Anthems of 15 Union republics

CD “National Anthems of the USSR and Union Republics”, ©1996 Melodiya.  Anthems recorded in 1970s—1980s.
These are the last official versions used in the period from ca.1977 till the breakup of the Soviet Union.
All tracks available here as MP3 256kbps.

Webmasters: please link to this page and not directly to the audio files (they change addresses from time to time).

(Note: the details in the listing above are not identical to the cover of the English CD version. I have used more common and accurate spelling of many author’s names than the hastily translated cover provides.)

The anthems appear on the CD in the same order in which the Union republics are listed in the Constitution of the USSR (see Chapter 8, Article 71). In the Constitution, they were initially listed in the order of decreasing population (according to the 1940 statistics, at least). Later, the population in different republics grew unevenly and the listing in the Constitution became no longer properly sorted by population, but it was kept unaltered in the 1977 Constitution.

The largest republic both in territory and population, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR; now Russia), did not have its own anthem. There was a considerable effort in 1945—1948 to write one, with numerous committees considering many proposals of music and lyrics, but none was accepted. On the map, I’ve linked RSFSR to the State Anthem of the USSR.

You can buy this CD on amazon.com | ozon.ru
This CD has also been ripped and published online by Artemy Lebedev (RealAudio 16kbps—40kbps) | Marxists.org (MP3 128kbps) | Soviet music
 

Instrumental recordings

This set of instrumental recordings was made by the Brass Band of the USSR Ministry of Defence in 1968.
They are available here as MP3 256kbps.

The full-length instrumental recordings listed above have been taken from the Soviet LP “National Anthems” released in 1968 (mother record numbers 1655a and 1656a). Regarding the short versions, I am not quite sure about their origin. We had them on a tape cassette obtained at the Moscow Radio before 1981. It is obvious from the sound they were performed by the same orchestra at the same time as the long versions, and recorded on an LP. However, we’ve failed to locate the LP. All these instrumental recordings have been digitized and cleaned up by Reinhard Popp (Rpps43@aol.com). Any use of instrumental recordings from this page without his permission is not allowed.

You can find lyrics (with translations), sheet music and information about these and other anthems on National Anthem Reference Page | NationalAnthems.us | Wikipedia

Some links about the USSR:

• Coats of arms of the Union republics
• State attributes of the USSR
• USSR — a comprehensive review in the Large Soviet Encyclopedia (ca.1977), in Russian.

Reader’s Comments

Anthems from a vanished country

In the former Soviet Union, each of the 14 “Union republics” (with the exception of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) had its own “national anthem”. This collection — by Soviet-era orchestras and choirs — is the only one of its kind. All of the former SSRs (Soviet Socialist Republics) are represented, along with the famous USSR anthem which was banished for a time under Boris Yeltsin but now (with new lyrics) lives again as the anthem of the Russian Federation.

The music represents the ethnic and culture diversity of the Soviet Empire: the heroic melodies and broad harmonies of the USSR and Ukrainian anthems reflect the expansive gestures of Orthodox church music; the Georgian anthem draws from the dissonant harmonies of Georgian sacred and folk music; the Armenian anthem, by the famous Soviet-Armenian composer Khachaturian, has the Middle Eastern feeling of the Armenian folk idiom.

The lyrics — which unfortunately are not translated — are typically bombastic. Verses expressing fealty to the “Party of Lenin” and praising the inspiring example of the “Great October” are normative. The word “glorious” appears to be inescapable. If you want a feeling for this style, check out the translations of the old USSR anthem available on the web.

Apart from their origins in different folk idioms, the musical styles tend to range from militant (Armenia and Azerbaijan) to sentimentally lyrical (Latvia and Lithuania). The Latvian anthem, in fact, is unique in this collection because it is the only one in which (without knowing the words) it is difficult to imagine that you are striding confidentially into the future in unity with the Party of Lenin following the heroic example of the Great October. Instead, the melody seems to evoke the quiet villages, rolling hills and gentle beaches of this small Baltic country. In contrast, the anthems of the Soviet Central Asian Republics are close in musical spirit to the score of any of Cecil B. DeMille’s blockbuster Hollywood costume dramas. One can visualize hordes of heroic Kyrgyz, Uzbek or Turkmen horsemen sweeping across the dusty plains of Asia... all in the name of socialism, of course.

Each of these anthems suffered a different fate after the USSR disappeared from history. The countries with the strongest national traditions (the Baltic states and Ukraine, for instance) restored older pre-Soviet anthems. Other republics retained the Soviet-era melody but wrote new lyrics. That was true especially of republics where the old Soviet nomenklatura still hold power: Belarus and Kazakhstan, for instance. Sadly, Armenia got rid of Khatchaturian’s stirring composition: the music was, perhaps, too militant — and too confident of a glorious future — for a postmodern world.

— Andrew G. Lang (langohio@sbcglobal.net), May 13, 2004; comment copied from amazon.com