‘We swept into Moscow in Gorbachev’s limousine’

Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant on his love affair with Russia before the ‘cancer of Putin’

“Alas they don’t release our records there, though as we all know we are the most popular group in Russia,” Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys is quoted as saying to his bandmate Chris Lowe, in Chris Heath’s 1990 book about the iconic British duo, Literally. While Tennant quickly adds that he “never ever believed” it to be true, the claim was probably no exaggeration at the time, as Western synth-pop experienced a surge in popularity in glasnost-era Russia, giving rise to new subcultures and dozens of Russian imitators.

However, much like their Western role models, these artists were often dismissed in Russia as popsa — a pejorative term used to contrast them with more “serious” music, primarily Russian rock, which revolved around themes of political resistance. Indeed, many in Russia still unfairly lump the Pet Shop Boys in with the purely commercial, producer-driven music of that era due simply to their synth-based sound, ignoring the group’s uniquely intellectual approach to pop music. While Russia has always featured prominently in the duo’s work, most notably in their composition of a score for Sergey Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin, in recent years the band has become more vocal than most Western artists in addressing the rising levels of political repression in the country, even writing songs about Vladimir Putin and Alexey Navalny. Novaya Gazeta Europe’s Andrey Sapozhnikov asked Neil Tennant about his long fascination with Russia and what drives the duo's outspoken criticism of Putin’s regime.

I have been interested in Russia since reading a book when I was a young boy about the 1917 revolutions. It fascinated me that the Russian empire was replaced by another empire, the Soviet Union, which unleashed a lot of energy but rapidly became a brutal dictatorship under Stalin, a 20th-century Ivan the Terrible. Since then I have read a lot about Soviet culture, particularly the work and struggles of Shostakovich and Prokofiev and other artists, writers, musicians. This interest fed into the lyrics I wrote. For instance My October Symphony, or indeed our first hit single, West End Girls: “In every city, in every nation / From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station.”

The first contact the Pet Shop Boys had with Russia was in 1988, during the first exchange visit of Soviet and British teenagers to each other’s countries. We were delighted to discover that, when the Soviet kids were asked who they’d like to meet in London, they said the Pet Shop Boys. And so we met them and discovered we had a Soviet audience.

We filmed part of the video for Go West in Red Square. Russia was politically and economically “going west”, so it seemed relevant and funny to have statues of Lenin pointing west.

A few years later communism collapsed and the Soviet republics became independent countries, and in 1993 we travelled to Russia for the first time to launch MTV Russia. While we were there we filmed part of the video for Go West in Red Square. Russia was politically and economically “going west”, so it seemed relevant and funny to have statues of Lenin pointing west.

We were met at the airport by a driver in a big limousine that they said used to be Gorbachev’s. Those days in Moscow, there were still three lanes: two going opposite ways and then another in the middle for important people. So we swept into Moscow in Gorbachev’s limousine.

A few years later, I returned to Moscow to record a choir singing on a new song of ours, A Red Letter Day, partly inspired by the changes we had seen in Russia on our first visit. In the late nineties we started to visit St. Petersburg regularly. It was thrilling for me to be physically present in streets that had so much historical resonance, but it was also impossible to ignore the victims of the economic problems that followed the implosion of the Soviet system — old ladies, for instance, selling possessions on the street.

While politicians argued about the right economic approach, we met young people setting up their own businesses, thrilled that they could travel abroad. Clubs were fun and there was a wild freedom in the air. Once, when we couldn’t get a taxi, the police drove us back to our hotel from a gay club! We enjoyed hanging out with a few friends we’d made. A young woman who was the daughter of the former Mayor of St. Petersburg — her name is Ksenia Sobchak — was briefly part of the clubbing crowd.

Brian Eno and his family lived in St. Petersburg for a while, and we attended the opening of his show at the Russian Museum. A few years later, our friend the British artist Sam Taylor-Wood had a big show at the same museum and we threw a crazy party for her in a new restaurant. We considered making an album in St. Pete (as expats called it). I remember a wonderful white night when we toured the canals of St. Petersburg in a boat, eating caviar and drinking wine.

