Though those Russian missiles never made it over from Cuba to the US in 1962, several Russian songs did hit their targets, flourishing in foreign ears even in the permafrostiest months of the Cold War.
Perhaps the best-known Russian tune out west is “Those Were The Days,” a song based on “Дорогой длинною,” pioneered by Ukrainian-born cabaret singer Alexander Vertinsky (who recorded the version embedded above) and written by Russian composer Boris Fomin to lyrics by Konstantin Podrevskii. Read in translation, the song sings of grief and of regret for past joys gone too soon:
But it turns out our song was futile,
In vain we burned night in and night out.
If we have finished with the old,
Then those nights have also left us!
(Trans. the University of Pittsburgh Department of Slavic Languages)
In the early 1960s, Columbia architecture scholar (and folk singer) Eugene Raskin wrote original English lyrics to Fomin’s melody and started performing the song in the folkie joints so vividly portrayed in Inside Llewyn Davies. Though recorded by popular American folkies the Limeliters in 1962, Raskin’s version was made culturally omnipresent in 1968 by Mary Hopkin—the Beatles’ first signee to their record label, Apple. In Hopkin’s version (and with Paul McCartney’s surprisingly minimalist and pointedly dissonant production), the folk song still bore an imprint of the regret evinced in the original, only now, in the shadow of the Summer of Love and the Prague Spring, cast in preternatural nostalgia for “the revolution.”
The song would go on to be translated and performed in—and this will be a seriously abbreviated list—French, Hebrew, Chinese, Bengali, Slovakian, Dari, and Greek, with anyone from Bing Crosby, Shaggy (!), a Finnish folk metal band, and of course the Leningrad Cowboys giving it a spin.
With the exception of the confounding lesbian minstrel show that is t.A.T.u. (seen here serving up the opposite of rainbow realness at this month’s Sochi Olympics), more recent Russian or Ukrainian pop smashes are harder to find. Both countries did win Eurovision Song Contests in the past decade: Russia with the Enrique Iglesias-y “Believe,” written by singer Dima Bilan and American producer/songwriter Jim Beanz (who also co-wrote Britney’s “Gimme More,” M.I.A.’s “Come Around,” and Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater”) in 2008; and the Ukraine with Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” four years earlier. If the below video has you thinking she is a Cossack Aguilera, know that Ruslana in fact graduated from the Lviv Conservatory as a classical pianist and symphony conductor.
This was her in 2004, giving her energetic winning performance in Carpathian cavewoman garb. (The song was apparently also successful in a version by Vietnamese pop star Hồ Quỳnh Hương, incidentally PETA Asia Pacific’s Sexiest Vegetarian Woman of 2013). In the past days, Ruslana’s been present and performing at EuroMaidan, just like she did during the Orange Revolution of 2004-05, singing her own songs, as well as the national anthem, in support of the Ukrainian revolution.
A far older Ukrainian hit can be found in “Очи чёрные” or “Dark Eyes,” which first appeared as a Ukrainian poem self-translated into Russian by poet Yevhen Hrebinka (a schoolmate of Gogol’s and the editor of one of the very first Ukrainian almanac of folk songs, stories, and sayings) in 1843. The romantic poem (the second verse: “Oh, not for nothing are you darker than the deep! I see mourning for my soul in you, I see a triumphant flame in you: A poor heart immolated in it.” Trans. Peter Farnbank) was then set to existing music (possibly a march or waltz by French composer Florian Hermann) in 1884. Yet it didn’t become an international success until Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin took the liberty of adding a few verses of his own:
Dark eyes, flaming eyes
They implore me into faraway lands
Where love reigns, where peace reigns
Where there is no suffering, where war is forbidden
(Trans. Katya from russmus.net)
With these words, the song suddenly became an emigré’s anthem, a song of war-torn homelands left behind. As far as I can tell, this version was first recorded by Mikhail Vavich in 1908 and later marketed by the trend-savvy Tin Pan Alley as a “famous Russian Tango” in the 1920s. From then on though, the song became the kind of cultural artifact that pops up everywhere, first as a musical shorthand for old-world class, and later as a sign of aristocratic obliviousness or dacha tomfoolery). We hear it in jazz performances by Louis Armstrong, Stan Kenton, or Django Reinhardt; in cartoons where Krazy Kat tries to avoid becoming a suicide bomber for the Cossacks (1933), Bugs Bunny battles gremlins on a B-18 bomber (1943), or Woody Woodpecker ice skates through Sunstroke Valley Idaho (1944); and perhaps most memorably on the movie screen.
