilled if he folds a thousand origami - cranes from colored paper.
On the other hand, cranes have their own image in Russian culture, with which Gamzatov was very familiar as a translator of Russian classical poetry. As Gamzatov recalls, when he flew home from Japan to the USSR, he thought about his mother, the news of whose death came to Japan, thought about his older brother Magomed, who died in the battles near Sevastopol, thought about another older brother, a missing soldier sailor Akhilchi, thought about other close people who died in the Great Patriotic War. “Isn't that why the Avar speech is similar to the cry of the crane from the century?”, He wrote in the poem “Cranes” translated by N. Grebnev.
The war found Grebnev from the very beginning, since at that time he served on the border, near Brest. He retreated with the Red Army, got into the famous Kharkov encirclement, where the Germans captured 130 thousand Red Army soldiers, went out one of the few, crossed the Seversky Donets, fought at Stalingrad, was wounded three times, and after the last wound on January 12, 1944, the war for him "Over." In the poem "Cranes", he also put his experience of war.
In 1968, the poem "Cranes" translated by Naum Grebnev was published in the magazine "New World". Singer Mark Bernes saw him. Bernes himself never fought in the war, but he went to give concerts on the front lines. And he especially succeeded in songs dedicated to the war. Obviously, the war was also his personal theme.
After reading the poem "Cranes", the excited Bernes called the poet-translator Naum Grebnev and said that he wanted to make a song. With poetry, the singer turned to Jan Frenkel, with whom he had worked a lot before, and asked him to compose music. It took a long time to write it. Only two months later, when the composer wrote the opening vocal, the work started to get easier. Later Jan Frenkel recalled:
“I immediately called Bernes. He immediately came, listened to the song and … burst into tears. He was not a sentimental person, but it often happened that he cried when he liked something. " For the composer Jan Frenkel, war was also a personal theme. In 1941-1942 he studied at the anti-aircraft school and was later seriously wounded. Mark Bernes recorded "Cranes" being seriously ill. This recording was the last in his life. The biographer of Jan Frenkel, composer Yuri Rabinovich, wrote:
“Bernes, after hearing the music, rushed everyone to record the song as soon as possible. As Jan said, he had a presentiment of his death and wanted to put an end to his life with this song. The recording was incredibly difficult for Bernes. But he courageously endured everything and wrote down "Cranes". Indeed, it became the last song in his life."
On October 22, Russia celebrates the Holiday of White Cranes, as a holiday of poetry and as a memory of those who fell on the battlefields in all wars.
Victory Day
In March 1975, the poet Vladimir Kharitonov turned to composer David Tukhmanov with a proposal to create a song dedicated to the Great Patriotic War. The country was preparing for the 30th anniversary of the Victory, and a competition for the best song about the war was announced in the Composers' Union. Just a few days before the end of the competition, V. Kharitonov handed over his poems to the co-author. David Tukhmanov quickly wrote the music, and the song was submitted to the last audition of the competition.
But the song "Victory Day" did not take any place. Moreover, listening to the song caused a painful, sharp reaction from D. Tukhmanov's senior colleagues, very harsh statements were made against the song, which immediately became known to the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. The reason was the music and its author. The poet V. G. Kharitonov was a war veteran, songs to his poems were written by laurel-crowned composers (Anatoly Novikov, Vano Muradeli and others) back in the 1950s. By that time, Kharitonov had written the words to the famous songs "My address is the Soviet Union", "Russia is my Motherland" …
And David Tukhmanov was a young author, known only for pop hits. In those days, the entire musical policy of the state was determined by the leadership of the Union of Composers, mostly very elderly people. The age of over 30 was considered immature. According to the leadership of the Union of Composers, as well as television and radio directors, Tukhmanov could not correspond to the status of a songwriter on a national scale.
Although D. Tukhmanov has already created the hits “The Last Train”, “These Eyes Opposite”, “White Dance”, “I Love You, Russia”, “Gutsulochka”, “My Address is the Soviet Union”, “How Beautiful This World” and many others, he did not have any titles and regalia, except for the Moscow Komsomol Prize. And therefore, having a diploma of a professional composer and having written three dozen popular songs, only in 1973 he was hardly admitted to the Union of Composers.
There was a second "minus" - in the music of the song "Victory Day" elements of either tango or foxtrot were heard. As a result, the song was banned, it was not allowed on the air - neither on the radio, nor on television. The first performer of the song was Leonid Smetannikov. She sounded on the set of the "Blue Light" program on the eve of May 9, 1975. And only in November 1975, in a concert dedicated to the Day of Police, Lev Leshchenko performed "Victory Day" on live television. The audience immediately accepted the song, and "Victory Day" was performed again - for an encore. After which the whole country began to sing this song, it became a hymn to the heroes of the war.