Rock conformists

How We Lost the Anti-War Movement

The propaganda cliché “Russia is rising from its knees” does not mean economic success or the discovery of new methods of cancer treatment, but something completely different. Russia turned out to be able to be a participant in several conflicts at once in different parts of the world at the same time, Russia now has new models of weapons that can destroy external enemies and deal with internal enemies no less effectively. Russia can raise the stakes in the international "Game of Thrones" indefinitely.

Of course, we scold the regime on this occasion and, of course, for the cause, but Russian society carries no less problems, which, in theory, should develop antibodies of pacifism in response to state saber-rattling.

But the voice of the opponents of the war is almost inaudible.

Anti-war demonstrations gather about two dozen intellectuals in major cities. Anti-war concerts are held with the participation of a couple of unknown punk bands in clubs for 200 people under constant pressure from the FSB. There is no single pacifist movement in the country, and its potential supporters are even deprived of their own musical voice, since Soviet and post-Soviet rock in its moral degradation has reached the tanks and recruiting centers of the Ministry of Defense at the Invasion festival. How did we come to such a deplorable result?

Increasingly, 1994, the year the first war in Chechnya began, comes to mind as a starting point. Then the TV screen was literally torn apart by burnt tanks and residential areas, smashed to dust by aircraft, kneeling ragged and emaciated “our guys”, who were somehow foolishly taken prisoner by smiling bearded militants, refugees and all the rest of the video sequence of an inhuman and unjust war. And how did the classics of Soviet rock and the young people who came to the stage in their footsteps reflect on this picture? No way.

Songs that had at least some relation to those events can be counted on the fingers of two hands. Yuri Shevchuk traveled to Chechnya and brought back The Dead City. Christmas" and "The boys were dying terribly." "Dead Dolphins", in which the vocalist himself was a Chechen, and the son of the actor Zolotukhin sat on the drums, tried to shout "Children from Hell". St. Petersburg "Mashninband" on his debut album "Zhelezo" recorded the angry and frank song "Sniper" to the limit. "Megapolis" made a cover of the eternal like this world Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind Marlene Dietrich. The purely underground "Western Front" - regular participants in the Russian Breakthrough festivals organized by Letov and Limonov - had the song "Grozny City". Here, to be honest, is the entire "list of ships."

Anti-war and anti-state pathos for rock and roll is a natural thing. He was born as part of the process of deconstructing the culture of the older generation, forever stained by two world massacres and the construction of concentration camps. John Lennon, David Peel, Jefferson Airplane, Simon and Garfunkel, Jim Morrison, Pink Floyd and many others, along with the leftist press, essentially opened a second front behind the lines of the US Army that fought in Vietnam. Their songs, recorded or played with a guitar, were played at huge anti-war rallies, where thousands of young people burned American flags and their draft cards, refusing to go to die in a distant country across the ocean in order to prevent the “reds” from coming to power.

But what about ours? They were silent just at the moment when it was necessary to tear their throats.

Russian rock never became the soundtrack for anti-war protests, Russian literature failed over the years to produce anything like Catch 22 or Johnny Got a Rifle, Russian poetry soared in drug and alcohol empyreans and endlessly experimented with style.

Two years after the start of the war, almost the entire formal and informal intelligentsia stood up under the banner of the “Vote or Lose” campaign to take part in the most fraudulent and deceitful election campaign in the entire modern history of Russia. Thanks to some reminiscences and the current interview on Yuri Dud's channel, we now know how much they paid for it and what was the exchange rate for “birthright” for lentil soup mixed with the blood of Chechen children and conscript boys. The underground (predominantly post-punk) at that time was having an affair with national Bolshevism, suffered phantom pains from the collapse of the USSR and stalked for the revival of the empire. After 20 years, their dreams seem to have begun to come true - but something is not visible on their faces.

Having injected themselves with the virus of conformism and demonstrative apoliticality, the creators of words and consonances fell asleep and forgot how to sound in the same key with their time. Perhaps the conscripts sent for slaughter listened to the Nautilus in their headphones, only they found there not answers to questions, but a banal “pull”. And one should hardly be surprised at the almost complete musical silence that shrouded the current wars in Ukraine and Syria, or the “tank invasion”.