How Russia’s biggest rock star gets away with speaking truth to power (a.k.a.

Putin)

In Russian culture, there is a persona referred to as yurodiviy, or holy fool,

whose madness gives him impunity to speak the truth to the czar. Sergei Shnurov is
modern Russia’s holy fool. Shnurov built a punk rock career singing about getting
drunk, having sex and getting by in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia. His lyrics
about the paradoxes of modern Russia, often critical of the Kremlin’s notion of
traditional values, are littered with words so vulgar that most of his songs never
make it to the radio. Yet, despite Shnurov’s disdain for contemporary Russian
political culture, he and his band, Leningrad, don’t worry about authorities
canceling their shows — a common fate for popular entertainers who have spoken out
against the Kremlin or promoted the wrong kind of values. Shnur, as he is widely
known, is beloved by a wide swath of Russians. Police officers love him as much as
tattooed hipsters and their middle-aged parents. Oligarchs hire him to sing at
their birthday parties, and he has hosted shows on state-funded television. Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s first wife once famously danced to Leningrad’s music
with a group of students in a viral video. This bizarre combination of Russian rude
boy and favorite of the ruling elite makes Shnurov incredibly popular,
controversial — and the most successful rock star in modern Russia. “Shnurov is a
very clever guy, a very well-educated guy. But he plays a fool,” said Yuri
Saprykin, a journalist, critic and essayist on Russian culture. “He’s popular
because of his humor and his cynicism about everything here,” Saprykin said. “He is
not just a rude boy who is swearing. It’s poetry. It’s funny, it’s edgy.” In
Russian Orthodoxy, the best known of holy fools is Nicholas Salos of Pskov, a 16th
century self-styled prophet who famously reprimanded Ivan the Terrible for his
brutal campaigns and persuaded him not to sack the western Russian city of Pskov.
Shnurov is a decidedly modern prophet. He can get on stage one night to entertain
the Kremlin elite with R-rated lyrics about drinking too much vodka and having sex,
then stand before the Russian Duma, the country’s parliament, to criticize the
government for trying to regulate creativity through the Ministry of Culture. “No
normal country has a culture ministry!” Shnurov told the legislators in his raspy
voice, hoarse after years of smoking. Shnurov had been invited to be a member of
the Duma’s Committee on Culture. The singer took the opportunity to suggest that
the culture ministry itself be abolished. “It’s just theoretically impossible to
regulate producers of culture,” Shnurov said in the February appearance, looking
straight into state television cameras as he addressed the parliamentary committee.
“This is not going to work, because ... any artist, any blogger, or anyone who has
Twitter can be the producer of ideas and the producer of culture, no matter how
awful it looks to you.” The comments seemed to drive directly at the heart of
Putin’s “managed democracy,” in which the former KGB officer has created a vertical
power structure with the Kremlin on top. Many of Russia’s most popular entertainers
have been punished for speaking out against the Kremlin. Putin’s system has pushed
the idea of traditional, Christian values as part of Russia’s core identity.
Patriotic themes are encouraged, while criticism of the Soviet past is dismissed.
Russian musicians who openly criticized Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 had
their concerts canceled or received threats from Putin supporters. Yet, in an
interview before a Moscow concert this summer, Shnurov dismissed accusations that
Russia is a censored state controlled by Putin. Shnurov is old enough to remember
censorship as it was practiced in the Soviet Union before its collapse in 1991.
“Today it is very funny to talk about censorship when we have the internet,” he
said, sitting in a backstage lounge the night before the sold-out show. With the
band calling it quits this year after playing together for more than 20 years, it
was one of the last concerts Leningrad would play in Moscow. Despite Shnurov’s
critical stance on many of Russia’s political developments over the years, he said
he did not believe Putin is an autocrat whose strong-arm rule is ruining Russia. If
Russia is turning toward the past, Russians themselves must take some of the blame,
he said. “Luckily, not everything depends on Putin. I don’t depend on Putin,”
Shnurov said. “These concerts don’t depend on Putin. There is no totalitarianism.”
At 47, Shnurov still has the energy of a young performer. He still sings about
