History has always fascinated me, but it’s most interesting when you learn the stories of the people who lived it. I love learning history from good historical fiction (or well-written non-fiction), but history in a song has its own special place.
I’ve always liked Al Stewart’s Roads to Moscow for its minor tunes but didn’t always give my full attention to the lyrics. Then one day elsewhere, I read that Russian soldiers who were captured, even briefly, by the Germans, were suspected of having been turned and of now being spies. They were given short shrift if they lived to return to Russia–either killed or sent off to Siberia. Hence this song, when I began really listening, took on new, heartrending meaning.
This, that and the other thing 