“…Black wings dare not fly Over the motherland to fly, “Its vast fields The enemy dare not trample…” – lines from the most famous poem “The Holy War”.

Vasily Lebedev-Kumach created the poem literally overnight

It was published on 24 June 1941 in the newspapers Krasnaya Zvezda and Izvestia.

Composer Alexander Alexandrov, having read the poem, wrote music to it.

“Holy War” sounded on the radio every morning after the Kremlin chimes – as a call, as an appeal to the entire Soviet people.

You can read the story of how the most famous song of the Great Patriotic War came to be here.

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