Today's episode of the Anthems podcast dives into the complexities of Russia, both in terms of its vast geography and its tumultuous history. The focus is on the national anthem of the Russian Federation, a piece that has gone through numerous iterations, reflecting the country's shifting political landscape. As the host navigates through Russia's rich cultural identity and the layers of propaganda associated with its anthems, listeners will gain insight into how the country's past informs its present. The episode also touches on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, acknowledging the war's impact on national sentiments while shifting the conversation toward a celebration of Russian music. With a mix of historical context and personal reflections, this episode invites listeners to appreciate the intricacies of Russia's anthem and what it represents for its people today.

I know that you're hearing a lot about Russia. But it's really big on a map and additionally I can't, and won't, hold the citizens all responsible for the things happening. Life is complicated.

Regardless, this has been a complicated episode to write because of the complicated nature of Russian history. Expect more about this folks. Here are my sources:

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20101001122856/http://flag.kremlin.ru/gimn/ 
2. https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2015/jul/28/pluto-ten-things-we-now-know-about-the-dwarf-planet 
3. https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/geography/countries/article/russia 
4. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/russia/ 
5. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-bordering-most-other-countries.html 
6. https://www.climatechangepost.com/russia/permafrost/ 
7. Figes, Orlando (2011). The Crimean War: A History. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 9781429997249.
8. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Basil_(Muscovy) 
9. https://www.rbth.com/history/329825-madness-of-3-russian-tsars 
10. https://archive.org/details/ivanterrible00loydgoog/page/n3/mode/2up 
11. https://countrystudies.us/russia/3.htm 
12. https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Brief_History_of_Russia/i8_RH3hhsAMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA92&printsec=frontcover 
13. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/43119 
14. https://guides.loc.gov/alaska-treaty 
15. W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (1990)
16. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Religious_Schism_in_the_Russian_Aristocr/tuvVBQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA6&printsec=frontcover 
17. https://web.archive.org/web/20070917041705/http://www.ensemble-aleksandrova.ru/index.php?id=42
18. https://freedomhouse.org/country/russia/freedom-world/2023 
19. http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/sg-zhit'.html 
20. Ledeneva, Alena V. (1998). Russia's Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Cambridge University Press. p. 1. ISBN 0-521-62743-5.
21. https://archive.org/details/shostakovichlife0000fayl/page/138/mode/2up 
22. Shostakovich, Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich (2004). Testimony : the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. Volkov, Solomon. (25th anniversary ed.). New York: Limelight Editions. pp. 261–262. ISBN 9780879109981.
23. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/dec/27/russia.ameliagentleman 
24. https://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/12/20-years-since-the-fall-of-the-soviet-union/100214/ 
25. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/22/world/end-soviet-union-text-declaration-mutual-recognition-equal-basis.html 
26. http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/mihalkovy_sv_mv/01.html 
27. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Fairy_Tales_and_True_Stories/zfiZAAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Sergey+Mikhalkov+Uncle+Styopa&pg=PA386&printsec=frontcover 
28. John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents. New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1974. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974. New York: Bantam Books, 1974.
29. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Shostakovich_and_Stalin/x__ntDIlYGYC?hl=en 
30. https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/periods-genres/national-anthems/russia-federation-state-lyrics-history-english-translation/ 
31. https://archive.org/details/yeltsinrevolutio00aron 
32. https://web.archive.org/web/20100512162358/http://pravo.levonevsky.org/baza/soviet/sssr0606.htm 
33. https://web.archive.org/web/20110819211722/http://lawrussia.ru/texts/legal_105/doc10a880x600.htm 
34. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/decemberweb-only/57.0.html 
35. http://en.people.cn/english/200012/08/eng20001208_57318.html 
36. https://web.archive.org/web/20090204114156/http://en.rian.ru/symbols/20070607/66606928.html 
37. http://www.gov.ru/main/symbols/gsrf4_2.html 

Hello and welcome to the Anthems podcast. We are actually getting another episode of this. I am shooting for twelve of them a year. This is number eight.

If I don't reach twelve on year one, I'm not going to be upset about it, but I am going to keep doing this. So thank you for sticking with me. Today.

I'm going to open the show with something different because we are going to talk about the bear in the room, or rather on the globe. It's impossible for me to ignore it because I'm looking at a lot of maps, contemplating future shows.

