Красная армия всех сильней [Krasnaja Armija vsekh silnej] [English translation]

Music by Samuel Pokrass

Lyrics by Pavel Grigoriev1

The White Army2 and the Black Baron3

Are preparing to restore the Tsar's throne to us.

For from the taiga to the British seas

The Red Army is the strongest.

Chorus:

Let the Red Army

Masterfully grip

Its bayonet with its toil-hardened hand,

And all of us must

Irrepressibly

Join the last deadly fight!

Red Army, march forward!

The Revolutionary Military Council 4 calls us into battle.

For from the taiga to the British seas

The Red Army is the strongest!

We are fanning the flames of a world-wide fire,

We'll raze churches5 and prisons to the ground.

For from the taiga to the British seas

The Red Army is the strongest!

1. 'The Red Army is the strongest' is a marching song written in 1920, during the Russian Civil War, the song was meant as a combat anthem for the Red Army.2. The White Army was a loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces that fought the Bolsheviks, also known as the Reds, in the Russian Civil War (1917–1922/3) and, to a lesser extent, continued operating as militarized associations both outside and within Russian borders until roughly the Second World War.3. Baron Pyotr Wrangel a.k.a. Black Baron (because his everyday uniform was a black-colored cossac woolen coat - 'chokha') was an officer in the Imperial Russian Army and later commanding general of the anti-Bolshevik White Army in Southern Russia in the later stages of the Russian Civil War. After his side lost the civil war in 1920, he left Russia and became one of the most prominent exiled White émigrés.4. Реввоенсовет (Revvoyensoviet) - The Revolutionary Military Council was the supreme military authority of Soviet Russia and later the Soviet Union. It was instituted on September 2, 1918 by decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), known as the "Decree Declaring the Soviet Republic Military Camp".5. Soviet Marxist-Leninism policy consistently advocated the control, suppression, and ultimately, the elimination of religious beliefs, and actively encouraged atheism in the Soviet Union. The state advocated the destruction of religion, and it officially pronounced religious beliefs to be superstitious and backward. The Communist Party destroyed churches, mosques and Buddhist temples, ridiculed, harassed, incarcerated and executed religious leaders, flooded the schools and media with anti-religious teachings, and it introduced a belief system called "scientific atheism," with its own rituals, promises and proselytizers.

• Artist:Red Army Choir
• Album:The World at War