Russia at a
loss for words
Reuters news report
courtesy CNN - 23 November 2000
MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- Musical offerings by a pop diva and two dead composers are in the race to end Russia's decade-long quest for a national anthem to be proud of. A composition by pop singer Alla Pugacheva is one of eight that Russia's State Council, an advisory body to President Vladimir Putin, mulled during its inaugural session on Wednesday.
Former president Boris Yeltsin foisted a little-known tune by 19th century composer Mikhail Glinka on the country in the early 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. But the music failed to stir national passions and political in-fighting between Yeltsin and a recalcitrant parliament dominated by leftists left Russia without any words for its "first song." Reigning soccer champions Spartak Moscow complained to Putin over the summer that the current anthem had led to a loss of morale and dip in the team's form. The embarassment reached new heights during the Syndey Olympics when Russian gold medallists complained they had to stand in silence during medal ceremonies.
Putin Mulls Anthem Impasse
The search for a rousing, popular anthem has now become an affair of state and Putin has been given a CD with eight songs and a variety of texts vying for the honor. If put to a nationwide vode, Pugacheva, a hugely popular 50-something singer, and her long-time lyric writer Ilya Reznik, might triumph. Leftits and pro-Kremlin deputies in the State Duma lower house of parliament back a return to Alexander Alexandrov's stirring tune, adpoted in 1944 under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as the country's anthem. But liberals say Stalin's bloody purges make the music inappropriate for 21st-century Russia, and accuse leftists of seeking to take the country back to the Soviet era. The pro-market reform Yabloko Party supports another Glinka tune - the "Slavsya" march - while its allies in the Union of Rightist Forces have yet to state their preference.
Polls show only 15 percent of Russians like the current anthem - based on Glinka's "Patriotic Song" - and that 49 percent favor a return to Alexandrov's music. Kremlin officials met lawmakers in a plush Moscow hotel on Tuesday to sound them out on a possible compromise, but deputies said it appeared even Putin himself has yet to make up his mind.
This is not the first time Russia has been lost for words for its national song. After the denunciation of Stalin by his successor Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, the Soviet anthem was without lyrics until a new text was agreed in 1977.
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RUSSIAN ENTERTAINMENT FROM RUSSIA |
30 November 2000
site author: Eric Norton
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