Soviet Space Song - Apple Blossoms on Mars (И на Марсе будут яблони цвести)

"And There Will Be Apple Blossoms on Mars" (И на Марсе будут яблони цвести) is a Soviet song from the early 1960s commemorating the country's successes in spacefaring.

By 1963, the time of the song's composition by V. Muradeli, with lyrics by E. Dolmatovsky, the USSR had already sent a satellite into space (Sputnik, 1957), followed by a mammal (Laika, 1957), a lunar flyby (Luna, 1959), completed a human spaceflight mission (Yuri Gagarin, 1961), and a Martian flyby (Mars 1, 1963) - for which the song was inspired. The lyrics extoll the values of socialism and technological development, alongside the general theme of the era - which was that spacefaring would win the Cold War for the USSR and pave the way towards prosperity, peace, and new discoveries. With the fall of the Union in 1991, many commentators have noted that the song's slow tempo and harmonic dissonance give it a much more melancholy meaning. The most famous renditions have been performed by Vladimir Troshin and Iosif (Joseph) Kobzon.