CHAPTER 1
‘LIVE, LIVE THE SPIRIT OF THE SLAVS’ (1834): ‘HEY SLAVS’ FROM 1942 TO 2006
The anthem ‘Hey Slavs’ became the state anthem of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) on 25 November 1988, under Amendment IX to the Constitution of 1974, which replaced Article 8 of the same Constitution. The amendment has only one clause: ‘The anthem of the SFRY is “Hey Slavs” (Pavlović 1990: 260)’. The change was part of a series of amendments that both chambers of the SFRY Assembly passed on that day aiming to strengthen federal control over economic and financial policies of the Yugoslav federation and its federal units. From 1942 until 1988 the song served as an unofficial anthem of Yugoslavia under the rule of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
These amendments constituted an attempt to resolve a protracted economic and political crisis that had gripped SFRY since the early 1980s. In spite of these and other emergency measures, its federal units, primarily Croatia and Slovenia, had been steadily taking over the functions of the federal government, including its armed forces. Finally, in June 1991 the parliamentary assemblies of Slovenia and Croatia proclaimed independence (or ‘disassociation’) from the SFRY and in a few months the assemblies of Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina followed suit. Further fragmentation followed as the Serb-populated parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina seceded from these federal units. The Arbitration Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia, established in August 1991, by the European Community (EC), in its Opinion No. 1 proclaimed that the SFRY to be in the ‘process of dissolution’ and then in July 1992, in its opinion No. 8, that ‘the SFRY no longer exists’.
However, the end of the SFRY did not end the career of ‘Hey Slavs’ as a state anthem. The new federation, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) formed in April 1992 out of its two federal units, Serbia and Montenegro, continued to use both the musical score and the name, without the lyrics. In 2003, this state was transformed into a highly decentralised federation called the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro. In the absence a more suitable song, the state union continued using ‘Hey Slavs’ without lyrics until it was dissolved in 2006 by the secession of Montenegro. The disappearance of this last South Slav federal state1 signalled the end of this piece's service as a state anthem.
In spite of its apparently brief lifespan as an official state anthem – from 1988 until 2006 – ‘Hey Slavs’ is in effect the longest serving state anthem of all the state anthems discussed in this book. Its first use as an unofficial anthem of an as yet unrecognised state was in November 1942 at the first session of Communist-dominated parliamentary assembly – the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia in Bihać in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It then served continuously as the anthem of three different states for the next 64 years. The next in line by its length of service is the Serbian royal anthem ‘The God of Justice’, which served as a state anthem from 1882 until 1918 (with a six-year suspension from 1903 to 1909) and then from 2006 until the time of writing (2014), in total 37 years of discontinuous use to date (see Chapter 4). The other anthems to be examined in this book have had a much shorter career as anthems of sovereign states, reflecting in part the relative youth of the states to which they are connected.
Not only is ‘Hey Slavs’ the longest serving state anthem in the region to date, but it is also the oldest song of all the anthems to be examined in this book. It was written in 1834 a year before the second-oldest, the poem ‘The Croat Homeland’, from which the current Croatian anthem originates, was published. The song was not intended to be the anthem of any one state or nation because at the time no poet could even imagine a state called ‘Yugoslavia’.
Only very few national anthems were not written in the language of their own nation but ‘Hey Slavs’ is one of them. It was written by a Slovak in a version of Czech or Slovak. Its Yugoslav version – in Slovene, Macedonian and Serbo-Croat – was a translation from the original, which was then further modified to suit the political needs of the Communist-ruled state.
From Slovaks to Slavs – and then only to South Slavs?
The song was written in 1834 by Samuel (Samo) Tomašik, a Lutheran minister of Slovak origin, who became a well-known writer and ardent promoter of Slav culture and unity. Originally written in Czech2 (at the time the boundaries between Czech and Slovak were not yet firmly established), it was first addressed to the Slovaks and thus it celebrates the Slovak or Slav ‘word’ that is, their language.
