SHOUTS - Music from the Rooftops!

There is cultural resistance in the anti-war music of some Russian musicians

Screenshot from YouTube video by Monetochka. It consists of videos sent by her listeners from Ukraine and Russia. Fair use.

This article was written by Alyona Fedotova and originally published by Global Voices on their website on December 23 2023. It’s republished here under the media partnership between Global Voices and Shouts.

Music is a powerful tool of resistance, and has been used this way for centuries. In the late years of USSR music played a big role in supporting dissent and new ideas. More recently, in Russia, which wages a full-scale war on Ukraine since February 24 2022, some musicians sided with the Russian pro-war authoritarian government, but some others became vocal in their anti-war statements.

Unfortunately, thoughtful anti-war songs in Russian get less attention than the warmongering tunes of a leather-clad Kremlin singer Shaman (Yaroslav Dronov). In 2022, he released a song titled “I’m Russian” (in Russian: “Я русский”, romanized as “Ya russkiy”). This track quickly rose to fame, becoming a significant part of popular culture in Russia. It garnered over 42 million views. However, the song also was ridiculed on various Russian social media platforms. Further on, Shaman became a welcomed singer at various pro-government and pro-war rallies. Some people compare him with models from Nazi propaganda posters. The fact of his un-ironic popularity is discussed on YouTube and in online media which publishes columns on contemporary Russian culture in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

It almost seems like there is no music culture in Russia beyond his output but there exists, in fact, also cultural resistance. If Russian antiwar music of the 2020s were a subgenre, there would be several headliners.

Popular musicians with anti-war stance

First, there’s a supergroup made of frequent collaborators, a rapper Noize MC and a high-pitch singer Liza Monetochka, joined by her partner Vitya Isayev. In a series of charity concerts “Voices of Peace” they perform their new war resistance songs, but their most popular one, a banger “People with Guns” was penned a few years before February 2022.

Its sarcastic lyrics go like this:

“All “bad” guys with guns will be killed
“Good” ones will make holes in their bodies
And if suddenly “baddies” are to triumph
It would mean the other ones were “baddies””

Many music videos by these artists are important for their visual component. “No One Got Hurt” by Voices of Peace wouldn’t work the same without the accompanying animated videos that are connected to two important periods of Russian history: depressive Soviet animation from the 1980s and minimalistic black and white Mr. Freeman, an animated protagonist from early 2010s Russia, a period defined by anti-Putin protests.

“I’ll Survive,” another song by the young singer Monetochka, has been released as a music video on YouTube. It was made from short video clips filmed by her Instagram and TikTok followers, including civilians that survived the siege in the east of Ukraine.

“Burn, Burn,” another popular song of hers, is now accompanied by an animated music video directed by Lado Kvataniya to reflect the horrors of the invasion.

Another superstar of Russian rebellious music is a rapper Oxxxymiron with his angry song “Oyda,” calling for the decolonization of Russian heritage. Miron Fyodorov (Oxxxymiron’s real name) is famous for his word puzzles and literary references.

His lyrics for the track include “Our flag/Has white snow and blue river (and nothing else),” and the video an image of a white-blue-white flag of Russia, a novel symbol chosen by some anti-war groups to deny the necessity of any bloodshed. Russian authorities label both the song and the flag extremist and forbidden.

Actually, “oy, da” is a neutral interjection that can mean both “oh, yeah” and “if you must;” One could even call it somewhat an analogue for Old English “Hwæt” in the beginning of “Beowulf.” A fortnight after the premiere of “Oyda,” a part of Russian society was shocked by the verbally similar on-stage exclamation “Goyda!” from a Kremlin supporter, actor Ivan Okhlobystin. According to a historic anecdote, the latter word was used by oprichniks, the repressive soldiers of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, right before they massacred people in the name of the tsar. “Okhlobystin” is referenced in a music video in another protest song “Anthem of the Doomed or Goyda, Orcs!” by Maxim Pokrovsky.

“We are farting gases and drilling oil.
The Third Reich is no match to us, we are the Third Rome!
The boss [Putin] will decide for you and me
Which one is flying back home as a Cargo 200 [killed in action]”

Pokrovsky is the front man of the famous rock band “Nogu Svelo,” and one of the most outspoken critics of Putin’s regime among Russian artists. Since 2022 he has released many tracks like “Ukraina,” “Generation Z,” and “We Don’t Need War,” that have become quite popular among Russian-speaking people all over the world.

Vladi, Zemfira and Yuri Shevchuk also recorded anti-war tracks

Another popular musician, rapper Vladi, released a full album of anti-war songs called “February Goes On and On,” meaning that the month of February 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is never ending for those who grieve this war. One of the songs, the track “How the F*** Is It Possible?,” perfectly records the first shock of the aggression from a point of view of an anti-war Russian.