heavy drinking and partying, but in recent years, he has embraced running and a bit
of healthy living. His stringy long locks of the early 2000s have been replaced by
an Ivy League cut. He wears a three-piece gray suit over a white T-shirt. Sergei
Shnurov after an interview in Moscow. (Denis Sinyakov / For The Times) He’s smart
and articulate, and his eyes light up when it’s clear he’s made a connection. Like
Putin, Shnurov is from St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city and the former
home to the czars. The men’s careers developed almost in parallel. Shnurov’s band,
Leningrad (the Soviet name for St. Petersburg), started out “as just a joke” in
1997 between a few friends who liked to make music. Meanwhile, Putin, a former KGB
officer, was rising through the ranks of St. Petersburg city government and then
Moscow’s political elite. In 2000, Putin was elected president as Boris Yeltsin’s
hand-picked successor. At the time, Leningrad — the band — was dominating Moscow
and St. Petersburg’s underground music scene, with Shnurov as guitarist and lead
singer. The band’s lyrics spoke to the average Russian not interested in
geopolitical scandals but in complaining about the irritations of daily life.
Shnurov has always insisted he wants nothing to do with politics. “I’ve read
somewhere that ‘rock and roll’ is a euphemism for [sex],” he said. “It doesn’t have
any relation to honesty, protest, any kind of social diagnosis. It relates only to
lust, idiocy ... and alcohol in my case.” By the early 2000s, Leningrad was selling
out large concert arenas. In 2002, former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov banned the
group from playing in the capital’s biggest venues. Officially, the ban was because
of vulgar lyrics, but many believed it was because of Leningrad’s subtle criticism
of the political elite. Leningrad and Shnurov made huge amounts of money as
Russia’s most popular band. Forbes magazine estimated in 2018 [link in Russian]
that Shnurov was worth about $14 million, making him Russia’s second most
successful entertainer after Alexander Ovechkin, a Russian-born hockey player on
the Washington Capitals. “The thing that is interesting about Shnur is that he’s
gone from a small punk scene to huge concert halls,” said Clem Cecil, the director
of Pushkin House in London, a nonprofit, non-governmental Russian culture center.
“He’s charismatic and gives people a really good time. He’s a glamorous rock star,
but there’s still that punk element about him.” And while Shnurov’s style and music
have become a social commentary, he is more than anything a showman and a cunning
businessman, Cecil said. Shnurov describes Leningrad’s original sound as a mixture
of vampire rock mixed with Soviet prison music and brass instruments to give it
punch. In recent years, Shnurov has pivoted toward music videos with satirical
criticism of Russia’s haphazard post-Soviet development. The catchy “In Peter, You
Drink!” depicts a bad day for a St. Petersburg office worker that turns into a
drinking marathon. It’s both a love song to Shnurov’s hometown and a mockery of
Russian stereotypes and their reality, all wrapped together in an addictive chorus.
In “Exhibit,” which has been viewed more than 148 million times, a young Russian
woman tries desperately to impress a suitor by painting the bottom of a borrowed
pair of high-heeled shoes with bright red nail polish to look like a pair designed
by Christian Louboutin. Admiring herself in the mirror, the woman turns to go
answer the door when she realizes that the nail polish on the shoes has stuck to
her apartment’s floor, and she falls flat on her face. It has become one of the
most viewed Russian videos of all time, and it exemplifies the Russia Shnurov says
he loves but is pessimistic about. “I think that Russia has turned its head a
little bit back. There is a lot of attention paid on what had happened and not on
what will happen or what will be,” he said. “This conservative situation doesn’t
mean any development, any future. If we always remember our great past, then where
is our great future? Shnurov this year announced that Leningrad was going on its
final tour. In addition to shows across Russia and Europe, the band will give four
performances in the U.S. in November, in New York, San Francisco, Seattle and
Miami. He has not decided what his next artistic endeavor will be, nor is he in a
rush to find it. “It’s not necessary to constantly produce something. Look at the
‘Catcher in the Rye’: That dude wrote one novel and that’s it, and then he
just ...” True to form, he ended the sentence with words that can’t be printed
here, but make his fans love him even more.
Vladimir Putin and his minions continue to whitewash the Stalinist past

