MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law bills restoring the music selected by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as Russia's national anthem on Tuesday, a Kremlin spokeswoman said.

Putin's widely anticipated act also makes the red, white and blue post-Soviet tricolour Russia's state flag and the tsarist-era two-headed eagle the state symbol. Parliament had earlier passed the laws at the Kremlin's request.

The anthem was adopted without words, replacing an interim tune chosen by Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, which never caught on.

Liberal politicians and many intellectuals in Russia had strongly protested against reinstating the piece that was hand-picked by Stalin in 1943, saying it risked waking the ghosts of Russia's bloody past.

Officially, new words are to be selected through a contest. But the Kremlin has already leaked proposed new lyrics written by children's poet Sergei Mikhailkov, now 87, who wrote the original words about the unbreakable Soviet Union.

During Yeltsin's decade in office Russia had no official symbols, with Communists in control of parliament refusing to formally ditch the Soviet anthem, the hammer and sickle seal or the red Soviet state flag.

The new laws keep the red flag as the symbol of the Russian army.

Putin has portrayed his decision to put the Soviet anthem alongside the other symbols as a way of paying respect to the military, cultural and scientific triumphs of different periods in Russian history.

Yeltsin's choice of an anthem, a wordless 19th century tune by composer Mikhail Glinka, never fired the imagination. Russian soccer players complained they had to line up in silence at matches with no words to sing.

Top authors, actors, theatre directors, classical musicians, ballet dancers and pop stars wrote Putin an open letter warning that the Stalin-era tune risked resurrecting ghosts of an era when millions of innocent Russians were imprisoned and killed.

Yeltsin himself also criticised the move, saying the Glinka tune only needed lyrics to catch on.