Victory Day

The story

"Victory Day" (Den' Pobedy) is among the most popular of the many Russian songs about the Second World War. It differs from most of them in its cheerful, marching tone, and in having been written thirty years after the war.

For the 30th anniversary of the Soviet victory, the Soviet government announced a competition for the best song about the war. In March 1975 the poet Vladimir Kharitonov, a veteran of the war, asked his usual partner, the young composer David Tukhmanov, to write a song for it; their earlier work together had been disco-influenced hits. Kharitonov brought his words a few days before the deadline, Tukhmanov finished the music just in time to record an orchestral track, and his wife, the singer Tatyana Sashko, sang it before the jury.

The jury, mostly older songwriters whose tastes had formed under Stalin, disliked it: they found the words light and frivolous and accused the melody of using the rhythms of the tango and the foxtrot, dances then regarded as bourgeois. Its performance was strongly discouraged. Lev Leshchenko, one of the best-known Soviet singers, nonetheless sang it at a concert in Alma-Ata in late April 1975; Leonid Smetannikov sang it on the television show Little Blue Light on 9 May, without much effect, and it was then not heard again until 10 November, when Leshchenko sang it at a grand concert in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on Militsiya Day, broadcast live on Soviet television. The audience demanded an encore.

Since then it has been sung at every Victory Day celebration in the Soviet Union and Russia, often closing the festivities, its last verse lost under the fireworks over Red Square. According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev liked it greatly, especially as sung by Joseph Kobzon, and told Kharitonov it would be sung long after both of them were gone. The American scholar David MacFadyen explains its lasting appeal by its drawing on the private memories of ageing veterans rather than the courage of young soldiers, joining joy at victory with grief at great loss. In a 2015 survey its words placed fifth among the best-loved lines of poetry in Russia.

What it says

A song for the anniversary of the victory of 1945, in the voice of ageing veterans; joyful and sorrowful at once.

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.