The Bryansk Forest Sternly Stirred

The song was written during the Great Patriotic War, in the autumn of 1942, deep behind enemy lines.^[1] The basis was the 19th century folk song "The Burrowing Storm" about the death of Ermak, the favorite song of the first detachment commander, D. E. Kravtsov.^[2]

On the night of November 6–7, 1942, Anatoly Sofronov performed it for the first time among the partisans. The author's recollections:

I sang it once, they asked me to sing it again, then a third time. They hugged me. And suddenly someone remembered that they had their own accordion player, and that they had to find him by morning and bring him here, and that he had a good ear and would definitely remember it... The next morning, a blind accordion player turned up in the same house. I don't remember his first or last name. I sat with him for about an hour, slowly humming the melody of the song to him, and somewhere by the end of that hour he was singing the song with me, and around us in that wooden house in the middle of the burnt village people gathered and also sang the song “The Bryansk forest rustled harshly” together with us…^[3]

According to the law of Bryansk Oblast No. 47-Z "On the symbols of the Bryansk Oblast" dated 20.11.98, adopted by the Bryansk Regional Duma November 5, 1998, the song "The Bryansk forest rustled harshly" was declared the anthem of Bryansk Oblast.^[4]

• Archived performance of the song. Real Media format, ~350 kb
• Anthem of the Bryansk region - "The Bryansk forest rustled harshly..." (Eng subs) on YouTube