Три танкиста (Three Tankmen) -- EPIC Orchestral Cover

Три Танкиста (Three Tankmen) is a 1939 Soviet military song composed by the Pokrass brothers with lyrics by Boris Laskin and famously performed by the A. V. Alexandrov Ensemble, better known as the Red Army Choir.

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Originally designed to commemorate the leadership of J. V. Stalin and the tactics and skills of the First Five Marshals of the Soviet Union during the Interwar period, Три Танкиста remains a popular song in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union. It acted as an unofficial anthem of the border and armor troops of the USSR.

The song was first performed by Nikolai Kryuchkov in the movie "Tractor Drivers" (premiered on July 3, 1939) during scene featuring the battle at Khalkhin Gol (went from spring to September 15-16, 1939), later it was performed by many famous performers and collectives. Many phrases from the song have since become "winged expressions" in Russian.

According to legend (the song's author Boris Laskin denies it), the crew from the song has a real equivalent — a BT-7 tank crew, who participated in the battle at Lake Khasan (July-August, 1938). The crew commander was Vasily Mikhailovich Agarkov, the driver and mechanic Nikolai Sergeevich Zhitenev, and the turret gunner was Sergey Mikhailovich Rumyantsev. On July 29, 1938, at night, all servicemen in the Far East were alerted: Japanese troops suddenly invaded the territory of the USSR at the Nameless Hill (height). In the morning, several crews, including Vasily Agarkov, were ordered to stay in the military camp and perform guard duty. The rest were upset by the inability to participate in the battle.

Agarkov offered to send a report to the headquarters with a request to go to the front. The next day, the crew took part in the fighting and participated in the Khasan events until the very end. The report was read out at the XVIII Party Congress (held in Moscow on March 10-21, 1939) as an example of boundless patriotism. This reportedly inspired the composers present at the congress, the Pokrass brothers and the poet Boris Laskin, to write a song about the crew.

The eponymous "Three Tankmen" were reunited in March 1971 on the Soviet news program Время ("Time"). In 1985, they also gave an interview to the Ogonyok magazine, in which the article "Those tankers..." was published in issue 15.