Yeltsin against Putin on new national anthem

MOSCOW, Russia -- Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin has stepped into the fray on the eve of the vote on a new national anthem.

The State Duma is to vote on Friday on President Vladimir Putin's proposal to restore the rousing communist-era anthem amid a fierce debate that has raised the ghosts of Russia's past.

But Yeltsin, in his first-ever public criticism of his protege and successor, hit out at Putin for going back to the old tune.

The Russian ex-leader's opposition to the Soviet anthem was the latest in a war of words which set the Internet buzzing and sparked letters to the press, negating Putin's call on Monday for the nation not to overdramatise the issue.

Yeltsin quoted Anatoly Chubais, long a Kremlin adviser and now head of a giant power utility, in saying it was immaterial that opinion polls showed many Russians favoured the old anthem.

"Chubais was quite right on this score: the president of a country should not blindly follow the mood of the people," he told newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. "On the contrary, it is up to him to actively influence it."

MESSAGE BOARD Changes in Russia

But parliamentarian who visited the president on Thursday said Yeltsin's words had not influenced the man he had plucked from relative obscurity to groom for the presidency.

At Putin's request, the Duma, parliament's lower house, is to vote on restoring the Soviet-era melody on Friday, along with laws to confirm the red-white-blue tricolour as the state flag and the imperial two-headed eagle as its national crest.

The laws seem likely to pass easily and Russia will begin 2001 with old-new symbols of statehood.

The Soviet tune, which will also have new words for the fourth time since its inception, is a stirring melody penned in the midst of the dark days of World War Two.

But opponents of its restoration say it would effectively pay homage to totalitarianism and disrespect to the millions of victims of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Liberal daily Izvestiya has led debate over the Soviet anthem, mostly coming down against its reinstatement.

Cultural figures, including famed ballerina Maiya Plesestkaya, have also opposed restoring the Soviet hymn, although other artists have backed it.

An Internet website, Polit.ru, has also called on people to sign up to an electronic petition rejecting the Soviet anthem.

Boris Nemtsov, a reformer who now heads a liberal party, said Putin was making a "historic mistake."

But Putin has said he has the backing of Russians, who refuse to reject their own history outright and do not see the years of Soviet rule as all bad.

The currently wordless Russian anthem was brought in to replace the Soviet one, which originally praised Stalin and contained the refrain: "O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people, to Communism's triumph lead us on!"

After the fall of Communism, Russia's new leaders selected a piece of music already well-known to the people -- a section of a Glinka opera -- which tells the stirring tale of a peasant who sacrificed his life to save the Czar from Polish invaders.

Choosing the words to go with it, however, has not been easy. A spokesman at the Russian Embassy in London told CNN.com: "The words from the opera were not appropriate."

Reuters contributed to this report.

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