Four Revolutionary Anthems

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You’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU 93.3 FM, my name is Siegfried, and welcome to a special episode of the show in which I will do something that I’ve wanted to do for awhile now.  Taking my cue from my comrades Kiran and Moxie on the Red Life Podcast, which you should really check out if you haven’t already done so, I’ll be examining a selection of revolutionary songs from various political movements and countries.  I’ll be looking at some of the history behind the music and the continued relevance of these songs today.  Back in the USSR is returning to its roots, because this is what the show was originally all about. 

But before I do that, I want to say happy birthday to Friedrich Engels, someone I’m sure you’ve heard of, seeing that this November 28^th marked the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1820.  Although he tends to get overshadowed by his close friend and collaborator Karl Marx, Engels was a remarkable revolutionary theoretician and political organizer in his own right who made massive contributions to the early socialist movement, from its understanding of labor relations to women’s rights to ecology and the relationship of humanity to the environment.  I would recommend that you check out his Dialectics of Nature if you want to see just how far ahead of his time he was.  But I could dedicate a whole show to this guy.  For now, we’ll have to move on and get into some music.

It’s on the fitting that I start with the music that gets played at the start of every single episode of the show: The National Anthem of the USSR itself.  Officially known as the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, it was adopted at the height of the Second World War in 1944, when it replaced The Internationale as the national anthem of the USSR.  It was a collaborative piece written by Sergei Vladimirovich Mikhalkov, who was actually a Russian author of children’s books, and the famous Armenian poet Gabriel Arkadyevich Ureklyan, who was better known as “El-Registan”.  The anthem’s music was composed by the Soviet composer Alexander Alexandrov, founder of the famous Alexandrov Ensemble.  He originally composed the music for the 1938 Hymn of the Bolshevik Party and it was chosen from among 200 contenders in a national competition in 1943 to serve as the basis for the USSR’s new anthem, which would celebrate the heroic resistance of the Soviet peoples and their impending victory against the Nazi invasion.  First published on November 7 1943, it was first played on Soviet radio at midnight on January 1^st 1944 and officially adopted as the national anthem on March 15 that same year.

Now the reason why the new anthem was commissioned in the first place is a problematic one for many communists, and I totally understand why.  Up until 1944 the worldwide communist anthem, “The Internationale” had been the national anthem of the Soviet Union.  The reason why this changed was because the leadership of the USSR elected to dissolve the Communist International in 1943 as a concession to Britain and the United States, the USSR’s allies in the struggle against Nazi Germany.  Of course, these two capitalist world powers would rapidly turn on the Soviet Union after World War Two, leading to the Cold War.  Dissolving the Communist International, the worldwide union of communist parties, for the sake of short-term diplomatic and political gain was a questionable decision to say the least.  But many in the Soviet leadership at the time believed that the alliance between the allied powers could be maintained after the war.  Declassified documents now show that the leadership of the United States harbored no such illusions and were fully committed to taking on the Soviet Union even before the war ended in 1945, dropping the atomic bombs on Japan largely as a show of force against their soon-to-be Cold War adversary.

The anthem was rarely performed with lyrics between the years of 1956 and 1977, but in 1977 it received updated lyrics to coincide with the 60^th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, with new lines celebrating Lenin in particular.  In fact, the version of the anthem that I play at the beginning of each episode of the show is from the 1977 October Revolution Day celebrations in Red Square.  This version of the anthem was used until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, although it’s worth pointing out that in 2000 the Russian Federation chose to re-use the same melody as the Soviet anthem but with different lyrics, which is why you hear it at the Olympic Games and other international sporting events to this day.  It’s more than understandable that they would do this following the catastrophic social and economic disintegration that occurred in Russia during the Yeltsin years of the 1990s when the country’s so-called “anthem” was a wordless instrumental piece of music entitled “The Patriotic Song”.  Given that the majority of Russians possess strong nostalgia for the Soviet Union and absolutely despise Yeltsin and the corporate kleptocracy he presided over after the USSR’s fall, reviving the Soviet-era anthem, even with altered lyrics, made perfect sense.

