The Russian Revolution started on International Women's Day, 8 March 1917 (22 February on the old Tsarist calendar), with a massive demonstration in Petrograd. (Photo credit: Wiki Commons)
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THIS PIECE BEGAN as a thank you note to Barbara Mor and Franetta McMillan for their supportive comments on my previous post, 'Far & Away the Road Goes Winding; Look & See How Merrily the Road Goes,' the title a passage so long it required single quotes and ampersands to fit the allotted headline space.
As I have said before, I regard responses from writers and artists of the caliber of Ms. Mor and Ms. McMillan as infinitely better than Sigma Delta Chi awards and I always genuflect accordingly.
But my effort to express my gratitude was blocked by TypePad, this blog's server, according to its tech support people because I was “keeping a page...open for too long without saving changes.”
As I said in rebuttal, “I have been in 'edit' mode occasionally for as long as six or seven hours...and in any case I have NEVER been blocked by TypePad as I was early this morning.”
Though TypePad's generally excellent and superbly responsive tech people say they are “working on resolving the underlying issue causing this error,” I cannot but wonder if TypePad's new owner, the advertising monopoly Video Egg (for which Google), is intent on ideologically purging TypePad of capitalism's opponents.
Could this hitherto unknown “error” therefore be part of a preliminary wave of technological discouragement?
Obviously we shall see.
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The quotation that titled my previous post – especially relevant today, 8 March, International Women's Day – is as I previously explained a line from Paul Robeson's translation of “Song of the Plains,” Polyushko Polyē in Russian, a favorite of the Red Cavalry during the Russian Civil War and World War II.
Robeson's variant, an anthem of the powerful U.S. Communist Party during the same approximate years, is linked in the previous post and again here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5PBrFXNQQA&feature=related
The Russian version, sung by the Red Army Chorus, is also re-linked:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdHyz0G7qcw&feature=related
The relevance of this song to International Women's Day is that it was on the morning of this day 94 years ago the women of the Lesnoy Textile Works struck to protest the firing of their (mostly Bolshevik) sister organizers and boiled into the streets of war-starved Petrograd chanting “Klyēb! Myr!” (“Bread! Peace!”).
Soon these women were joined by the men of the nearby Putilov Machine Works, and perhaps an hour later – when the soldiers and Cossacks refused the Tsar's orders to fire on the marchers – the Russian Revolution had begun.
The above photograph, from Wiki Commons, gives us a sense of what that day was like: note the smiles, especially on the women's faces; Wiki translates the banners – typically blood red with yellow letters – as (from back to front) "feed the children of the defenders of the motherland" and "increase payments to the soldiers' families – defenders of freedom and world peace."
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Explanatory note: We are often confused by the fact that in Russia this event is called the “February Revolution.” This is because under the Tsar and the Russian Orthodox theocracy, an older form of the calendar was in use. International Women's Day – founded 100 years ago in 1911, was therefore 22 February on the Russian calendar despite the fact the same day was 8 March on calendars everywhere else. Though the theocratic calendar was eventually replaced by the revolution (the modern calendar is now used in Russia too), the original names of the revolutions themselves – February for the overthrow of the Tsar, October for the Bolshevik victory – have endured.
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As a matter of semiotic interest, here is the song Polyushko Polyē as used by present-day Russian youth in a curious and visually interesting metaphor that connects Russian athletes of today with the Red Cavalry of the revolution and the subsequent civil war:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvlTN4hONkw&feature=related
The peaked hats worn by the Red Cavalry were a deliberate effort to link their struggle to that of the Scythian horse-archers who routed the Persians from the steppes in 512 BCE; the Scythian warriors wore identically-shaped headgear.
Though I know nothing of this video's history, I cannot but wonder if it was among other things a Trotsky-sarcastic response to President Bill Clinton's “let-them-eat-cake” suggestion midnight basketball would somehow fill the empty bellies and the cored-out minds of all the children imprisoned in the U.S. ghettos.
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I deserve no special credit for the discovery of the music to which I have linked. With the obvious exception of the jock version of Polyushko Polyē, it was in fact the music of my childhood, the legacy of my late father's aesthetics and heartfelt political convictions.
The earliest records I remember – 78 rpm played on a then state-of-the-art mahogany-cased Victrola through the speakers of a walnut-cased RCA three-band radio – included the first album that was truly mine, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 1939 performance of Sergei Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf."
This was a cherished gift, probably given me on my third birthday and most likely by my father, which would explain why my mother destroyed it in one of the rages preliminary to her foiled attempt at post-partum abortion on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 – another story for another time.
Returning to the infinitely more comfortable topic of familial music, I remember we also had Antonin Dvorak's "New World Symphony" (the album with the totem poles on the cover).
But the most lasting impressions came from Robeson's "Songs of Free Men" (with its cover illustration of a dagger piercing the Nazi serpent) and most of all from the Red Army Chorus, the latter an album imported from the Soviet Union by New York City's Stinson Trading Company.
For me as a child the music of the Red Army was eerily hypnotic. There was not a single word of English anywhere in it – neither in the lyrics nor on the album cover and record labels – but the images the music evoked seemed as vivid as real life. Though I would realize this only after I reached my late 30s and found translations of many of the songs, these mental images were also astonishingly accurate – as if I had been born understanding Russian. I was not translating it as we do a second language; I was knowing it as pictures and sensations, precisely as we comprehend our own native vocabularies – an inexplicable ability I lost long before puberty and which remains deeply perplexing to this day, not the least because some would argue this phenomenon proof positive of reincarnation.
Here is more of the Red Army Chorus, a Civil War song called Partizanska that again became popular during the Great Patriotic War Against Fascism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBbZA0ZQF6I&feature=related
(Note from the accompanying photographs the numbers of women amongst the partisans, especially in Russia: not surprising given that women sparked the actual Russian Revolution.)
And here is another song about partisans, a moving ballad of the French Resistance sung by Leonard Cohen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG4ndbhOkpI&feature=related
One of the verses of "Partizanska" translates approximately as follows:
Banner-bearers were riding past us
Their flags red as the blood of the dead and wounded
The squadrons were advancing at a gallop
To which the closing words sung by Cohen seem a perfect conclusion, especially on this of all days:
Ah the winds the winds are blowing
Through the graves the winds are blowing
Freedom soon will come...
LB/8 March 2011
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This is an invaluable post, Loren, for the memory which needs
desperately to be updated to NOW. And very grateful for the photo,
it's the 2 very young girls upfront left who seem to be most smiling, one hiding half her smile behind a bashful hand. Smiles that make us cry. We'll never know what happened to them next, but here they seem to be happy with a vision of a Future (where, in earlier days, they & all in the photo would have been turned into a sea of blood, the usual massacre.
Hooray International Woman's Day !! And how about a Global Human's
Century Free of $$$ & Ratfinks!!!!
Posted by: Barbara | 03/09/2011 at 07:20 PM
There's numerous Barbara's on your email list, I forgot to add Mor.
Posted by: Barbara Mor | 03/09/2011 at 07:22 PM