Belarus: Five Years Later

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (centre), Veronika Tsepkalo (left), and Maria Kolesnikova making their signature hand gestures at a meeting in Minsk in 2020. ©Getty Images

Alexander Lukashenko, the former Soviet state farm director turned Belarus strongman, once said that a woman could never run his country. Then three of them challenged him.

Five years on from the biggest protests in Belarusian history, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and Veronika Tsepkalo, both now in exile, have been speaking to the BBC about the price they paid for inspiring hundreds of thousands of Belarusians to take to the streets to call for change.

Their former teammate, Maria Kolesnikova, is now in a Belarusian prison, sentenced in 2021 to 11 years for extremism and plotting to overthrow the government.

Her sister Tatsiana Khomich tells the BBC the family haven’t heard from her since last year.

The three women joined forces in August 2020, when the opposition candidates they were supporting were all forced to end their presidential bids.

Their short-lived alliance made global headlines with pictures of them showing a heart, a fist, and a victory sign with their hands.

They claimed it took them 15 minutes to agree to join forces against Lukashenko, who has been in charge of Belarus since 1994.

“Far quicker than it would take men to do it,” said Veronika Tsepkalo, at the time.

She was left in charge of her husband Valery Tsepkalo’s campaign after the former Belarusian ambassador to the US was barred from registering as a candidate and fled the country fearing arrest.

Maria Kolesnikova campaigned for banker Viktor Babaryko, who was also prevented from standing and arrested ahead of the election.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is widely recognised as the leader of the democratic opposition in exile. © BBC News Russian

But it was Svetlana Tikhanovskaya who ended up on the ballot, stepping in for her husband, the activist and popular video blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, after he too was thrown in jail.

Together the three women travelled around the country, drawing big crowds of supporters eager for change. Their promise was simple: release all political prisoners, then hold a free and fair election.

In 2025, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya speaks about the “emotional uplift” all of them felt during those days.

“We managed to unite Belarusians”, she tells the BBC.

When election day came on 9 August, people flocked to the polls. Svetlana’s supporters were convinced she had won the vote, but Alexander Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory.

This sparked unprecedented mass demonstrations across the country, which lasted for several months. The authorities responded with a brutal crackdown. At least four people were killed – their deaths blamed on the security forces.

But none of the three women who had electrified the campaign, were there to lead the protestors.

Tsepkalo left Belarus just before the election. Tikhanovskaya was detained by the KGB a day after the vote and forced out of the country under threat of being jailed and losing her children to state care.

Maria Kolesnikova’s family are continuing their campaign for all political prisoners to be released © BBC News Russian

Maria Kolesnikova stayed behind. She was arrested in September, after tearing up her passport at the border with Ukraine to prevent a forceful expulsion.

Along with her former boss Viktor Babaryko, she is one of more than a thousand political prisoners still held in Belarus, according to a human rights group Viasna.

Since 2020 tens of thousands of people have been arrested for opposing the regime, many say they have suffered torture and mistreatment while in detention.

Today, any public dissent in Belarus is crushed.

“I sincerely believed that Lukashenko’s regime would fall”, Veronika Tsepkalo tells the BBC.

Like hundreds of thousands of Belarusians who are estimated to have left the county after 2020, she now lives abroad with her family, working at a big tech company in the UK.

Veronika Tsepkalo has won awards for her work defending the rights of Belarusian women. ©BBC News Russian

So what went wrong with the protest movement?

“It was this all-or-nothing approach”, says Tatsiana Khomich, Kolesnikova’s sister who is now campaigning for release of Belarusian political prisoners. “We overestimated ourselves and underestimated what the authorities are capable of.”

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya says she now understands they had no plan and “weren’t ready for any radical change”.

Once a stay-at-home mum who admitted to being shy and lacking her husband’s charisma, she is now recognised as leader of the democratic opposition in exile, and regularly meets heads of state and lobbies for sanctions against Lukashenko’s government.

“If I could transfer my present knowledge, my experience to myself five years ago, I would definitely have felt more confident,” Tikhanovskaya says. “I’ve learned a bit of diplomacy, how to talk to politicians, how to be comfortable around powerful people”.

Svetlana and Sergei Tikhanovsky at a press-conference following Sergei’s release. ©Reuters

Less than two months ago Svetlana unexpectedly got her husband back: Sergei Tikhanovsky was released along with 13 other political prisoners and sent to Lithuania to his family.