So we are going to talk about Russia, or officially the Russian Federation, which means that I have to acknowledge another terrible thing. But this is one that's happening while you listen to the show in real time for at least some more of the foreseeable run.

And that in the immortal wards of Huck Finn sucks, my friend. It powerful sucks. Obviously, Putin's war will not be the focus of this episode of my anthem show, but you'll be thinking about it.

So I have to acknowledge it and say something.

What I will say is that I think weve had enough of war, especially ones with no discernible purpose apart from an in vain effort at reconstructing some of the former glory of the USSR. Ukraine will get their episode when theyre done kicking Russia out of their country.

I think doing it before that would be a disservice to the people that are exhibiting a level of heroism that is simply astonishing, and I wish I never am asked to do so. Despite the country being in the news constantly right now, this anthem is not brought to you by the war this country's leader started.

This one got picked because Russia is very big and I notice it a lot, and I'm looking at lots of maps. It's a silly reason, but I am frequently a silly person, and leaning into silliness is an important part of life. It should be for everybody.

It's fun, especially for an episode where the topic runs the risk of straying into grimly serious stuff that Russia has done in history. It also has a very large part in history because it's a giant country, and somehow that's worked out that way.

Since my education was initially in the american public school system, learning real stuff about Russia has involved dispelling some of the notions that were in my head was painted as kind of a backwards place for most of my, you know, up through high school, nobody really said the truth about it. In the system, as with everything, it is far more complicated than I was led to believe so. Propaganda.

An apt term for the material I'm covering in national anthems. Kinda, right? Which is the closest thing to a smooth and intentional segue that I have managed to get through yet. No spoilers again.

Well, no more of them. You'll hear me again in about four minutes. And right now you will hear an anthem. Lord Shiva.

Know, my initial impression is that I kinda love the thing. It should not be a large shock that I'm a fan of anthem music in general. It's a weird thing to do.

Remember when I said I lean into that, but if I liked or disliked everything about them and I was doing a show, that would be even weirder. Soviet music is actually usually very good in this genre. It's not super bombastic, but it's like a proclamation in song.

Here it is, in fact, a march with a little something more that we'll get to. But we have got a lot of getting to to get through to get there. So it's about time to get to the getting.

I know at least it's easy for me to locate this country on a map, since it is literally the entire top half of Europe and Asia. So we all do know where Russia is. If we've looked at a map of the world ever.

It's possible to go on and on and make ridiculous comparisons to things about the size of Russia. But I'll just note that it has roughly the same surface area as the dwarf planet Pluto, that is roughly 10% of the entire land area of the earth.

It is a gigantic country in a physically real way, and borders a bunch of countries alphabetically. They are Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Norway, Poland, and Ukraine.

That is 14. And yes, it is the country that borders the most other countries.

It is also one of only three nations that border three oceans, and the lakes there compromise fully one quarter of the world's surface fresh water. Even more wild is that 80% of that water is in a single amazing lake called Lake Baikal. It is a place I spent way too much time reading about.

Despite its enormous size, the population in Russia remains a modest about 147 million. It still sounds like a lot, but compare it with the United States, a little less than half the size of, but a little more than twice the population.

This is mostly because 60% to 65% of Russia is in inhospitable permafrost, making it tough to live there.

But it's not impossible because there are about 33 million people that live up in the tundra of Siberia, despite the extremely large area they're dispersed over and the variety of humanity that lives there. There is a distinct russian identity throughout the the country.

Its been that way pretty much since the early 15 hundreds when Vasili III, who was the grand prince of Moscow at the time, finished the process of annexing the last few independent russian states in the area. He did this with the backing of the Russian Orthodox Church, for reasons that I didnt read enough to wager an educated guess at.

Although I find that historically speaking, official churches tend to be a fan of consolidating power for the people theyre considered official. Bye. When Vasly died, his first son was crowned the first tsar of Russia.

You know his name even if you know nothing else about the guy, because it is Ivan the terrible. First to be clear listeners, this guy was definitely terrible in the contemporary sense of the word.

He was a foul tempered killer of thousands of innocent civilians, in addition to being one of the most intelligent and highly educated people of his epoch. This stuff is complicated.

Terrible is not exactly the correct translation for this word, though at the time it was a cutting edge translation, but it has not aged particularly well. The russian word is grozny and it more accurately translates as menacing, fearsome, redoubtable or formidable.

It's also what the capital of Chechnya is called. Okay, and tangent. Ivan tried to establish an orderly dynasty of tsars.

