One beautiful sunny day, leaving the entrance of the house, I noticed the boys playing in the yard. It would seem that the picture is familiar to the eye - boys of six or seven years old, shouting and hooting, playing war. I would have passed by if I had not heard one of the teenagers, who had apparently been taken “captive,” shouting indignantly: “Hands off Soviet power!”
I wonder if he knew what he was saying? What Soviet power?
When we pronounce some words and sayings, we sometimes don’t even think about how they appear, live and reach our days. As a keen person, I got excited and plunged headlong into this topic. And this is what I found. As an example, let's make sentences from these words and phrases.
As the saying goes, Let's get back to our sheep.
Two people talking:
- These ballers since morning they chase the quitter, ok at least not They're hooligans!
- Look how pasta are cracking!
- Yes, hunger is not a thing. If they don't come to their senses, will fly like plywood over Paris!
Now let's look at each case in order.
There are several versions of the origin of the phrase "Let's go back to our sheep." According to one of them, it appeared among the ancient Greeks, who, being great thinkers and philosophers, did not consider it shameful to herd sheep. Naturally, in the process of self-feeding the sheep, which was soothing to the eye, the Hellenes indulged in discussions about lofty matters. But when it was time to return to prosaic matters, they used to say to each other: “Let’s go back to our sheep.” That is, from heaven to earth.
The second origin takes us back to 1456, when the now famous medieval farce was first staged. The main plot of the farce is the scene in the courtroom. A man is being tried for stealing an entire flock of sheep. The emotions of numerous witnesses constantly confuse the court. The participants in the process make scandals, quarrel and accuse each other of various sins. So the judge has to constantly remind him of the main thing - let's get back to our sheep! He pronounces this phrase dozens of times, thereby reconciling the participants in the process.
Dear friend!Or, as the French would say, sher ami. These are the words at the beginning XIX centuries, the remnants of the French army, retreating along the Smolensk road, ragged and hungry, forced to get food for themselves, said with outstretched hands to the Russian peasants who were finishing their porridge with butter: “Mon cher ami, don’t let them die of hunger!” At the same time, they made a pitiful expression on their faces (in a word, beggars), to which our man, seeing the ragged Frenchmen from afar, sighed: “Again these ballers they came!"
Word " quitter" is of Moscow origin and also dates from the beginning XIX century. I was on the street. Prechistenka hospital of doctor Ferdinand Justus Christian Loder. They treated there with artificial mineral waters, it was wildly popular, and, as they would say today, the Moscow crowd considered their appearance in this establishment prestigious. While drinking mineral water was not only a fashionable social activity, but was also considered a panacea for many ailments. While drinking mineral water under sun loungers in the garden of the hospital, the gentlemen imposingly rocked in their chairs and discussed the latest news for hours. Accordingly, to the cab drivers who were waiting for their masters, such a pastime seemed like empty idleness.
Knowing that the gentlemen were heading to Loder to take water, the servants ran to the hospital to look for them in order to tell them some news. And they asked the cab drivers where gentlemen such and such were. To which the cab drivers responded, waving their hand towards the garden: “And over there, Loder is being chased!”, which over time turned into "They're chasing a quitter."
Most linguists and lawyers believe that words "hooligan" and “to hooligan” come from the English “Hooligan,” the surname of an Irish family who lived in London in the late 18th century and were known for their rudeness. Subsequently, street brawlers were called hooligans, and the word itself became a common noun. In Russia, the words “hooligan” and “hooliganism” became widespread in the 90s of the 19th century.
Where did the word " pasta"?
One of the legends says that in the 16th century the owner of a tavern located near Naples cooked for visitors different types noodles. One day his daughter was playing with dough, rolling it into long thin tubes and hanging them on the clothesline. Seeing his daughter’s “toys,” the owner first became very angry, and then decided why good things should go to waste and welded these tubes, poured them with a special tomato sauce and served the guests a new dish. The guests were delighted. The tavern became a favorite place for Neapolitans, and its owner, having amassed a decent fortune, built the world's first factory for the production of these unusual thin tubes. The name of this successful entrepreneur Marco Aroni, and this dish, of course, is now well-known to everyone “ pasta"!