It is thought that Donald Trump’s administration was key in securing their release.

Having said in the past that she went into politics “out of love” for her husband, Tikhanovskaya now admits she’s since also fallen in love with Belarus and the vision for her country.

“We’re not going to compete with Sergei about who’s more important, who has more followers et cetera. Sergei will be a natural fit for our movement,” she says.

Tikhanovskaya rarely speaks to Veronika Tsepkalo and in the interview with the BBC doesn’t want to go into details of what happened to their relationship.

Tsepkalo is more candid: she accuses her former “sister-in-arms” of hijacking their movement and pushing her out.

“The trio has broken up”, states Tatsiana Khomich.

Khomich, who is still part of her sister’s team, says all of them now have their own projects.

Tatsiana Khomich says she hasn’t heard from her sister this year. ©BBC News Russian

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya says her priority is working towards the release of political prisoners and lists helping Belarusians abroad and keeping Belarus on the international agenda as her achievements.

Veronika Tsepkalo is sceptical of these successes, calling them “action for action’s sake”.

Back in her husband’s team, she has been campaigning to bring Alexander Lukashenko to international justice.

Tatsiana Khomich thinks that trying to force regime change from abroad is “meaningless”.

“In reality, we’re now much further away from it than we were five years ago”, she says.

Both Tikhanovskaya and Tsepkalo believe at some point in the future there will be a free and democratic Belarus.

When asked to respond to criticism that she had put her own ambitions before her team, Tikhanovskaya says:

“Maybe that’s the kind of thing people who don’t really know me would say. I’d like us to finally hold new and fair elections but I certainly won’t be taking part in them.”

Source: Tatsiana Yanutsevich & Tatiana Preobrazhenskaya, “The women who stood up to Europe’s ‘last dictator,’” The Best of BBC News Russian — in English,” 5 September 2025

Kapela (ensemble) Rej is a group performing traditional Belarusian music. Their main instruments are the duda (Belarusian bagpipe) and the violin.

The ensemble on the recording:
Vital Voranaŭ: duda
Ursula Oleksiak: violin, vocals
featuring Sergi Llena (Spain): frame drum, gaita de boto

The recordings were made in Serbia during the Rog Banata festival in the towns of Zrenjanin (2024, tracks 1-9) and Bečej (2023, tracks 10-13). The album cover photo was taken at the performance in Belgrade in 2024 by Sandra Crepulja.

Released August 27, 2025

Source: Antonovka Records (Bandcamp)

Maria Kalesnikava, musician, activist, and political prisoner, was detained on this day in 2020. She was kidnapped on the Minsk street by the Belarusian authorities and the next day taken to the Belarusian-Ukrainian border to be thrown out of the country. But she tore up her passport and thus could not cross the border. In 2021, together with Maksim Znak, she was sentenced to 11 years of imprisonment (Maksim got 10 years). Now she is kept in Homiel women’s colony.

Kalesnikava is of my age, and five years of her life she has already spent in jail. Since February 2025, Maria and her family have exchanged no letters or calls… At least, she is not in solitary confinement but kept together with other female prisoners.

I’ve not been writing about the political situation in Belarus for a while, but that is not because there is some improvement. No, every day we read about new detentions. This week human rights defenders have recognized 14 new political prisoners, and the authorities have added 68 names to the so-called “extremist list”. All in all, we now know about 1197 political prisoners, 32 foreign citizens among them. A recent case: a 52-year old British citizen (she also has the Belarusian citizenship) was arrested while crossing the Belarusian border and sentenced to 7 years of prison (https://spring96.org/en/news/118604).

But still hundreds stay unrecognized because of different reasons. Without free Belarus, you won’t have peace in Europe.

Source: Julia Cimafiejeva (Facebook), 7 September 2025

Yesterday, I wrote about the five years Maria Kalesnikava had already spent in jail and about 1197 political prisoners in Belarus. And today, we’ve learned about another death.

Political prisoner Andrei Padniabenny, a 36-year-old Russian citizen, has died in Mahiloŭ penal colony No. 15. He was tried twice on criminal charges and sentenced to 16 years and eight months in a medium-security penal colony. He had been behind bars for nearly four years. The exact cause of his death is unknown.

His mother Valiantsina, reported on Facebook:

“My precious grandchildren are left without a father… The only consolation is that no one will be able to torture my son anymore, either physically or psychologically… I believe that God’s justice will reach the guilty, and no crime will go unpunished….”

