One of the last legislative acts of the Russian parliament in the first year of the millennium was its agreement, by a healthy majority, of a new national anthem. The version on which the deputies agreed was, in fact, the old national anthem. The old Soviet anthem.
This decision was seen by many Russian liberals as a reactionary step. And they were right. It was a reaction in both senses of the word: a return to a glorious (hideous) past, and a reaction of the legislators to what most see as the west’s humiliation of Russia during the first decade of its independence. It also, in their view, fits with the progress of President Vladimir Putin from mock-democrat to open autocrat – through the KGB-isation of government, the marshalling of parliament behind his policies and the suppression of the free media with the pursuit, via the Russian and the international courts, of the main press barons, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky.
If they, and some western commentators, are right, then the anthem is of extraordinary significance. It means that the liberalising trend in Russia and the Soviet Union over the past 15 years is being halted. Russia will, according to this version, turn in on itself once more but also turn back towards its traditional allies in the Arab and third worlds, and seek rapprochement with China and India in an anti-western front. Is this likely? The answer is unknowable: but on it some light can be shone – from the narrative of the anthem itself.
The Duma’s decision was a curious one. It decided only on the music of the national anthem, which is to be the Soviet hymn music written by the composer Alexander Alexandrov during the last war. The words are still at issue. A number of versions are being proposed, and two are being considered seriously.
One has been written by Yevgeny Primakov, who has been one of the most influential figures of the Russian Eighties and Nineties. A former Pravda journalist, he was a foreign policy aide to Mikhail Gorbachev, became head of the Foreign Intelligence Service under Yeltsin, then foreign minister and prime minister. The party he founded is called Otechestvo – Fatherland – and his version reflects some of the patriotic spirit behind that name:
Russia has come through a stream of ordeals
And now, the fate of our birthplace is in our own hands
Let us all rise up, as one, people of Russia
To shape a happy fate for our country for ever!
[Chorus] Glory to you, our united Fatherland,
Your dignity in the world, your honour, your strength!
The unconquerable Russian banner
Leads us to accomplish yet more!
The other version, which currently leads the field, is – incredibly – by the writer of the words of the original Soviet anthem, Sergei Mikhalkov. Now in his late eighties and recently remarried to a woman a third his age, the poet has suffered the indignity, for the past two decades, of being known less for his past achievements and more for his fathering of the film directors Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and Nikita Mikhalkov (the latter became the cultural hero of the new Russia with films such as Burnt by the Sun, which won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in 1994 and the Oscar for best foreign film in 1995). Now, he is back in his own right – bidding to set a stamp on the new Russia of Vladimir Putin as he did on the second half of the century dominated by Stalin.
Powerful wings beat over us
The Russian eagle takes flight,
And the symbol of the Motherland – the tricoloured banner
Leads the Russian peoples to victory!
[Chorus] Glory to you! Our free Fatherland
Eternal union of brotherly peoples!
The wisdom of the people given by our ancestors
Glory to you, our birthplace! God is above you!
Yet for all that such versions are available, the anthem may wander, a song without words, for some time yet. The effort to give expression in a hymn to the patriotic present of Russia is terribly hard – since Russia has neither of the preconditions that usually attend the birth of an anthem, victory or threat.
The pre-revolutionary anthem, “Bozhe Tsarya Khraniye” (God Save the Tsar) was written after the defeat of Napoleon and was set to the stirring tune that comes at the end of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The Bolsheviks, concerned to lead the world as the first group to express in state power the most radical promises of the enlightenment (and knowing well that God had not saved the Tsar, as they had murdered him and his family), replaced it with the “Internationale” – which, though stained by association, is still magnificent:
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race!
It was replaced by Mikhalkov’s anthem in 1944, so that the Soviet Union could be seen to express the relief of the nation and its gratitude to Stalin for saving it from German annihilation. It went –
The party of Lenin, the party of Stalin
Leads us from victory to victory!
This had only a 12-year life – until, in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev unveiled, in his secret speech, some of Stalin’s crimes (those committed on party members). For 21 years, while Alexandrov’s music was played, no words were sung. It was only in 1977, relatively late in Brezhnev’s long political career, that the anthem was rejigged to exclude the “friend of the toiling masses” and include the people:
The party of Lenin, the strength of the people
Leads us toward the triumph of communism!