So why was Tomašik telling the Slovaks that their Slavic language would live forever? The answer is found in Tomašik's detailed account of the writing of this song from his diary. On 2 November 1834 while he was visiting Prague he was taken to a Czech theatre performance, which he greatly enjoyed and approved of. However, he was later shocked to hear German and not Czech spoken by the audience, in the restaurants and cafes, and on the streets of the Czech cultural capital. Worried about the preservation of the Slovak as well as the Czech language in this sea of German speech, he was reminded of Josef Wybecki's patriotic song ‘Poland Has Not Yet Perished’; and so he went back to his hotel and, by candlelight, wrote the whole song. Originally he left the instructions that ‘It be sung as: “Poland Has Not Yet Perished”’ (Pavlović 1990: 33–4).
The Polish marching song was written in July 1797 by Wybicki, a friend of the Polish general Jan Dąbrowski, and entitled ‘The Song of the Polish Legions in Italy’. Later it became known by its first verse ‘Poland Has Not Yet Perished’. General Dąbrowski was commander of the Polish volunteers fighting under General Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy against the Habsburgs. The marching song urged Dąbrowski and his volunteers to march on and liberate Poland. However, Poland was only finally liberated in 1918, at same time as the South Slav lands of the Habsburg Empire. ‘Poland Has Not Yet Perished’ attained the status of an official state/national anthem in the newly independent Poland in 1926, some 16 years earlier than ‘Hey Slavs’ did in Communist Yugoslavia.
The first stanza of the song was probably on Tomašik's mind when he was writing the first version of ‘Hey Slavs’.
The Song of the Polish Legions in Italy (in translation)
Poland has not yet perished
While we still live.
What the alien power has seized from us,
We shall recapture with a sabre.
March, march, Dąbrowski,
To Poland from the Italian land.
Under your command
We shall rejoin the nation.4
The first stanza of ‘Hey Slavs/Slovaks’ also asserts the persistence of the Slav language as long as ‘we’ – the Slavs including Slovaks – live. Yet, apart linking the persistence of the preferred language/nation to its living speakers/members, there is no other thematic resemblance between Tomašik's lyrics and Wybecki's song. The most important link between the two is instead found in their actual music. Wybecki's music is based on the lively folk melody of a mazurka while in Tomašik's song, although the mazurka melody is preserved, its original liveliness disappears. The song is thus a paean dedicated to allegiance to a language.
In the original version of Tomašik's song, the addressee of the first verse appeared to be Slovaks (‘Slowacy’) although the ‘word’ in the same line later appeared to be ‘Slavic’ (‘Slowane’). In the version sung by the patriots in the Czech and Slovak lands of the Habsburg Empire, ‘Hey Slovaks’ soon became ‘Hey Slavs’, and in the last authorised version, published in 1888, the author changed both the title and the first words to ‘Hey Slavs’, noting in a footnote that in its first publication the first words were, indeed, ‘Hey Slovaks’ (Pavlović 1990: 37–8).
The first translation of the Tomašik's song into Croatian was published in December 1837 in the Ljudevit Gaj's ‘Illyrian’ newspaper Danica Ilirska (with the original ‘Hey Slovaks’ in the first verse) and the first translation into Serbian was published in Novi Sad, then in Hungary, in the Serbska pčela in 1839. While keeping the ‘Hey Slovaks’ of the first line, the Serbian variant removes the reference to the highest Slav deity Perun (in the second stanza) and refers to him simply as to God (Pavlović 1990: 43–7). Further translations brought even more striking modifications and additions to the original. The closest to the version used as the state anthem appears to be the translation/modification published again in Novi Sad in 1887. In this version there were only three lines that corresponded in full to the original while all the others had undergone significant modification and additions (Pavlović 1990: 47–8).
Before becoming the state anthem of Yugoslavia, ‘Hey Slavs’ in its various versions also served as a celebratory song of Slav unity at banquets and pan-Slavic meetings throughout the Slav world. During World War I it was sung in the trenches by Slav soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army in order to signal their unwillingness to fight their fellow Slavs in the Russian and Serbian armies, as well as their readiness to surrender.5 It became the song of the pan-Slav Sokol youth and sport movement, which flourished in Czech and other Slav countries, including those of the South Slavs. The Sokol movement, with its stress on physical fitness as well on Slav cultural education was originally intended to parallel and counter the German mountaineering and physical fitness organisations in Austria-Hungary and Germany. Founded in 1862 in Prague by a romantic nationalist Mihal Tyrs, the Sokol movement was conceived on the model of the German Turnverein (established in 1811). In the late nineteenth century the Sokol movement spread to other Slav-populated countries including Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. In the new unified kingdom in 1918 there were 254 Sokol branches with 40,000 members (Pavlović 1998: 45).
