War of Songs E-Book

Andrei Rogatchevski

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 369

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This multi-authored monograph consists of the sections: “Pop Rock, Ethno-Chaos, Battle Drums, and a Requiem: The Sounds of the Ukrainian Revolution”, “The Euromaidan’s Aftermath and the Genre of Answer Song: A Musical Dialogue Between the Antagonists?”, “Exposing the Fault Lines beneath the Kremlin’s Restorative Geopolitics: Russian and Ukrainian Parodies of the Russian National Anthem”, “‘Lasha Tumbai’, or ‘Russia, Goodbye’? The Eurovision Song Contest as a Post-Soviet Geopolitical Battleground”, and “(Post-)Soviet Rock Soundtracks the Donbas Conflict”.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Glossary

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements and Technicalities

Foreword

Introduction

1 Pop Rock, Ethno-Chaos, Battle Drums and a Requiem: The Soundtrack of the Ukrainian Revolution

1.1 Music and the History of Protests in Ukraine

1.2 The Main Locations of Protest Music

1.2.1 The ‘Political’ Camp

1.2.2 The ‘Apolitical’ Camp

1.2.3 The Anti-Maidan Camp

1.2.4 Social Media

1.3 The Five Phases of Euromaidan

1.3.1 Rise up! (21 – 19 November 2013)

1.3.2 Vitia, Goodbye! (30 November 2013 – 15 January 2014)

1.3.3 The Burning Tyre (16 January – 20 February 2014)

1.3.4 There Swims a Duckling (21 – 23 February 2014)

1.3.5 Warriors of Light (23 February 2014 and beyond)

1.4 Common Features and General Tendencies

1.5 The Many Anthems of the Euromaidan

1.6 The Power of Music

2 Euromaidan’s Aftermath and the Genre of Answer Song: A Musical Dialogue Between Antagonists?

2.1 Responses to New Base Songs

2.2 Reworkings of Old Base Songs

2.3 Conclusion

3 Exposing the Fault Lines Beneath the Kremlin’s Restorative Geopolitics: Russian and Ukrainian Parodies of the Russian National Anthem

3.1 A brief history of the Russian national anthem

3.1.1 From “Gimn partii bol’shevikov” to “Rossiia sviashchennaia” – Melody and Lyrics

3.1.2 An Inviting Target

3.1.3 The Anthem’s Fatherland and Presentist Utopia

3.2 The Parodies

3.2.1 Parody 1: The Veteran Dissident’s Anthem

3.2.2 Parody 2: The Russian Anthem as Religious ecoNOMism

3.2.3 Parody 3: The Unofficial Anthem of the Russian Official

3.2.4 Parody 4: Death to the Empire!

3.2.5 Parody 5: The Verdict of the Singing Truck Driver

3.2.6 Parody 6: Framing is Everything – The Sebastopol Apocryph

3.2.7 Bonus Track: A Grain of Truth and the Ideology of Masturbation

3.3 Conclusion

4 ‘Lasha Tumbai’, or ‘Russia, Good-Bye’? – The Eurovision Song Contest as a Post-Soviet Geopolitical Battleground

4.1 Previous Research and Historical Context

4.2 GreenJolly and the ESC in the Orange Revolution aftermath

4.3 Dancing Russia Good-Bye – Verka Serdiuchka and the 2007 ESC

4.4 We Don’t Wanna Put In – The 2009 ESC in Moscow

4.5 A Million Voices: Euromaidan’s Impact on the ESC Stages

4.6 1944 or 2014? Jamala and Crimea

4.7 Celebrating Diversity with Iuliia Samoilova – The ESC in Kyiv 2017

4.8 Conclusion

Concluding Remarks and Possible Future Prospects

References

Bibliography

Discography

Filmography and music videos

Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

Copyright

Glossary

Avtorskaia pesnia – Ukrainian: avtors’ki pisni, author’s songs. See Bard music.

Bard music – also known as author’s songs (Russian: avtorskaia pesnia, Ukrainian: avtors’ki pisni). A musical genre associated with singers like Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotskii. Its roots are in songs from the Soviet penal camps and the urban pre-revolutionary genres gorodskoi romans (city ballad) and blatnaia pesnia (underworld song – see Russkii Shanson) as well as European singer-songwriters like Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens, Wolf Biermann, and Mikis Theodorakis (Steinholt 2005, 103ff; Hufen 2010).

Chervona Ruta – Red Rue. A biennial Ukrainian music festival arranged since 1989.

EDM – Electronic Dance Music. An umbrella term for popular music rooted in the traditions of Chicago House and Detroit Techno of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Estrada – small stage. Used for officially approved popular music in the Soviet Union (Steinholt 2005, 15, Fn. 14). MacFadyen (2002, 3) defines it as Soviet popular/light entertainment “that includes pop music but also applies to modern dance, comedy, circus arts, and any other performance not on the ‘big,’ classical stage.”

Fabrika zvezd – Star Factory. A casting show which is the Russian equivalent of Star Academy.

Hutsuls – a Ukrainian ethnic minority from the Carpathian mountains in the country’s southern part.

