MOTHER RUSSIA

Unbeknownst to the band members themselves, Sire Records put out an edited version of Renaissance's Mother Russia as a single. The single was released only in America to promote the band's 1974 album Turn of the Cards. The b-side of the single is I Think of You taken from the same album.

Inspired by the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich from 1962, Betty Thatcher's lyrics for Mother Russia is about the horrors of the Gulag labour camps in the Soviet Union. The song has become one of the best known pieces by Renaissance, very often played live.

Whilst the album version of Mother Russia runs to nine and a half minutes, the edited single version is cut down to only three and a half minutes. The single edit now appears on CD for the first time ever as a bonus track on the recent four-disc re-issue of Turn of the Cards by Esoteric Recordings. As is often the case, the longer album version is the definitive version and the only version you really need. The edit will be of interest mainly to curious fans and collectors.

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