When Putin was manoeuvred into power 25 years ago, it felt like it could be a positive thing: he was going to take on the oligarchs and improve the economic situation for Russians. But when I asked a friend in St. Petersburg what he thought about Putin, he gave a one-word answer: “Stalin.” I assumed he was pessimistically exaggerating, but he was right and I was optimistically wrong.

In 2005, we performed in Red Square, headlining the Russian part of the international Live 8 event, a day of concerts in eight countries in support of the Make Poverty History campaign and invoking the spirit of Live Aid. Putin had apparently given permission for the event to take place on this historic site next to the Kremlin. On that day, it really felt like Russia was part of the free world. This feeling was not to last.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, Moscow and St. Petersburg were regular destinations on our world tours and you could see these cities, particularly Moscow, becoming more and more prosperous. But simultaneously you became aware of human rights issues; the managed elections; the presidency passed to Medvedev and back to Putin; the gradual descent into a dictatorship presiding over a managed democracy. The media were curbed and controlled. Independent media outlets were gradually shut down.

Anti-gay legislation was passed and vicious homophobic activity encouraged. A British TV presenter, Reggie Yates, made a chilling documentary following homophobes in St. Petersburg who were trapping and attacking gay men — a strong indicator that things were getting weird. The police certainly weren’t going to drive you back to your hotel from a club anymore. Ksenia Sobchak, our clubbing acquaintance, was a candidate in a presidential election — allowed to stand by the Kremlin to maintain the illusion of genuine democratic choice.

There were regular aggressive attacks on former Soviet republics: cyberattacks in Estonia, border conflict in Georgia, and of course the issue of Ukraine. It felt like the citizens of former parts of the Russian and Soviet empires saw Russia as a nightmare past they didn’t want to return to when the possibility (and for the Baltic states the reality) of EU and NATO membership beckoned.

Putin gradually indicated his ambition to rebuild the Soviet empire starting with his famous comment, “The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”, and in doing so he became a recruiting sergeant for NATO. Having experienced the reality of Soviet cold war subjugation, most of the former eastern bloc states had already joined NATO, so why wouldn’t Georgia and Ukraine also want to join when Putin threatened their stability and territorial integrity and seemed to resent that they didn’t see themselves as provinces of Russia? Putin lives in a 19th-century past where provinces are annexed. Crimea, for instance.

We have seen the optimism of Russia opening up, and the tragedy of it closing down.

Throughout all of this, we and other western musicians continued to perform in Russia. I continued to write occasional lyrics inspired by Russian themes. For instance Kaputnik, which is superficially about a guy angry at the breakup of his relationship but is really about Putin and the former Soviet republics: “I’ll never recognise your new independence / I’ll say you wish you hadn’t lost all you had / And then suggest an intervention is needed / by someone like me who knows you’ve gone mad.”

Our last two concerts in Russia were at big private parties: the annual staff party of a large industrial concern in Yekaterinburg and, in 2019, the 50th birthday party in St. Petersburg of a successful businessman whom we had originally encountered more than 20 years previously when he was a young clubber, setting up his first business. He’s now an exile.

We have seen the optimism of Russia opening up, and the tragedy of it closing down. Why does Russia live out an exceptionalist fantasy? Is the repressive past impossible to escape and Putin just the latest autocrat? Is Russia as a country locked in a political cycle of abuse? When it’s reported that a 12-year-old girl has been arrested in Russia for making an anti-war drawing, how can you think otherwise? Being a Russian gay activist is now to be labelled and punished as an “extremist”.

For Russia to move on from the cancer of Putin will require a revolution of attitudes, a rejection of Putin and Stalin. It will require frank discussion of the history of Russia and the Soviet Union — like that for which the human rights group Memorial, which commemorated those persecuted in the Soviet era, was closed down by the Putin regime, and similar to the de-Nazification process in postwar Germany.

Reparations must be paid to Ukraine. Then Russia could become what surely everyone wants: a peaceful and prosperous country positioned in Europe and linking it to the east, rejecting its past as a bully to both its neighbours and its own citizens; an integral part of world civilisation. This is a huge task and it begins with the retreat of all Russian (and North Korean) troops from Ukraine, followed by the arrest and trial of Vladimir Putin. We can only hope for this red letter day.

I do not imagine that anyone really cares what we think about Russia, but you did ask.