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The circumstances of the composition and first performance of the song were hurried; the lyrics were published on 24 June 1941, and Alexandrov immediately wrote the music for them, writing the notes out on a blackboard for the singers to copy manually. The first performance was on 26 June at
Belorussky Railway Station, where according to eyewitnesses it was sung five times in succession.[2]
In the 1990s Russian media published the allegation that the lyrics had been plagiarized by Lebedev-Kumach, and that they were indeed written during the First World War by
Aleksandr Bode [
ru] (1865–1939). These claims were taken to court, and the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta in June 2000 was forced to publish a retraction of the claim.[3] Prof. Evgeniy Levashev (2000) still upheld doubts on the authorship, and on the reasonableness of the court's decision.[4]
One of the most famous Soviet patriotic songs, The Sacred War has been sung in several languages including Russian,[5] Finnish,[6] Hungarian,[7] Estonian,[8] Latvian,[9] Chinese,[10] Korean,[11] Japanese,[12] Vietnamese,[13] Hindi,[14] Punjabi,[15] German,[16] French[17] and English.[18] There exists a version of the song in Ukrainian,[19] however it is repurposed for the
War in Donbas from the Ukrainian side and instead has anti-Soviet and anti-Russian themes.
^В. Олару. Стихотворение в газете Независимая Молдова, 21 июня 2001 (
"Архив за 21.06.2001 - "Независимая Молдова"". Archived from the original on July 11, 2008. Retrieved 2009-09-17.{{
cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (
link))
^Е. М. Левашев. Судьба песни // Архив наследия — 2000 / Сост. и науч. ред. Плужников В. И.; РАН. Российский Научно-исследовательский институт культурного и природного наследия им. Д. С. Лихачёва. — М.: Институт Наследия, 2001, 305–330. (
online version).