Marsh nesoglasnykh – Dissenters’ March. An oppositional protest movement in Russia in 2007.

Mass song, Soviet mass song – a popular musical genre during the Soviet era. The term refers to the songs being both for the masses and about the role of the heroic masses in the building of communism. Soviet mass songs were often professionally composed and generally infused with optimism, enthusiasm and patriotism. The lyrics would ideally praise the efforts and achievements of the Soviet people under the guidance of the CPSU, although ideological messages could sometimes play a less prominent position. Part of the socialist realist doctrine which from 1934 governed all cultural expression in the Soviet Union, the mass song played a key part in the construction of the new, Soviet man (See also Edmunds 2000, 233-36).

Moskal’ – a derogatory term for Muscovites or Russians.

Nebesnia sotnia – the Heavenly Hundred. The name given to the killed protesters during Euromaidan.

Podatkovyi Maidan – Tax Maidan. Protests in Kyiv against new regulations for small to medium sized businesses in 2010.

Pomarancheva revoliutsiia – Orange Revolution. Protests triggered by contested presidential elections in Ukraine in 2004.

Popsa, popsnia – a (derogatory) word for pop, often used in opposition to rock music.

Rose Revolution – Vardebis Revolutsia. Protests triggered by disputed parliamentary elections in Georgia in 2003.

Reggaeton – with its recognisable beat (base drum on 1 and 3, snare on 1, 2+ and 4), electronically produced sounds and mostly rapped lyrics in Spanish, reggaeton as a genre emerged in Puerto Rico before becoming highly successful within the Latino/a-communities in the USA in the 2000s and 2010s.

Revolutsiia na hraniti – the Revolution on the Granite. A student hunger strike in Kyiv in 1990.

Rukh – The Movement. A social movement for the dissolution of the Soviet Union, started in 1989. It later transformed into a political party.

(Russkii) Shanson – Russian Shanson, also blatnaia pesnia (underworld song). The lyrics often tells a story of life, love or politics, from the perspective of a criminal. The focus in shanson is not on great musical or vocal performances, but on the storyline, and the music is often accompanied by a simple beat, synthesizers and guitars.

Trembita (plural trembity) – alpine horns linked to Ukrainian traditional music.

Tulip Revolution – protests triggered by contested parliamentary elections in Kyrgyzstan in 2005.

Ukraina bez Kuchmy – Ukraine Without Kuchma. Protests against President Leonid Kuchma in Kyiv in 2000-01.

Abbreviations

CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union

EAEU Eurasian Economic Union

EBU European Broadcasting Union

EDM Electronic Dance Music

EEA European Economic Area

ESC Eurovision Song Contest

fSU former Soviet Union

GEMA Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrecht

OMON Otriad militsii osobogo naznacheniia

OUN Organisation for Ukrainian Nationalists

RF Russian Federation

RT Russia Today

UPA Ukrainian Insurgent Army

VTsIOM Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniia obshchestvennogo mneniia

Acknowledgements and Technicalities

We would like to thank Marina Dyshlovska, Janet Handley, Anastasia Kozhevnikova, Christopher Reynolds, Ilia Rogatchevski, Muhittin Kemal Temel, Heiko Wandler, Ilya Yablokov, Tanya Zaharchenko and Pavel Zhuravel’, as well as the audiences at the 19th Biennial International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Conference in Kassel, the 2018 British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) Annual Conference in Cambridge and the 2018 Insomnia Festival in Tromsø.

A special thank you goes to Josephine von Zitzewitz for copy editing and Florian Grammel for his help with formatting the final manuscript. We would also like to thank the ibidem team – especially Valerie Lange, Christian Schön and the “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” series editor Andreas Umland.

***

All illustrations and photographs are by Arve Hansen, unless otherwise noted. If not otherwise noted, all interview excerpts, quotes from books, lyrics, and other material have been translated into English by us. Song titles etc. are translated on first mention unless the word resembles its English equivalent or is a proper name. Interview excerpts in the original language have not been grammatically corrected so the quotes reflect what was said (this especially applies to interviews done in English). Any grammatical mistakes in the English translations, however, are ours. Unless otherwise noted, all emphases in quotes are by the respective author, not our own.

We use the Library of Congress’ (1997) romanization tables for Russian and Ukrainian in the book’s main body, but omit ligatures and umlauts. The only exceptions are other transcription systems used in written correspondence by our consultants, official spelling of names and words in languages other than Russian or Ukrainian, and where the original script is deemed important.

Finally, web resources are unstable. URLs change and files constantly move on the internet. If you need to access one or more of our sources for the purpose of academic free use and some links in References are no longer working, please contact one of the authors.

Picture 1: Clashes on Hrushevs’koho Street, 19 January 2014.

Foreword

Only five years ago, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would have seemed an absurd joke, similar to, say, a Texan invasion of Arizona. A war among Russian and Ukrainian musicians and a schism in pop and rock communities over the Ukrainian issue would have seemed even more improbable: the political tensions that began between the Kremlin and Kyiv after the 2004 Maidan did not influence the cultural sphere, which remained serene.