Anyways, moving on from the Soviet National Anthem, I’d like to move on to a truly iconic anthem of the communist movement, a song that was the original national anthem of the USSR prior to 1944, “The Internationale”.  The Red Life Podcast covered this truly remarkable song in their most recent episode, but, because this is a radio show and not a podcast, on the Back in the USSR you’ll get to hear the whole thing!

The Internationale – French Version

It has to be said that The Internationale is perhaps the most translated political anthem in history, but I decided to stick with the original French version.  The Internationale was written by the French socialist, Eugene Pottier in June 1871 after the defeat of the Paris Commune, and became the official anthem of the International Workingmen’s Association or First International. Eugene Pottier himself was an elected member of the Paris municipal council during the Commune and was forced into exile after its brutal destruction at the hands of the French Army.  The Internationale’s music, a distinctive melody that is now universally recognizable, wasn’t composed until 1888 by the Belgian socialist composer Pierre De Geyter. 

Since then it has been translated into German, English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Bengali, Indonesian, Tagalog and many, many, many other languages around the world.  This is only fitting for a universal anthem of working class uprising and revolt. 

The Internationale was translated into Russian by the socialist poet Arkady Kots in 1902 and was adopted by the Russian Bolshevik Party as an official anthem in 1912.  It became the national anthem of the Soviet Union in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and was also the anthem of the Communist International.  Even after it was replaced as the national anthem of the USSR in 1944, it continued to be the official song of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation continues to use it to this day.

The Internationale was first translated into Chinese in June 1923 by Qu Qiubai, one of the leading members of the Communist Party of China but his translation did not see wide use because it was written in old-style Classical Chinese.  It was the translation of Xiao San, a Chinese communist poet and friend of Mao Zedong, later in 1923, that would be adopted as the anthem of the Communist Party of China and was chosen as the national anthem of the Chinese Soviet Republic when it was established in Jiangxi Province in 1931.  It continues to be the official song of the Communist Party of China to this day.

Now I want to move on to talk about the song that would become the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China.  The March of the Volunteers, as the great Paul Robeson was to say years later, was “born in the struggle of the brave Chinese people” against European and Japanese colonialism in the early 20^th Century.  The song’s lyrics were written in 1934 by Tian Han, one of the greatest modern Chinese dramatists, poets and playwrights, and was originally to be used in a movie entitled “Children of Troubled Times” in which the protagonist gives up a life of luxury in order to fight against the Japanese invaders.  Nie Er, who composed the music for Tian Han’s poem, is considered one of the greatest modern Chinese composers and I remember seeing murals depicting him in Ningbo during my latest trip to China to teach English back in 2019.  Both Tian Han and Nie Er were communist sympathizers and were persecuted for it by the Chinese Nationalist authorities, with Tian Han being imprisoned for two years and Nie Er dying in exile in 1935 at the age of 23.  Nevertheless, their song rapidly became one of the most popular anthems of resistance throughout China.  The name “March of the Volunteers” refers to the Chinese volunteer soldiers who opposed the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in 1931.  Also known by its opening line “Chee Lai” (“Arise!”), it became a favorite song of the communist Eighth Route Army during the famous Long March.

The song would become known in North America during the Second World War, with Paul Robeson first performing the song in Chinese to a large concert at New York’s Lewisohn Stadium in 1940 and recording it for Keynote Records in early 1941.  Robeson’s version of The March of the Volunteers would get a lot of airtime on British, American and Soviet radio.

The song’s first use at the Chinese national anthem came at the World Peace Conference in April 1949 in Prague Czechoslovakia, not long after the capture of Beijing by the communist People’s Liberation Army.  However, it was not officially adopted until August of that year, when it was picked by a committee out of 632 entries to be the new national anthem and was played when the People’s Republic of China was founded on October 1^st 1949.

