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 work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)