However, there had been an occurrence which can be considered a harbinger of things to come, if not exactly a trigger of the sad events that followed. The Russian leadership was extremely concerned and anxious about the 2004-05 Maidan, when the opposition candidate Viktor Iushchenko came to power as a result of a spontaneous expression of the Ukrainian people’s will. In particular, the Kremlin was impressed by the active role, played at the Maidan rallies by popular Ukrainian musicians, such as Vopli Vidopliasova, Okean El’zy and others. In the aftermath of these frightening events, and to ensure the loyalty of Russian rockers, Putin’s administration called a meeting. The meeting was led by the then ideologue-in-chief Vladislav Surkov, a devotee of contemporary music. Nearly all famous Russian rock musicians were present. Some of them later told me that Surkov was respectful and gentle. He did not instruct people what to do, let alone threaten them, but enquired if they had any problems and how he could be of help. Several musicians made requests which were subsequently met on orders from above. This way Putin’s assistant gave the unpredictable musicians a reassurance of sorts: we love you and will look after you for as long as you are with us. No one made any declarations after the event. It seemed that the meeting did not leave any trace. An important detail, though: the intermediary between Surkov and various rockers, who telephoned them to bring them to this “friendly meeting”, was Vadim Samoilov, back then still a co-leader of the Agatha Christie band.

In the next decade or so, politics did not play much of a role in the musical relations between Russia and Ukraine. These relations were warm and integrated, like those between Canada and the USA, where few people seem to remember that Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, for example, are Canadians by birth and nationality. Similarly, the Ukrainian pop stars Vera Brezhneva, Ani Lorak, the duo Potap i Nastia, the trio VIAgra, as well as the Boombox and 5’nizza bands, have become household names on the Russian music market, on television and on the radio waves. There has even been talk of Ukrainian pop’s dominance in Russia; some experts explained this by the better quality and higher relevance of Ukrainian hits, as far as the sound production value was concerned. Such an explanation rings true. I would also add yet another reason for the Ukrainian success: Ukrainian pop singers are more emancipated when it comes to sexual innuendo. Suffice it to mention the mock transsexual Andrei Danilko assuming the persona of a buxom diva called Verka Serdiuchka, and openly erotic video clips by VIAgra and other seductive women popsters. Being foreigners, they could get away with more. And being guys next door, they were welcome with open arms everywhere in Russia.

This idyll ended abruptly in spring/summer 2014. The musical war started with the musicians’ division into three groups: those rooting for Putin, those rooting for Ukraine (or at least against the anti-Ukrainian aggression) and the neutral ones. A distance exists between the first two groups that is as enormous as their mutual dislike. It seems that hardly any Ukrainian musician belongs to the first group, whilst the neutral ones (those who depend on Moscow royalties so much that they continue to entertain the public in what Ukraine calls the aggressor state) are few and far between. In Russia, the situation is more complex. The overwhelming majority consists of those musicians who persistently keep silent in public and refuse to take sides. As I know many of such neutral individuals personally, I can infer that most of them are not wildly excited about Putin’s politics. But taking a public stand means saying goodbye to broadcasts, contracts and concerts. Unless we are talking about a deep underground art scene, Russian musicians tend to depend on the state to a greater or lesser degree. Surely there are also people who could not care less about the war and occupation but they keep mum because they do not want to miss out on the Ukrainian concert and corporate market.

All the more credit goes to those who are not afraid to speak out against the Kremlin’s antics. Such individuals are surprisingly numerous and varied. Andrei Makarevich, the frontman of the Mashina Vremeni band (known as the Russian Beatles), made critical remarks about Crimea and Donbas – and was immediately and ruthlessly attacked by the Russian mass media, even though he had earlier been in favour with the authorities and performed at a presidential inauguration. Almost all doyens of Russian rock – such as Boris Grebenshchikov, Yuri Shevchuk, Vasily Shumov, Mikhail Borzykin – adopted the antiwar stance. In St Petersburg, musicians formed a movement known as Anti-army. Vadim Kurylev, the driving force behind the movement (and leader of the Elektropartizany band), wrote in his manifesto: “Rock has always emerged on the wave of antiwar sentiments. All the greatest rockers – John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan – were pacifists”. In 2017, Anti-army released an LP called Nam ne nuzhna voina (We Don’t Need War) including antiwar songs performed by over twenty bands of different styles, from folk rock to post-punk. It has to be noted that few of these songs contain specific references to the occupation of Ukraine, but when they sing about war in today’s Russia, it is clear which war they imply. In the summer of 2018, seven bands (the extremely popular Pornofil’my and the singer Monetochka among them) explicitly boycotted the largest Russian open-air music festival, Nashestvie, just because it was sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Defence. In our semi-totalitarian times, the fact that many Russian musicians continue to perform in Ukraine is a gesture bold enough.