Music puts emphasis on the tragedy of mothers losing their children in this war

Manizha Sangin, a civil rights activist, the last Russian artist to perform in Eurovision, and Lado Kvataniya’s spouse, released “Soldier,” a dance-centered performance in English, that puts an emphasis on the tragedy of the mothers losing their children during their military service.

The same idea is behind the music video of “Happy New Year, My Son” by Maxim Pokrovsky — mentioned earlier — and his band Nogy Svelo starring Chulpan Khamatova and Arthur Smolyaninov, two famous Russian actors in exile.

Little Big, a popular band that was supposed to go on Eurovision in 2020 released a video, “Generation Cancellation,” that angered some viewers for not putting blame on any side of the conflict.

Some musicians do not directly condemn the war but use other means of expressing the stance

At the same time many Russian artists release compositions that have multiple readings. Some fans might perceive them as anti-war, but many would call this opinion either a stretch or wishful thinking. It is in tune with many people willingly replacing censored words like “war” and “blast” with substitutes offered by state media. Softer lyrics allow the promotion of a song despite Russian censorship. Popular in the early 2000s rock singer Diana Arbenina’s tracks “A Night without a War Declaration” and “Don’t Be Silent” still exist only as records from her live shows posted by fans online.

The anxious song “I’ll Have to Be Silent” from a much younger Erika Lundmoen sounds like a direct answer to that. As Apple Music describes, Lundmoen is a singer-songwriter who infuses the Russian pop scene with her unique blend of escapist melodies and heartfelt vulnerability.

And for some musicians “to be silent” was a good piece of advice: recently Arbenina’s concerts were prohibited in Russia, which also happened to most of the people mentioned in this article.

Read more: For school New Year’s Eve parties in Moscow, some music is apparently deemed inappropriate

Some songs and artists have a sudden comeback in playlists of anti-war audiences. Take for instance Alla Pugacheva, a Soviet superstar who for decades was a fairy godmother of mainstream Russian pop. As soon as her husband, TV comedian Maxim Galkin, opposed the war and their family left the country, she faced a terrible fake news campaign aimed against her. “I once asked Yaroslav Dronov [Shaman] to say one important thing, now I will say it too, although no one has asked me to: ‘You will hear from me again!’ Whether you like it or not, life has shown I am still in your hearts,” the diva wrote on Instagram earlier this month.

While all living Russian musicians must pick a side, even dead artists are resurrected with some help from AI technologies to make a point. For example a popular in the 80s rock singer Viktor Tsoi, who died in 1990, is AI-resurrected in this music video. His electronic copy sings the critical anthem from 1988, “A Train on Fire,” originally written by another rock star, Boris Grebenschikov. The metaphor of the train on fire is about the country, from where there is no escape and which is in war with its people.

If one checks any comment section under the music videos in this article they will see that listeners often regret the small size of the anti-war music audience, even if the same video was streamed millions of times, making this sorrow futile.

Acclaimed producer Roman Liberov has recently united some of the artists mentioned above and many other musicians. Together they filmed the concert “We Exist,” that premiered on December 12, 2023. Through this musical project anti-war artists oppose the narrative of Russian war resistance as a marginal point of view. Perhaps their music will help to overcome the narrative of an imaginary or not pro-Putin majority in Russia.

This article was originally written by Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya and published by The New Arab.

Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya explains why the revolutionary protest song, ‘Bella Ciao’ continues to play a role in global struggles today, and how it has served anti-government Gota Go Gama protests in Sri Lanka which forced the president to resign.

Earlier this summer, a video from the Sri Lankan ‘Gota Go Gama’ protests circulated online: the president Gotabaya Rajapaksa had finally resigned, and protestors were singing a Singhala version of ‘Bella Ciao’, the popular Italian song which was used in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement of the 1930s and 1940s. While the military violence and attacks on protestors in Sri Lanka continue, this was a clear moment of victorious celebration in the ongoing movement against the authoritarian regime.

The song – which details the singer’s awareness of their imminent death at the hands of the ‘invader’ and desire to die as a ‘partisan’ or freedom fighter – has been adapted by various anti-fascist movements globally prior to its use in the Gota Go Gama protests. In fact, the protests are part of a wider trend of anti-authoritarian resistance movements across South Asia in recent years, several of which have been characterised by new versions of ‘Bella Ciao’ in different languages.

”This cyclical, continual reproduction of ‘Bella Ciao’ across starkly contrasting yet uncannily similar contexts of protest is ultimately testament to the unifying power of protest music, as reproduced across time and space, in illuminating connections between struggles across decades, centuries and continents against a backdrop of evolving forms of capitalism.”

