- Source: Po dolinam i po vzgoriam
"Through Valleys and Over Hills" (Russian: По долинам и по взгорьям) or "Through Forests and Over Hills" (Serbo-Croatian: По шумама и горама / po" target="_blank">Po šumama i gorama), also known as the "Partisan's Song", is a popular Red Army song from the Russian Civil War.
Pyotr Parfyonov wrote the latest version of the song after the 1922 Battle of Volochayevka. It is sung to the melody of "Rozpryahayte, khloptsi, koni", a Ukrainian folk song.
The song has many versions in other languages, including Serbo-Croatian, Greek, German, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Kurdish, and as well as in many languages of the Soviet Union. The song was adapted by the Yugoslav Partisans and used in World War II.
History
Vladimir Gilyarovsky wrote the poem "From the Taiga, the Deep Taiga" in 1915 during World War I dedicated to the Siberian Riflemen, with text similar to the well-known version. Gilyarovsky's poem was published that year in several corpuses of Great War's soldiers' songs, and in the post-Soviet era it became known as the March of the Siberian Riflemen.
After the end of the Russian Civil War, the song was popular within the Soviet Union. Later, during World War II, it resurged in popularity among anti-fascist partisan fighters, most prominently among Yugoslav and Soviet partisans.
The song entered the official canon of Soviet songs when the director of the Red Army choir Aleksandr Aleksandrov, together with the poet Sergei Alymov, introduced the song into the choir repertoire. The words of the song were attributed to Alymov. The author of the melody was named as Ilya Aturov, commander of a Red Army unit, from whom Aleksandrov heard the melody of the song. The Red Army choir rendition was distributed on phonograph records. In 1934, a letter from veterans of the Russian Civil War in the Far East was published in the Izvestia central newspaper, naming Pyotr Parfyonov as the original author. Later that year, Parfyonov recalled the story of the creation of the song in the Krasnoarmeyets–Krasnoflotets (lit. 'Red Army man and Red Fleet man') magazine. In this article, Parfyonov wrote that he borrowed the melody from his earlier 1914 song Na Suchane (lit. 'On the Suchan'), and penned the verses to po" target="_blank">Po dolinam i po" target="_blank">po vzgoriam after the Red takeover of Vladivostok in early 1920. However, he was arrested in 1935 and executed in 1937 as part of the Great Purge. The song continued to be published attributed to Alymov and Aturov until the Supreme Court of the Russian SFSR confirmed Parfyonov's authorship in 1962.
Decades after the end of the Russian Civil War, White émigré accounts were published that included the lyrics to a White variation of the song, the March of the Drozdovites, claimed to have been written by White colonel Pyotr Batorin in commemoration of the Jassy-Don March. These accounts claimed that the composer Dmitry Pokrass was ordered to write the tune of the march by Colonel Anton Turkul during the White occupation of Kharkov in 1919.
The song is commonly played by the Alexandrov Ensemble. In the Middle East, the Russian song also got Hebrew texts written by the poets Avraham Shlonsky - Halokh halkha hevraya - a translation after Alexander Blok, which in several mobilizing versions served the Zionist Socialist Hashomer Hatzair movement and the Palestinian Communist Youth (now BANKI) movement in the Mandatory Palestine and then in Israel - and Didi Menosi - Mul gesher hanahar - which is known in the interpretation by the Israeli Gevatron ensemble. The music was used also as the first melody for the anthem of Palmakh Jewish shock units in Palestine. In the 1960s, French anarchist Étienne Roda-Gil penned a version dedicated to the Makhnovshchina.
Lyrics
= "Through Valleys and Over Hills"
== "From the Taiga, the Deep Taiga"
== "March of the Siberian Riflemen"
== "The Makhnovshchina"
== "Through Forests and Over Hills"
== Alternative version
=Basil Davidson recites alternative lyrics as he heard them from Yugoslav Partisans in his 1946 book Partisan Picture:
= Greek lyrics
== Hebrew lyrics
=See also
List of socialist songs
Notes
References
External links
French translation
March of the Siberian Riflemen on YouTube
