«Эх, тачанка-ростовчанка» («Ah, tachanka, girl from Rostov») is the opening line of «Tachanka,» a beloved Soviet song from the 1930s celebrating the machine-gun-mounted horse cart that became a folk symbol of the Red Cavalry’s mobility during the Russian Civil War. Roman’s parody swaps in Buguruslan, a real, modest town in Orenburg Oblast with a genuine, if much less romantic, oil industry, a fitting bit of small-town boosterism for a classmate’s secondhand story about easy money out in the provinces.
The Tachanka Song
