Silence and success

Ukrainian-born singer Anna Asti became a superstar in Russia by ignoring the war. Then she attended the ‘almost naked’ party.

Two weeks ago, Anna Asti seemed poised to finish 2023 on a high note. The Ukrainian-born singer had drawn huge crowds during her latest tour of Russia, her new album had dominated the Russian charts for months, and her childhood pop idol, Philipp Kirkorov had dubbed her the country’s “number one” singer. Then she made the mistake of attending blogger and TV presenter Nastya Ivleeva’s “almost naked” party in Moscow. Like many of the event’s other attendees, Asti faced swift and intense backlash: her upcoming concerts were canceled, and the premiere of her upcoming concert film was postponed. In the nearly two years since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Asti has refrained from speaking publicly about the war in her birth country. Nonetheless, Russian Orthodox activists have now begun calling for the singer to lose the Russian citizenship she recently obtained, claiming she violated Russia’s “traditional values” by attending the scandalous party. Journalist and music critic Lev Gankin recently wrote about Anna Asti’s rise to fame and what it says about today’s Russia. Meduza shares an abridged English-language version of his article.

“Man, another banger!” cries legendary Russian singer Philipp Kirkorov in one scene from the concert movie Anna Asti: Path of the Phoenix. The film’s subject, widely considered to be Russia’s top pop star of the last two years, is visiting Kirkorov at his estate, and not for the first time: their conversation makes clear that a year earlier, she came to show him the songs on her debut solo album, Phoenix.

Now Asti has returned to show the veteran pop star her second album, Tsaritsa. “Do you realize that you’re number one right now?” he asks her as they listen to her music. The 33-year-old responds by laughing, a mixture of pride and embarrassment on her face. Elsewhere in the film, she tells audience members that when she was small, she would be “glued to the TV screen” whenever the video for Kirkorov’s 1995 hit “Zaika Moya” (“My Darling”) would come on. Never would she have imagined, she says, that she’d one day be singing duets with the “coolest artist ever.”

By all appearances, Philipp Kirkorov is absolutely right: Asti is Russia’s most popular singer of the last two years. According to data published by the streaming service Zvuk in late November, 12 of Russia’s 100 most-played hits in 2023 featured her. The music videos for her songs “I Believe in You” and “Tsaritsa” each have more than 50 million views on YouTube. In September, the mobile operator Megafon reported that two of Asti’s songs were its most requested ringback tones, and a month later, Russian media reported that 25,000 people had attended her three recent concerts in Moscow.

But Anna Asti’s popularity extends far beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg. She’s given concerts throughout Russia’s regions, from Petrozavodsk in the northwest, to Sochi near the Black Sea, to Vladivostok in the Far East. The branded tour trucks carrying her equipment through the country bring to mind Santa Claus’s motorcade in Russian Coca-Cola commercials.

To understand Anna Asti’s popularity in Russia right now, we have to consider two questions. The first is what her songs contain. The second is what they don’t.

Many of Asti’s hits can be described as “sad dance” music (which happens to be the title of the most popular track from her previous group, Artik & Asti) — songs that feature lyrics about unrequited love sung over a pulsating house beat. The defining image of Asti’s career at its current stage is the phoenix that soars dramatically over audience members at her concerts; it seems to represent the singer launching her solo career from the ashes after getting rid of the ghosts of her past.

But one key part of Asti’s old career is still with her: her songwriter Dima Loren, a master of danceable rhythms, tear-jerking ballads, and gravity-defying choruses. There’s no question that his methods work: the definitive minor chords, the bridges that build the listener’s expectations, and the wide melodic leaps that connect verses to choruses have consistently led to hits for Asti. Meanwhile, her lyrics alternate between handwringing over romantic situations and moments of triumph and empowerment, often while switching between linguistic registers in compelling ways.

But perhaps even more important to Asti’s success are what her songs leave out. For starters, their subject matter rarely, if ever, moves beyond romantic situations. Even these love stories, however, are described in extremely abstract terms, with no names, meeting places, or context. In the ten songs from her latest album, for example, only twice does Asti reveal the settings of the situations she’s singing about (in one case, it’a kitchen; in the other, a dance floor). Apart from those details, we find ourselves in an imaginary, airless space with no distinct features or even basic information like furniture, clothing, or weather. Instead, we’re given a jumble of literary tropes, such as “You healed my burn, and I your emptiness,” or “You’re my breath of oxygen in a world of CO2.”

It’s likely this level of abstractness that has allowed such a wide audience to identify with Anna Asti’s music: her songs serve as templates into which any listener can project their own story. But her vague lyrics also suggest something else: the singer either can’t or doesn’t want to go on record as saying anything more specific.

Asti’s phoenix-from-the-ashes story is truly impressive; few artists who leave popular bands to pursue solo careers manage to achieve even greater success in their second acts. At the same time, however, there will always be an elephant in the room when it comes to her success: she reached superstar status in Russia amid the country’s full-scale war against Ukraine, which she’s never mentioned in any of her songs or in public comments.

This is despite the fact that Asti was born in Cherkasy, a Ukrainian city that came under Russian shelling as recently as September 2023, and began her music career in Kyiv. According to Ukrainian media, Asti was in the Ukrainian capital on February 24, 2022, when the Russian military first started bombing the city, but she soon relocated to Russia. There’s no doubt that in the Ukrainian context, Anna Asti looks like someone who chose to pursue a career in the aggressor country right at the moment when many of her colleagues, including ones who previously sang in Russian and earned money in the Russian market, cut ties with the country. Just a few months ago, Russian media reported that Anna Asti had obtained Russian citizenship.

In these circumstances, it’s clear why Asti would prefer not to talk about the war (or the “special military operation”) in her songs or in interviews — and why she avoids saying anything that could be subject to misinterpretation. In fact, this is another factor behind her rise to fame in recent years. Anna Asti’s songs, with their lively beats, catchy melodies, escapism, and romantic cliches, reflect the worldview of a broad cross-section of Russian society: people who count themselves neither among the war’s fervent supporters nor among its ardent opponents. The independent surveying project Chronicles called these people the “majority of non-resistance,” while Valery Fedorov, the head of Russia’s state-owned polling agency VTsIOM, said these Russians have “withdrawn into themselves” and are “trying to pretend that nothing has changed.” It’s these people who are the Tsaritsa’s most grateful subjects.

Article by Lev Gankin. English-language adaptation by Sam Breazeale.