I used to look like this when I was a high-school student in Korea.
In this 1954 photo, I am shaking hands with General Maxwell
Taylor, the commander of the U.S. Forces in Korea. Under
him were 350,000 combat-ready US troops. In 1962, General Taylor
was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under the Kennedy administration,
and was in charge of the military planning during the Cuban missile
crisis which included a a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.
In 1945, I was in an American-influenced village called
Sorae, which was
occupied by Soviet troops immediately after World War II.
They were wearing uniforms looking like
this. I took
this photo while visisting Moscow's Arbat Street in 1990.
In 1994, I was attending a conference held in Minsk. The meeting
took place in a Russian military base
which used to serve as the conference center for the Warsaw Pact
(counterpart of NATO during the Cold War era). There, I met
many warm-hearted Russian
soldiers and officers. It was a real pleasure for me
to mix up with them and exchange gifts.
Comments
Dear Professor Kim,
Thank you for the fascinating story about the Russian song. I am very
interested in the Russian language, although I am a computer scientist.
(I'm barely able to read cyrillic, without understanding what's written.)
So, I looked up on the web about the song.
This google cache gives a good history of the song:
http://www.stanford.edu/class/slavgen194a/audio/proshchanie_slavianki.htm.
Unfortunately, the original page seems to have been taken off of the
internet. On the page, mentions an interesting Korean connection that you
might enjoy:
Curiously, the march continues to carry its anthem aura even now that the
the official Russian hymn has been adopted. During the greeting ceremony
in Seoul in March 2001, President Putin was greeted first by the two
official anthems of Russia and South Korea and immediately afterwards by
Proshchanie slavianki.
I also found this excellent mp3 of the same song at
http://www.aghtung.narod.ru/Mp3/marx_gimn/proschanie_slavianki.mp3.
linked from the following Russian page:
http://www.aghtung.narod.ru/marx_gimn.htm
The link is very slow, so it can take up to 40-50 minutes even on a
broadband connection, but it is well-worth the wait because of the
superior sound quality. The file size is about 2.1MB.
A shorter version with just the instruments can be found at:
http://www.sovmusic.ru/mp3/slavank2.mp3.
Finally, here's an English page about the composer of the song with
some background information:
http://www.tstu.ru/eng/kultur/composer/agap/agap.htm.
Hope you find these helpful.
Best,
Yoonsuck Choe
http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/choe
September 17, 2003
From lyssyak@ineonet.net Mon May 17 01:32:39 2004
Date: Sat, 1 May 2004 23:34:03 -0400
From: Sergey
To: yskim@physics.umd.edu
Subject: Proschanie Slavianki
Dear Mr. Kim:
I found your web site (http://ysfine.com/style/index.html) when I was
looking for a music..... Needless to mention that your web site is a very
interesting project which has reflection of your ideas and your vision of
the world. Meanwhile, I would like to thank you for a music file of
"Soviet Army March No. 5" (Proschanie Slavianki). This unforgettable
music was written in 1912 in Tambov town. Vasiliy Agapkin, 28-year old
cavalry orchesrant wrote this music. He become a Soviet army officer
after time was passed by and that is why everybody knew this music as
"Soviet Army March No.5"
I found this information here:
http://musicplanet.ru/belov/html/11_Raznoe/musykanty/Agapkin.htm.
May be it will be interesting for you.
Thank you again many times.
Sincerely,
Sergey Lyssyak
admin@ineonet.net
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