World War II transformed the Sokol anthem into a song of Yugoslav national resistance. In particular, the German occupation of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the Nazi policies of reprisal and mass murder of civilians made ‘Hey Slavs’ a pan-Yugoslav song of resistance to German military might. According to the story it was first sung as a song of resistance by Serb civilians, including high school students, facing the Nazi machine guns at the large-scale massacres of Kragujevac in October 1941.
The song, with its full three stanzas, appeared among other patriotic songs in the first collection of revolutionary and patriotic songs published by the Communist-led Partisan authorities in the Serbian town of Užice in October 1941. In November 1942, the Communist-led resistance movement then appropriated the song as the anthem of their emergent state. ‘Hey Slavs’ was sung at the opening and closing of the first meeting of the Communist-dominated Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In November 1943, the second meeting of this assembly in Jajce (again in Bosnia and Herzegovina) elected a Communist-dominated government in Yugoslavia, laid down the blueprint for a federation modelled on the USSR and, perhaps most importantly at the time, prohibited the king (then in exile in London) from returning to the country. At that meeting the general secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz-Tito, was also given, by acclamation, the title of marshal – a title that had not existed before in Yugoslavia. ‘Hey Slavs’ was sung again at the opening and closing of that meeting that established both the Communist-ruled federation in Yugoslavia and the personal rule of Tito, which lasted until his death 1980. The song then served as the state anthem of the federation until its demise in 1991 although its role as the state anthem was enshrined in its constitution only in 1988, on the eve of the demise.
The reason for this late, and perhaps desperate, constitutional recognition was simple: the Yugoslav Communist leaders did not want this song to be the anthem of the state they created and ruled, probably because it so obviously failed to express their preferred values or ideas. Less than a month after the establishment of their government in Jajce, in December 1943, the deputy chairman, veteran Communist Moša Pijade, wrote of the urgent need to hold a competition to choose the lyrics and music of the new anthem of Yugoslavia (Pavlović 1990: 58). However urgent the need, the competition still had to wait for the end of the war. It was therefore not until 1946 when the Communist-controlled Presidency of the National Assembly of Yugoslavia, following the adoption of the first Communist Constitution, opened the first public competition for the new anthem. Out of 446 submissions, the selection committee could not find any one worthy of their choice. Instead they proposed to invite 28 of the best known, and politically approved, poets to submit their proposals (Pavlović 1990: 67). The Committee recommended the poem of a young Communist poet Čedomir Minderović, which was promptly declared to be the anthem of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia. After several attempts to get the best and again politically approved composers to put the text to music, the music selection committee declared in 1948 that none of the submitted musical scores ‘has the expressive qualities which are essential for the State anthem’ (Pavlović 1990: 83). And so Minderović‘s anthem was abandoned leaving ‘Hey Slavs’ as faute de mieu.6
A second public competition was held in 1968 by the Association of Composers of Yugoslavia and yielded a musical score that was accepted as the musical score of the state anthem. However, the public competition for the lyrics, held in 1973 did not yield any acceptable lyrics, in spite of the 506 entries. In 1977, still having no official anthem, the SFRY Assembly passed a law on anthems and other symbols which prescribed the ‘temporary use’ of ‘Hey Slavs’ as the state anthem until the Assembly found a new anthem. In 1984, the Assembly held a third public competition for the anthem (lyrics and music together), but its selection committee again could find no suitable candidate among the 726 submitted entries (Pavlović 1990: 347). And so it was in 1986 that parliamentary deputies from several federal units proposed that ‘Hey Slavs’ become the official state anthem. Their proposal was then adopted in 1988.
Apart from public competitions, the Yugoslav Communist leaders considered, in private, a number of different anthem-like songs, some of which had already gained a degree of popularity, but eventually rejected all of these ‘privately’ considered anthem-candidates. During their rule the Communist leaders and their approved experts failed to agree both on what their preferred anthem should express and how it should do so. Using a temporary anthem that they found unsatisfactory was thus easier for them than trying to forge a consensus around the ideas that a ‘permanent’ anthem should express. Perhaps this reflects an aspect of the Yugoslav Communist ideology that has been explored in Dejan Jović‘s Yugoslavia: The State that Withered Away (Jović 2008). Many of the Yugoslav Communist leaders believed that, according their preferred reading of Marx, the state should disappear (‘wither away’ are Marx's own words) and should be replaced by ‘free associations of working people’. According to this doctrine, since the Yugoslav state is only a temporary construction, its state symbols should only be temporary as well. Having a temporary anthem – an anthem faute de mieux – may thus be viewed as yet another application of Marx's doctrine of the withering away of the state in socialist Yugoslavia.
