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 28th marked the 200th 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 1st 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 60th 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 20th 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 1st 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
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