Tony Gatlif’s Swing has a great gypsy version, for instance, and it also plays when Catwoman dresses as Russian journalist Kitka in the very campy 1966 Batman film, but the song’s most comfortable home was in the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s, where it worked as a running joke in killer classics such as The Shop Around the Corner (above and indispensably better than its bastard child, You’ve Got Mail) and My Man Godfrey (after that film, the song would stalk Russian-born actor Mischa Auer into You Can’t Take It With You and And Then There Were None), and is parodied by the Ritz Brothers and Danny Kaye, used as a symbol of a harmless, unrevolutionary Russia.
Though “Dark Eyes” is a gorgeous song (with a delightfully similar melody to The Knife’s “Marble House”), my favorite Russian musical export is “Подмосковные вечера” or “Moscow Nights,” written by Ukrainian-born poet Mikhail Matusovsky and composed by Vasily Solovyov-Sedoi in 1955. Two years later, it won the Soviet song contest at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, and the song started on its international course, becoming very popular in China (here it is actually performed by Chinese officials) and rising to the top of the American easy-listening chart in early 1962. My favorite version, released that same year, was performed at a hauntingly stately pace by the great Ketty “Love Letters” Lester, who also does a beautiful cover of the Hungarian torch song “Gloomy Sunday.”
This, we have to remember, was the very height of the Cold War, with the Cuban missile crisis just around the corner, and here was the sweater-clad Chad Mitchell Trio (who would later boast John Denver as a member) recording a live album at the Bitter End, a New York City folk club, and singing a beautifully hushed and unironic “Moscow Nights” in Russian. And this after opening their show with their original “John Birch Society,” which skewers the anti-communist think tank (also parodied by Bob Dylan in his song “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”) of that name with lines like: “socialism is the -ism dismalest of all” and “if mommie is a commie then you gotta turn her in.” The New York Times would later report on the trio’s Carnegie Hall show that their set was “so filled with social commentary that it almost seemed more a topical review with music than a concert.”
Not that Chad Mitchell was such a peacenik, mind you, of his 1963 “Twelve Days of Christmas” parody—in which young West Germans add Rudolf Hess’ blessings and a Telefunken H-bomb to the partridge in the pantry—he said, “the song was about Western permissiveness, about the re-establishment and rebuilding of West Germany. In the face of Communism we forget that a few years ago Fascism was as dangerous as certain aspects of Communism. … Our old enemies are neither watched nor punished.” (See also their “I Was Not A Nazi Polka” on that topic, below).
“Moscow Nights,” meanwhile, remained a song of international reconciliation, with the gay Texan pianist Van Cliburn (who famously received a New York ticker-tape parade after being the first American to win Moscow’s International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, and performed for every American president from Truman to Obama since) playing it as an impromptu encore to President Reagan and Gorbachev on one of that Soviet statesman’s rare visits to the White House in 1988, shortly before the whole Iron Curtain would start to come clattering down.
My thoughts the past weeks have often been out east, with the people suffering unconscionable injustices in Russia and those drawn into violent revolution in the Ukraine. Now that no one can say that Germany (or hardly anyone, for that matter) is not “watched,” it remains worthwhile to know that the fact that the ‘world is watching’ can force dictators to back down, curtail their violence, or, perhaps, even see sense. On that note, I hope you did not watch that dictatorial Sochi extravaganza; here’s some lovely ice being skated on elsewhere instead, with Sasha Cohen competing for the US at the 2006 Games in Turin.