I’ve played Paul Robeson’s version of The March of the Volunteers to my Chinese students a number of times because he performs it in both Chinese and English, and not many of them knew that their national anthem had ever been sung in English.  It’s a testament to how things can change.  When Robeson was singing that song in the 1940s and it was getting all kinds of airtime, China was considered America’s friend and ally, whereas by 1949 China was considered an evil “red menace” and no American radio station would be caught dead playing it.  Unfortunately that remains the case today, with this “new cold war”, which is why I wanted to show some internationalist spirit and play Robeson’s version of The March of the Volunteers in defiance of the rising Sinophobia and racist hostility that we see the capitalist press promoting today.

Paul Robeson – The March of the Volunteers

The final song that I want to talk about in this episode of Back in the USSR is the current national anthem of Cuba, which is actually the oldest of the songs on this list.  La Bayamesa or El Himno de Bayamo (“The Bayamo Song”) is a true anti-colonial anthem composed in 1867 by the Cuban poet Perucho Figueredo who would later be captured and executed by the Spanish colonial authorities in August 1870.  In this case the melody of the song actually preceded the lyrics by about a year, as Figueredo didn’t write the words to the song until October 20, 1868 when the Cuban rebels he was fighting alongside captured Bayamo, the capital city of Granma province, from the Spanish and he was so moved by the event that he composed the lyrics on the spot and even gave the song its first ever performance.  Before his execution two years later, he shouted the words to his song in defiance of the firing squad.  La Bayamesa became the Cuban national anthem in 1902 and was retained after the 1959 Cuban Revolution due to its status as an anthem of Cuba’s struggle against colonialism, which now included the struggle against U.S. imperial aggression.

Now the Bayamo Song originally had three verses but the current version has only one, so like the March of the Volunteers it’s very short.  The version I’m going to play comes in at the end of a truly amazing Cuban rock song from 1971, a song that really captured the island nation’s spirit of revolutionary action and faith in the socialist future, entitled “Cuba Va” (Cuba Goes) by the Experimental Sound Collective of Pablo Mllanes, Noel Nicola and Silvio Rodriguez.

Experimental Sound Collective – Cuba Va!/Bayamo Song

Well comrades and friends, we’ve been through four different revolutionary songs in this episode of Back in the USSR.  I want to thank you again for listening and I’ll be sure to do this again in the future.  For the remainder of the show, I’d like to play a talk given by the Indian communist Vijay Prashad that he gave at the University of Toronto Mississauga in March 2018 entitled “The Necessity of Communism”.  Just over the weekend, 250 million workers in India went on strike in opposition to the fascist, fanatically capitalist government of Prime Minister Modi, demonstrating a level of mass mobilization that dwarfs anything we’ve seen in Europe or America over the past year.  It shows just how advanced the class struggle is in India today and the genuine revolutionary potential that is building in that part of the world.  I think we should take hope in that.  There’s been very little this year to inspire genuine hope for the future, but this rising movement of Indian students, workers and peasants absolutely should.  And I think this talk, even though it was given before the COVID pandemic, is very revealing as to why the struggle has advanced to this degree.  Here’s Vijay Prashad:

Vijay Prashad – The Necessity of Communism

Globalization: the New Imperialism

The following talk by progressive scholar and political analyst Michael Parenti was recorded in the year 2000 at the height of the popular global struggle against the World Trade Organization (WTO).  Given the recent renegotiation of NAFTA under Donald Trump in order to better serve the interests of the American capitalist class and the promise of Joe Biden to re-commit the United States to free trade and a so-called "rules based" global order, the subject of this talk is more relevant than ever.  The American Empire is the current sword and shield of global capitalism and the Fortune 500, enforcing its interests against defiant countries via economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, political destabilization and military aggression.  Capitalism must always expand and it therefore seeks to dominate and exploit the land, labor and resources of every corner of the globe.  This is the true nature of what is called "globalization", and it follows that the struggle against capitalism and empire must be international as well.    