By 1991, the party of Lenin was leading no one anywhere: though the official anthem remained unchanged until the Red Flag was pulled down from above the Kremlin at the end of that year and the tricolour raised. A new national hymn was first played during Boris Yeltsin’s inauguration as president of what was still then Soviet Russia in mid-1991. It borrowed from an earlier composer than Tchaikovsky – Mikhail Glinka, whose “Life of the Tsar” (or “Ivan Susanin”, as first he and later the communists called it) celebrates the saving by the peasant Ivan Susanin (who gives his life in doing so) of the tsar-to-be from an invading Polish army. The new anthem, again without words, was taken from the rousing hymn of praise for the coronation of the tsar in the final act – an association that led commentators to christen Yeltsin “Tsar Boris” from the outset, a christening that his later erratic, capricious, but always autocratic, rule amplified.
Now a new era demands a new effort to capture the Russian essence.
If asked to judge between the two main versions on offer, one would have to say that old Mikhalkov has still got it. His combination of the Russian symbols – (two-headed) eagle, white, blue and red tricolour, the insertion of God into the concoction, together with the Soviet-sounding “eternal union of brotherly peoples” – adroitly forms a super-patriotic collage. And not just super- patriotic: Mikhalkov touches on such themes as Russian subordination to authority (“powerful wings beat over us; God is above you”); the multinational nature of Russia and – by implication – the even more multinational nature of the Soviet Union, conjured up in using the word “soyuz” (union) in the hymn; and the mystical, pre-communist belief in the people’s wisdom as something greater than the formal laws and institutions of the west. Within these few lines, the tsarist, communist and present/future epochs are all stroked into at least symbolic life.
It fits well the strength and the dilemmas of Putin’s Russia. Gorbachev’s theme was the transformation of Soviet communism into social-democratic openness, for which the Stalin-era hymn was increasingly inappropriate. Yeltsin’s theme was the creation of a functional capitalism – not really a subject for an anthem, unless “Money Makes the World Go Round” from Cabaret was to be pressed into service. Putin, struggling still with the vast failures of both these projects, has little choice but to seek to encompass a style with more heads than the national bird.
In that sense, it would seem Mikhalkov does the trick – the more so since, by accenting Russian subordination to authority, he conforms to what many liberals see as the leitmotif of Putin’s first year, the slice-by-slice restoration of fear in the authority of the state and its secret services.
Grigory Yavlinsky, the major opposition politician, recently told the Canadian journalist Chrystia Freeland (whose article follows) that “Putin is making a lot of decisions with the help of the FSB [domestic security services]. These are the people who are close to him, and he understands them.”
But this is, like the official story – that Putin is a confirmed democrat – too one-dimensional. Democracy and free-market liberalism have neither been ingrained in the country, nor have they failed. They remain suspended, sometimes dangling above the political process, sometimes part of it. Their representatives are in government, thrashing it out behind the Kremlin walls with men who are indeed close to Putin and who did indeed rise through the ranks of the secret services with the president, or parallel to him.
Putin commands the political spectrum more completely, at the end of his first year (according to the polls and the focus groups) than he did at the beginning, when he stepped in at short notice for Yeltsin who – capricious and self-absorbed as ever – suddenly decided he had had enough. He does so because he has absorbed the more obvious streams of Russian tradition and history into himself and his administration, and is able to express them.
“The anti-Putin opposition that thrashed about feebly at the beginning of this year has long since been routed,” wrote Vitaly Tretyakov, editor of the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent). “In Russia today, there is no other ideology that is competitive in the eyes of the people than the one indicated by the word ‘Putin’.”
But if he has many faces, Putin has probably come to accept that there is one direction only for Russia, and that remains westward. This, too, seems to be a message of the first year. His friendship with Tony Blair is opportunistic on both sides, which may mean it will last. Blair wants to be the medium through which Russia reaches out to Europe and the US; Putin needs such a medium. But it is a recognition, too, by one established leader of another, who, though he is in an easier situation, must equally absorb diverse streams of national tradition and cope with the ambiguities and contradictions among them.
Though it did not become the official anthem until early in the 19th century, our own was made popular in September 1745, when Charles Edward Stuart’s Scots-Catholic-Gaelic army seemed to be threatening London. “God Save the King (or Queen)”, adopted at a time of civil war, could be and was pressed into service for empire and foreign wars: now, it becomes increasingly meaningless and is preserved only because it is hardly ever sung. At some point – it is hardly a task of urgency – it should go; though the controversy will be such that any sensible government would wish to postpone the day of reckoning.
What would we then put in its place? It would be hard, maybe impossible, to decide. The age of anthems is over. It is Russia’s bad luck – as if it did not have enough of that – to be searching for one at such a time.
And because it is such a time, and because it is not the country Mikhalkov would like it to be, nor what the liberals fear it is becoming, it may not find one.
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