Wide Is My Motherland

The story

"Wide Is My Motherland", also called the "Song of the Motherland", is a Soviet patriotic song of 1936 with music by Isaac Dunaevsky and words by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach. They wrote it for the film Circus, working on it for half a year and changing tune and words again and again; the version they settled on was their thirty-sixth.

Circus, starring Lyubov Orlova and Sergei Stolyarov, tells of an American performer who flees racism in the United States after giving birth to a Black child, comes to the Soviet Union to sing in a circus act, and falls in love with a director there, and with the Soviet homeland as the film presents it. The song's melody and chorus run through the film, and its last stanza is sung at the end as the characters march in a May Day parade on Red Square.

The song was popular at once. A full recording of three stanzas came out in 1937; after the adoption of the 1936 Constitution a further verse had been added that mentioned Stalin. From 1939 the opening notes, played on a vibraphone, were the interval signal of All-Union Radio. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and Winston Churchill declared Britain's support, the BBC, unwilling to broadcast the Soviet anthem of the time, "The Internationale", played this song instead.

During de-Stalinization the stanza naming Stalin was dropped from public performance and replaced with a new one about comradeship and proletarian internationalism. The song was translated into languages of the Eastern Bloc, among them German and Hungarian; the Museum of Russian Anthems holds fifteen recordings, including versions in German, Hungarian and Hebrew. In the early 1990s some politicians proposed it as the anthem of Russia, and the proposal came up again in 2000. It remains a popular patriotic tune in Russia, and has been heard in later Russian films and television, among them the opening of the film "Zefir v shokolade" and the opening titles of the 2020 series "Igra na vyzhivanie".

What it says

A song of pride in the size and freedom of the Soviet homeland, broad and joyful in mood.

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.