Intelligentsia revolts as Putin brings back Soviet anthem ===================================== Amelia Gentleman in Moscow Wednesday December 6, 2000 A group of influential Russian film-makers, writers and musicians expressed their disgust yesterday at President Vladimir Putin's decision to resurrect the national anthem of the Soviet Union. An open letter published in the daily newspaper Izvestiya marked the latest controversy in a prolonged search for appropriate symbols to represent post-communist Russia. This week the Duma is expected to approve a bizarre mixture of soviet and tsarist emblems as the official iconography of new Russia, including the old anthem, (with new, as yet undecided verses), the tsarist two-headed eagle as the state coat of arms, and the pre-revolutionary tricolor as the national flag. Designed as a compromise package to ensure a sense of continuity with all the conflicting strands of Russia's past, this solution was championed by Mr Putin. But its announcement prompted the outrage of members of the liberal intelligentsia, who said it caused "revulsion". Alexander Alexandrov's stirring anthem was written in 1943, when much of European Russia was under German occupation, and the Soviet dicta tor Joseph Stalin gave it his personal approval. As statues of Lenin toppled with the collapse of communism in 1991, it was abandoned by former president Boris Yeltsin and the hunt began for a replacement. Music by the 19th-century composer Mikhail Glinka was taken up, but politicians could not agree on suitable words and most people said the score was not sufficiently rousing. Yesterday's open letter stressed that reviving Alexandrov's music would be wounding to the memory of the victims of soviet political repression. Even stripped of the original text, the tune alone was too redolent of Russia's painful Bolshevik past. "No new lyrics will ever be able to erase the words attached to it that for ever glorify Lenin and Stalin. "Because we have a memory, we are convinced that it will not be possible to join seamlessly the history of Russia to the history of the Soviet Union without. The seams are there and they still drip blood." The head of the Russian orthodox church, Patriarch Alexei, gave unexpected support to this former hymn of atheism, which he said represented "continuity with the soviet era, which of course was a terrible tragedy, but during which there was also a lot of good". In a separate development, relations between Russia and its neighbour Georgia became further strained yesterday when the Kremlin imposed visa restrictions on travel between the two countries. Russia said the measure was introduced as a result of Georgia's continuing lax control on the passage of rebel fighters across its mountainous border with the separatist republic of Chechnya. ===================================== (c) Guardian Unlimited