According to the publication, Andrei died on September 3. This is the ninth death of a political prisoner in Belarus and the second death of a Russian citizen behind bars.

Other political prisoners who died in captivity:

Vitold Ašurak

Aleś Puškin

Mikałaj Klimovič

Vadzim Kraśko

Ihar Lednik

Dźmitry Šlethaŭer

Valancin Štermier

Alaksandr Kulinič

Source: Julia Cimafiejeva (Facebook), 8 September 2025

Something I Learned Today: Red Power

Sean Trischka, “Something I Learned Today” (Hüsker Dü cover)

Marxism did not make many inroads in Indian thought in North America – as opposed to its adoption by Indigenous thinkers elsewhere in the Americas – until the Second World War. Six decades before theories of settler colonialism were developed by Maxime Rodinson for Israel and, in their current academic configuration, by Patrick Wolfe for Anglo-settler states, Karl Kautsky refined the distinction between ‘work’ colonies, where Europeans settled and conducted extermination, and ‘exploitation’ colonies, where the aims were more purely extractive and relied on local labour. But the importance of radical politics for Native American thinkers wasn’t merely abstract. Lenin’s policies on safeguarding Indigenous cultures in the Soviet Union were looked on by many Native Americans as preferable to the forced assimilation initiatives of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. When Native nations petitioned to attend the Versailles Peace Conference, the Wilson administration dismissed them out of hand.

In 1932, the Marxist Nez Perce anthropologist Archie Phinney travelled from Idaho to the Soviet Union. He completed a doctorate at the Leningrad Academy of Science in which he favourably contrasted Soviet management of minority peoples with US federal Indian policy. As Benjamin Balthaser has noted, of particular interest to Phinney was the way that – in theory, if not in practice – the Indigenous peoples of Russia maintained dual identities as Soviet citizens and custodians of their cultures, which retained the right to outright self-determination. Phinney acknowledged the necessity of the developmentalism imposed by the US state but pointed out that it was hardly in Indian interests to become proletarians at the same level as the poorest people in the country. ‘The US government,’ he wrote, ‘feels compelled to rehabilitate [the Niimíipu] and bring them up “to the level equal to that of the average rural white family”. Yet that “average rural white family” is itself in need of a strong dose of “rehabilitation”.’ He argued instead for reforging traditions of common ownership on reservations into democratic co-operatives which would allow Indians to pursue – and exhibit to the rest of the country – alternative paths towards social transformation.

Native-Soviet mutual admiration reached its zenith in 1942, when Chief Fallen Tree of the Mohawk nation presented an Indian war bonnet to a representative of Stalin, whom the Indian Confederation of America voted ‘warrior of the year’. But the rest of the decade saw radicalism weaken dramatically. The interest in Marxism vanished with the Cold War consensus, as figures such as Luther Standing Bear – who starred as an Indian gardener in the Red Scare film Bolshevism on Trial – became a standard bearer for the ‘progressive’ Indian cultural movement of the 1940s and 1950s. More materially, 45,000 Indigenous soldiers had enlisted in the Second World War (the US military relied on code based on the Navajo language). But there were good reasons for Indigenous activists to think that the US state was starting to move in their favour. Roosevelt’s New Deal had included an ‘Indian New Deal’, in the form of the Indian Reorganisation Act, which counteracted some of the measures that had divided Indian lands. His administration closed down Indian boarding schools and other vehicles of violent assimilation, and also sought to re-sovereignise Native lands, including by means of legal jurisdiction. The Reorganisation Act went so far as to include provisions for the state to buy land and restore it to Indian reservations. As a further counter-thrust legal advocates for Natives such as Felix Cohen sought to bring the states back into submission by, for instance, suing them in federal court for withholding welfare payments to tribes. In the following decade, Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal was undermined by Western senators who sought to terminate the status – and take over the territorial holdings – of tribes by using the language of civil rights to insist on their members becoming fully integrated citizens of the nation.

One of Roosevelt’s more enduring reforms was the policy of hiring Native Americans to work at the Bureau for Indian Affairs. Many of the leading Indian activists of the postwar decades held jobs at the bureau, transforming it into a laboratory for reform. They conceived of their mission as preserving New Deal gains and their particular foe was the postwar drive for ‘termination’, by which politicians sought to cut off federal land grants to tribes deemed sufficiently assimilated. The 1956 Indian Relocation Act accelerated this process by moving Indians into cities en masse. The result was predictable: a new revolutionary movement of Native Americans who channelled their sense of dislocation into a new wave of activism known as Red Power.