Michael Parenti - Globalization, the "New" Imperialism

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Back in the USSR November 16

There isn't a script or write-up for this week's show, but I would highly recommend that you check out these links to content featured in the episode:

Alan Rickman - The Preacher (1989)

Sean Blackmon - A Black Socialist Speaks On Elections, Nov 13 2020

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The Bolshevik Revolution at 103

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You’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried and I want to thank you all for tuning in.  Given the time of year and everything that’s been going on, you might be expecting me to do another anti-war Remembrance Day show or talk about the results of the US election.  But tonight, I want to focus on something that happened two days and 103 years ago on November 7 1917.  I’m speaking, of course, about the Bolshevik Revolution, perhaps the most earthshaking and epoch-changing event of the last century, setting the stage for further revolutions, labor struggles and anti-colonial revolts all around the world.  Through its radical example, the revolution that brought down the Tsarist Russian Empire and forged a new socialist state also sounded the death knell for every single one of the centuries old colonial empires that still dominated the globe in 1917. 

The words of John Reed, author of 'Ten Days That Shook the World', provide a glimpse into the cataclysmic events that took place in November 1917 and that would follow the birth of the young USSR:

“I suddenly realised that the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom brighter than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die….”

The diverse peoples of the Russian Empire in 1917 rejected the old order, they rejected war, they rejected empire, and they rejected capitalism.  The simple Bolshevik Party slogan of “peace, land, and bread” was what carried the day in a devastated country that had lost millions of people to WW1, an imperialist war of aggression.  This is why they supported the message of Vladimir Lenin and what was to become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  They had had enough.  They had already overthrown the Tsar in February 1917 and now they were going to overthrow the entire system that had so victimized and exploited them. 

To many in the West, the October Revolution is described in a few bland buzzwords in our history books. "Stalinist", "Dictatorial", "Authoritarian".  None of which are inaccurate.

The October Revolution was dictatorial to the people who exploited the masses, and it suppressed them by organising the small farmers, peasants and industrial workers together.

The October Revolution was authoritarian, to the rich merchants, the nobility, the financiers, the factory-owners and agribusiness profiteers. It divided their wealth and used it to rebuild a new society, one where the wealth that was produced would benefit the people.

Within the space of a few decades, the USSR went from an impoverished semi-feudal society, to a highly advanced and modern society, surpassing its Western counterparts in many areas, including space exploration.  In the fields of science, education, health, literature, sport and more, the USSR exploded in every direction, routinely making much 'wealthier' Western countries look worse off.

The pioneering achievements of the Soviet Union began almost immediately.  Right after the Revolution of 1917, Lenin as leader of the world’s first socialist state wasn't just confronted with a civil war fomented by 17 foreign armies, but also with a disease pandemic of catastrophic proportions: the Spanish Flu. ⁠

⁠The Spanish flu spread throughout the war-torn country during the Russian Civil War, infecting nearly half of the population. The pandemic led to the deaths of up to 2.7 million people in just 18 months and even claimed the life of one of Lenin's closest allies, Yakov Sverdlov of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. ⁠

In the wake of the Spanish flu, Lenin was one of the driving forces behind the adoption of universal healthcare in the Soviet Union and with it the world.  No country had a notable public healthcare system until then.  Most doctors either worked for themselves or were funded by charities or churches and most people had no access to them at all.  You might recall me talking in the past about how my granddad, who was born in 1918, grew up in a coal mining town in northern England without electricity, running water, sanitation or healthcare – and that was in one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, then as now.  And people in towns like that had to wait until after WW2 to get healthcare access, whereas the people of the USSR, a much poorer country, got public healthcare access in the 20s and 30s due to the pioneering efforts of socialism.

In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country to put in place a centralized public healthcare system, funded via a state-run insurance plan, which Western countries were ultimately forced to emulate largely due to rising working class unrest and fear of revolution.  And it’s worth pointing out that one of the main reasons why Western elites have been so brazen about cutting healthcare services over the last thirty years is because, after the fall of the USSR, they’re no longer afraid of a socialist revolution breaking out in their own countries.  The same is true for women’s rights, labor rights, civil rights and others.  Fear of socialism forced capitalist governments to make concessions in the 20^th Century, but now that fear is gone and the concessions are being rolled back.

