"Give Us Peter the Great"

Rich in songs is the history of slavery. Toiling on the Great Pyramids, Egyptian slaves intoned rhythmical chants (sample: "Hey, you, work! You, get up!"). Dixie's Negroes put body & soul into their work songs. Volga boatmen were soothed by the haunting tautology of Ei Ukhnem. More recently, political prisoners in Nazi concentration camps composed and sang such songs as the now famous Peat-Bog Soldiers:

Up and down the guards are pacing,

No one, no one can go through

Flight would mean a sure death facing,

Guns and barbed wire greet our view.

In Siberia and in the arctic wastes of the Soviet Union, millions of song-loving Russians are working in forced labor camps. With words and music, they too describe their bitter life and express their longing for home. In the current issue of the Russian-language Paris magazine Narodnaya Pravda, many of their songs are set down by an exile who calls himself S. Yurasov.

In the Soviet camps, Yurasov writes, all singing is forbidden. But the prisoners often sing sotto voce, occasionally raise their voices to a full chorus. Known from Karelia to Kamchatka is the song:

0 you, my berries, my berries,*

We do not want any Stalin.

We do not want any Rykov.

Give us Peter the Great.

In transfer prisons, new convicts meet nonpolitical criminals, pick up prison argot and learn prison songs. There is one for every occasion. As they are herded into the train the convicts sing:

The second bell has rung, and I am leaving

For the far away North, for Solovki.

Enough of turmoil and tears--

Perhaps we'll meet along the way.

Then, to the whir of the train wheels:

The locomotive flies through village and vale

Into the unknown . . .

Engine, please stop! Wheels, be quiet!

Trainman, use your brakes!

Just once more I want to see my dear mother

And bow to her for the last time.

And at journey's end:

Snow-storm and deadly cold

And we prisoners everywhere.

Besides the new songs, the prisoners also stick to the old favorites. One murderer,

Yurasov recalls, would cry like a child when he heard:

The mountain ash

Cannot reach the oak

Probably it's fate

To be always alone.

In the arctic snows, as in the Alabama bottoms, the slave's sentiment is: "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child."

*Berries are always turning up in Russian folk music, possibly because serfs in the old days were forced to sing while they picked berries, so that their masters would know that they were not eating the fruit.

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