Source: Thomas Meaney, “Red Power,” London Review of Books, 18 July 2024. My gratitude to Adam Tooze’s Chartbook for pointing me to this article, and to the supremely invaluable Sumanth Gopinath for sharing Sean Troschka’s cover of Hüsker Dü’s “Something I Learned Today.” Something I Learned Today will be an occasional series on this website, akin to El lector ruso and Sunday Reader. ||| The Russian Reader

Shopsh: Circassian Vocal Tradition of Zhiu

As the sun rises on 21 May, marking the Day of Remembrance for the Circassian Genocide, we invite you to listen beyond the silence that often surrounds the wounds of colonialism. In the following article, Bulat Khalilov, co-founder of Ored Recordings – a label dedicated to traditional and post-traditional music from the North Caucasus – reflects on a paradox within Circassian music today: how a culture with rich vocal traditions has, in a sense, sidelined its most distinctive feature, the polyphonic vocal technique of zhiu?

In conjunction with today’s commemorations, Ored Recordings is releasing a compilation, Shopsh: Circassian Vocal Tradition of Zhiu, which highlights the vocal tradition of zhiu as both a form of remembrance and a possibility.

21 May is the Day of Remembrance for Circassians – or, more directly, the Day of the Circassian Genocide.

In 1864, the Russian Empire marked this day as the official end of the Russo-Caucasian War, which had begun over a century earlier in 1763. What Russia celebrated as victory, most Circassians – and many other peoples of the North Caucasus – remember as loss: a brutal war for independence that ended in exile, devastation and what many now call genocide.

That view isn’t fringe. It’s shared by most Circassian historians and civil society voices. To date, only Georgia and Ukraine have officially recognised this as genocide. But across the Circassian diaspora – from Türkiye and Syria to Jordan, the EU and the US – 21 May is marked with acts of remembrance. And yes, those memories echo back home, too – in Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia.

However, most Circassians in the North Caucasus are suspicious of these gestures, considering them to be opportunistic and insincere. Their refusal to embrace recognition from other states usually stems from a desire to avoid becoming a pawn in a larger geopolitical game.

Officially, the Russian state doesn’t like to talk about any of this. The war itself is treated as taboo, its memory reframed as a tool of Western propaganda or a threat to national unity. And yet, every year, people still gather. From moderates to patriots, from Nalchik to Cherkessk to Maykop, Circassians take to the streets – sometimes quietly, sometimes defiantly.

At Ored Recordings, we return to this trauma again and again – not to dwell, but to listen. To ask how this wound still shapes the way we live, create and imagine. Every year on 21 May, we release a concept album. One year, it’s heroic songs from the war. Another, it’s diaspora voices from Türkiye. Or wartime songs of the 20th century. Each time, we try to trace how our people processed a colonial wound through music, or indeed failed to do so.

This year, we chose to focus on traditional vocal techniques in Circassian music. At first glance, this may seem unrelated. But in truth, every serious conversation about the state of Circassian culture circles back – if not to 1864 itself, then certainly to the long shadow it cast.

This release is a compilation of mostly unpublished recordings. Think of it as a teaser – a warm-up – for future albums. In those upcoming releases, we’ll dive deeper into each performer’s story and the recording context.

НокIуэ жи! A prelude of sorts

This essay – and this release – emerged from a simple question: what’s really going on in Circassian music today?

A big part of the tradition is group singing. Usually it’s men (sometimes women, sometimes mixed groups), gathering to sing. The lead voice carries the main melody, while the others hold a choral drone or a call-and-response. This choral technique is called zhiu or yezhiu.

Like in many cultures, group singing wasn’t just about music – it was a way to be together, to make a space for cultural and social connection.

Most Circassians today learned about this from the elders. From people who sang at weddings and late-night gatherings. Or from those who, as kids, would secretly listen to adults sing into the night. But our main source are still the archives – dusty tapes recorded by Soviet folklorists. Interestingly, the folklorists’ archives have ended up becoming tradition-bearers in their own right.

Academic work on Circassian vocal music – papers, dissertations, theoretical frameworks – has had almost no impact on today’s performers. Music theory and actual practice in Adyghe communities have mostly run on parallel tracks, rarely intersecting.