The group that might be termed “the mouthpiece of the war” is fortunately the smallest. These musicians can be divided into two subcategories. The first encompasses the official statist pop music, whose exponents make regular appearances on TV and at the Kremlin receptions. The recently deceased Iosif Kobzon – incidentally, born in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk – was one of them. He had been singing pop-propaganda since Communist times. His younger colleagues include Oleg Gazmanov and the Liube band. This is their niche and they work within it. The second subcategory is headed by Vadim Samoilov – the very same person who gathered musicians for Surkov’s 2005 soiree. This subcategory comprises patriotically minded rockers, who sing from time to time in front of the Donbas separatists and condemn the “Nazi junta”. If Samoilov can be branded by some a cynic and a careerist, the anti-Ukrainian feelings of his bedfellows, so to speak (Aleksandr Skliar, Vadim Stepantsov and Yulia Chicherina), are probably sincere. Curiously, I knew Skliar and Stepantsov well, we were friends – and I cannot possibly understand what happened to them. Neither will I be able to do so in the future, as we are no longer in touch. This is an emblematic story of divided friendships and even married couples…

Alas, Russia’s latest territorial expansion not only cost the lives of over ten thousand people, but also destroyed the relationships between peoples and individuals who used to be very close. The single musical space has been broken into two warring territories. This division has adopted administrative forms of expression, too: in Ukraine, there is a list of Russian musicians who are banned from entering the country for their statements about Crimea and Donbas; the Russian authorities, often prone to hypocrisy and hybridity, do not keep an official blacklist but issue implicit instructions preventing Ukrainian (and other) musicians with pro-Maidan views from performing in Russia. Frankly, I can’t see how and when this confrontation would end. Hypothetically speaking, it’s the musicians who could be the first to carry the olive branch and try to reconcile the two peoples. Many Russian performers are still dearly loved in Ukraine. Ukrainian music, against all odds, is listened to in Russia and enjoys a significant resonance (the recent success of the rap band Griby confirms this). Yet the restoration of warm relations is impossible until the aggression stops. And the cessation of aggression is impossible until the Russian authorities are radically transformed. And such a transformation may well be long in coming. In any case, a war of songs is better than a war of shells and bullets.

Artemy Troitsky

Tallinn

Picture 2: The barricades on Instytuts’ka Street, Maidan, 22 January 2014.Note the Angry Ukrainians poster hanging on the bridge.

Introduction

International news reports from our tortured planet’s many conflicts and skirmishes come erratically, in bursts and waves interspersed with long periods of silence. Proxy wars, or so-called ‘low-intensity’ warfare, are quickly reduced to more or less distant background noise. Terrible as they may be, the conflicts quickly lose the shock value needed to remain in the headlines on a regular basis. Thus, we slowly become accustomed to the existence of yet another ‘forgotten war’. It is therefore fortunate that news media are not the only carriers of information about conflicts and their social, psychological and geopolitical aspects. Conflicts generate a constant flow of comments and observations, as well as cultural output. This output sometimes aims simply to empower one of the warring sides, sometimes adds a polemical dimension to the conflict itself, sometimes aspires to reflection and analysis, and in some rare cases even seeks solutions to overcome hostilities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, music constitutes a significant proportion of this cultural output, in recent years not least in the form of music clips published online. The format of Do-It-Yourself or semi-professional music video has a short response time and can potentially reach hundreds of thousands of listeners/viewers within days of publication. Once published, popular music video clips are subject to answers in the form of edited homages or more or less hostile parodies, or in the form of new, friendly or hostile, music video clips.

The process which has now culminated in this book began when we, four colleagues studying various aspects of East Slavonic culture and society, started to share song clips on a regular basis, gradually building up a collection of material. In the years following the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, a rapidly growing compilation of internet links tagged “WoS” (for “War of Songs”) enabled us to embark on four different research trajectories which in time would become chapters in this book. Whereas each of us has been responsible for researching and developing one such trajectory, each chapter, in multiple rounds of feedback, has been subject to substantial input and modification from the other three authors. The result is, we hope, a harmonious whole where each part actively engages with the others, rather than a mere selection of independent contributions on a shared topic.

Our first trajectory investigates music at the actual scene of events, the context in which some of the most powerful and influential music video clips originated. Chapter 1 examines the Maidan demonstrations in Kyiv, and follows the protest music through the winter of 2013-14, in a variety of locations: in the camps for and against the revolution, online and offline. How did the music change as the demonstrations shifted from a largely homogenous pro-European rally to a multifaceted large-scale revolutionary uprising, from peaceful protest to deadly street battles and, finally, to contemplation and mourning? What functions did the music have, and how did these functions change over the course of the events?

Trajectories number two and three deal more directly with music video clips. Chapter 2 investigates and analyses the exchange of answer songs between various antagonistic groups and communities surrounding the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The case examples cover Ukrainian and Russian exchanges, as well as showdowns between Russian liberals and nationalists. Four distinct groups have been identified: a) Ukrainian anti-separatist, b) non-Ukrainian anti-separatist, c) Ukrainian pro-separatist, and d) non-Ukrainian pro-separatist. Given that normally answer song writers, whether consciously or not, strive to conform to Jürgen Habermas’s four principles of discourse (inclusivity, equal distribution of communicative freedoms, truthfulness and absence of contingent external constraints or constrains inherent to the structure of communication), are these principles of discourse still adhered to in the Russo-Ukrainian answer songs under consideration, given that they have been written not in peace time but in the course of an armed conflict?

