Opposition groups release a new collection of protest songs.
Russian rock music, which was in didactic opposition to the Soviet Union before its fall in the early 90s, has lately tended to compromise with the increasingly authoritarian Kremlin rather than challenge it.
Some leading Russian rock figures, for instance, entertained the Kremlin-backed youth movement Nashi at its summer camp on Lake Seliger in 2005 and 2006 as well as performed on Red Square to celebrate the election of Dmitry Medvedev to the presidency on March 2 this year.
But the “Dissenters March,” Marsh Nesoglasnykh, Internet compilations, the second, 49-track edition that came out earlier this month, prove that rock music’s original subversive spirit has not expired. Subtitled “A Collection of Protest Songs,” the albums feature dozens of bands, old and new, and have been downloaded by thousands in Russia since the first compilation came out last year.
Andrei Skovorodnikov, the frontman of Krasnoyarsk punk band Paranoiya i Angedoniya and a member of Eduard Limonov’s banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP), came up with idea of collecting protest songs and putting them on the web during discussions on Namarsh_ru, the Livejournal.com Internet community for the members and supporters of pro-democracy coalition The Other Russia.
“It was said from the start that this is music that we, ‘dissenters,’ like — it’s not the bands that are members of The Other Russia, belonging to NBP or The United Civil Front,” said Skovorodnikov by phone from Krasnoyarsk. “But the songs they perform express our views and feelings about what’s happening in Russia today.”
Skovorodnikov said the project is noncommercial and was originally available only for download. Krasnoyarsk oppositionists made some CD copies to give away at The Other Russia’s conferences in Moscow, though, and pirated editions of it were even seen in Moscow and St. Petersburg record shops last spring, he said.
The first, 38-track compilation came out in October 2007 and was called “Dissenters March,” after The Other Russia’s peaceful protest rallies frequently banned by authorities and brutally dispersed by the OMON special-task police.
“We were discussing what could be done that would be interesting and attract people, and I said, ‘Let’s do a music compilation that expresses our ideas and that would be inspiring,’ and suggested that the members of the community select the songs themselves,” said Skovorodnikov.
Apart from recent songs such as “When Oil Runs Out” by DDT, a massively popular Russian rock band based in St. Petersburg, and “Living in a Police State” by Adaptatsiya, a Russian-language punk band from Kazakhstan, the compilations also paid tribute to protest songs from the 1980s, featuring Kino’s “[We're Waiting for] Changes” and Televizor’s “Fed Up.”
Even though Skovorodnikov belongs to the NBP, the compilations were made in the coalition spirit of The Other Russia, featuring protest songs that do not necessarily comply with his party line.
“I didn’t reject a song called ‘Freedom to M.B.Kh.’ [the initials of imprisoned former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky] by Jack Pot just because it’s liberal. It shouldn’t be that way, once we all have joined The Other Russia and stand for freedom of speech and equality. If we’d start dividing between ourselves, we would be lying, saying one thing and doing the other.
“We must start with ourselves, and we can always find a common ground. If it would be cut artificially, it wouldn’t be that interesting to people, because they would detect falseness. And there should not be anything false if it’s real music.”
Sergey Chernov, The Moscow Times
From edition: to download the collection “Dissenters March”-2 it is possible here. Music, photo, video, covers, Info (in russian) 351 Mb.
Tags: Dissenters March, Khodorkovsky, Kremlin, Limonov, Medvedev, music, NBP, OMON, Other Russia, protest, Skovorodnikov, songs, Soviet Union