Orchestration of the National Anthem of the USSR. Recent Discoveries in Russian Archives

A commission to orchestrate the National Anthem of the USSR in 1943 has been neither widely publicised nor researched. The aim of this paper is to re-establish the sequence of events from the moment when Aleksandrov's song was proclaimed the Anthem and to re-evaluate the role of the Russian composer Sergei Vasilenko in its orchestration. The analysis and discussion of these subjects rely heavily on unpublished and little-explored materials on Vasilenko from the archives in Moscow