Most rulers generally attempt to establish continuity in an orderly dynasty, but we know these hereditary based government systems do not hold up long term in most cases. In Ivans case, it essentially never got out of the gate and into the race.

It ushered in something called the time of troubles, an area of history that has literally wrought PhD thesis. So consider the following like dipping a pinky nail into an ocean.

The time of troubles was a period of fairly complete political chaos and I widespread economic turmoil due to said chaos and also part and parcel with the famine level crop failures that were happening in Russia at the time. Sure, the tsar died without an heir, but his father knew he was going to be bad at his job.

So his brother in law held all the working lovers of power in Moscow. And when Feodor died, he wasted no time inconvening a council and getting proclaimed tsar himself.

Then several people were very briefly in charge and then murdered four entire times before they ended up with the guy that was at the very beginning of the 300 year long Romanov dynasty. And that is a huge story.

It's such a gigantic and interesting tale that we're gonna buckle up and use our extremely capable imaginations to experience a leap forward almost completely to the end of it.

First, I really am telling a story about the anthem, even if it takes me a few, and this is a nice segue out of fast forward. Second, this war showed Russia some things about itself, and it informs the mindset of the people that produced the current national anthem.

The Russian Empire had become part of something called the Holy alliance shortly after Mister Napoleon Bonaparte got his head handed to him by the russian army in the russian winter.

The alliance was a mostly reactionary thing that came about when the french american revolutions and then the napoleonic wars scared the absolute crap out of the monarchist powers in the west.

They formed this group to police Europe and enforced the divine rights of the kings of Austria, Prussia and Russia, and the very specific russian orthodox christian values that they felt their kingdom should have.

It was an alliance that was ideologically rejected by the other european monarchs because there was a bunch of near eastern mysticism and it made a lot of people uneasy in the west.

However, they all tacitly or directly participated in the holding onto power thing the alliance wanted, because not a lot of monarchs willfully relinquish mostly absolute power.

Anyway, the real point of bringing up the holy alliance at all is that Europe was using these countries as a police force, because at the time, Russia had a very large standing army and the tsar was not shy about using it. There was something like 60 or 70 million people in the country at the time, and the standing army was a million strong.

So Nicholas I, who was in charge at the time, loved flexing like this and having his army march in to enforce the current conservatism by force made the people in his country feel like their country was powerful.

But that also made him think that Russia was entitled to snap up the remains of the Ottoman Empire because the tsar, 100% believed that he was divinely entitled to his role. And then he had his armies march in to start the crimean war. Britain and France backed up the Ottomans, and a high casualty war was fought.

That resulted in Russia learning that their military was ridiculously outdated and that all of the systems in their country were also mostly hopelessly outdated. The illusion of the largest country as the most powerful country had been shattered for the people, and they started to agitate for change.

Unfortunately for those people, the reform didnt even begin until Nicholas I died some years later. His successor was Alexander I, and he actually started to try to get some stuff done.

The pace of reform in any autocratic country is almost never fast enough for the people in every part of the historical record that I'm familiar with so far, and it was not different in Russia. We also saw the birth of a russian intellectual movement called nihilism. It sought the destruction and dissolution of structural russian elements.

This eventually produced an anarchist branch of the agrarian socialist movement. And one of these groups were making repeated attempts to assassinate the current tsar, Alexander II.

Petersburg and become a chorister, a fun word that I just learned for being in a chorus. This was at the Kasnan cathedral. This place was built during the first decade of the 19th century. It was modeled after St.

Peter's in Rome and eventually came to serve as a monument to the defeat of Napoleon. They even interred commander in chief General Mikhail Kutuzov there. In honor of the victory.

Sascha went on to study under Medner, an apparently influential russian composer that I've never heard of. I think my wife did, though. But he remains quote on my list to read about. He learned viola. He achieved a doctor of the arts in either Moscow or St.

Petersburg.

If, like me, you're into neoclassicalism and may sonic symbolism as an overt and fairly explicit architectural expression. I kept some of my drafting nerd. Thank you Mister Carlson.

The pronunciation is very difficult for me with slavic and russian names. Despite being mostly tangential to our story, he was one of the first people to use a word blot, and I love this word. It's amazing.

It's sort of my favorite.

It resonates with me in terms of today's politics, blot or blat is a form of corruption that compromises a system of informal agreements, exchanges of services, connections, party contacts, and or black market deals to achieve results or get ahead. Sounds just like insert whatever country you're watching political news about to continue.