But the sound itself – those dusty Soviet-era recordings collected by ethnomusicologists – found a way through. Once digitised, they slipped into public circulation (sometimes semi-legally) and became a strange kind of bridge: not from scholar to scholar, but from singer to singer, across generations.

Those old recordings remind us that the song and its lyrics are guardians of language, poetic style and cultural memory. And yezhiu? That’s the secret ingredient. The thing that gives it punch. Soviet musicologists put it nicely: yezhiu helps the song “reach the hearts of the people”.

There’s even a sharp old proverb: “Ежьур уэрэдым и щIопщ” – yezhiu is the whip for the song. It keeps the rhythm. Holds the structure together. Gives the song its shape.

And yet – despite this deep knowledge and respect for vocal technique – modern Circassian music mostly revolves around instruments. Not voices.

So we asked ourselves: how did a whole new wave of Circassian music appear – something unthinkable even ten years ago – and why does almost all of it seem to avoid yezhiu, the central tool of our tradition?

[The essay continues at 3/4 online magazine.]

Sources: Bulat Khalilov, “Shopsh: Circassian Vocal Tradition of Zhiu,” 3/4, 19 May 2025; and Ored Recordings (Bandcamp). Thanks to Heikki Hirvonen for providing a link to an essay on the Circassian genocide. Please go to the Ored Recordings page on Bandcamp to download this and other releases and make a generous donation to them as you do so. ||||| TRR

“The Squadron Did Not Notice the Fallen Fighter”

Silly little fly was burning on a candle
Burning the small fry, smoke that is so tender
Little star has fallen into the puddle by the steps
The squadron did not notice the fallen fighter

The dead one did not live, the sick’s not kicked the bucket
The seer was not blind, the sleeper is still tucked in
Merry beating brave hearts (in Morse code would tell)
The squadron did not notice the fallen fighter

No-one was more dear, no-one was more pretty
No-one was more pained, no-one was more happy
There was no beginning and there was no end
The squadron did not notice the fallen fighter

— Eric Boros, “The Squadron,” from Secondhand Guitar, released February 3, 2014 • Music and words: Yegor Letov • Translation by Szarapow

Source: Vialka (Bandcamp). Thanks to Szarapow for the heads-up.

For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.

Military officials responded to her repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying he was on active duty and therefore incommunicado. Then, late last November, two days after they again made that assertion, she learned that he had gone missing on Nov. 1 — from a Telegram channel that helps military families.

“We lost your son,” Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer in Rafael’s unit in charge of family liaison, told her when she traveled to its headquarters in western Russia.

“Lost him how?” she says she responded, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had failed to check in by radio, a search had proved impossible. “How do we search for him?” she says the officer told her.

Variations on that grim scenario have been repeated countless times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense lacks any formal, organized effort to track down legions of missing soldiers, according to bereaved families, private organizations that try to assist them and military analysts. Relatives, stuck in limbo, fend for themselves with scant government information.

The ministry itself declined to comment for this article. Mr. Sokolov, the liaison officer, said in a text message: “You do realize that I can’t comment on anything.”

Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, the hunt for missing soldiers is expected to endure for years, if not decades.

[…]

Source: Neil MacFarquhar and Milena Mazaeva, “Message From the Russian Military: ‘We Lost Your Son,’” New York Times, 3 May 2025

Last year was the deadliest for Russian forces since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine: at least 45,287 people were killed.

This is almost three times more than in the first year of the invasion and significantly exceeds the losses of 2023, when the longest and deadliest battle of the war was taking place in Bakhmut.

At the start of the war, losses happened in waves during battles for key locations, but 2024 saw a month-on-month increase in the death toll as the front line slowly edged forward, enabling us to estimate that Russia lost at least 27 lives for every square kilometre of Ukrainian territory captured.

The BBC Russian Service, in collaboration with independent media outlet Mediazona and a team of volunteers, has processed open source data from Russian cemeteries, military memorials and obituaries.

So far, we have identified the names of 106,745 Russian soldiers killed during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The true number is clearly much higher. Military experts estimate our number may cover between 45% and 65% of deaths, which would mean 164,223 to 237,211 people [have been killed].

