Who wrote the song "Holy War"

For many films describing the great feat of the Soviet people, the modern spectator is familiar with the song "Holy War". Melody captures it immediately, with the first notes of his patriotic impulse. It is performed by a mighty chorus, one can not sing it.

For many years it was believed that the author of the song was the famous Soviet composer Lebedev-Kumach, who composed it literally in one sitting immediately after the outbreak of the war, possibly even on June 22, 1941. He had a lot of songs, including very good ones. "I do not know another such country," "If tomorrow the war" and other similar works glorified the Soviet-collective farm system in the first place, but there was not such a grand anthem to Russian patriotism as the "Holy War".

The very mention of holiness was in those days sedition. When Hitlerite Germany attacked , the word began to be used again, especially after Stalin's "brothers and sisters", borrowed from the church-seminary vocabulary, but it was later, on July 3.

The mention of the "accursed horde" also causes associations with something from "the legends of the old days". The listener involuntarily gets the impression that these poems were written not by the Stalin Prize laureate and by a prominent member of the Writers' Union of the USSR, but by the whiteguard officer who is not beaten by the Bolsheviks, it is painfully much in this original Russian song. For the Soviet even the place does not remain.

Propaganda of the pre-war years focused more on internationalism than on patriotism. It was considered normal to leave the native land in order to give some unknown peasants from Grenada land without even asking first, and whether they want such a gift.

The solution of the unexpected and almost instantaneous transformation of the communist Lebedev-Kumach into a Russian patriot is simple. The fact is that his text does not belong to him. The "Holy War" was written during the First World War. A true author is a gymnasium teacher from Rybinsk Alexander Bodet. Melody, in fact, is also composed by him.

We must pay tribute to VV Lebedev-Kumach: the words of the song "Holy War" were subjected to a certain politically sustained correction. "Teutonic force is dark" became fascist. This, of course, is not entirely correct, because fascism is an Italian phenomenon, in Germany there was Nazism. They attacked us not Mussolini's black-shirts, but all the same Germans. But it so happened that the members of the Nazi Party, that is, the German National Socialist Workers Party, are called fascists here. Not the essence is important.

The text was changed hastily, it was done, in all probability, really overnight. The song "Holy War" proved to be very useful and was taken from somewhere in the closet or drawer of the desk, where four years of dust had been gathering dust. The teacher of the old, still royal temper, sent his work to a venerable songbook in the hope that he would like it. The fact that the work will be appropriated, he probably could not even guess, as an intellectual assuming a priori decency, characteristic of Russian artists. Alexander Adolfovich Bode was mistaken twice.

The "sacred war" Lebedev-Kumachu did not like, this conclusion arises from the fact that the song lay from 1937 to 1941 in the archives of the Soviet poet. True, it was only after June 22 that she was introduced to the world.

The second error is visible to the naked eye. Assigning someone else's work is a shameful thing, but it is quite permissible according to the concepts of many figures of Soviet art. But Alexander Adolfovich considered Vasily Ivanovich a great poet ...