Stalin's original georgian name is Loseb Syrionus Ukashlovi, speaking of difficult things to pronounce, but that's not like super branding, so he changed it. He is another guy who we may meet again on this show, but I'm not super sure about Stalin like I am about Napoleon.

He was also, I think it's fair to say, a mostly terrible person. Thankfully, he gets a pretty short role in this story, though it is a pivotal one.

Im going to kind of breeze through some history here because a detailed history of the USSRS song choice is only slightly relevant. Stalin wanted a short song emphasizing the imminent victory in war, and his poet delivered.

And they picked up an entirely different instrumental tune as the anthem of the newly minted Russian Federation.

But we're skipping the part about the different anthem for a moment and we're going to do a time jump that is necessitated by a fun and ridiculous detail.

All of the versions were set to the same music, and we have an excellent example of why anything historical involving the USSR this deeply in it is going to be complicated to parse out in a sensical way and result in it taking me a couple of months to write the show. It is possibly a record holding thrice anthem writer and his name is Sergei McAlhoff.

But I'll have to check back on the record holder part because we need to know, I think investigated in a bonus episode.

Sergei was born into a noble family and in addition to being a repeated writer of the anthem, he is one of the most beloved children's authors of all all time in Russia, having done books, movies and cartoons. He is particularly well known for a super tall soviet policeman called Uncle Stiopa in English, its uncle Steeple.

There's an interesting story about that guy, I'm sure, but we're not going to talk about him again.

In between writing the original anthem and the soviet era anthem, our poet and his wife served as KGB agents and used their influential cultural position to introduce various agents to people they would attempt to compromise, or, in the case of the french ambassador at the time, successfully did compromise another anthem writer that was very much involved in the establishment of the country they were writing for.

Yeltsin was advised to revive God save the tsar with some lyrical modification, but instead, he opted for the officially wordless piano composition patriochescaya pesnia in English, the patriotic song. Again, a wordless piano composition that was intended to be the permanent anthem, and it was explicitly written into the proposed constitution.

But brandy, new governments are not always incredibly stable governments, and the constitution that they settled on kicked this and other matters of state symbols to the Duma. The Duma is the lower house of the russian parliament, and I personally know only what I just told you about them.

But it was never officially adopted because it was constitutionally referred matter and required a two thirds supermajority.

So, mostly because of opposition by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, there was an unofficial and wordless anthem that was used because it was a regional soviet anthem. Don't worry, though, my patient podcast listeners, there's a man that had a solution to the problem, and that man is, um, Vladimir Putin. It's okay.

I don't have to get into this. Dude's maybe almost as bad as Stalin's life story and political up and comingness. But he did start the conversation about a new anthem.

So he's in the timeline.

And here we are with a very popular president of the country commenting that he thinks the anthem is uninspiring for Olympic athletes and then puts the issue before the state council. It gets discussed. And that was the situation at the time. There was always a contingent of the population that didn't like the wordless anthem.

And I'm guessing if they had managed to land on some lyrics before Putin's presidency, then they wouldn't have changed them. I did actually check because of course I did, and they didn't. So things happened the way that they did happen.

This bill called for the anthem to use the music from the original Bolshevik hymn that Alexandrov wrote, but did call for a committee to form and set about finding new lyrics.

Things moved very quickly, and by the 20 December, a mere twelve days later, the law had final approval and its first official performance on the 25th. Sergey's new lyrics were officially adopted on the 30th.

Before I discuss the song itself, got a couple more loose ends here. Because this is an endeavor that humans were involved in. There was opposition to it.

Boris Yeltsin, in a rare public criticism of Vladimir Putin, said the choice was blindly following the people and rejecting the reforms that had been made since the collapse of communism in the country. The liberal political party was not a fan of the anthem choice.

But as you might not be shocked to hear, the communists were super thrilled about it and enthusiastically backed the decision.

Well, almost certainly never know what Putin's full motivation for wanting this particular melody for the anthem is, but my bet is that it was a combination of complicated political calculations, nostalgia for an anthem that did have an important place in the first 40 years of his life, and a genuine concern for the well being of the country he was in charge of. People are complicated. This podcast has chosen to think that at first, maybe Putin wasn't terrible, but I'm wrong about lots of stuff.

However, I'm not going to reach out to the Kremlin to get a comment on what he thinks because I'm not getting on that list because of the song's status as the so called Stalin hymn.

