What Was the Russian National Anthem?
On 25 December 1833, in the Winter Palace, a choir of singers performed the new Russian anthem Bozhe, Tsarya khrani (“God Save the Tsar!”). The music, by Count Alexei Lvov, was the result of two years of effort; the words were drawn from a 19-line poem by Vasily Zhukovsky that Nicholas I himself had polished. Lvov, a Guards officer and amateur violinist who had served as a military bandmaster, played the piece for the tsar in the presence of Glinka, who later noted that Lvov had tried out more than fifty drafts. The anthem became one of the most recognisable pieces of music in nineteenth-century Europe and stayed the official anthem of the Russian Empire until the revolution of 1917.
Earlier anthems and hymns
The imperial anthem of 1833 was the last in a sequence. The first Russian state hymn, the Molitva russkikh (“Prayer of the Russians”) of 1816, was a setting by Prince Alexander Lvov of words by Zhukovsky to the English tune of God Save the King. It was preceded, as a ceremonial piece, by the Preobrazhensky March, the regimental march of the Preobrazhensky Guards, which had been played at state occasions since the late seventeenth century. Dmitry Bortniansky’s Kol slaven (“How Glorious Is Our Lord”), composed in 1783 for the British royal family and reworked for Russian use, was also regularly played at official functions.
These pieces were used in a more or less unsystematic way: a court ceremonial might open with the Preobrazhensky March and end with Molitva russkikh, but there was no single, formally designated national anthem. Nicholas I’s 1833 anthem, with the official title Molitva russkikh but universally known by its opening words Bozhe, Tsarya khrani, was the first to occupy that role unambiguously (Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism, 2004).
The anthem in Russian culture
The anthem quickly became central to Russian public life. The Russian Guards, the entire officer corps, and the imperial bureaucracy sang or played it on every state occasion: coronations, military reviews, diplomatic receptions, the opening of the State Duma from 1906. Composers quoted it in their own works. Tchaikovsky quoted the melody in the 1812 Overture of 1880 and in the Marche Slave of 1876. By the 1880s, the anthem was the most familiar piece of music in the empire.
The anthem also served as a recurring point of tension in Russian public life. When Sergei Witte arranged the protocol for the coronation of Nicholas II in May 1896, he carefully framed the ceremony so that the anthem would be sung in both Russian and the language of each foreign delegation — a concession to the empire’s multi-ethnic composition that was in turn criticised by Russian nationalists.
After 1917
The anthem was suppressed after the October Revolution. The new Soviet government, which had no use for tsarist symbols, replaced it with the Internationale, the European socialist hymn. The pre-revolutionary anthem, however, continued to circulate among Russian émigrés: a Russian émigré choir in Paris performed it at virtually every gathering of the post-1920 diaspora, and it remained the unofficial anthem of White Russian veterans for decades.
In the USSR the anthem of 1944, with music by Alexander Alexandrov and words by Sergei Mikhalkov and Gabriel El-Registan, took the Internationale’s place. The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 brought a return to Glinka’s wordless Patriotic Song for the new Russian Federation; in 2000, on Vladimir Putin’s initiative, Russia restored the Alexandrov music with new Mikhalkov lyrics that left the Soviet tune intact. The question of which anthem, and which words, Russia should adopt was one of the more telling cultural debates of the 1990s (Buckland, The Music of Russian Nationalism, 2007).