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Bard, poet, writer. Aleshkovsky should be a legend.
Nevertheless fate has deemed his destiny otherwise. He
was born in
Krasnoyarsk
in 1929, spent his early years in
Siberia. Later his family moved to
Moscow
where he started kindergarten. He has said that he
learned slang before he learned the stories of the Brother's
Grimm.
During the war he lived in
Moscow. All this time he was
"secretly hating the vozdh". Vozhd was of
course Stalin. By the end of the war in the
1950s more then 50 million Soviet citizens had perished in
the Second World War, the famine in
Ukraine, and the
Terror which lasted throughout most of
Stalin's reign. Throughout the 40s and the 50s
he described himself as a humorist, slacker, sluggard,
gambler, swindler, hooligan, scoundrel, smoker, and a soccer
player. Nevertheless he still found time to read the
works of Jules Verne, Pushkin, Dumas, and
others.
After the war he was drafted into the Soviet Navy, however
in 1950 he was imprisoned for four years for breaking a
military code. After his release in 1953 he worked as
driver and moved back to
Moscow
in 1955. It was around this time when he was a driver
that he began writing poems, stories, and finally starting
composing songs. In 1959 he composed his most famous
song, "Comrade Stalin". This is perhaps one of the
crown achievements of the bard movement's analysis of Soviet
society. The song is bitter, yet humorous. It is
written from the standpoint of a Soviet prisoner, who knows
that he is getting what he deserves:
Comrade Stalin, you're a huge intellectual,
You know so many languages.
But I am just a Soviet prisoner (zakluchony, zek)
And my only comrade is a wise old guy.
To be honest with you I don't know what I'm here for.
But the prosecutors were obviously right.
For now I sit in the Turuhan region
where you were in exile under the czar.
We confessed other people's sins right away
and walked towards an angry fate.
But we believed in you so much Comrade Stalin,
perhaps even more then we believed ourselves.
And so I'm here in the Turuhan region,
the security guards here are rude and just like muts,
of course I understand all of this
as just another part of the Class Struggle.
Either rain, or snow, or mosquito's over us,
and we're in the taiga from morning till morning,
here out of sparks (iskra)
people would make flames,
thank you so much, I'm warming by the fire.
It's harder for you, you worried about everybody
on the planet in the desperate nightly hour,
you walk around in your office in the Kremlin,
smoking your pipe, not blinking your eyes.
Yesterday we buried two Marxists
we placed their bodies into a bright red cloth.
One of them had a right-wing tendency,
the other one, it turns out, wasn't involved.
Keep smoking a thousand years Comrade Stalin!
And let me die here in the taiga.
I believe that there'll be plenty of steel and iron
for the joy of the whole population!
The song "Comrade Stalin" was spread around in all the
zek circles, and he gained a
tremendous amount of fame -- sadly many people didn't know
who had composed these songs.
Vysotsky, in his early days, used to sing this song to
his friends and at concerts; there are still recordings of
him performing "Comrade Stalin". Even to this
day when listening to this song people understand its
greater meaning -- how the brutality of one corrupt
individual swept over an entire nation, in the name of a
working class that was oppressed by those claiming to fight
for it.
Aleshkovsky wrote plays and TV screenplays for children
while living in the
USSR. Since the 1970s
he's been writing prose. Since 1979 Uz Aleshkovsky has
been living in the
United States. He is
a testament to a movement, and should be honored much more
by the Russian émigré community.
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