Symbolic image of the people’s revolution based on the series “La casa de papel”. Image by AbarcaVasti, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Anthem of struggle

Certain features of the song have held throughout its reproduction across different contexts: its undeniable catchiness, and its clear theme of political resistance, despite drastic shifts in its lyrics. The song has even found its way beyond the realm of resistance movements into mainstream television, famously featuring in the hit Spanish crime drama Money Heist.

A Hindi adaptation of the song was released around the time of the mass protests against the fascistic Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA, introduced in India in 2019. Broadly, the CAA aims to deny Indian citizenship to (Indian) Muslims; it is widely perceived as a step towards ethnic cleansing, indicating the current escalation of Modi’s Hindu supremacist regime into full-blown fascism.

Following the popularity of ‘Wapas Jao’, the songwriter, Poojan Sahil, subsequently penned a Punjabi version retaining the same melody with new lyrics, also entitled ‘Wapas Jao’ (‘Go Back’), for the large-scale Indian farmers’ movement protesting new anti-farmer legislation introduced by Modi’s government in 2020. These farm laws, which received global coverage and were largely retracted in Autumn 2021 following the year-long mass protests, were set to adversely affect poor farmers, and are widely seen to represent the ongoing corporate takeover of agriculture in India.

Both versions of ‘Wapas Jao’ have a similar theme lyrically to ‘Bella Ciao’ – although, as Sahil clarified, the songs are not translations. The Hindi version alludes to the fascism of the Indian government through the repeated line ‘go away, o you tyrant’, explicitly locating the singer within the resistance movement, and the song as an unmistakably anti-fascist anthem.

‘Wapas Jao’ (across both versions) also moves away from the somewhat personal lyrics of ‘Bella Ciao’, which uses the singular pronoun ‘I’ throughout (in contrast to ‘we’ in ‘Wapas Jao’) and captures the fear invoked by the rise of fascism through the line ‘I feel death approaching’. By contrast, the lyrics of the Punjabi ‘Wapas Jao’ discuss the movement against the Indian government and the major companies which are profiting from the farm laws. Both versions of ‘Wapas Jao’ are thus references to the context of the original song which take its anti-fascist commentary a step further, situating themselves within a specific anti-fascist protest movement.

By pairing the original melody with a sparse acoustic guitar, these versions both highlight the timeless catchiness of ‘Bella Ciao’ as well as showing its versatility in lending itself to diverse musical styles – and languages – of different eras and locations. The case of ‘Bella Ciao’/ ‘Wapas Jao’ illustrates Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that reproduction allows the work of art ‘to come closer to whatever situation the person apprehending it is in’, and thereby ‘actualises what is reproduced’.

Interestingly, the anti-fascist or partisan ‘Bella Ciao’ is not, in fact, the original version -despite being the best-known – but is adapted from the ‘mondine’ version, which originated as a folk song sung by mainly women paddy workers (mondine) in Northern Italy in the late 19th century in protest against harsh working conditions. This agrarian context is evoked – intentionally on Sahil’s part – by the Punjabi version of ‘Wapas Jao’ centred on the farmers’ movement, which includes the lyrics ‘each grain of soil sings in chorus’.

Taking on the tyrant

Whilst the anti-fascist version of ‘Bella Ciao’ focused on resistance against ‘the invader’ as opposed to ‘the boss’ of the original version, the Punjabi ‘Wapas Jao’ evokes a new kind of invader – or ‘tyrant’ – the Indian government and the companies taking over Indian agriculture, which are being urged to ‘go back’ by agricultural workers. This version recalls the voice and perspective of the original song, in a new political, geographical, and temporal context.

Indeed, this evoking of the original version also underlines the concentration of agricultural workers in the Global South and their relative decline in the Global North during the 20th century.

Having originally been centred on workers’ experiences, and subsequently been reproduced and adapted in various contexts of anti-fascism, ‘Bella Ciao’ is once again being used to shed light on (agricultural) workers’ struggles through the Punjabi ‘Wapas Jao’.

Through both versions, meanwhile, Sahil arguably utilises the fame of ‘Bella Ciao’ as an anthem of resistance against the widely-known rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, referencing the song through reproduction as a way to emphasise the gravity of the current situation in India through implicit comparison.

This cyclical, continual reproduction of ‘Bella Ciao’ across starkly contrasting yet uncannily similar contexts of protest is ultimately testament to the unifying power of protest music, as reproduced across time and space, in illuminating connections between struggles across decades, centuries and continents against a backdrop of evolving forms of capitalism.

The Gota Go Gama protestors singing ‘Bella Ciao’ sends an affirmingly hopeful message – that the movement recognises itself as situated within a history of people’s struggles all sharing the same determination for change, from the anti-fascists in Italy to the farmers in India and everything in between and beyond.

Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya is a writer, activist and co-editor of Red Pepper magazine, interested in arts and culture and social movements.

Follow her on Twitter: @AnanyaWilson

Cover photo by AntanO. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.