1864 marked an important date in the history of music as related to the communist ideological struggle. St. Martin’s Hall held a meeting of the First International, an international organisation attempting to unite working class individuals under the pretext of class struggle as defined in socialist and communist thought. As the organisation and its members grew, music made a key intervention during the second convention organised in 1889 in Paris as The Internationale became the national anthem of the movement. A French revolutionary anarchist, Eugène Pottier, wrote the lyrics to the piece which originally were in French. The song, as a call to arms, urges people to partake in:
la lutte finale
Groupons-nous et demain
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain
(« This is the final struggle / Let us group together and tomorrow / The Internationale / Will be the human race. »)
The anthem became the leading song for many groups such as socialists, communists, and anarchists, but the global aspect of the struggle rendered the piece to be important for these groups all around the world and the fact that the whole world did not speak french, the translation of this piece was extremely widespread. Analysing the two examples of the USSR and China under Mao, we can observe the importance of the global outreach of communist thought and how The Internationale is the embodiment of this.
The anthem was translated into Russian in 1902, but its usage did not remain solely at the disposal of communist proponents. From the point of the Bolshevik Revolution The Internationale was utilised as the anthem of those that supported the revolution and only in 1944 the newly established Soviet Union adopted the « Hymn of the Soviet Union » as its national anthem. The Internationale is so inextricably linked with communist ideology that even after the Soviet Union adopted a different official anthem, the Communist Party remained with The Internationale as its anthem, which it still is up until this day, even under the Russian Federation. This deviation of the piece, demonstrates the difference between the regime of Stalin and communist thought and ideologies, Stalin was a proponent of the ideologies (officially, and the political debate between who Stalin was and how he governed the USSR and true communist thinking is not the goal of this post) but he was not the representation of them, nor was he the source of communist thought.
1923 saw The Internationale translated to Chinese. Poet Xiao San, a friend of Mao Zedong, translated the lyrics from the Russian version and it became and still is the de facto anthem of the Communist Party of China. Similarly to the Soviet Union, The Internationale was replaced by an official anthem of the PRC called March of the Volunteers in 1949. Even though the march bares a very strong resemblance to The Internationale, it was adopted as the national anthem as it was more characteristically Chinese, both musically and lyrically. The Internationale is still played in the National Congress of the Communist Party of China, both during the opening and closing ceremonies. But this attempt to nationalise and regionalise communist music and culture can be clearly seen with the example of The Internationale, as the piece was demoted in both regimes and replaced with more culturally appropriate anthems. Yet the importance of the piece to communist ideology remains obvious as two of the arguably most influential communist political groups, the communist parties in Russia and China, utilise the song as their anthem till this day.
Chinese music in the Mao era: a comparative approach with soviet music under Stalin 