“Hunger is not an aunt, she won’t serve you a pie” – that’s exactly how this saying sounded at first. But someone once didn’t finish, someone else picked it up, and we habitually say: “ Hunger is not my aunt" not having the slightest idea what kind of aunt we are talking about, and the words about pies flying by like plywood over Paris.
And at the very beginning of the era of aeronautics, it was not plywood that flew over Paris, but an airship called the Flaneur. This event was loud and covered in numerous press, including in Russia they read how the Flaneur soared over Paris. Newspapers wrote again and again about how the Flaneurs flew over the capital of France. And in one of the central newspapers of tsarist Russia there was a typo in the word “Flaneur” - they missed a letter L. That's flies still " Plywood over Paris."
TEXT: Yana KUD
PHOTO: from open sources
In the spring of 1920, when the meat grinder of the Soviet-Polish War began to spin with renewed vigor, the Entente adopted a large-scale program to supply the Polish army. However, they were never able to implement it in full. The British communists came out with the slogan “Hands off Soviet Russia!” At that time, slogans had not yet degenerated into empty chants - they served as a guide to action. The essence of the slogan was simple: all workers must by any means prevent the sending of military supplies to Poland. The slogan was taken up by all communist and almost all socialist workers' organizations in Europe and America. It has also reached Japan. The effect was such that Stalin remembered him with kind words twenty years later. Most of the deliveries were either completely disrupted, expired, or were completely lost. A large number of English and French military experts traveling under the guise of tourists to Poland suffered, even to the point of death.
The greatest contribution to the movement was made by English and German communists. Today is about the Germans.
In Germany, the slogan was taken up by dockers and railway workers
and Spartacists - fighters of the "Spartak Union" (be sure to google), essentially the military wing of the NSDPD, created by Rosa Luxemburg (a fighting, courageous aunt - love, who offends - spit in the eye) 
In short, this is what the German comrades did for the victory of the Red Army:
- drove transports with weapons for Poland into dead ends and destroyed them;
- weapons, vehicles and aircraft intended for Poland were disabled at enterprises;
- dumped military cargo intended for Poland into the sea;
- they agitated ordinary military personnel of the Entente occupation forces so that they themselves began to disable military equipment.
Read more about the most striking cases.
On May 9, the newspaper Rote Fahne called on the entire German proletariat to demonstrate in support of Soviet Russia. 
Almost two hundred thousand people came out to demonstrate across the country. The government and the Entente were warned. As usual, no one heard the demonstrators.
Then all the industrial centers of Germany were covered with Spartacist leaflets:
"Workers!
Organize a boycott of Poland! Prevent all transport to Poland! Create organizations to implement these measures!"
(text according to "Rota Fahne" dated July 25, 1920).
Let's go!
On July 7, in Mannheim-Ludwigshafen, workers and employees of the company that owned the warehouses refused to unload artillery shells from the warehouses into wagons. On July 11, they were joined by workers from the Fugen company in Ludwigshafen. Police detachments arrived in Ludwigshafen. The workers began throwing 75mm shells at them - “Load them yourself!” One policeman's leg was crushed.
The dispatch did not take place, the matter ended in nothing, as the problems began to grow like a snowball.
On July 22, a Polish ship with military cargo arrived at the port of Danzig. The port workers refused to unload it. The authorities argued with them for a week, after which the commander of the British units, Hawking, sent 200 soldiers to unload. And he received a surprise - the soldiers came to the port and joined the strikers. All the troops had to be raised. 22 British soldiers were sentenced to death. A crowd of thousands of German residents of Danzig came to the guardhouse building, broke down the gates and freed the soldiers. Under the threat of total fuck-up, Hawking was forced to pardon the soldiers and send the Polish authorities to hell - the British abandoned themselves.