In the third chapter we turn to various attempts at deconstructing the central official narrative of the Russian Federation as the former centre of Soviet power and the current regional superpower. Parodies of the national anthem of Russia have become a genre in its own right among Russian opposition members and dissidents, as well as among Ukrainians, especially after 2014. What are the differences and common denominators between Russian and Ukrainian anthem parodies and what can they tell us about the controversies surrounding Russian nation building in the 21st century? Much of the material presented here is controversial, especially since the 2016 change in Russian legislation, which has sought to outlaw disrespectful renditions because it is a national symbol. This fact, and the richness of the material, have meant that not all parodies covered will be quoted in their entirety. Instead, the readers are provided with references to the full versions and will, if they so wish, be able to investigate these more closely in their own time.

Our fourth, and in one sense oldest, trajectory follows the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). In a time of hybrid warfare where new forms of battlefields appear, the boundaries between deliberate intervention and coincidental provocation have become increasingly blurred. Using ‘traditional’ media like television and radio to shape public opinion – also beyond the boundaries of the nation-states – has taken on a more important role, and the ESC has become one of the subversive outlets used. We investigate how, despite a ban on political messages, geopolitics has repeatedly made it to the stage of the televised musical mega-event. How have young post-Soviet nations, Ukraine among them, used the ESC platform to articulate their independence from Russia as the hub of the former USSR? And how has Russia responded? By focusing on the use of soft power, we demonstrate how Ukraine and Russia, as well as Georgia, use the field of cultural diplomacy to promote their geopolitical agenda through ESC contributions.

The first major publication of the research group Russian Space: Concepts, Practices, Representations, based at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, this book continues our individual research foci on popular music, politics and nationalism in a post-Soviet context (see e.g. Hansen 2016 and Hansen 2017, Rogatchevski and Steinholt 2016, Wickström and Steinholt 2009, Wickström 2018). At the same time, it broadens this approach with some initial probing steps into the territory of popular music and geopolitical conflict in the context of contemporary Russia and Ukraine.

Our book does by no means claim to be exhaustive, whether in scope, case studies or questions addressed. A relatively small contribution to a new field of research, there is a natural limit to the number of answers a book such as this can provide. Still, although it represents only a small selection of a large variety of musical texts and practices, we hope our book will reveal some underlying questions of key significance and help provide a platform for further academic study into popular music and Russo-Ukrainian relations past and present.

AH, AR, YS and DEW

Table 1 Overview of central post-Soviet events.

Year

Event

1989

First Chervona Ruta (Red Rue) music festival in Ukraine

1990

Revolutsiia na hraniti (Revolution on the Granite – Ukraine)

1991

Independence of Ukraine and Georgia

1993

Russia and Ukraine join EBU

1994

Russia competes for the first time in ESC

2000/01

Ukraina bez Kuchmy (Ukraine Without Kuchma – Ukraine)

2003

Vardebis Revolutsia (Rose Revolution – Georgia)

Ukraine competes for the first time in ESC

2004

Pomarancheva revoliutsiia (Orange Revolution – Ukraine)

2005

ESC hosted in Kyiv

Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan

2005

Georgia joins EBU

2007

Georgia competes for the first time in ESC

Marsh nesoglasnykh (Dissenters’ March – Russia)

2008

Russo-Georgian War

2009

ESC hosted in Moscow

2010

Podatkovyi Maidan (Tax Maidan) in Kyiv

2013

Protesty u Vradiivtsi (Protests in Vradiivka)

2013/14

Euromaidan

2014

Russian annexation of Crimea

2014-

Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict

2017

ESC hosted in Kyiv

Picture 3: A decorated Christmas tree, Maidan, 2 December 2013.

1 Pop Rock, Ethno-Chaos, Battle Drums and a Requiem: The Soundtrack of the Ukrainian Revolution

During the winter of 2013–14, Ukrainians from different backgrounds occupied the Maidan Square in central Kyiv whilst singing about a forthcoming revolution.1 The protests, known as Euromaidan in the West, and the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, were initially triggered by the Ukrainian government’s announcement, on 21 November 2013, of the suspension of a trade deal agreement with the EU, but it soon became a nation-wide movement against a power-abusing and corrupt leadership. Despite freezing temperatures and police brutality, the protesters endured and by late February the government was overthrown and President Ianukovych fled the country. Yet the price proved to be high, as more than 100 people had perished during the revolution. The events were accompanied by music that involved a large number of genres, styles and instruments, in a multitude of locations, ranging from the internet to the barricades. It was as diverse as the large mass of protesters. During the three months the revolution lasted, the music that had been joyful and optimistic in the beginning, later turned jocular, then aggressive, and in the end, mournful.

