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:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)