On July 24, a train with sealed carriages arrived at Marburg station. The railway workers blocked him on the tracks and demanded that the train manager show what he was carrying in these cars. A police squad arrived at the station. The police were beaten. Then French officers came out of the carriages and demanded that the crowd disperse, otherwise they would shoot. The crowd was blown away by this: the officers were severely beaten, their keys were taken away, and all the carriages were opened. The carriages carried rifles and ammunition. Every single rifle was smashed right there on the tracks. The train, with beaten officers, was driven to a dead end.
On July 26, in Berlin, railway workers detained a train from an artillery depot in Spandau. Boxes of ammunition and grenades were thrown out of the train. The grenades evaporated.
At the end of July, the railway workers' union obliged all members to maintain round-the-clock watch at stations and report on the movement of trains with military cargo.
On August 1, a train arrived in Erfurt from Cologne, which was accompanied by a company of French soldiers. It included a sealed carriage in which British officers were traveling. The train stopped and demanded that the French hand over their weapons and open the carriage. The French, in response, grabbed the driver and his assistant and threatened to use weapons if the train did not move (To the Germans! In 1920! In Germany!).
The railway workers formed a wall around the French soldiers and very seriously informed them that not a single passenger on the train would leave the station alive.
The French got scared and threw down their weapons. The British barricaded themselves in their carriage and shouted from there that they were bringing food.
The echelon was driven to a dead end, from where government troops managed to pull it out and send it to Poland only the next day.
On August 3, in Stuttgart, at the Daimler Werke plant, new armored vehicles, fully armed and equipped, already loaded into wagons for shipment, were cut into pieces by Spartacists using autogenous guns.
On August 7, Stettin workers detained a large transport of mortars and mines produced by the Magdeburg company Wolf. A couple of days later, another carriage with the company’s products arrived. The Stettiners asked their colleagues from Magdeburg: “What’s going on?!”
The company's trade union, together with local railway workers, went to open all the cars at the station. We found another carriage with mortars.
Trade union activists came to the management of the company and, by force of persuasion, forced him to make a decision to coordinate all future shipments with the Trade Union.
On August 10, at the Berlin Pankow station, railway workers threw tens of thousands of detonators out of a sealed carriage.
On August 11, the steamship Ethos sailed from Rotterdam to Danzig with a cargo of 500 boxes of “war materials.” The boxes sank into the sea; they were missing in Danzig.
On August 12, a ship with British planes arrived in Danzig. The loaders threw them into the sea.
Danzig annoyed the British and Sir Reginald Tower forbade English ships carrying military cargo from entering the Danzig port. (Later, in September, the Entente will have to send a military squadron to Danzig to restore order).
On August 13, the largest transport of 100 wagons of all kinds of weapons was detained at the station in Karlsruhe. The government demanded that the movement continue. The station manager immediately quit, and the workers refused to do anything. The transport stood for a week before moving on. Only a few carriages moved - the weapons evaporated from the rest.
On the same day, in Ludwigshafen, the French commission sent aircraft engines from the Benz plant to Poland. When checked, all the motors turned out to be damaged, and in one they found a piece of paper with an obscene drawing of a Polish military man.
On August 14, an Entente train arrived at the Schneimüdel station, accompanied by English and French soldiers. The train was met by a crowd of 2,000 workers. The workers began to open the cars and throw everything out onto the platform. The French officer fired his pistol into the air and his skull was immediately broken with a blow from a crowbar. 40 soldiers were laid face down on the platform, tied up and stacked: the British in the station toilet, the French in the barn.
The train's cargo was destroyed on the spot: machine guns, rifles, gasoline, kerosene, two armored vehicles, motorcycles, spare parts.
The police officers were unable to interfere.
On August 15-17, a railway strike took place in Upper Silesia - trains did not run at all.
