Somewhere there, beneath birch crowns old and dear
a lone comrade major moonward howls his sorrow
longing for how far we’ve strayed.
O thou shalt not ask for papers no more
shalt not hit our door with thy boot
shalt not hit us with thy baton
shalt not huff and shalt not puff,
shalt not trace our IPs.
O we’re out of range, unavailable. Leave thy message on Signal, not after it.
Throughout the years, the rank of “major” became memetic, coming to denote an officer of the special services or the police who pays you a visit either to conduct investigative procedures or to deal with the oppositionally-minded, creating a meme “a visit from the major at home” that has survived Soviet times and is very much alive now.
Vasily Lozhkin’s painting “Motherland knows” (with the text “Motherland hears / is listening”) is most famous incarnation of the meme. He painted it in haf an hour (as he said) as a riff on Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1950 song Родина слышит (“The Motherland Hears”, lyrics by Yevgeny Dolmatovsky), which was a Soviet patriotic anthem whose opening line Родина слышит, Родина знает (“The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows”) was already only heard ironically in the late Soviet period. Sergei Dovlatov mentioned the meme in his notebooks as “the anthem and call-sign of the KGB”, and Shostakovich himself reportedly recognised the memetic potential of his creation.
One of the most famous internet-memes on the topic, in this case evoking a military comrade major who desperately wants you to enlist or get drafted luring you into his Faustian bargain.
