Letras
The balalaika rings silent from Minsk to Red Square
As the cortege assembles to bury the bear
Nadya Rostropovich looks on in despair
With Irina, Katryna and Olga
And quietly remembering her brother Ivan
Shot in the back in Afghanistan
The Stalinist purges the snowy white grave
That claimed Boris, Dmitry and Igor
She remembered how proud she cheered with the crowd
When Yuri Gagarin sailed over the clouds
Nadya and Ivan shouted aloud
"We put the first man in space"
But that was before the feared KGB
Put a question mark over her own loyalty
To keep an eye on her comrades one, two and three
Irina, Katryna and Olga
And poor Uncle Vlad, whom the duck declared mad
For refusing to leave his beloved Leningrad
She stood in the doorway tearful and sad
When they frogmarched him off to the gulag
He took a last look at his own native hills
Where grew the red dogwood and wild daffodils
The look on his face is haunting her still
Comrade Nadya Rostropovich
Sometimes alone she'd think of the West
Of ladies with opals adorning their breasts
Park Avenue posers who behaved like the Tsar
With silver coke spoons for their caviar
She'd reflect back to when she'd just turned ten
And faithfully subscribed to Fair Play For All Men
But seventy odd years of Bolshevik dreams
Had worn down her pride and left her no means
To cope with her own disillusions
If Trotsky and Engels saw the Dakas and Zils
The Politburo boys with their hand in the till
The bear was long dead before he got ill
Was it the cure or was it the fever?
No more Reds on their beds to freak out the feds
A defunct superpower in tatters and shreds
The marks left by Karl leave them queueing for bread
In the Caucasus, Baltics and the Urals