History
The song originally was not a song but a composition for piano without lyrics, written by Mikhail Glinka and entitled in French, "Motif de chant national." The song has been confused with the closing chorus of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar, probably because both begin with the same word ("Slav'sya"), but the two compositions are unrelated (though the operatic music, too, has been suggested as a candidate for the Russian national anthem).
The tune of this instrumental anthem, which was chosen by Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s and favored by the Russian Orthodox church, went without lyrics for several years. In 1999, a contest to provide suitable words for the anthem was won by Viktor Radugin with his poem "Славься, Россия!" ("Slav'sya, Rossiya!"; "Be glorious, Russia!"). Glinka's anthem was replaced soon after Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin took office. The National Anthem of the Soviet Union music with modified lyrics was established and approved by federal legislature in December 2000.
Read more about this topic: Patrioticheskaya Pesnya
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)