Conveying the Emotion of Revolution through Song

There’s an intangible challenge to teaching History that seems distant and unrelatable today. We can give students the facts, assess and test them for knowledge, and ask them about their causes, consequences, significance, etc.

But when all’s said and done, do they know what it was really “like” at the time?

 

Revolution and Emotion

Apart from anything else, revolutions are emotional events. Descriptions of demonstrations, meetings, and rallies from Russia in 1905 or 1917 make clear the heightened sense of urgency, excitement, anticipation, and often frustration and anger that people “on the street” felt.

This is not really a call to encourage students’ “empathy” in thinking about History. I’ve never been terribly comfortable with approaches that get students to “imagine” what it was like to be at another point in time, not least because we ourselves often just don’t know enough about the past and people who inhabited to do so properly. As historian Norman Davies once put it, the idea of “historical empathy” can mean that “students are sometimes in danger of having nothing but their teacher’s prejudices on which to build an awareness of the past.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t observe empirically what the emotions of revolution meant to people at the time. More importantly, by engaging with carefully selected sources from the time, we can enable our students to do the same.

 

Revolution and Song

One of the most striking ways the emotionally charged atmosphere of revolution was conjured and captured for prosperity is in the songs sung on the streets of Russia. In a fantastic book from 2015 on what she terms the “culture of revolution”, Deborah Pearl points to songs as "a collective, performative act [...] evoking memory, emotion, and solidarity."

At the time I read Deborah Pearl’s book, I was becoming increasingly convinced through my own research that songs, and contemporary accounts of them, could unlock an emotional dimension to revolutionary events. I was looking particularly at revolutionary events in the Siberian city of Krasnoiarsk, where workers and soldiers had briefly overthrown Tsarist authority in 1905. Here, newspaper and archival documents spoke frequently of songs sung on the streets, including the inspiring and uplifting Marseillaise and the reflective, mournful, yet defiant You Fell a Victim.

Krasnoiarsk (central in Siberia, part of Eniseisk Guberniia) in the Russian Empire c. 1905

Twelve years later, in Petrograd, the American journalist John Reed would be engulfed in the emotional renditions of revolutionary song at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets:

Suddenly, by common impulse, we found ourselves on our feet, mumbling together into the smooth lifting unison of the Internationale. A grizzled old soldier was sobbing like a child. Alexandra Kollontai rapidly winked the tears back. The immense sound rolled through the hall, burst windows and doors and seared into the quiet sky. “The war is ended! The war is ended!” said a young workman near me, his face shining. And when it was over, as we stood there in a kind of awkward hush, some one in the back of the room shouted, “Comrades! Let us remember those who have died for liberty!” So we began to sing the Funeral March*, that slow, melancholy and yet triumphant chant, so Russian and so moving. The Internationale is an alien air, after all. The Funeral March seemed the very soul of those dark masses whose delegates sat in this hall, building from their obscure visions a new Russia—and perhaps more.

 

Interpreting Song in the Classroom

Using accounts John Reed’s account might give students an insight into the emotional atmosphere of the Russian revolution. The songs themselves, however, might also be used as a stimulus to identify the nature of the emotions they engendered.

Lyrics and recordings of both can be found online at Marxists.org, here. It’s worth pointing out that these recordings were not from the Second Congress of Soviets in 1917 (clearly, a full orchestra or professional choir would not usually have accompanied impromptu renditions on the streets or in a political meeting). But the lyrics (although in translation) would have been largely the same and carried huge significance to those singing them.

Try playing clips of the two songs to students before they see the lyrics. Can they tell which song is which, just from the melody and harmony? Why?

Then, ask them to look at the lyrics. What messages to these seem to convey?

Students should then be in a position to make a good stab at the bigger questions. Why were songs sung at revolutionary events like this? What motivated participants to sing them, and why might the songs themselves have motivated participants in turn? Why the variation in songs sung? What, overall, is the significance of song in a revolution?

A simple lyric sheet for classroom use can be found on the Google Drive here.

 

* judging by the lyrics he quotes, John Reed’s “Funeral March” appears to be the same song as You Fell a Victim.