DemocracyPost contributor August 30 at 9:46 AM This past week, the Russian Military
Historical Society — a government-affiliated body headed by Vladimir Putin’s
culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky — concluded its second research expedition to
the Sandarmokh forest in the northwestern region of Karelia. Its purported aim was
to “find the remains of the prisoners of Finnish concentration camps and fallen Red
Army soldiers” dating from the 1940s. The real reason behind the effort was
revealed in a letter from Karelia’s acting culture minister Sergei Solovyev to the
leaders of the expedition. “Speculation around the events in the Sandarmokh forest
not only cause harm to Russia’s international image [and] create an unfounded
feeling of guilt in the public mind toward the supposed victims of repression … but
also serve as a consolidating factor for the anti-government forces in Russia,”
wrote Solovyev, encouraging the society to find an alternative explanation for the
mass burial sites in the forest. Sandarmokh is a unique place in Russia: the most
well-documented of all the sites where victims of Stalin’s Great Terror, also
called the Great Purge, were buried in unmarked mass graves in 1937 and 1938.
Historians cautiously estimate the total number of those fallen in that purge at
between 700,000 and 1.2 million people. Nearly 10,000 of them lie in this 25-acre
forest between the towns of Medvezhyegorsk and Povenets, executed over a 14-month
period and buried in 236 communal pits. According to the first-hand account from
NKVD officer Mikhail Matveyev, who commanded the killings (and who lived well into
his old age until the 1970s), he made the victims lie face down in the prepared
trenches before shooting them at point-blank range. Those buried in Sandarmokh
include peasants displaced by Stalin’s collectivization; prisoners of the Solovki
concentration camp and those working on the construction of the White Sea Canal;
fishermen and hunters from nearby villages; literary figures; scholars; scientists;
military and political leaders; clergy of different religious denominations. All in
all, representatives of 58 ethnic groups from several Soviet republics and foreign
states were murdered in Sandarmokh. “This is a special place,” says Irina Flige of
Memorial, an organization that works to document Soviet-era purges. She added: “We
know the names of all the people who were killed and buried there. We know who
committed these atrocities — from the criminal orders issued by Stalin to the
rifleman who stood in the security cordon.” The credit for this detailed knowledge
belongs to Memorial itself. Using information found in the briefly declassified
archives in the early 1990s as well as accounts from those who could still
remember, Yury Dmitriev — a historian and Memorial’s leader in Karelia — led
several expeditions to Sandarmokh beginning in 1997, uncovering graves and
eventually documenting the names of everyone buried here. Since 1998, Sandarmokh
has held the status of a memorial cemetery, with annual remembrance vigils held on
Aug. 5, the anniversary of the NKVD decree that launched the Great Terror in 1937.
For many years, government officials and senior clergy from the Russian Orthodox
Church took part in the ceremony. Several years ago, this stopped. In 2016,
Dmitriev was arrested on charges widely viewed as politically motivated; he is one
of the 305 people currently designated by Memorial as political prisoners. The
repeated expeditions by the Military Historical Society aim to “refute” historical
truth by attributing the remains at Sandarmokh to those killed in World War II —
not Stalinist terror. Such attempts might be an insult to historical memory — but
they fit neatly into the pattern of public rehabilitation of the Communist regime
and the whitewashing of its crimes that began with Putin’s ascent to power two
decades ago. Early in his first term as prime minister, he restored a memorial
plaque to Soviet KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and, after Putin was elected president,
the music of Stalin’s national anthem, both of which had been discarded in the
democratic wave of the 1990s. On Putin’s watch, the education ministry approved a
textbook that justified Stalin’s purges as having created “a new class of
management suitable to the goals of modernization.” Monuments to the Soviet
dictator were erected in Novosibirsk, Arkhangelsk, Penza and other cities. It is
becoming fashionable among Russian officials — especially those in law enforcement
— to put up portraits of Stalin on their office walls. Why should they hesitate
when their president refers to the fall of the Soviet empire as “the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”? For Putin, appeals to the Soviet
past are above all a way of legitimizing his rule. Justifying past repressions of
citizens and aggression against others — and trying to eliminate, to quote the
Karelian minister, the “unfounded feeling of guilt” — is more about Putin than
Stalin. And that brings the quest for historical truth and the power of historical
memory to the forefront of today’s struggle against authoritarianism in Russia. In
this regard, Memorial’s work to protect Sandarmokh is no less important than the
protests against election fraud currently taking place in Moscow. Both sides
understand this well. “Just like the former [Soviet] rulers, the current ones …
realize their lack of legitimacy,” says Memorial’s Irina Flige. “[The Karelian
minister’s letter] is written by those who are mortally frightened of being
punished for crimes — both past and current ones. … We should be in awe of this
text because it reveals their true mindset.” Read more: Vladimir Kara-Murza:
Putin’s Russia feels increasingly like a fortress under siege Christian Caryl: On
his 20th anniversary in power, Vladimir Putin looks weaker than ever The Post’s
View: What does Putin fear? David Von Drehle: What does Trump see in Putin anyway?
Jennifer Rubin: Trump’s subservience to Putin on display

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