Comments: 3

• Guy from Woodinville, WaThis song moved me so much when I first heard it as a young man. It is one of the most intelligent and literate songs ever written. It made me a confirmed Al Stewart fan for life. I still look forward to every concert when he comes to the Seattle area. And he still produces fantastic music--the man is amazingly prolific! Just listen to 2006's "Somewhere in England 1915." Brilliant stuff!
• Bill from Oakland, CaMatt's got it right. The song is the story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who served in the Red Army artillery during the war. The narrative starts with the German invasion in the summer of 1941, describes the epic fighting retreat from Poland to Moscow, and then the slog back as the Russians learned how to beat what had been the best army in the world when it started. But, near the end, Solzhenitsyn wss 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. Of course, millions had been sent to the Gulag, and many had died. 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". Richard Overy's "Why The Allies Won" has a quick and to-the-point analysis of how the Axis, the Nazis, the Facists and the Japanese Army had appeard to be unbeatable when the war started in 1937, but were halted by the fall of 1942, and completely lost strategic initiative by the middle of 1943. Wirth's "Russia At War" tells the military story from the Russian side effectivly, and "Enemy At The Gates", about Stalingrad, captures the exact moment of what Churchill called "The Hinge Of Fate". (Along with El Alamien in North Africa and Midway/Guadalcanal in the Pacific). 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, once or twice. Its a great song.
• Matt from San Jose, CaSorry to disagree, but this song is written from the perspective of a Russian soldier.
  
  The end of the song is most chilling. The soldier was captured by the Germans, and then released. Communist Russia was very suspicious of captured soldiers because they though they had been "comprimised." The "special train" that the soldier must board will take him to a kind of exile Siberia, forced by his own government.

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