Unbreakable Union Of Freeborn Republics!

[poliphilo]

cmcmck was saying Stalin could have chosen to be a professional opera singer (and wouldn't that have altered the course of history!) and so I was scouring the Net to see if there was any record of his singing voice- but there isn't. One thing led to another and now I have the state anthem of the Soviet Union (as sung by the Red Army Choir) going round and round in my head. It's really rather uplifting.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Imagine going to the opera in NYC to hear the new young baritone talent from Georgia, Osip Djugashvili singing in a piece with ad posters done by the new young German designer Adolf Hitler, the show produced by the new young German talent Josef Goebbels who is also beginning to make contacts in Hollywood with crits written up by the talented journalist Benito Mussolini.............

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And Leni Riefenstahl lined up to make a filmed record?

Problem is I can't see Hitler ever making it big as a designer. All the artwork of his I've seen is pretty damn ordinary.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

But very much in keeping with poster design of the day.

[qatsi.livejournal.com]

That particular devil certainly did have all the best tunes. The anthem of the USSR is brilliant. I first heard it when we went to see the Red Army Choir on their tour of the UK, probably around 1985. I have a CD with the anthems of all 15 republics; some of the others are pretty good too. (Khachaturian - of subsequent Onedin Line fame - wrote the Armenian anthem; the Estonian one is also quite calm and lyrical. Mostly they conjure up the poster art of Uncle Joe greeting the grateful children, and rosy-cheeked women gathering the plentiful harvests from the collective farms. Ahem.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Listening to the Red Army Choir made me feel quite teary about the good old days- the endless fields of wheat and sunflowers, the happy labourers, the chugging of the tractors...

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Jaysus, there was I thinking he was a spoiled priest :)

Stalin had a weird obsession with writers. He'd persecute them and spare them, all on a whim.

Not all autocrats are boors. Saddam Hussein had four languages and wrote novels (probably not very good ones, but it does take sustained concentration.) And I learned the other week that Bashar al Assad was Oxford educated and speaks excellent English.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Mao was a poet and philosopher, Hitler was an artist and patron of the arts, Goering was a great collector...

It's our modern democratic politicians that don't have a much of a cultural hinterland.