Russia to revive Soviet anthem

By Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW, DEC. 5. Russia will reinstate the old Soviet anthem on Friday, December 8, nine years to a day after the Soviet Union was declared dead. The decision was taken on Monday at a Kremlin meeting of the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin, with parliamentary and regional leaders.

The old Soviet tune was ditched by the former Russian President, Mr. Boris Yeltsin, in favour of the politically- neutral Patriotic Song by the 19th-century composer Glinka. Mr. Yeltsin, who liked to describe himself as ``the man who buried Communism,'' also replaced the Soviet red flag and the hammer-and- sickle as the national coat of arms with a pre- Communist red-blue-and-white tricolour and the tsarist double- headed eagle. However, the left-leaning Russian Parliament refused to ratify the new state symbols.

In a compromise proposal, Mr. Putin called for retaining the tricolour and eagle. The President further bowed to the leftists, recommending that the Soviet red flag be adopted as the banner of the Russian armed forces. Until new lyrics are written, the national anthem will be performed without words. The Soviet anthem, written in 1943, sang praise to ``the solid union of free republics huddled around Russia''.

Russian liberals strongly protested reintroducing the Soviet anthem, denouncing it as a ``symbol of the bloody crimes of Stalinism''. However, recent polls showed that 49 per cent of Russians supported adopting the Soviet anthem, with its far more stirring and familiar melody, which is moreover associated with the Soviet Union's victory in World War. Only 15 per cent favoured the current provisional anthem.

In a televised address to the nation on Monday night, Mr. Putin said that opponents of the proposed anthem, flag and coat-of-arms linked them only with dark pages in Russian history.

``If we are guided by this logic, we will have to consign to oblivion the achievements of our people over the ages, which were also connected with state symbols,'' the President argued. ``Ruling out the symbols of past epochs, including the Soviet epoch, means admitting that: our mothers and fathers lived useless and senseless lives.''Mr. Putin, who has vowed to restore Russia's power and greatness, clearly attaches symbolic significance to reinstating the Soviet anthem before the New Year which ushers in a millennium.

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Section  : International
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