Wind of Change

The story

"Wind of Change" is a power ballad by the German rock band Scorpions, recorded for their 11th studio album, Crazy World (1990). It was written and composed by the band's singer, Klaus Meine, and produced by Keith Olsen with the band. Meine wrote it after the band's visit to the Soviet Union at the height of perestroika, when the enmity between the communist and capitalist blocs was easing and large-scale reforms had begun in the Soviet Union. He was inspired by the Moscow Music Peace Festival of 13 August 1989 at Lenin Stadium, where the Scorpions played before about 300,000 fans. Meine said the idea came to him one summer night as he sat at the Gorky Park centre looking at the Moskva River, and called the song his personal reappraisal of what had happened in the world in recent years. He was referring to the SNC cultural centre that Stas Namin had opened inside Gorky Park without official permission, where Russian and foreign musicians, poets, artists and designers met freely.

The song celebrates glasnost and the end of the Cold War and speaks of hope at a time of tension, as the Communist-run governments of the Eastern Bloc fell from 1989. It refers to landmarks of Moscow, and sets the balalaika beside the guitar as a sign of harmony between cultures. Musically it opens with a clean guitar introduction by Matthias Jabs played alongside Meine's whistling; the guitar solo is by Rudolf Schenker.

Released as the album's third single on 21 January 1991 by Mercury and Vertigo Records, it became a worldwide hit just after the failed coup that would lead to the end of the Soviet Union. It reached number one in Germany and six other European countries, number two in the United Kingdom, four in the United States and seven in Australia. With an estimated 14 million copies sold it is one of the best-selling singles of all time, and the best-selling single by a German artist. The band also recorded it in Russian, as "Veter Peremen", and in Spanish, as "Viento de Cambio". In 1991 the band presented Mikhail Gorbachev with a gold record and $70,000 of the single's royalties, which Soviet news sources said would go to children's hospitals.

The song became tied to the Revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Scorpions played it at the Brandenburg Gate on 9 November 1999, the tenth anniversary. In 2005 viewers of the German network ZDF chose it as the song of the century. In 2020 the podcast Wind of Change, hosted by Patrick Radden Keefe, investigated a rumour, said to come from inside the agency, that the song was written by or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency; Meine called the idea entertaining but "not true at all", and Keefe said he could neither prove nor disprove it.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the band changed the song's opening lines when performing it live, to speak of Ukraine; Meine said it was not the time to romanticise Russia. By 2024 they had changed the opening again, to a more neutral text. The official video passed one billion views on YouTube in February 2023, and the song passed one billion streams on Spotify in November 2025.

What it says

A song of hope written as the Cold War was ending, about East and West meeting in peace. The mood is calm and wistful rather than triumphant.

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.