The combination of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 had the effect of radicalizing millions of colonized and oppressed peoples worldwide: from Vietnam to the American South.  W.E.B Du Bois, the US civil-rights icon and unapologetic communist, and Ho Chi Minh, who would ultimately lead the socialist revolution in Vietnam, were as inspired by the new Soviet Union as they were angered by the betrayal of colonized peoples by the victorious allies in WW1.  The May 4^th Movement of Chinese students, angered by how the Versailles Treaty sold out the Chinese people to continued imperialism and colonial domination by Europeans and Japan, would ultimately take inspiration from the Bolshevik Revolution too, giving rise to the Chinese communist movement, which would emerge victorious in 1949.

And that’s not evening mentioning the Cuban Revolution, the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa, the resistance to the Vietnam War, the downfall of European colonization in Africa, the rise of the so-called “Pink Tide” of left-wing governments in Latin America, and dozens and dozens of other historical events that would probably not have happened without the Bolshevik Revolution and the political forces set into motion by it.  Even the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945, a date which, in my opinion, is what we should be celebrating every year rather than November 11, would almost certainly have never happened without the USSR’s gigantic contribution to turning the tide in WW2.

There can be no doubt that the October Revolution was one of the greatest events of the 20th century, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that even in the most difficult of circumstances and harshest of times, working class and oppressed people can, and will prevail.  This is very important to understand given the circumstances that we face today.

This brings me to the US election, which I really don’t want to talk too much about, but I can’t avoid mentioning.  Donald Trump is finished.  Joe Biden has won.  The paranoid idea that Trump was going to launch a coup or start a civil war proved to be unfounded, and I think that proves the point that he was not an exceptional threat or a Hitler-wannabe, just a capitalist swindler with an ego and a marketing strategy.  The idea that a guy like him is exceptional or unprecedented in American history is laughable, if you look at the kind of racist right-wing populism that was employed by presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan, all of whom sought to buttress capitalism by reinforcing the racial divide within American society.  And I fail to see how a half-senile old white dude and a middle-aged black woman who built her career on serving the same racist prison-industrial complex that her running mate played such a key role in setting up in the 80s and 90s, will improve things…especially given that he’s explicitly campaigned against basically every single policy item proposed by Bernie Sanders and the DSA.

That being said, Trump did provide a lot of encouragement to far-right forces around the world, and if this loss can take at least some of the wind out of their sails that would be a good thing.  I mean if Bolsonaro chooses not to run for re-election in Brazil because Trump lost, that would be amazing.  Still, I don’t think Biden is going to withdraw support for the same Ukrainian neo-nazis that he did so much to put in power in 2014.  It’s been part of American foreign policy since the start of the Cold War to encourage right-wing forces and right-wing violence around the world as a means of stopping leftist and progressive alternatives to global capitalism.  And that’s not going to change, even if it becomes a little more low key now.

In my show a last week, I stressed that there is far more continuity than change in American presidential politics.  Afterall, the president is an emperor and the guardian of the global capitalist order, those are the class forces that he defends and stands for and is prepared to use horrific violence to uphold and extend.  I understand the need that people have for hope, but hope, at least in my books, comes from winning victories against the institution, not the man.  Presidents come and go, but the empire remains, the violence of empire remains, the racism of empire remains, and the plunder and exploitation of empire remains.  Whether a particular president sucks particularly bad or not, the empire is the real threat and it’s a threat all over the world.  The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 punched a big hole in the armor of the European-dominated global order at the time, paving the way for countless victories and the break-down of a brutal colonial system.  Working class and oppressed people will have to do something similar today if the present global order is to be defeated.

In conclusion, I want to congratulate Luis Arce, the new socialist President of Bolivia, who was just inaugurated on Sunday in defiance of right-wing threats and fascist street violence (check out Back in the USSR’s episode from October 26 for more details on the political situation in Bolivia).  He’s the one who truly deserves praise right now and not a certain Wall Street stooge who only got into power because “he’s not Trump”.  It’s important to remember, to always remember, that the spirit of 1917 goes on, anti-colonial struggles are still ongoing, people are still resisting capitalism and pushing for socialism as they fight for justice and a livable future.  These people are the real heroes and their victories are the real victories.