Russian Anthem

The current Russian anthem unites long-standing tradition and a contemporary take. The music to it was composed during the time of the Soviet Union by Russian Aleksandr Aleksandrov and the lyrics were written by Sergey Mikhalkov and Gabriel El-Registan.

Since it was first used back in 1944, the Russian anthem has been modified and once even literally lost its words—from 1956 to 1977 it was just the music of the anthem that was performed for ideological reasons.

In the 1990’s the Russian anthem temporarily gave way to the new one—that to the music of Mikhail Glinka, but this anthem was left wordless – no words had ever been written to accompany the music for 7 years. Due to this fact and the popularity of the anthem to the music of Aleksandrov, it regained its status as the official Russian anthem in 2000. Interestingly, the new words for the anthem were written by Sergey Mikhalkov—the author of the original Soviet anthem.