My frequent readers know that I am not exactly fond of Russia and, in general, Russians themselves. That’s because for most of my childhood, I lived in the Cold War era, back when what is now Russia was part of the Soviet Union.
I cannot tell you how many times we came close to nuclear war. You can read about all that in my Word War III archive. The then Soviet Union always had nukes pointed directly at us at all times. To be fair, we had the same pointed at them.
The nukes could have started flying within minutes without any major hesitation. To put it simply, the Soviet Union was our enemy. I don’t feel like writing an article that details why we became enemies after World War II, so let me Google that for you.
It is generally not in my nature to validate or condone the Russians. We still have nukes pointed at each other. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We will know the second that Russia launches against us, and within fifteen minutes, after the process progresses, we’ll be sending a love letter or two to them. Don’t fool yourself: Russia as a whole is still our enemy and it’s only a matter of time before Putin gives the order.
I am so against Russia and its people that the Russian language does not appear on the list at the top of my site of languages that this site can be translated into.
But none of that matters right now, and it’s all because of a silly little song called I Am Very Glad, As I Am Finally Returning Back Home, a song that was released in 1976. The song is nothing but an instrumental track with a voice layover by the late Russian musician Eduard Khil. The vocals were nothing but nonsensical jibberish, and there’s a reason for that.
Moments before Khil took the stage, he was pulled aside by Russian censors and was told that he could not perform the song as written because they found it to be too pro-American. That simply wouldn’t do, given that it was the Cold War. I can’t blame the censors for doing what they did. Those were different times after all. If I were a censor, I would have done the same thing for pro-Soviet lyrics.
The lyrics had to do with a cowboy returning home to the West, something that the censors took to be an American song. So, they did what they had to do.
The song remains popular even to this day for reasons that I will not give any ink on this website. All you need to know is that this song as we know it today came about because, at the last minute, Khil had to come up with something to sing. So he did the only thing he could do: he made up nonsense on the spot, leaving the censors with nothing to do.
Yes, the song is a Soviet song. Yes, it comes from a communist nation. But the song is so damn catchy even if it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But then again, Russia doesn’t make any sense even today, right?