Until the late 1980s most Yugoslav citizens appear to have preferred to retain ‘Hey Slavs’ as their national anthem. Public opinion polls conducted in 1974 and 1984 showed that 65 and 86 per cent, respectively, of the people interviewed preferred to retain this anthem. Only 7 and 4 per cent of the population definitely preferred a change of the anthem. In 1984, even in Slovenia, which opted for independence only five years later, 90 per cent of the people interviewed wanted the anthem to remain unchanged (Pavlović 1990: 331).7
The anthem
Below is the official version of the anthem in Serbo-Croat, one of the three principal state languages of the SFRY.
The transformation of a celebratory song into a national/state anthem required some changes in the text. However, in this case only two lines of the original song are preserved. These are the first two lines of the third stanza of the original song, which became the third stanza of the anthem. The second stanza of the original song, mentioning God and Perun, the Slav deity, was removed and the wording of the remaining verses of the two stanzas of the original song was changed. Although the two songs share a common theme and associated sentiment – resistance to enemies with hostile intent – these are in effect two different songs. In particular, Tomašik's song is about the language and the gift of language; it is a song proclaiming an allegiance to language. In contrast, all references to language have been removed from the Yugoslav anthem. The anthem attempts to address all citizens of Yugoslavia, ostensibly regardless of the language they spoke. As a result of these changes the anthem became primarily a song of defiance and resistance, not of allegiance to a language.
Already by 1941, in the first printed Yugoslav Communist version of the song, the very focus of celebration – the word ‘language’ in the first verse of the original song – had been replaced with ‘spirit’ and ‘the gift of language’ had been replaced by ‘the gift of freedom’ (see below). This change was understandable in view of the changing context and function of the song. When the country was faced with the Nazi conquest, it was not the language that was primarily considered to be under threat and thus in need of celebration. Instead, it was something less tangible but more significant, that is the spirit/freedom of the people that required preservation. That spirit was understood in terms of defiance and resistance.
The Communist version of 1941 still retained the following stanza, which originated from, but was not identical to, the second stanza of Tomašik's original:
The gift of freedom [language] gave us god
The mighty one who wields the thunder
No one must ever take away
This treasure from us.9
The god of Tomašik is not a Christian God, but the highest deity of the pre-Christian Slav pantheon. He is the god Perun, the thunder and lightning wielding equivalent of Zeus. Appropriately, the top Slav god bestows the gift of language on the Slavs and stands in their defence against all the world, particularly when the world is intent on robbing the Slavs of such a precious gift as their language. By 1941, in the Communist version, the word ‘language’ was aptly replaced by ‘freedom’ and Tomašik's explicit reference to Perun was omitted by removing the last line of Tomašik's second stanza.
The idea of a God/god-given freedom (or language) is, of course, incompatible with an atheist Marxist-Leninist world view. However, during the war against the Axis forces occupying Yugoslavia, the image of a god bestowing freedom and wielding his thunder and lightning may have had its uses even for a resistance movement led by avowed atheists. With the Communist victory, the efficacy of the god would perhaps be diminished, with the consequence of the above stanza's disappearance in 1945 from both the printed and the sung version the anthem.
The central theme of Tomašik's original song is resistance and defiance – resistance against those who want to take the precious gift (be that language or spirit, the essence of the people) and defiance against a world of enmity or indifference. This has been preserved in the anthem version above. As with some other anthems discussed in this book, the anthem lyrics above offer a description rather than an overt exhortation. The resistance and defiance are described in a highly symbolic form, using similes and imagery direct from nature. The description is intended to have the effect of an exhortation. This exhortation is to ‘do as our forefathers did, and so preserve our collectivity, by means of their immortal spirit’. The unspoken assumption is that the forefathers themselves resisted and would therefore expect contemporary people to continue resisting. The function of the song then is to remind the singer of a sacred duty. ‘Hey Slavs’ is a serviceable anthem for such an amorphous purpose.
