In many films describing the great feat of the Soviet people, the modern viewer is familiar with the song “Holy War”. Her melody captures immediately, from the first notes with her patriotic impulse. She is performed by a powerful choir, in one voice not to sing her.
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 right after the outbreak of the war, possibly even on June 22, 1941. He had a lot of songs, including very good ones. “I don’t know such another country,” “If the war is tomorrow” and other similar works glorified primarily the Soviet-collective farm system, but there wasn’t such a magnificent anthem to Russian patriotism as “The Holy War”.
The very mention of holiness was seditious in those days. When Hitler Germany attacked , the word began to be used again, especially after the Stalinist "brothers and sisters" borrowed from church-seminary vocabulary, but that was later, on July 3.
The mention of the “cursed horde” also evokes associations with one of the “traditions of ancient times.” The listener involuntarily has the impression that these verses were written not by the Stalin Prize laureate and a prominent member of the USSR Writers' Union, but by the White Guard officer, which was not finished by the Bolsheviks, it was too much genuine Russian in this song. For the Soviet, there’s even no place left.
The pre-war propaganda emphasized more on internationalism than patriotism. It was considered normal to want to leave their native land in order to give land to some unknown peasants from Grenada, without even first asking if they wanted such a gift.
The solution to the unexpected and almost instantaneous transformation of the communist Lebedev-Kumach into a Russian patriot is simple. The fact is that the text does not belong to him. "Holy War" was written during the First World War. The true author is Alexander Adolfovich Bode, a gymnasium teacher from Rybinsk. The melody, in fact, is also composed by him.
We must pay tribute to V.V. Lebedev-Kumach: the words of the song “Holy War” underwent a certain politically sustained correction. "Teutonic dark force" has become fascist. This, of course, is not entirely correct, because fascism is an Italian phenomenon, there was Nazism in Germany. It was not the black shirts of Mussolini who attacked us, but still the Germans. But it so happened that members of the NSDAP, that is, the German National Socialist Workers Party, are called fascists in our country. Not the point.
The text was changed hastily; this was apparently done, indeed, in one night. The song “Holy War” turned out to be the most opportune and was extracted from somewhere in the closet or drawer of the writing desk, where it was gathering dust for four years. The teacher of the old, still royal hardening sent his work to the venerable songwriter in the hope that he would like it. The fact that the work will be appropriated, he probably could not even have imagined, as an intellectual assuming an a priori decency characteristic of Russian artists. Alexander Adolfovich Bode was mistaken twice.
Lebedev-Kumach did not like the “Holy War”, this conclusion suggests itself on the assumption that the song lay from 1937 to 1941 in the archive of the Soviet poet. True, the case of bringing it into the world of God appeared only after June 22.
The second error is visible to the naked eye. Assigning someone else's labor is a shameful thing, but quite acceptable according to the concepts of many figures of Soviet art. But Alexander Adolfovich considered Vasily Ivanovich a great poet ...