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“The Internationale“ (“L'Internationale“, Интернационал) is a left-wing anthem. It has been a standard of the socialist movement since the late nineteenth century, when the Second International adopted it as its official anthem. Subscribe!: Twitter: The title arises from the “First International“, an alliance of workers which held a congress in 1864. The author of the anthem's lyrics, Eugène Pottier, an anarchist, attended this congress. Pottier's text was later set to an original melody composed by Pierre De Geyter, a Marxist. The Internationale ranks among the most universally-translated anthems in history. It has been adopted variously as the anthem of anarchist, socialist, communist, and social democratic movements. The original French lyrics were written in June 1871 by Eugène Pottier (previously a member of the Paris Commune) and were originally intended to be sung to the tune of “La Marseillaise“. However, the melody to which it is usually sung was composed in 1888 by Pierre DeGeyter for the choir “La Lyre des travailleurs“ of the French Worker's Party in his hometown of Lille, and the first performed there in July of that year. DeGeyter had been commissioned to do this for the choir by Gustave Delory, the mayor of Lille. Pottiers' lyrics combine contains one-liners that became very popular and found widespread use as slogans; other lines (“Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun“ - “No God, no Caesar, no tribune“) were already well-known in the workers' movement. The success of the song is connected to the stability and widespread popularity of the Second International. Like the lyrics, the music by DeGeyter was relatively simple and down to earth, suitable for a workers' audience. The Russian version was initially translated by Arkady Kots in 1902 and printed in London in Zhizn, a leftist Russian émigré magazine. The first Russian version consisted of three stanzas (as opposed to six stanzas in the original French lyrics and based on stanzas 1, 2, and 6) and the refrain. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the text was slightly re-worded to get rid of “now useless“ future tenses – particularly the refrain was reworded (the future tense was replaced by the present, and the first person plural possessive pronoun was introduced). In 1918, the chief editor of Izvestia, Yuri Steklov, appealed to Russian writers to translate the other three stanzas and in the end, the song was expanded into six stanzas to serve as the anthem of the nascent RSFSR, and eventually, USSR.