The song does not, of course, raise the question of why this is necessary. Why must there be resistance and defiance? The context of the singing provides an obvious answer to this in the following form: because X is threatening to rob us of Y. ‘X’ in this schema is a place-holder for any enemy or adversary whose identity may change over time. ‘Y’ is a place-holder for anything of value that is under threat. First, it was the native language of Slovaks, under the threat from the ubiquitous German; then it was the native language of any one Slav group, under the threat from any other group; and finally, in the Yugoslav Communist version, it became the spirit of freedom, under threat from the foreign invaders and their ‘domestic lackeys’, that is the local quislings. Eventually, at the end of the war and following the victory of the Communist Party, there was no longer any threat to freedom, and so the whole stanza about the gift and the enemies who are threatening to steal the gift, disappeared.
In short, the anthem relies on context to provide a necessary identification of foe/adversary and of the specific threat posed. Moreover, its description of resistance and defiance is highly general and symbolic. In its final anthem version, the song describes more a spirit of resistance and defiance then any particular act. In the anthem we are not told how to resist or how we may actually be resisting the threat, we are just told that we are consistently and persistently offering resistance.
Amorphous context dependence makes ‘Hey Slavs’ an almost universal song of national liberation or national resistance for any group that identifies itself as Slav. The indeterminacy of the national identification of the addressee of the song proved to be crucial in the multinational setting of wartime Yugoslavia. Yugoslav Partisans were resisting not only their foreign foes who invaded Yugoslavia (Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Bulgarians) but fighting a series of civil wars with several movements and armed organisations that were appealing to and drawing their support from particular national groups in Yugoslavia such as the Serbs (the royalist Chetniks), Croats and Bosnian Muslims (the pro-fascist Ustashas) and Albanians (the pro-Italian Bali Kombatar). Appealing to any one national group groups would, in such a setting, turn the other – allegedly opposing – national group against the Partisans. This is what the Partisan leaders wanted to avoid at all costs. It was not only their Marxist internationalist ideology of international proletarian solidarity but the practical needs of recruitment of personnel and fighters that required them to appeal to all the nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia under the slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity of the peoples of Yugoslavia’. The addressee of this song suited this purpose well enough. Although the non-Slavs of Yugoslavia (in particular Kosovo Albanians) were left out, this song appears to successfully address the widest range of the population of Yugoslavia.
For all these reasons, the Yugoslav Communist Party found the song very useful as a song of national resistance. Even when its efficacy in mobilising the population to fight was no longer an issue, the spirit of resistance that the song celebrated became entrenched in the personal identification of many inhabitants of Yugoslavia regardless of their national or political position. This may explain the widespread popularity of the anthem, at least among those citizens who spoke one of the Slav languages.
The imagery of this song, while sharing the drama of the other anthems such as ‘God of Justice’ (see Chapter 4), is notably narrower in scope than in the Serbian and most other anthems discussed below. The song begins with the abstraction of spirit, the heart of the people. No concrete imagery is evident until the second stanza where we find Hell's abyss and futile thunder. Things are more concrete still in the third stanza where we find storms, earthquakes, breaking stones and shattering trees. This is the Romantic sublime in full swing and, as is also the case in ‘God of Justice’, the outside of civilisation may be regarded as something essentially German. The struggle of the Slavs against Germanic culture and militancy is like a struggle against threatening nature. Does that make it a futile struggle? Ultimately no, because in the last stanza we see that nature is on the side of the Slavs as well. In this case, what is witnessed in the anthem is no longer the sublime alien power of distant gods (as in Tomašik's original song); rather it is the well-behaved nature of the river gorges that provides a homeland of the majestic kind and one deserved by only those who are not traitors.
The song ends with a curse. This is not quite the opposite of a prayer (as found in the ‘God of Justice’) but is similar. Traitors to their homeland will be damned. Those who are against the people will be smitten if God heeds the prayerful aside and thus the inside and outside of the unison – the people-singing-in-unison – is foregrounded. This seems entirely apt for a song sung before a firing squad by unrepentant people.
