A poet’s songs honor two Russias

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After the death of a prominent Russian poet, The World’s Alex Gallafent reports on the changing shape of Russia’s national anthem.

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KATY CLARK:  You could say that poet Sergei Mikhalkov was embedded in Russian history.  Mikhlakov died today in Moscow at the age of 96.  He was best known for writing lyrics for this tune.  It’s the national anthem of Russia.  It was also the anthem of the old Soviet Union.  Mikhalkov wrote different lyrics for each.  The World’s Alex Gallafent has more.

ALEX GALLAFENT: The story of Russia’s national anthem doesn’t begin with Sergei Mikhalkov.  For that, we go back to this:  God Save the Tsar was Russia’s national anthem from the early 1830s.  The words are kind of what you’d expect.  ‘God save the noble Tsar!  Long may he live,’ et cetera, et cetera, standard stuff.  And it worked fine – until 1917, when revolution entered the bloodstream.  By 1922, a workers’ anthem was in the throats of Russians: The Internationale.  “No one will grant us deliverance”, rang the words.  “Not god, nor Tsar, nor hero.”  But a hero figure due did emerge, at least in Soviet propaganda: Josef Stalin, and the hero needed an anthem.  The Hymn of the Bolshevik Party was written in 1939.  Its words praised the Party of Lenin, the party of Stalin, wise party of Bolsheviks.  But Stalin commissioned new lyrics from the late Sergei Mikhalkov.  The new anthem was unveiled in 1944.  Here it is in an English translation recorded the following year.  And yes, this is the American Paul Robeson singing – a longtime supporter of the Soviet experiment.  Stalin’s cult of personality made a name-check necessary, but when he died in 1953, the Soviet Union began to de-Stalinize the country.  That included the national anthem.  For the next couple of decades, the Soviet Union did without lyrics, but in 1977, Sergei Mikhalkov popped up again.  This time he left Stalin out and focused on Lenin.  Now the refrain referred to the Party of Lenin, the strength of our peoples and Communism’s triumph.  That’s how it stayed until the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.  Boris Yeltsin scrapped the old anthem, replacing it with a tune by the 19th century composer Mikhail Glinka.  Yeltsin held a competition for lyrics.  Here’s the winner:  Save your breath.  Yeltsin was out of power before

the words had been officially unveiled.  Vladimir Putin took over; he brought back the old tune, and for a third time, the state turned to Sergei Mikhalkov for new lyrics.  The current refrain goes, “Be glorious, our free Fatherland, long lasting union of brotherly peoples, common wisdom given by our forebears.  Be glorious, our country, we are proud of you!”  National anthems are meant to sound like they’ve existed for all of time; they’re bits of musical mythology.  But old tunes have a habit of cropping up in strange places.  Take the one we started with, God Save the Tsar.  Over here the tune has another home:

The University of Pennsylvania.  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

KATY CLARK: This is PRI.

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