20 February 2024 was the deadliest day for Russian forces that year.

Among the casualties were Aldar Bairov, Igor Babych and Okhunjon Rustamov, who were with the 36th Motorised Rifle Brigade when four Ukrainian long-range HIMARS missiles hit a training ground near the city of Volnovakha in occupied Donetsk.

They had been ordered to line up for a medal ceremony. Sixty-five servicemen were killed, including their commander Col Musaev. Dozens more were wounded.

Bairov, 22 and from Buryatia in eastern Siberia, had studied to be a food sanitation specialist but was drafted for mandatory military service and then signed a contract to become a professional soldier.

In February 2022 he went to fight in Ukraine and was part of the battle for Borodyanka during his brigade’s advance towards Kyiv in March 2022. The town was almost completely destroyed. Ukrainian sources say Russian soldiers were involved in the execution of civilians.

Aldar Bairov (left), Okhunjon Rustamov (C) and Igor Babych were all killed in a strike on 20 February last year

Okhunjon Rustamov, 31 and from Chita in Siberia, had worked as a welder after serving a mandatory term in special forces. He was mobilised during a partial draft in October 2022.

Unlike Rustamov, Igor Babych, 32, had volunteered to go to war. He had worked with adults and children diagnosed with cerebral palsy, helping them with physical therapy until April 2023.

In total, 201 Russian soldiers died on that day, according to our data.

A few hours after the strike on the training ground, then-Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu met Vladimir Putin to bring him news of military success from the front line.

There was no mention of the training ground attack, nor was there any word from the Ministry of Defence in its daily reports.

A relative of Okhunjon Rustamov said she had already buried three close family members over the course of the war. “In December 2022, my husband died. On 10 February 2024, my godfather. And on 20 February my half-brother. From one funeral to the next.”

In our analysis, we prioritised exact dates of death for soldiers. If that wasn’t available, we used the date of the funeral or the date the death was reported.

In the first two years of the war, 2022 and 2023, Russian losses followed a wave-like pattern: heavy fighting with high casualties alternated with periods of relative calm.

In 2023, for example, most casualties occurred between January and March, when Russian forces attempted to capture the cities of Vuhledar and Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast.

In the first year of the full-scale invasion, according to our calculations, Russia lost at least 17,890 soldiers. This number does not include losses from Russia’s two proxy forces in occupied eastern Ukraine.

In 2023, the number rose to 37,633.

In 2024, there was no period showing a significant fall in casualties. Bloody battles for Avdiivka and Robotyne were followed by intensified assaults towards Pokrovsk and Toretsk.

In August 2024, Russian conscripts were killed when Ukrainian forces stormed over the border into the Kursk region. From August 6 to 13 alone, an estimated 1,226 Russian soldiers died.

However, the heaviest overall losses occurred during a slow Russian advance in the east between September and November 2024, according to leading US military analyst Michael Kofman.

“Tactics emphasised repeated attacks with dispersed assault groups, using small infantry fire teams, which increased overall casualties relative to terrain gained,” he explained.

After almost two years of intense fighting, Russian forces seized the logistical hub of Vuhledar in Donetsk on 1 October 2024.

According to estimates by the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), from September to November 2024, Russian forces captured 2,356 square kilometres of Ukraine.

Even then, Ukrainian forces at the front did not collapse.

The cost of this advance was at least 11,678 Russian military deaths.

Actual losses figures are likely higher. We have only accounted for soldiers and officers whose names appeared in publicly available obituaries and whose dates of death or funeral fell within this period.

Overall in 2024, according to ISW, Russia captured 4,168 square kilometres of land.

If we assume that our figure of 45,287 confirmed deaths in 2024 is about 40% of the full number, then the total number would be closer to 112,000 fatalities last year.

This means that for each square kilometre captured, 27 Russian soldiers were killed, and this does not include the wounded.

How losses are changing recruitment

Russia has found ways of replenishing its depleted forces.

“Russian recruitment also increased in the second half of 2024 and exceeded Russian casualties, allowing Moscow to generate additional formations,” says Michael Kofman.

One-time payments to soldiers signing new contracts were increased in three Russian regions. Combat salaries for volunteer soldiers are five to seven times higher than the average wage in most regions.

We also class as volunteers those who signed up to avoid criminal prosecution, which was allowed by law in 2024.

Volunteers have become the fastest-growing category of casualties in our calculations, making up a quarter of those we have identified.

In 2023-2024, thousands of volunteers who signed contracts with the Ministry of Defence were sent to the front lines only 10–14 days later. Such minimal training will have dramatically reduced their chances of survival, experts say.

