Polyushko-pole

The story

"Polyushko-pole", known in English as "Song of the Plains", "Meadowlands", "Cavalry of the Steppes" or "O Fields, My Fields", is a Soviet song with music by Lev Knipper and words by Viktor Gusev, written in 1933. In Russian pole means a plain or field, and polyushko is its fond, diminutive form. The song became part of Knipper's symphony with chorus "A Poem about a Komsomol Soldier", composed in 1934 to words by Gusev. Its words are sung in the voice of a young Red Army recruit.

The song was performed many times in the Soviet Union. The Alexandrov Ensemble, best known abroad as the Red Army Choir, has sung and recorded it regularly, and the group Poyushchiye Gitary released a well-known rock version around 1967. At the opening of the London Youth Congress of 1945 a choir of 6,000 sang the whole song.

It was already known in the West: Paul Robeson recorded it in 1942 as "Song of the Plains", in English and Russian, on his album Songs of Free Men (1943). Later arrangements include the Swedish jazz pianist Jan Johansson's "Stepp, min stepp" (1967), Jefferson Airplane's instrumental "Meadowlands" on Volunteers (1969), Phillip Bimstein's "Meadowlands" (1982), a version by James Last, and, as "The Cossack Patrol", a version by Ivan Rebroff. The Rahbani brothers reused the melody, crediting Knipper, for "Kanou Ya Habibi", sung by Fairuz in their 1974 play Loulou, and Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim made a nigun of it.

The tune has been used in film and television: in the opening credits of The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), throughout Reds (1981), at the start of Cast Away, in the film Comrade Pedersen, where schoolchildren sing it in class, in Airwolf, in the anime Girls und Panzer, in the series Kleo, and in the Russian film Captain Volkonogov Escaped (2021). Michael Palin sang it with the choir of the Russian Pacific Fleet in Full Circle with Michael Palin, and bands from Blackmore's Night (1999) to Powerwolf (2009) have set their own songs to it.

What it says

A soldier's song of a young recruit leaving home to stand guard for his country; proud and earnest in mood.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so the Institute does not print them itself: Genius shows them below, under its own licence.