State Anthem of the Soviet Union

The story

The State Anthem of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the national anthem of the Soviet Union, and the regional anthem of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, from 1944 to 1991. Its music was composed by Alexander Alexandrov in 1938 as the Hymn of the Bolshevik Party; its opening bars came from an earlier piece of his, "Life Has Become Better", based on words Joseph Stalin had spoken at the First All-Union Meeting of the Stakhanovites on 17 November 1935. Alexandrov described the music as a march joined to Russian traditional music, above all the bylina epic songs, and it shares chord progressions with Vasily Kalinnikov's overture Bylina and has been compared with Robert Schumann's "Frühlingsfahrt".

When the Comintern was dissolved in 1943 so that the Soviet Union could keep its alliance with the other Allies of World War II, a new anthem was needed to replace "The Internationale". A contest held in the second half of 1943 drew more than 200 entries, and Stalin chose Alexandrov's music himself. He wanted short words that would invoke the Red Army's coming victory over Germany on the Eastern Front. His staff called the poets Sergey Mikhalkov and Gabriyel' Ureklyan (El-Registan) to Moscow, and they finished a first draft overnight. The anthem was first published on 7 November 1943, broadcast on Soviet radio for the first time at midnight on 1 January 1944, and officially adopted on 15 March 1944. Its verses named Stalin and the war against Germany; Stalin is reported to have opposed putting his name in the text and to have given way when members of the Politburo insisted.

After Stalin's death, de-Stalinization made the lines about him unacceptable, and from 1956 to 1977 the anthem was played without words. One exception came at the 1976 Canada Cup ice hockey tournament, where the singer Roger Doucet insisted on singing it after consulting scholars of Russian studies at the Université de Montréal and Soviet team officials. In 1977, for the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, new words that Mikhalkov had written in 1970 were adopted: Stalin and the war were left out, the varying refrains became one, and a line about the national flag was replaced by one naming the party of Lenin.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia took the wordless "Patriotic Song" as its anthem. Soon after Vladimir Putin first took office in May 2000, the federal legislature approved the Soviet anthem's music, with new words, as the national anthem of Russia in December 2000. Boris Yeltsin criticised the decision, though some opinion polls showed that many Russians favoured it. The new words were again by Mikhalkov, who had now written the anthem's text three times. The same music was set to a proposed anthem for the State Union of Russia and Belarus, "Derzhavny Soyuz Narodov", which was never adopted.

In some post-Soviet states, laws banning communist symbols make a public performance of the Soviet anthem illegal: in Ukraine since 2015 it can carry up to five years in prison, and Latvia and Lithuania adopted similar laws.

What it says

A state anthem praising the Soviet Union, its peoples and its party; solemn and ceremonial. The 1944 words also praised Stalin and the war against Germany, which the 1977 words left out.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.