One Russian republic, Bashkortostan, has seen the highest numbers of casualties, with 4,836 confirmed deaths. Most were from rural areas and 38% had gone to fight with no military experience.

The one-time payment for signing a Russian army contract in Ufa is 34 times the region’s average salary of 67,575 rubles (£600).

Calculating deaths from open source data will always be incomplete.

This is because the bodies of a significant number of soldiers killed in the past months may still be on the battlefield and retrieving them presents a risk to serving soldiers.

The true death toll for Russian forces increases significantly if you include those who fought against Ukraine as part of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

An assessment of obituaries and reports of searches for fighters who have lost contact suggests between 21,000 and 23,500 people may have been killed by September 2024.

That would bring the total number of fatalities to 185,000 to 260,700 military personnel.

CLARIFICATION 5 May 2025: This story has been updated to make it clear that the figure of 27 losses per sq km is based on an estimated number of deaths last year of about 112,000.

Source: Olga Ivshina, “How Russia took record losses in Ukraine in 2024,” BBC News Russian, 4 May 2025. This article was also published on Substack on 6 May 2025.

Yegor Letov, “The Squadron Did Not the Fallen Fighter” (1990)

Source: YouTube

Глупый мотылёк
Догорал на свечке
Жаркий уголёк
Дымные колечки
Звёздочка упала в лужу у крыльца…
Отряд не заметил потери бойца

Мёртвый не воскрес
Хворый не загнулся
Зрячий не ослеп
Спящий не проснулся
Весело стучали храбрые сердца…
Отряд не заметил потери бойца

Не было родней
Не было красивей
Не было больней
Не было счастливей
Не было начала, не было конца…
Отряд не заметил потери бойца

Source: Grazhdanskaya Oborona Official Website

Clubbing

In the wee hours of Sunday, 4 May, Russian security forces raided concerts in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, at which, among other things, they asked attendees about their attitude to the war, local media have reported.

In Yekaterinburg, law enforcement officers interrupted a concert at the club Syndrome. As the musicians were performing, people in uniform came on stage, halted the concert, and asked the concert organizers to turn on the lights, concertgoers told the Telegram channel Svet. Ekaterinburg.

“People were ordered to stand facing the walls and told that there would be a document check. [The police] checked everyone’s documents, tattoos, and elbows, asked about their attitudes to left-wing radical movements and to the SMO (the war in Ukraine—ed.), and they checked the messenger apps on their phones. After the check, people were taken outside and ordered to scram,” said one of the guests.

Another clubgoers told the news website E1.RU that police locked him in a paddy wagon, confiscated his phone, and checked his contents. Police insulted the detainee and refused to explain the reasons for the check. According to eyewitnesses, police and Russian National Guard officers took part in the raid. Those agencies declined to comment on this report.

Regular raids by law enforcers in Russia

In St. Petersburg, law enforcers raided a rave party at the [underground] club Kontrkult. A source close to the police told Ren TV that the reason for the raid was that the event had not been “sanctioned.” According to the news website 78.ru, partygoers had their documents checked and were searched for banned substances. The publication adds that the event’s organizers were detained. This has not been officially confirmed.

Footage of the raid on Kontrkult, as posted on the Telegram channel SHOT

Similar raids on various establishments have happened regularly in Russia in recent months. Law enforcers have carried out several raids on fitness centers, in which people were issued military conscription board summonses. Similar raids have been carried out against migrant workers, who also had their documents checked and summonses handed to them, along with members of the LGBT community, who have been declared “extremists” in Russia.

Source: Daniil Sotnikov, “Law enforcers raid clubs in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 4 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Nizhny Tagil anti-war protester Yekaterina Sergeyenko. Photo: Mezhdu Strok, via Svet.Ekaterinburg

💬 Student from Nizhny Tagil fined 120,000₽ in criminal “defaming” case

In Nizhny Tagil, 21-year-old student Yekaterina Sergeyenko has been sentenced for “defaming” [the Russian army]: she was fined 120,000 roubles [approx. 1,280 euros]. According to the news agency Mezhdu Strok (“Between the Lines”), criminal charges were filed over the young woman’s comments in the “Incident Nizhny Tagil” group on the social network VKontakte.

