Songs of the Years of Fire (Песни огненных лет, 1971) by Inessa Kovalevskaya

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Songs of the Years of Fire
Песни огненных лет
Pesni ognennykh let (ru)

Year 1971
Director(s) Kovalevskaya Inessa
Studio(s) Soyuzmultfilm
Language(s) Russian
Genre(s) History
Musical/Opera
Politics
Serious
War & battles
Animation Type(s)  Drawn (cel)
Live-action
Length 00:19:30
Wordiness 9.74
Animator.ru profile Ru, En
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Subtitles:
Pesni ognennykh let.1971.en.1.24,975fps.1761026131.srt
Date: October 21 2025 05:55:31
Language: English
Quality: ok
Upload notes: 1243 characters long (view)
Creator(s): Ahmed il Lavavetri, FBJ, Niffiwan, Hermos Flutter, Ivan Oid, LHaritonov, Paul Smith, Vladimir4757

Pesni ognennykh let.1971.ru.1.24,975fps.1761025813.srt
Date: October 21 2025 05:50:13
Language: Russian
Quality: unknown
Upload notes: 863 characters long (view)
Creator(s): Niffiwan



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Description:

Five songs about the Russian Civil War: "Polyushko-pole", "Tachanka", "There, Far Beyond the River", "Echelon Song" and "White Army, Black Baron" aka. "The Red Army is the Strongest".

The film opens and ends with an instrumental-only arrangement of "Polyushko-pole", written in 1933, sung from the perspective of a Red Army recruit.

The "Tachanka" song was written in 1937 and glorifies the eponymous Tachanka, a horse-drawn cart with a heavy machine gun mounted on the rear that reached its peak use during the Russian Civil War. Its wide use was pioneered by Nestor Makhno, who attempted to establish anarchist communism in southern Ukraine, but it was soon also taken up by the Bolsheviks and later the Polish army.

The text of "There, Far Beyond the River" (Russian Wikipedia) was written in 1924 and became popular in the army, though was set to its current melody only in 1928 (the melody was very possibly a folk melody that was also used for other words). It uses a common folk motif of a dying warrior relating his last message to his horse.

The "Echelon Song" was written in 1933 by A. V. Alexandrov (who also wrote the Soviet national anthem) about the events of the 1918 Battle of Tsaritsyn (later renamed to Stalingrad, currently Volgograd), during which Joseph Stalin became best friends with Kliment Voroshilov, who was a prominent military and political figure in the USSR until 1960. It is about the "railway warfare" (or "echelon warfare") used in that battle.

"White Army, Black Baron" aka. "The Red Army is the Strongest" was written in 1920, about the final Crimean offensive in the Russian Civil War by "Black Baron" Pyotr Wrangel's troops that July. It is, thus, the only song in the film that was actually created and sung during the Civil War.

The first video above is more white (from 2019), while the second is more yellow. The second one was remastered in Nov 2022 by RedMediaArchive with the use of Topaz AI, with the source upscaled, color-adjusted, and hard-coded subtitles removed. It is also played at a faster frame rate. On the other hand, the sound quality of the songs seems to be better in the second one.

 

DISCUSSION



1.Admin

A pretty epic "music video", this one. The songs are excellently performed (by the Red Army Choir, if I'm not mistaken), and they are dynamically and movingly accompanied by the animation. There's not much of a plot, but it's not aiming at that. Inessa Kovalevskaya never really cared much for the plot in her films, I think - she always put the music and mood above everything. Many of the songs in her films became very famous, though the films themselves aren't always as well remembered (nor were they initially much liked by professional critics, at least before it became obvious just how popular they were).

There are 5 songs included here, though only 4 are actually sung. If you follow all the rabbit holes in learning about them (see the links helpfully included above), you can learn quite a lot about the Russian Civil War. Or just enjoy the wonderful music and pictures.

This was released on DVD a while back on the "Animated Soviet Propaganda" DVD set. The first two songs were fairly well-translated in that release (though they didn't realize that a few of the lines were different compared to the "usual" modern versions of these songs), but the last two (especially the final one) deviated quite a bit more from the actual words. So the translations for those have been changed quite a bit here.


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