Sergei Mikhalkov, z"l

Sergei Mikhalkov died last week, at 96. My friend Sasha Senderovich told me that when he (Mikhalkov, that is) got to heaven, he presented St. Peter with a copy of an anthem he’d composed for the occasion. “I’m sorry, but there’s been a mistake,” said St. Peter, who put the lyricist on an elevator and sent him down several floors. Soon Mikhalkov started to feel the fires of Hell, so he quickly took out his pen, and made a few adjustments. (Sasha found the anecdote here.)

In 1943 Mikhalkov completed lyrics for the heart-warming National Anthem of the Soviet Union. Lines like “splotila naveki velikaia Russ” [Great Rus’ united forever] mixed references to Leninist ideology with nationalist messianism, hinting at the transition from an idealistic worker’s state to a dictatorship that would readily manipulate old Imperial rhetoric. And, in fact, the anthem replaced the “International” as the Soviet hymn. Years after Krushchev had disclosed Stalin’s atrocities, Mikhalkov conceived a new version, which was institutionalized in 1977, where things like “Nas vyrastil Stalin na vernost’ narodu” [Stalin has raised us on devotion to the people] had been replaced by “Na pravoe delo on podnial narody” [He (Lenin) lifted the nations to do the right thing].

For a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union there was no real Russian national anthem. There was some kind of hard-to-remember tune that no one really liked, and many complained that they missed the minor chords and strong chorus of their Soviet anthem, even if they didn’t like what it had said. (True, this is more to the credit of the composer, Aleksander Aleksandrov, than the lyricist.) But then one December morning in 2000 I awoke at 6 am sharp, Moscow time, in a run-down hotel to a wordless "Soiuz ne rushimyi" being blasted from a scratchy Soviet-era radio. I had arrived the night before for a conference, and had been dreaming I was back in California, and for a minute or so, could not figure out where, or when, I was. Was I still dreaming? Had I died and landed in some bizarre Slavicist limbo? Had a second Bolshevik Revolution taken place overnight? As I slowly came to and listened to the broadcast I learned that a few days earlier Putin had ordered a return of the old anthem. For a little while it remained wordless, but in 2001 Mikhalkov came to the rescue again, emerging from retirement at the age of 88 with a new ballad for a new Russia, complete with lines like “Khranimaia Bogom rodnaia zemlia” [Kept by God our native land].

Now Mikhalkov, may his memory live on, has left us. What will Russia do if there is another Revolution? Who will slip Lenin and God in and out of these verses, all the while maintaining the powerful refrain, “slavsia otechestvo nashe svobodnoe” [praised be our free fatherland]? I do not know. But I will admit that every single version of this anthem gives me chills, a fact that terrifies and disgusts me and also makes me fear the logic-crushing power of music. This video is my favorite, with its fabulous hair and glasses, its we-are-the-world united-front recording-studio feel and its Lenin-spelling birds. I love how it just goes on and on and on, far longer than a parody requires, so that after a while you start to suspect they’re not reveling in their mischief, but in the song.