On August 17, the Entente commission received a shipment of small arms from the Genshov plant in Durlach. All the barrels were "grossly" damaged.
On the same day, a transport arrived in Berlin at the Stettin station, in which workers discovered 200 heavy and 100 light mortars, 10,000 howitzer shells, 20,000 grenades, 6,000 pistols. The head of the train was police lieutenant Tamshik, who in 1919 personally shot and killed two communists. Until August 20, he sat barricaded in his carriage while workers unloaded and dismantled the weapons.
On August 20, in Fürstenwald, the Pinch company loaded 4 seaplanes and 28 torpedo tubes into the train. During loading, they were all strangely beaten and broken. The trash had to be disposed of.
On September 3, a train arrived in Erfurt, carrying food to Poland using invoices. 3 tons of French rifle cartridges were found on the train. They blew everything up in a dead end.
After the Soviet-Polish truce in October 1920, Spartacists and railway workers took patronage over 50 thousand interned Red Army soldiers who were able to break out of encirclement into German territory.
There are plenty of sources on Google for the queries “Spartacists” and “hands off Russia.” The Germans have cool websites like
“Hands off Soviet Russia!”
By September 1919, the movement under this slogan had assumed a massive scale. Of course, the guys from the Comintern (that is, in fact, agents of Moscow) had a hand in this. However, no agents or intelligence services are capable of organizing a mass popular movement out of nothing. But there was a mass movement, and a very serious one.
AND main reason not even in sympathy with the communists - although leftist sentiments were very strong in Europe at that time. It's a matter of the general situation. Millions of people returned from the Great War - and saw that no one really needed them. But everywhere the overweight heroes of the rear were having a great time. Let me remind you that, for example, after the Second World War and in capitalist countries, the bastards who stole from the rear tried not to get in the way. But then people didn’t understand...
An illustration of what was happening can be the bestsellers of those times, telling about the World War - “On Western Front All Quiet" by the German Erich Maria Remarque, "Fire" by the Frenchman Henri Barbusse and "Death of a Hero" by the Englishman Richard Aldington. What is interesting here for our topic? The works of the winners and losers are absolutely identical in intonation. War looks to everyone like a dirty, vile and, most importantly, completely meaningless affair. And this was not some pacifist “underground”, but the most popular books - it was not for nothing that the Nazis later burned them at the stake.
So: these people absolutely did not understand why their governments were getting involved in a new war in distant Russia. Attempts to convince the public that “the Bolsheviks threaten the civilized world” ran into skeptical grins from people who went through the meat grinder of the battles of the Somme and Verdun: if your The world is called civilized, then the Reds are right! It must be said that the “bourgeois” journalists overdid it. They told such outrageous horrors about the “atrocities of the Bolsheviks” that readers just shrugged their shoulders: they say, how long can you lie?
And it didn’t come down to just shrugging shoulders, or even to street demonstrations, of which there were enough.
In August 1919, the Citroen plant went on strike in France. In addition to the typical trade union demands - higher wages and the like - the workers also put forward political ones: the cessation of all assistance to opponents of Soviet power. It was very serious. The Citroen plant was the flagship of the French trade union movement, and other enterprises could follow its example.
In the UK, dockers went on strike, refusing to load ships heading to Russia. Let me clarify that a docker is not a loader, it is a very skilled work specialty that takes years to master. If dockers go on strike, the port freezes.
As a result, on the wave of these sentiments in Great Britain and France, socialists came to power. By the way, it was then that the British Labor Party pushed the Liberal Party (Whigs) to the political margins and has since been one of the two main British parties.
Of course, these socialists were not Bolsheviks at all. According to our concepts, they were something like people's socialists or right-wing Mensheviks. But I had to answer to voters, who could easily turn from strikes to shooting. Great Britain completely stopped supporting the Whites. France later tried to help the Poles - and again there was a wave of strikes.