In Sound System: The Political Power of Music (2017), Dave Randall defines several functions of music. Sometimes, he argues, songs give force and voice to political messages, whilst at other times, songs “capture and define the spirit of a growing movement, giving courage to long oppressed people and uniting them around a set of demands” (Randall 2017, 166). This emphasis on the importance of music is expanded by Andrew Green and John Street (Green and Street 2018), who argue that even though music is an important part of activism, it is often sidelined or ignored by scholars in political science. To rectify this, they suggest that the use of music in political activism could be divided into two categories, often overlapping rather than mutually exclusive, namely prefigurative use or pragmatic use. When activists employ the prefigurative approach, the music is not meant to achieve concrete political goals, but to be the embodiment of the activists’ ideals – their shared idea of what an idealised future should look like. Music can become a focal point for the development of activist communities, and create social bonds and common goals between people from a broad political spectrum. Conversely, the pragmatic approach is to use music to achieve specific goals. Music can function as the backdrop entertainment during political events to set the right mood, and be used to affect people’s behaviour. Music has the potency to “bring together diverse, otherwise stratified actors, and [use] this sense of togetherness to communicate […] political stances.” (ibid., 176)

Despite the importance of music in public protests, and the prominence of music during the Euromaidan in 2013–14, few academic works have studied the music of the recent Ukrainian revolution. The ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky’s 2016 analysis of the group Dakh Daughters is one exception, and Nataliia Mykhailychenko’s 2016 research on the symbolic revival of traditional Ukrainian songs, such as “Plyve kacha” (There swims a duck), is another. Christian Diemer (2015) also touches upon the conflict in his research on the relations between music and regions in Ukraine. One Ukrainian book about art on the Maidan includes interviews with musicians (Kovtunovych and Pryvalko 2016), and a number of news articles on the subject have seen publication (e.g. Culshaw 2014; 24 Kanal 2014; Pastukh 2015). Yet, to our knowledge, no scholarly publication has yet dealt with the music of the revolution as a topic in its own right.

The current chapter examines the role music played during the Euromaidan. We start by looking at the traditions for protest music in Ukraine, and by discussing the different reasons why collective mass actions are so prevalent in the country. From there, we examine how music was organised during the Euromaidan by looking at the different locations where music was played. We investigate the changes in the music performed during the revolution, and identify five stages in its development. The general tendencies, mood, and emotions of each phase is discussed, and one prominent song representing each phase is analysed. Our aim is to explain what general moods and emotions were dominant in each of the five phases, and how the protesters responded to key events of Euromaidan through music. Musical features and tendencies that prevailed throughout the three months are discussed in a separate section, before we investigate why the numerous proclaimed “anthems of the revolution” failed to become such. In the last section we discuss the functions of music by applying Green and Street’s (2018) two concepts of pragmatic and prefigurative music.

The material we use was gathered in 2018 from qualitative interviews with three musicians who participated in the Euromaidan2and 16 conversations with protesters,3 as well as from qualitative data collected in Kyiv for a previous study between November 2013 and May 2015.4 Additionally, many protests in Kyiv since 2007 have been observed. Those have also had a heavy presence of music.5 We believe that such observations can be valuable not only for musicologists or students of collective actions but for all those who seek a better understanding of the recent Ukrainian events.

We mainly focus our research on the music of Euromaidan, yet Ianukovych’s government also arranged concerts for the pro-governmental Anti-Maidan, which was staged as a counter-measure to the Euromaidan protests. The music of Anti-Maidan is therefore briefly discussed.

1.1 Music and the History of Protests in Ukraine

In Ukraine, one of the main historical narratives is the country’s long history of struggling for independence – against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union. As part of this struggle, music has been prominent. During the wars of 1914–1919, the West-Ukrainian army used the so-called rifleman songs (strilets’ki pisni) for recruitment, for building a national identity, and when marching into war. Similarly, in the 1940s and 1950s, the Organisation for Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the partisan Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) used so-called insurgents’ songs (povstans’ki pisni) as a motivation and recruitment tool in their fight against Poland and the Soviet Union (Semenoh 2004, 146-148).

In the 1960s and 1970s, bard music6became an element of protest and dissent in the Soviet Union. “A person with a guitar could easily give voice to thoughts and moods which were persecuted by the authorities,” says Maria Burmaka, who became one of the leading voices of the protest movement in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the height of Gorbachev’s Glasnost’ reforms, in 1989, Burmaka became the winner of the first music festival in Ukrainian language, Chervona Ruta (Red Rue – Burmaka, interview). Glasnost’ had made it possible for performers to play bard music, as well as the Ukrainian national anthem, Ukrainian patriotic songs and Western genres, such as rock, folk, electronica, and industrial. This would have been unheard of less than 10 years earlier, because of the heavy censorship in the Soviet Union.7

The music of Chervona Ruta became an important part of the leading Ukrainian movement for the dissolution of the Soviet Union, known as Rukh (the Movement – Zychowicz 2015, 90). In 1990, Rukh, together with several students’ unions, initiated a student hunger strike on the Maidan Square, called the Revolution on the Granite (Revoliutsiia na hraniti). Burmaka recounts how the musicians at the square played the songs from the Chervona Ruta festival for the strikers and protesters. She performed songs based on verses found during her ethnographical research on Ukrainian poets, many of whom were executed in the repressions during the 1920s and 1930s (Burmaka, interview). Other respondents confirm that there was a great deal of music on the main square at the time, especially bards, and one states that people were singing rifleman and insurgent songs (strilets’ki and povstans’ki pisni). The students demanded, among other things, an end to the Soviet Union and to military service outside of Ukrainian borders. After 16 days of hunger strike, the students’ demands were partially met, including the right to give a speech in the Ukrainian Parliament.

