MOSCOW — Lyricist for Soviet, Russian anthems
Sergei Mikhalkov, an author favored by Stalin who wrote the lyrics for the Soviet and Russian national anthems, persecuted dissident writers as part of the Soviet propaganda machine and fathered two noted film directors, has died at age 96.
Mikhalkov died in a Moscow hospital Thursday, said DenisBaglai, a spokesman for his son, director Nikita Mikhalkov. Baglai said he had no further details immediately.
In 1943, Mikhalkov, a young author and war correspondent whose poems were favored by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was commissioned to write lyrics for a new Soviet anthem designed to inspire Red Army soldiers in the midst of World War II.
After the dictator's death in 1953, the anthem was mostly performed without the lyrics, but Mikhalkov remained one of the most vocal and outspoken bards of communism.
As a functionary and later chairman of the governmentregulated Soviet Writers' Union, Mikhalkov became an integralpart of the propaganda machine designed to indoctrinate Soviet citizens and weed out dissidents. He was part of smear campaigns against authors such as Nobel laureates Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was deported from the Soviet Union in 1974.
In 1977, the Politburo approved adjustments to the national anthem, where Mikhalkov replaced references to Stalin with phrases glorifying Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin.
After the 1991 Soviet collapse, the Russian government scrapped the anthem, replacing it with an instrumental piece by 19th-century Russian composer Mikhail Glinka.
But when Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, he restored the old anthem. Mikhalkov adjusted the text again, replacing references to Lenin and the Soviets with a paean to Russia's "divinely protected" forests and meadows.
Mikhalkov's son Nikita won an Academy Award for the 1994 film Burnt by the Sun, about a family during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. His other son, Andrei Konchalovsky, has made a career as a Hollywood director.
His survivors also include his physicist wife Yulia Subbotina, 10 grandchildren and eight greatgrandchildren.
Arkansas, Pages 17 on 08/28/2009