Hands off Russia (“Hands off Russia”)
slogan and name of the movement of the working class and other democratic sections of the population of capitalist countries that unfolded in 1918-20 in defense of the Soviet state from foreign military intervention. This movement, reflecting the enormous revolutionary influence of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the solidarity of the working people of the whole world with the workers and peasants of the Soviet country, took place in different countries various shapes. In Great Britain, already in the fall of 1918, participants in workers' rallies and trade union meetings, putting forward the demand “Hands off Russia,” threatened a general strike if the British government did not abandon attempts to strangle the Russian revolution by military force. In January 1919, at a conference in London, the National Committee of the “Hands Off Russia” movement was elected, which by the summer of 1919 had assumed even wider proportions; W. P. Coates became the national secretary of the movement, and G. Pollitt became the national organizer. Local committees of the movement actively developed their activities. The demand for an immediate end to the intervention also spread to military units sent or sent to the Soviet country. In France, the Socialist Party called on workers to fight against anti-Soviet intervention; the General Confederation of Labor welcomed the sailors of French warships who refused to fire on the Black Sea cities of Soviet Russia in April 1919. The Society of Friends of the Peoples of Russia (founded in 1919) actively participated in the fight against intervention; Outstanding cultural figures (A. France, A. Barbusse, etc.) spoke in defense of the Soviet Republic. In December 1919, Bordeaux port workers refused to load military equipment for the interventionists and White Guards. In Italy, the demand for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Soviet Russia was put forward by socialists in December 1918 and took a prominent place in the May Day protests of Italian workers in 1919. In the United States, participants in mass workers' meetings joined the protest of the League of Friends of Soviet Russia (founded in June 1919) against the intervention; in July - October 1919, in New York alone, these meetings involved 1 million people. Leaflets were distributed in China and petitions were sent to the government protesting against its anti-Soviet agreements with Japan. The disruption of the anti-Soviet intervention and blockade was facilitated by revolutionary battles in Germany, Finland, Hungary and revolutionary uprisings in other countries. While weakening the general front of imperialism, these actions, whose participants demonstrated deep sympathy for the Soviet state, provided direct assistance to the working people of Soviet Russia. A new rise in the “Hands Off Russia” movement was noted in 1920, when the imperialists organized a Polish attack on the Soviet Republic. The struggle against the anti-Soviet war unleashed by the imperialists in Great Britain took on a particularly wide scale; in May 1920, London dockers refused to load weapons destined for Poland onto the Jolly George. The Communist Party of Great Britain actively participated in the unfolding movement. Under strong pressure from the English working class, Labor and trade unionist leaders joined the movement. On August 9, in connection with the ultimatum demand of the British government to stop the counter-offensive of the Red Army, a joint meeting of representatives of the Labor parliamentary faction, the Executive Committee of the Labor Party and the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress was held, at which a Central Action Council was created, which convened an all-England workers' conference on August 13. The conference demanded diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia, the establishment of normal economic relations with it, and authorized the Central Action Council to use all types of work stoppages, including a general strike, in the fight against the war. At the same time, local Action Councils (committees) were actively working (there were about 350 of them), whose active employees were communists. Ultimately, British workers forced the government to abandon direct entry into the Polish-Soviet war on the side of Poland. Active protests in defense of the Soviet Republic took place in Germany, Italy (Italian railway workers disrupted the shipment of weapons and ammunition to Poland; the sailors of the steamship "Calabria", on board which were Polish reservists, did not allow the ship to leave the port), in France, where in 1920 a number of strikes against the sending of war materials to the interventionists and White Guards, and in a number of other countries. The Hands Off Russia movement was a clear manifestation of proletarian internationalism; it helped the young socialist state defend its existence. “... We were able to defeat the enemy,” said V.I. Lenin, “because at the most difficult moment the sympathy of the workers of the whole world showed itself” (Complete collection of works, 5th ed., vol. 39, p. 346). Lit.: Lenin V.I., Letter to the workers of Europe and America, Complete works, 5th ed., vol. 37; his, Letter to the English workers, ibid., vol. 41; his, Reply to a letter from the United Provisional Education Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain, ibid.; him, Comrade Thomas Bell, ibid., vol. 44; his, On the Policy of the English Labor Party, ibid.; Pollitt G., Selected articles and speeches, trans. from English, [t. 1], M., 1955; Volkov F.D., The collapse of the English policy of intervention and diplomatic isolation of the Soviet state (1917-1924), [M.], 1954; Gurovich P.V., The rise of the labor movement in England 1918-1921, M., 1956; Anti-war traditions of the international labor movement, M., 1972. G. V. Katsman.