There were quite a few people, and there honestly might still be, that were not at all happy about the anthem, which has led to a couple of controversies that weren't mention famous cellist Mister Avaz Leopoldovich Rostropovich. Again, sorry. According to the blurb I read in his bio, he enlarged the cello repertoire more than any other cellist ever.

I'll fact check that someday or you can email me he and others refused to stand when the song was played. Many were critical of the song that was used at a time when terrible crimes were committed by the government.

It represented in a kind of cruel final blow to the man that helped lead Russia out of the grip of totalitarian communism. The anthem was played at Boris Yeltsins funeral.

On the one hand it doesnt make sense because he was a former president and it is the national anthem of the country that he was the president of. However, it was a song that he was personally specifically opposed to for well expressed ideological reasons.

And with that we have at last arrived at the discussion of the song.

In characteristic fashion, musically, this is a interesting song right out of the gate for me because it can be played in either four four or two four time, both in the key of c. I've no idea why they've done this. It's another thing that I'll look into someday.

But at either time signature, the anthem is played at 76 beats per minute in a solemn and singing manner. Fun fact on my metronome that time signature is slightly faster than Andante and slightly slower than Andantino.

I will be reading through this only the current version of the lyrics. Sometimes I do it different, but here we just get the current iteration of them.

This has been a very complicated episode to write, though I will make a little supplement to it at some point in episode 8.3 or 8.1 or something rather, as usual, I will be reading this in English. The lyrics are obviously originally in Russian. The song is written as verse one chorus, verse two chorus, verse three chorus.

I'll do a read through of each verse chorus and then the other two verses. This time we're talking about each verse and the lyrics in between them because that's how it works out sometimes.

Verse one Russia is our sacred state Russia is our beloved country a mighty will, great glory, your dignity for all time standard and classical anthem stuff here, equating the state to something sacred, maybe divine, although not explicit here love and glory for one's country are clear aspirations for the listener. An uncomplicated beginning for what really are fairly uncomplicated lyrics.

The chorus follows each of the three verses and it reads as be glorified our motherland, the age old union of fraternal peoples, ancestor given, wisdom of the people. Be glorified, country, we are proud of you. This refrain first heaps glory on the motherland and reminds the people of their union as one.

In fact, they are a brotherhood.

They have been given the wisdom of the ancestors and it will glorify the country they're proud of even more very anthem appropriate refrain, and it serves to move the song along the second verse from the southern seas to the polar edge, our forests and fields are spread out, you're the only one in the world, you were the only one. The native land so kept by God. In the second verse we hear about how big Russia is because it had to be mentioned, right?

It's the biggest singing about the things that make a country unique or better in some minds, is a natural thing for anthems to have in them. This time it's an attribute that you can usefully sing about.

In fact, Russia is so huge and awesome that it's the only country here the divine connection is made explicit as well, also not uncommon in national anthems. The third and final verse a wide scope for dreams and for life. The coming years open to us. We are given strength by our fidelity to the fatherland.

So it was. So it is, and it will always be so. This is more topic appropriate lyricism and touches on core anthem topics.

Projecting good about the country into the future and an optimism for what's coming is a common theme in many of these songs. Then we bring it all together again with a reason to be true to your patriotism and a final reminder that it will always be this way.

I know this took forever to write and record. The thing is, writing stuff that you have to learn essentially all of the history about is not possible to shortcut.

If I would like the narrative to be coherent in any way, I just can't do it. But it's worth it, though, and I'm gonna keep doing it and I'm gonna try and get twelve of these a year out, and I hope you keep listening to them.

The writing, recording and production for the show is done by me. I wrote and played the intro and outro music.

The music was used with my permission and my voice is terrible this time because I'm recording it, getting over being sick for a couple of weeks unless otherwise noted. The anthems I play are public domain stuff. My sources and other stuff I find are contained in the show notes.

The most direct way to get to these show notes is@anthemspodcast.com you can find me on Facebook and WhatsApp as the Anthems podcast.

I'm not gonna be on other socials for the time being, but I am sharing the episodes hash anthemspod so if you follow that maybe it'll pop up on your feed. I've also heard that ratings and reviews super matter, so if you feel like doing that, it'd be cool.

Plus then I have feedback and I can use it to be better at this. And getting better is a goal that I have because I've got a bunch more of this stuff to write and you know, I want them to be good for you guys.

I'll see you next time.