There also appears to be a curious kind of negative theology at work in the anthem. God is not there after 1945 but hell is and people can be cursed. Cursed for what? Are they cursed for abandoning or betraying the purported bonds of blood/spirit/land? The exhortations of the song are necessarily ambiguous. Who is the enemy? What do we actually have to do? What the song teaches is that struggles against nature are ultimately futile, but that, despite this, there remains the hope of a peaceful homeland in which attitude will be all important; hence the song's zero tolerance of traitors. In this text pagan and materialist fatalism (to which at least some Communists subscribed) meet. Superior forces will neither be placated nor exhorted by prayer in the conventional sense and so it is better then to curse on one's own level.
Which nation is singing ‘Hey Slavs’ in unison?
The short and not very informative answer to this question would be: no single nation is addressed by the song nor is supposed to be singing it either. ‘Slav’ is primarily a linguistic marker identifying someone whose mother tongue belongs to the Slavic family of languages. Slavs are not a nation in the modern sense of the word: they are not a group, settled on a bounded territory and defined by a set of national markers, striving for a state or state-like institutions. There was never a nation of Yugoslavs either in this sense of the word. In the SFRY, Yugoslavs were not recognised as a nation or a nationality; indeed the very label ‘Yugoslav’ in post-1960 documents and census data was printed with quotation marks. In the 1981 census, 1.2 million citizens of Yugoslavia declared themselves as ‘Yugoslavs’; in 1991 their number was reduced to 710 thousand (Pavković 2000: 50). In 1991, SFRY had around 23.5 million inhabitants; and the state anthem was to be the anthem of all of them.
And yet if no single nation is singing the anthem, what does the anthem tell us about the singers? First, unlike all other anthems examined in this book, ’Hey Slav’ does not identify the singers by reference to any national markers – historical myths, landscapes, rulers or symbols. It does not even identify the singers’ homeland nor where they come from; they are only identified by the language in which they are singing the anthem, which is supposed to be a Slavic language. Second, it tells us that the singers are resisters like their forefathers and that, like their forefathers, they are currently resisting or are at least ready to resist the foreign enemies. Third, it tells us that the singers are steadfast and fearless resisters who persevere in their resistance under any and all adverse circumstances. The anthem tells us that the singers are fearless resisters and also that they are Slavs or identify as Slavs. This is a presentation that fits almost all the nations whose languages belong to the Slavic family. However, by identifying themselves as Slavs, the singers in Yugoslavia are distinguished from their primary foes in World War II, people who were not Slavs. These earlier foes were primarily German, Italian and Hungarian.
As an anthem ‘Hey Slavs’ is primarily an exhortation to fight for something worth defending. It is thus a fighting song although, unlike many fighting songs, it does not exhort the singers to actually go out to fight and kill and/or die. For the purposes of this exhortation, it is not necessary to define the nation that is singing the anthem. In the context of Yugoslavia this proved to be a definite advantage, as there were, officially five (later six) nations, that were expected to sing and identifying all of them would be long and tedious as well as unnecessary.
In addition, the anthem is also self-congratulatory: it praises the resisting spirit of the singers, their steadfastness and their fearlessness. The two aspects – exhortation to fight and self-congratulation – are intertwined in the anthem. The anthem exhorts those whom it praises and congratulates at same time. This strategy of self-exhortation is a common strategy in many fighting anthems. In order to get people to march, fight and potentially die you need to tell them that they can do it because they are so good at it, that they are as good, if not better, than their ancestors. Such combinations of self-congratulation with exhortation are found not only in the model fighting song the ‘Marseillaise’ and variety of anthems that follow its model (see Introduction Part I) but also in the only other fighting song, ‘Today over Macedonia’ (see Chapter 6).
‘Hey Slavs’ is thus an illustration of the portability not only of national songs but also of the common devices national songs and anthems deploy to exhort and congratulate the singers. It started out as a song of national devotion to a native (Slav) language, exhorting the native speakers of Czech and Slovak to resist any foreign encroachments under any circumstance and praising them for their ability to resist. It then became a celebratory song of an athletic and sports movement in several Slav regions in Europe before World War II transformed it into a song of national resistance. The victorious Communist liberators, in the absence of any acceptable alternatives, used it as the state anthem of their multinational (predominantly South Slav) federation, and after 128 years of being sung-in-unison by various Slav peoples, with the end of the last federation of South Slav peoples in 2006, ‘Hey Slavs’ ended its public career as an anthem.