After the fall of the Soviet Union the following year, rapid inflation, lack of goods, corruption and rising crime resulted in numerous new demonstrations and protests, often involving musicians. From the early 2000s, political mass protests started to entail the building of large stages for supporting musicians, as was the case during the Ukraine Without Kuchma (Ukraina bez Kuchmy) protests that took place in Kyiv from December 2000 to March 2001. The allegations of President Kuchma’s involvement in the torture and beheading of the investigative journalist Heorhiy Gongadze brought thousands of people, including many musicians, to the Shevchenko Park to protest. The musicians performed bard music, rifleman and insurgent songs, as well as rock, thus mixing the traditional Ukrainian protest music with more contemporary genres. The protests were suppressed, however, by riot police and the secret service.

Three years later, the Orange Revolution (Pomarancheva revolutsiia) took place on the Maidan Square in Kyiv. Prompted by the widespread allegations of electoral fraud during the presidential election of 2004, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the square on the appeal of the presidential candidate Viktor Iushchenko, against the government’s candidate Viktor Ianukovych. Famous rock bands from the 1990s, such as Vopli Vidopliasova and Okean El’zy, performed for the masses from a large stage in the middle of the Maidan. “If during the Revolution on the Granite the sounds had been made by acoustic guitars, the Orange Revolution was a time for rock music”, says Burmaka (Burmaka, interview). She participated as one of the organisers of the concerts on the main stage and as a musician, and vividly remembers the Orange Revolution as being amplified and energised by music. “The stage was active round the clock, and we and the musicians […] had to agree on a queuing system for being on stage.” (ibid.) Describing the Orange Revolution, Marko Halanevych from the group DakhaBrakha notes:

[…] the Orange Revolution was very theatrical, and there were many performances […], people were wearing Orange [the party colour of Iushchenko ’s party Tak], and made Chinese dragons. […] It was a very joyous time.

(Halanevych, interview)

The 2004 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) winner, Ruslana, also had a key role on the Maidan Square as an organiser and as a musician. She had publicly supported Ianukovych before the election campaign, but changed sides during the Orange Revolution, stating “I feel a moral duty to declare my protest against the brutal force and manipulations […] against my compatriots.” (Ukrainskaia Pravda 2004) The music most people associate with the revolution was not, however, rock or pop, but the hip-hop song “Razom nas bahato, nas ne podolaty” (Together we are many, we will not be defeated), by the rap group GreenJolly.8 The Orange Revolution managed to achieve a re-election by peaceful means, which in December 2004 Iushchenko eventually won.

In an article on online musical activism during the Orange Revolution, ethnomusicologist Adriana Helbig observes that “music and the Internet played crucial roles […]” (2006, 81). The internet, she argues, was a powerful tool for activists to make and share music with political messages, and spread the experience of the energetic atmosphere on the Maidan Square, in a society with few unbiased media outlets. (Helbig 2006). She is backed up by the historian Bohdan Klid, who states that the music of the revolution captured the attention of the international and national media, “helped elicit powerful feelings of emotions”, raised patriotic feelings, and helped mobilising support for Iushchenko (Klid 2007, 131). He states that

the successful outcome of the Orange Revolution […] marked a victory for Ukrainian-language songs, especially rock and hip-hop, over Soviet-style and commercial Ukrainian- and Russian-language pop associated with the Ianukovych campaign

(ibid., 130)

Klid describes the commercial production and pirating of CDs with music from the revolution as reflective of the pervasiveness and popularity of Ukrainian songs (ibid., 131).

No sooner had the new leadership taken their position than their own intrigues started with many allegations of corruption, abuse of power, and cronyism. At the same time, Russia put pressure on the new leadership, by fuelling separatist sentiments on the Crimean peninsula and raising the price of Russian gas to Ukraine. When Iushchenko lost his presidency to Ianukovych in 2010, many Ukrainians felt the Orange Revolution was dead.

It is safe to say that discontent has been a common theme in the society of post-Soviet Ukraine, and in the years before Euromaidan tension continued to grow as numerous protests and demonstrations occurred in Kyiv and elsewhere. The Tax Maidan (Podatkovyi Maidan) in 20109 and the Protests in Vradiivka (Protesty u Vradiivtsi) in 201310 are prominent examples, yet none of these were as large as the three protest waves mentioned above.

