Background The Ukrainian national anthem can be traced back to one of the parties of the Ukrainian ethnographer
Pavlo Chubynskyi that occurred during the autumn of 1862. Scholars think that the Polish patriotic song "
Poland Is Not Yet Lost", which dates back to 1797 and later became the national anthem of Poland and the
Polish Legions, also influenced Chubynskyi's lyrics. The Polish patriotic song was popular among the nations of the former
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that were at that time fighting for their independence; the
January Uprising started a few months after Chubynskyi wrote his lyrics. According to a memoirist who was present, Chubynskyi wrote the lyrics spontaneously after listening to Serbian students singing
Svetozar Miletić's "" () during a gathering of Serbian and Ukrainian students in an apartment in Kyiv. Chubynskyi's words were rapidly taken up by the earliest
Ukrainophiles. In 1862, the head
gendarme, Prince
Vasily Dolgorukov, exiled Chubynskyi to
Arkhangelsk Governorate for the "dangerous influence on the minds of commoners". The poem was first officially published in 1863 when it appeared in the fourth issue of the
Lviv-based journal ; the journal mistakenly attributed the poem to Taras Shevchenko. It became popular in the territories that now form part of
Western Ukraine and came to the attention of a member of the Ukrainian clergy,
Mykhailo Verbytskyi of the
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Inspired by Chubynskyi's lyrics, Verbytskyi, then a prominent composer in Ukraine, decided to set it to music. The lyrics were first published with Verbytskyi's sheet music in 1865. The first choral public performance of the piece was in 1864 at the
Ruska Besida Theatre in Lviv. One of the first recordings of this anthem (then spelled "") in Ukrainian was released on a gramophone record by
Columbia Phonograph Company during World War I in 1916. As a folk song, it was performed by a Ukrainian emigrant from Lviv and New York resident Mykhailo Zazuliak in 1915.
Early use "
Shche ne vmerla Ukraina" was not used as a state anthem until 1917 when it was adopted by the
Ukrainian People's Republic as its national anthem. Still, even between 1917 and 1921, the song was not legislatively adopted as an exclusive state anthem as other anthems were also used at the time.
During the Soviet period In 1922, the
Ukrainian SSR signed the
Treaty on the Creation of the USSR with the
Russian SFSR,
Transcaucasian SFSR, and
Byelorussian SSR, which created the Soviet Union. Following the signing of the treaty, "" was banned by the Soviet regime. The authorities later decided that each separate Soviet republic could have its anthem, but "" was rejected in an attempt to help to suppress separatist sentiments held by Ukrainian nationalists. In 1939, "" was adopted as the official state anthem of
Carpatho-Ukraine. After
Joseph Stalin ordered that "
The Internationale" be replaced with the
State Anthem of the Soviet Union in 1944, all the constituent republics of the union were forced to produce each of their representative regional anthem as well. The Ukrainian government established a commission on the anthem on 23 February 1944. Soviet authorities, after a period of struggle, successfully persuaded public intellectuals to create an anthem with lyrics fitting their political interests and music sterile of any Ukrainian national elements. On 23 February, the Ukrainian chairman
Mykhailo Hrechukha started a meeting by reading a synopsis of the anthem-to-be in front of musicians and litterateurs: the Ukrainian nation's union with the Soviets were envisaged for the first stanza; the Ukrainian people, their struggles, and "freedom" under
Lenin and Stalin were envisaged for the second stanza; Ukraine's economic and political "flourishing" in the union were envisaged for the third stanza. The refrain was conceived to be used after each stanza, which was considered as a
paean to the union of the Soviet peoples and the reunited Ukraine following the
Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Composers worked on the score before the decision on the lyrics; by February 1945, 11 composers were selected as finalists. Anton Lebedynets' score won with an overwhelming majority vote, and the score was adopted as the music of the new Soviet anthem in November 1949. Earlier in January 1948, the lyrics of
Pavlo Tychyna and co-author
Mykola Bazhan won; due to plagiarism of his text, Oleksa Novytskyi demanded to be listed as a co-author, but to no avail. On 21 November 1949, the new anthem of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was adopted. Borys Yarovynskyi edited and reorchestrated the anthem in 1979.
Post-independence On 15 January 1992, "" was adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament, as the state anthem and was later instituted in the Ukrainian Constitution. However, the lyrics for the anthem were not officially adopted until 6 March 2003, when the Verkhovna Rada passed a law on the state anthem of Ukraine (), proposed by then-president
Leonid Kuchma. The law proposed Mykhailo Verbytskyi's music and Pavlo Chubynskyi's first stanza and refrain of his poem "". However, the first line of the lyrics was to be changed from to . The law was passed with an overwhelming majority of 334 votes out of 450, with only 46 MPs opposing. Only the members of the
Socialist Party of Ukraine and the
Communist Party of Ukraine refrained from voting. The national anthem that up until then had only officially consisted of Mykhailo Verbytskyi's music, would henceforth also include the modified lyrics of Pavlo Chubynskyi. The popularity of the Ukrainian anthem has become particularly high in the wake of the
Orange Revolution protests of 2004 and
Euromaidan of 2013. Ukrainian composer
Valentyn Sylvestrov, who participated in Ukrainian protests in Kyiv, characterized the Ukrainian anthem thus:
Since Euromaidan and the Russo-Ukrainian War in
Kyiv; the protesters sing the national anthem. During the Euromaidan protests of 2013, the anthem became a revolutionary song for the protesters. In the early weeks of the protests, they sang the national anthem once an hour, led by singer
Ruslana. In
World Affairs, Nadia Diuk argues that the national anthem was used as "the clarion call of the 'revolution during Euromaidan, which added weight to protests that previous ones, such as the Orange Revolution, lacked. In a 2014 survey, after being asked "How has your attitude toward the following changed for the last year?", the
Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that the attitude towards the Ukrainian national anthem had "improved a lot" in 25.3% of Ukrainians, especially after the start of the
Russo-Ukrainian War. After the start of the
Russian invasion of Ukraine, several orchestras in Europe and North America performed the Ukrainian national anthem in order to show their solidarity with Ukraine. == Lyrics ==