M O S C O W, Dec. 26, 2000 — The tune that Russians once sang in praise of the “unbreakable” Soviet Union is their anthem again, a decade after the union broke up.

Russian President Vladimir Putin today signed into law bills that restored the music chosen by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as Russia’s national anthem.

The act fulfills a pledge to have the tune in place in time to ring in the new year, but liberals have said the move could raise the ghosts of Russia’s bloody past.

Putin also made the white, blue and red post-Soviet Tricolor Russia’s state flag and the tsarist-era two-headed eagle the state symbol. Parliament had earlier passed the laws at the Kremlin’s request.

The Kremlin said Putin had set up a committee to pick new words to accompany the tune hand-picked by Stalin in 1943,replacing lines that began: “Unbreakable union of free republics.”

Officially, a contest is to be held for the new verses, but the Kremlin has already leaked proposed new lyrics written by children’s poet Sergei Mikhalkov, now 87, who wrote the original words.

It would not be the first time Mikhalkov has changed the words: after Stalin died, he was commissioned to rewrite a verse to remove the out-of-favor dictator’s name.

A Decade Without Symbols

Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had ditched the Soviet Anthem, picking a tune by 19th century composer Mikhail Glinka, but it never caught on and no one wrote words.

Russian soccer players complained they had nothing to sing at matches.

During Yeltsin’s decade in office Russia had no officialsymbols, with Communists in control of parliament refusing to formally ditch the Soviet anthem, the hammer and sickle seal or the red Soviet state flag.

The red flag now remains as the symbol of the Russian army.

Putin has portrayed his decision to put the Soviet anthem alongside the other symbols as a way of paying respect to the military, cultural and scientific triumphs of different periods in Russian history.

By and large Russians have seen the move as a clever, evenpopular, compromise. But liberal politicians, cultural figures and Soviet-era dissidents’ groups called it a dangerous mistake.

Top authors, actors, theatre directors, classical musicians, ballet dancers and pop stars wrote Putin an open letter warning that the tune risked “resurrecting phantoms” of an era when millions of innocent Russians were imprisoned and killed.

Yeltsin himself also criticized the move, saying the Glinka Tune only needed lyrics to catch on.

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=81849&page=1