State Anthem of Ukraine

The story

In the autumn of 1862, at a gathering of Serbian and Ukrainian students in a Kyiv apartment, the ethnographer Pavlo Chubynskyi heard Serbian students sing Svetozar Miletić's "Srpska pesma" and, according to a memoirist who was there, wrote his poem on the spot. Scholars think it was also influenced by the Polish patriotic song "Poland Is Not Yet Lost" (1797), popular among the peoples of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth then struggling for independence; the January Uprising began a few months later. The earliest Ukrainophiles took up the words at once, and in 1862 the head of the gendarmes, Prince Vasily Dolgorukov, exiled Chubynskyi to Arkhangelsk Governorate for his "dangerous influence on the minds of commoners".

The poem was first published in 1863 in the fourth issue of the Lviv journal Meta, which wrongly attributed it to Taras Shevchenko. It became popular in what is now Western Ukraine, and Mykhailo Verbytskyi, a priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and a prominent composer, set it to music in 1863. The first public choral performance was at the Ruska Besida Theatre in Lviv in 1864, and the words were first printed with his music in 1865. That year it was sung in Przemyśl, then in the Austrian Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, at a commemoration of Shevchenko; this performance is the origin of Ukraine's National Anthem Day, held each year on 10 March. Mykhailo Zazuliak, an emigrant from Lviv living in New York, performed it as a folk song in 1915, and Columbia issued one of its first recordings in 1916.

In the first half of the 20th century, during attempts to found a Ukrainian state from lands of the Russian Empire, Poland and Austria-Hungary, the song served as the anthem of the Ukrainian People's Republic from 1917 (though other anthems were also used until 1921), of the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and in 1939 of Carpatho-Ukraine. After the Ukrainian SSR joined the Soviet Union in 1922 the song was banned, and it was rejected as a republican anthem in order to suppress separatist feeling. Between 1944 and 1949 Soviet authorities had a new anthem of the Ukrainian SSR written to a prescribed outline, with music by Anton Lebedynets and words by Pavlo Tychyna and Mykola Bazhan; it was adopted on 21 November 1949.

The song was sung as the de facto anthem at the inauguration of Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of independent Ukraine, on 5 December 1991. Parliament adopted it as the state anthem on 15 January 1992, and the Constitution of 28 June 1996 named Verbytskyi's music. The words followed only on 6 March 2003, when the Verkhovna Rada passed the Law on the State Anthem proposed by President Leonid Kuchma, by 334 votes of 450: the first stanza and refrain of Chubynskyi's poem, with the first line slightly changed.

The anthem became especially popular after the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan protests of 2013, when protesters, led by the singer Ruslana, sang it once an hour in the early weeks; Nadia Diuk called it the clarion call of that revolution. The composer Valentyn Sylvestrov heard in it the beginning of a church liturgy, a hallelujah. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 several orchestras in Europe and North America played it in solidarity with Ukraine.

What it says

A patriotic song declaring that Ukraine, its glory and its freedom live on, and calling its people to stand together for their freedom. Solemn and hymn-like rather than martial.

The words