Up with Lenin

New words for a lost anthem

Russians who happened to tune in to Radio Moscow at 7 one night last week were startled to hear the massed voices of the famed Bolshoi Theater chorus in a fortissimo rendering of their long-lost national anthem. Not for 20 years had the rousing hymn been sung in public in the U.S.S.R. Now, the press agency Tass announced, it would be broadcast on radio throughout the Soviet Union at 6 a.m. and 12 midnight daily and at the start of each day of television programming. The anthem will also be transmitted regularly by loudspeakers in public squares and parks, on trains and street corners and in sports stadiums, concert halls and theaters. Attentive listeners to the anthem noted a significant alteration in the once familiar lyrics. Gone was Stalin's name in the stanza:

Through tempests the sunrays of freedom have cheered us. Along the new path where great Lenin did lead. Be true to the people, thus Stalin has reared us. Inspired us to labor and valorous deed!

These sentiments had become unpopular after then Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 exposed Stalin's campaigns of mass terror against innocent Soviet citizens. In his celebrated de-Stalinization speech, Khrushchev cited the national anthem as an example of the dictator's passion for self-glorification, calling it a "clear deviation from Marxism-Leninism, debasing and belittling the role of the party." After that, the lyrics were never sung, although the tune was occasionally played on state occasions and at sports events.

In May the Central Committee formally decided to refurbish the old anthem with some new words. Commissioned to do the job were the two original authors, who had been paid 100,000 rubles ($19,000) when they composed the lyrics in 1943. They were two-time Stalin Prize-winning Poet Sergei Mikhalkov and Harold El-Registan, a pop songwriter best known for his operetta Only Love.

Old hands at following the vagaries of the party line, Mikhalkov and El-Registan had little trouble in composing a deft change in the banned stanza about Stalin. The new last lines:

Be true to the people, thus Lenin has reared us. Inspired us to labor and valorous deeds!

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