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.
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