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:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)