Great Soviet Encyclopedia. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. 1969-1978 .
See what “Hands off Russia” is in other dictionaries:
Mass popular movement against antis. intervention for peace that unfolded in England in 1918 20. Victory Vel. Oct. socialist The revolution in Russia was greeted with joy by the English. workers and with hatred of the English. ruling classes. Fight against... ...
Allied intervention in northern Russia Civil War in Russia English tank "Mark 5", captured by the Red Army during military operations. Arkhangelsk ... Wikipedia
See also: Foreign military intervention in Russia Allied intervention in northern Russia Civil War in Russia ... Wikipedia
This term has other meanings, see Intervention (meanings). Military intervention in Russia Civil war in Russia ... Wikipedia
- [From this general outline, the histories of some individual wars of more importance are highlighted.]. I. Relations and wars between Russia and Turkey until Peter I (1475 1689). Relations between Russia and Turkey began from the time of the latter’s conquest of Crimea in... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Ephron
Russian-Turkish wars 1676−1681 1686−1700 1710−1713 1735−1739 1768−1774 1787−1792 ... Wikipedia
Anthems of Russia 1. Thunder of victory, ring out! (unofficial) (1791 1816) 2 ... Wikipedia
- (Great Britain) state in the West. Europe, located on the British about you. Official name B. United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; The whole of Britain is often inaccurately called England (after the name ... Soviet historical encyclopedia
- (USSR, Union of SSR, Soviet Union) the first socialist in history. state It occupies almost a sixth of the inhabited landmass of the globe, 22 million 402.2 thousand km2. Population: 243.9 million people. (as of January 1, 1971) Sov. The Union holds 3rd place in... ... Soviet historical encyclopedia
quiz: where did the expression “Hands off Soviet power” come from? and got the best answer
Answer from Yuri Ivanov[guru]
This slogan sounded like this from the beginning.
Hands off Soviet Russia! ..The slogan appeared in England at the beginning. 1919 (originally: “Hands off Russia”). The expression “Hands off! "was introduced into use as a political slogan by W. Gladstone in the fall of 1878.
Answer from 2 answers[guru]
Hello! Here is a selection of topics with answers to your question: quiz: where did the expression “Hands off Soviet power” come from?
Answer from Valentina semerenko[guru]
ot vlasti.
Answer from ABC...[guru]
When a guy squeezes a girl at the entrance. She tells him this phrase. The organ of "Soviet power" may vary depending on the position of the guy's hands.
Answer from Kondrat Timur[newbie]
From the White Guards!
Answer from Petr petrov[guru]
This is a phrase from V.I. Lenin. And it arose in an ordinary way. After the coup, many papers were soiled by unwashed hands, including important decrees. Lenin said, irritated, to his subordinates. And then they went their separate ways. Naturally, Lenin already knew this expression.
P.S/Small turns into Great, and Great into small!
Answer from Colt 45 caliber[guru]
Once, a politician with the original Russian name Lazar and the simple village surname Kaganovich suddenly said at some Tskov drinking party: “Let’s lift up the skirt of the Russian woman of Russia!”
To which the old mushroom Kalinin replied: “Hands off SOVIET Russia.... Russian bully.”