Al Stewart - Roads to Moscow

[Brett]

• Al Stewart - Roads to Moscow

• Heartbreaking song of the OstFront

• ---

• LINK

[Pirate-Drakk]

I got this song on a CD years ago and was quite amazed and impressed. A very odd subject for Al Stewart, but like most of his work, very well done.

[Brett]

This is such a moving song, I had always wondered if it was about
a family member. So I did some goggling, & found this second
hand account which I copied:

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One of Stewart´s epic songs, he is reputed to have read 40 books
researching it…

The song is the story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who served in the Red Army
artillery during the war…

… near the end, Solzhenitsyn was captured by the Germans, held for a day,
and then turned loose when they retreated. Winning the war hadn´t helped
Stalin´s murderous paranoia, and anyone who had such experience, or any
other contact with Westerners, Axis OR Allied, was considered likely to
have become a spy.

So Solzhenitsyn was jailed, tortured, tried, convicted and shipped off to the
Gulag. He managed to survive, to outlive Stalin, and he was freed along with
thousands of others in the later 1950s. …. His ground-breaking fiction, ´A Day
In The Life Of Ivan Dennisovich´ told what the Gulag had been like. Later he
produced the 3 volume, non-fiction, ´The Gulag Archipelago´…

I´ve seen Al Stewart perform this song several times and he introduced it as the
story of Mr. Solzhenitsyn, with slides while he played...

**************************************

I had always been under the impression Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Gulag
for a critical letter, not for being a POW. Not matter why, it was a Monstrous
crime for Stalin, and Solzhenitsyn was just 1 of millions …

[Pirate-Drakk]

I had no idea it was a true story! I will listen to the words more carefully next time...

[Jim O]

Originally Posted by Brett

This is such a moving song, I had always wondered if it was about
a family member. So I did some goggling, & found this second
hand account which I copied:

**************************************************

One of Stewart´s epic songs, he is reputed to have read 40 books
researching it…

The song is the story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who served in the Red Army
artillery during the war…

… near the end, Solzhenitsyn was captured by the Germans, held for a day,
and then turned loose when they retreated. Winning the war hadn´t helped
Stalin´s murderous paranoia, and anyone who had such experience, or any
other contact with Westerners, Axis OR Allied, was considered likely to
have become a spy.

So Solzhenitsyn was jailed, tortured, tried, convicted and shipped off to the
Gulag. He managed to survive, to outlive Stalin, and he was freed along with
thousands of others in the later 1950s. …. His ground-breaking fiction, ´A Day
In The Life Of Ivan Dennisovich´ told what the Gulag had been like. Later he
produced the 3 volume, non-fiction, ´The Gulag Archipelago´…

I´ve seen Al Stewart perform this song several times and he introduced it as the
story of Mr. Solzhenitsyn, with slides while he played...

**************************************

I had always been under the impression Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Gulag
for a critical letter, not for being a POW. Not matter why, it was a Monstrous
crime for Stalin, and Solzhenitsyn was just 1 of millions …

In his (Solzhenitsyn's) own "autobiography" on the Nobel site he says that it was for critical letters from 1944-1945 and other writings. No mention of having briefly been a prisoner is made. See Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - Autobiography:

I was arrested on the grounds of what the censorship had found during the years 1944-45 in my correspondence with a school friend, mainly because of certain disrespectful remarks about Stalin, although we referred to him in disguised terms. As a further basis for the "charge", there were used the drafts of stories and reflections which had been found in my map case. These, however, were not sufficient for a "prosecution", and in July 1945 I was "sentenced" in my absence, in accordance with a procedure then frequently applied, after a resolution by the OSO (the Special Committee of the NKVD), to eight years in a detention camp (at that time this was considered a mild sentence).

He was released from the Gulag in 1953 at the end of his term which more or less coincided with Stalin's death and sent to "internal exile" in Kazakhstan.