Warszawianka (Whirlwinds of Danger)

The story

"Warszawianka" is a Polish socialist revolutionary song written between 1879 and 1883. Its title, which means a woman of Warsaw (and can be rendered "The Varsovian" or "The Song of Warsaw"), deliberately recalls an earlier Polish song of the same name; to tell them apart it is often called "Warszawianka of 1905", after it became the anthem of the workers' protests of the Revolution in the Kingdom of Poland (1905–1907), when 30 workers were shot at the May Day demonstrations in Warsaw in 1905.

By one account Wacław Święcicki wrote the words in 1879 while imprisoned for socialist activity in the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel; by another he wrote them in 1883, just after returning from exile in Siberia. The music is by Józef Pławiński, who was imprisoned with him, and draws partly on "Marsz Żuawów", a song of the January Uprising. By the early 1890s it was one of the most popular revolutionary songs in Russian-ruled Poland.

The song spread across languages and causes. A Russian version, "Varshavianka", which removed every mention of Warsaw, is usually credited to Gleb Krzhizhanovsky and dated to 1897, when he was in prison; it became very popular. In the 1920s Douglas Robson of the Industrial Workers of the World wrote English words, "March Song of the Workers", better known as "Whirlwinds of Danger"; "Rufus John" Goss recorded it in London around 1925, Paul Robeson sang its first verse and Leon Lishner the whole, and in 1938 a version with new second and third verses by Randall Swingler was published. In the early 1930s Valeriano Orobón Fernández made the Spanish "A las barricadas", one of the most popular songs of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, and in the early 2010s the Burmese student activist Zin Linn wrote a Burmese version from the Spanish. The army of East Germany marched to a German translation, and France's 1st Parachute Hussar Regiment adopted the tune with other words. Isadora Duncan made a dance, "Varshavianka", to it in 1924.

The tune is heard in films: Battleship Potemkin (1925), in scenes of Odesa in the Revolution of 1905; The Youth of Maxim, sung by demonstrating workers; Hostile Whirlwinds (1953), named after the first words of the Russian version; Doctor Zhivago; The Jackal; Hail, Caesar!; and the Polish series 1983 (2018). The Prague Revolutionary Choir sings it in Polish and Spanish in turn.

What it says

A socialist revolutionary march of the workers' movement; defiant and solemn.

The words