Concept
Po dolinam i po vzgoriam (По долинам и по взгорьям; По шумама и горама), also known as Partisan's Song, is a popular Red Army song from the Russian Civil War. Pyotr Parfyonov wrote the latest version of the song after the 1922 Battle of Volochayevka. The song has many versions in other languages, including Serbo-Croatian, Greek, German, French, Hungarian, Hebrew and Kurdish among others. The song was adapted by the Yugoslav Partisans and used in World War II. Vladimir Gilyarovsky wrote the poem "From the Taiga, the deep Taiga" in 1915 during World War I dedicated to the Siberian Riflemen, with text similar to the well-known version. Gilyarovsky's poem was published that year in several corpuses of Great War's soldiers' songs, and in the post-Soviet era it became known as the March of the Siberian Riflemen. After the end of the Russian Civil War, the song was popular within the Soviet Union. Later, during World War II, it resurged in popularity among anti-fascist partisan fighters, most prominently among Yugoslav and Soviet partisans. The song entered the official canon of Soviet songs when the director of the Red Army choir Aleksandr Aleksandrov, together with the poet Sergei Alymov, introduced the song into the choir repertoire. The words of the song were attributed to Alymov. The author of the melody was named as Ilya Aturov, commander of a Red Army unit, from whom Aleksandrov heard the melody of the song. The Red Army choir rendition was distributed on phonograph records. In 1934, a letter from veterans of the Russian Civil War in the Far East was published in the Izvestia central newspaper, naming Pyotr Parfyonov as the original author. Later that year, Parfyonov recalled the story of the creation of the song in the Krasnoarmeyets–Krasnoflotets (Red Army man and Red Fleet man) magazine. In this article, Parfyonov wrote that he borrowed the melody from his earlier 1914 song Na Suchane (On the Suchan), and penned the verses to Po dolinam i po vzgoriam after the Red takeover of Vladivostok in early 1920.