Where does the discontent in Ukraine come from? Often, Ukraine is portrayed as a country of two opposing regions: the pro-European West and the pro-Russian East. With the onset in 2014 of the military conflict in the Donbas region there are, of course, two sides opposed to each other, yet it is often stated that linguistic, ethnic, historical and religious divisions could neatly fit into this East-West dichotomy, or, similarly, into a four-region framework (East, West, Centre, and South). Some nationalist Ukrainians tend to emphasise that Ukraine is one entity, and that regional differences are minor and exaggerated. This is, at least in music, partially confirmed by the research of Diemer (2015), who argues that the musical consumption and repertoire played across the regions in Ukraine are to some extent similar. Yet to say that Ukraine is without regional differences would be to ignore a number of significant issues. It is hard, however, to justify that Europe’s second largest country by size, and with a population of 44,9 million people – comparable to that of Spain or Poland – could be divided into just two or four regions. Ukraine has far too many languages, religions, ethnicities and cultures, with historical influence from a variety of countries, to fit such a crude model. One possible solution to the question is the regional framework, developed by Barrington and Herron (2004), which divides Ukraine into eight regions, but even this might be refuted by many Ukrainians as too simplistic.11

The main sources of discontent in Ukraine since the 1980s have been Ukraine’s weak economy, politics controlled by a small number of all-powerful oligarchs, a dire need for reforms, widespread cronyism, and rampant corruption at all levels. On top of this, there have been many instances of power abuse by the elites. All this has contributed to a widespread scepticism towards politicians in Ukraine in general. Another source of discontent comes from questions concerning national identity, such as “where does Ukraine belong, in the European or in the Russian sphere of influence?”, “what should be the status of the Ukrainian and Russian languages?” and “how should Ukraine relate to its history?”

Before November 2013, Ukraine was presented with the prospect of signing an association agreement with the EU, which would include Ukraine in the European free market. The politicians of Kyiv and Brussels had been negotiating the agreement since 2008, and it was to be signed by president Viktor Ianukovych at a EU summit in Vilnius on 29 November 2013. This was a controversial decision, however, as Ukraine simultaneously was presented with the option of joining the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) with Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia. Since the two deals were mutually exclusive and two major outside powers were bidding for Ukraine, it naturally sparked much debate in the country. Only a small majority was in favour of the EU-deal, whilst a large minority was in favour of joining the EAEU. When on 21 November, days before the organisation’s summit in Vilnius, Ianukovych announced that he would suspend the deal with the EU, without prior consultation or discussion with the population, both the pro-European idealists and the reform-hungry Ukrainians were quick to announce a protest action on the Maidan Square.

1.2 The Main Locations of Protest Music

When people started to gather on the Maidan Square on 21 November 2013, the three political parties of the parliamentary opposition had, despite their differences, united against Ianukovych. The party leaders made a statement about showing a united front, condemning the suspension of the trade deal agreement and seeking to lead the protests. The politicians did not, however, have a straightforward job of uniting and representing the wider opposition, which consisted of large segments of the population mistrustful of politicians. The protesters who had gathered at the square announced that party symbols were not welcome, as their protest was ‘apolitical’. The politicians therefore decided that they would organise a ‘political’ Euromaidan at the European Square, about 250 meters from the Maidan, probably hoping to use the name of the square as a relevant symbol, whilst at the same time distancing themselves from the failed Orange Revolution.12 The result of this division was that Kyiv now had two parallel Euromaidans, a ‘political’ and an ‘apolitical’ one, next to each other.

1.2.1 The ‘Political’ Camp

The politicians’ strategy was quite similar to that of the oppositional politicians during the Orange Revolution, despite their attempts to distance themselves from it. Just as in 2004, the politicians built a large stage and employed the venture “Art Veles” to organise the concerts. The music was selected and organised with the help of professional musicians, such as Burmaka and Ruslana, in the same manner as in 2004 (Burmaka, interview). They also invited the same mainstream rock bands, who had risen to fame during the 1990s, to attract crowds to their rallies. Rock bands such as Mandry and Plach Ieremii performed during these rallies on 24 and 25 November 2013 in the same manner as they had done nine years previously, and politicians held their appeals to the audience in between the songs in the same manner.

Picture 4: A ‘political’ concert, European Square, 23 November 2013.

Yet, even if this strategy attracted more people to their concerts than were drawn to the Maidan, the Maidan Square never emptied of people as the European Square frequently did. Several of our respondents condescendingly refer to the first mainstream entertainment at the European Square as tantsi, pliaska (a dance), and showed their disdain for what they saw as politicians trying to exploit the situation for their own political gain. Several mainstream artists preferred to perform at the ‘apolitical’ Maidan, where concerts also were being held (see below). The politicians’ choice of venue was obviously not enough to distance them from the popular experience of the failed Orange Revolution, and they lacked the creative energy of the ‘apoliticals’, who had a hard core of students and other young people staying day and night on the Maidan Square. The ‘political’ Euromaidan, in contrast, had to hire in security to protect their camp at night.

The opposition party leaders soon understood that they were losing to the ‘apolitical’ Euromaidan