The Red Army Is the Strongest

The story

"The Red Army Is the Strongest", widely known by its opening words as "White Army, Black Baron", is a Soviet march with words by Pavel Gorinshtein and music by Samuel Pokrass. It was written in 1920, during the Russian Civil War, as a combat anthem for the Red Army. Its immediate occasion was the last offensive of Pyotr Wrangel's White troops from the Crimea in July 1920; "Black Baron" was Wrangel's nickname, from his reputed liking for black uniforms, and a verse echoes the Revolutionary Military Council's call for a final effort in the Crimea, published in Pravda on 10 July. The offensive was halted, and Wrangel's army, pursued by the Red Army and by the cavalry and infantry of Nestor Makhno's insurgents, fell back into the Crimea in November 1920 and was evacuated to Constantinople on 14 November.

The tune may draw on Eastern European Jewish folk music: one passage is also heard in the Yiddish song "Dus Zekele mit Koilen" (The Little Coal Sack). The song became popular in the first years of the Soviet state. It was sung in 1923 at a rally in Leningrad against Lord Curzon's ultimatum to Soviet Russia, which gave one of its lines new weight, and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, named it in a letter to a school for blind pupils in the Vologda region as one of her favourite songs, beside "The Internationale". One of its phrases passed into common use and was taken up by other writers, among them V. A. Lugovsky in his 1926 poem "Pesni o vetre".

Passed on by ear from 1920 to 1925, the song changed along the way; Gorinshtein later recalled that his original had four or five verses and a slightly different refrain. It was first printed in 1925 and then under several titles, among them "Krasnaya armiya" and "Krasnoarmeyskaya"; only in 1937 did "The Red Army Is the Strongest" become its settled title. From the 1920s to the 1940s it was printed without its authors' names, until in the 1950s the musicologist A. Shilov established that they were Gorinshtein and Pokrass.

The march travelled with the communist movement. German communists of the Weimar Republic sang it in a free German translation in the 1920s. In Vienna, after the July Revolt of 1927, Fritz Brügel wrote new words to the tune, "Die Arbeiter von Wien" (The Workers of Vienna), which became popular among Austrian socialists and with the Republikanischer Schutzbund, who fought the Dollfuss regime in the brief Austrian Civil War of February 1934; that version was later adapted into Turkish as "Avusturya İşçi Marşı". The Chapaev Battalion of the International Brigades adopted the march in the Spanish Civil War, and the Czech communist Julius Fučík is said to have sung it in a Nazi torture chamber. During the Second World War new Russian words were set to the tune, among them Pyotr Belyi's of 1941. The Corsican group Chjami Aghjalesi later set its patriotic song "Borgu", which commemorates the Battle of Borgo, to the same melody.

What it says

A combat march of the Civil War presenting the Red Army as stronger than all its enemies; brisk, defiant and martial.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.