Vechernye Vedomosti reports that at the time she posted the comments, Sergeyenko had a prior administrative conviction for painting sixteen pacifist slogans on buildings in the city. This fact influenced the decision to file criminal rather than administrative charges against her.

Judge Oksana Belkina of the Tagilstroy District Court found Sergeyenko guilty. Although the verdict has not yet entered into legal force, the fine, according to Mezhdu Strok, has already been paid.

Source: Svet.Ekaterinburg (Telegram), 4 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Sunday Reader No. 3: Languages

Haku, “奥二重で見る”

Source: Haku (YouTube)

As a Kyrgyz woman born in the last years of the Soviet Union, I never thought twice about whether my usage of the Russian language was problematic or not — until recently when I reached out to my Ukrainian friend in Russian, and she responded to me in Ukrainian.

I have been thinking about the political aspects of language since then.

Last week I was invited to a podcast to talk about de-colonial feminism in Central Asia by a research group that does memory studies in Kyrgyzstan. There we sat in a warmly lit Bishkek studio in comfortable canary-yellow armchairs — two women of clearly Central Asian descent, with names that mean ‘honey’ and ‘worship’ in our native language, discussing whether the Soviet Union was a colonial empire, and how a more than 100-years history of Russian presence in the region has disrupted and affected the lives of peoples of Central Asia. I am making smart jokes and incisive observations, we laugh, we debate, we lament — all in Russian.

Although this language was not the main subject of our discussion, we comment in passing on it — noting how intangible colonial legacies can sometimes have a constructive element to them.

It is, of course, possible for all of us to drop the language of the colonizer, whether it’s English, French, Spanish, Russian, or Chinese — and speak our own languages, but the ease and comfort of using these when trying to communicate with people outside our cultures is just so tempting! And so then the question is whether to take offense towards the language because it happens to have been “originated” by the ‘big bad’ or to ignore that and make it our own?

Russian was the language of books that took me on journeys across galaxies, of Soviet-era films that fanned the fire of idealism in me, of finding community with other post-Soviet teenagers that, like me, had traveled to the United States as exchange students. We spent the year yell-singing Kino’s songs, making the olivier salad for a New Year’s celebration, and rooting for Evgeni Plushenko in the 2001 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.

It was the language of the early science fiction stories I wrote when I was twelve, of expressing my first heartbreak in broken poetry form, and of clumsily flirting, building alliances, or of standing up to bullies.

It is also the language of differentiation — a tool of categorizing people into social strata, both inside Russia and in the non-Russian republics during Soviet times. My own mother had been ridiculed for not speaking Russian well, considered ‘dark’ and uneducated, uncultured. To this day she gets offended when my Russian-schooled siblings sometimes laugh at the little mistakes she makes when attempting to speak it because it reminds her of how she was treated when she was younger.

Not to worry though — this is a very rare occurrence, because our mom is so strong-minded that she’s bent everyone to her will, forcing everyone to speak Kyrgyz if they wanted to be understood by her. Even our dad, who was a Russian speaker with a beautifully reverberating voice, had mastered the Kyrgyz language for our mother’s sake. My siblings too, although their attempts at translating their jokes and anecdotes from Russian into Kyrgyz for our mom sometimes backfire because they do not take into account the semantic nuances of the two languages. And despite her lack of Russian, she made a successful career in the 90s as a kommersantka — just like thousands of other women who picked up the baton when the system that was oppressing them fell — traveling by bus and train to Moscow, Minsk, Tallinn, and later by plane to Meshhed, ensuring we were never hungry or dependent on anyone.

Maybe that’s a good example of how language does not have to be a cornerstone of someone’s lived experience. Some people choose to speak the oppressor’s language, some people choose not to. As long as there’s a way of making each other understood, even by mixing words or even using gestures, it’s all good.

My Ukrainian friend was so kind and gracious when I apologized for using Russian when I reached out to her, and she sent me a beautiful voice message back in Russian. I could hear she struggled a little speaking it because, as she explained, she had not spoken it in a while. She said she didn’t mind using it to communicate with me, and that she was sorry she hadn’t learned some Kyrgyz by now because she has other Kyrgyz friends too. And I was sorry I hadn’t learned Ukrainian by now. But eventually it was Russian we exchanged these lamentations in, and the question remains open to me — whose language is it anyway?

Syinat Sultanalieva is a human rights activist and researcher from Kyrgyzstan, who writes science fiction on the side when she’s not busy dissecting power structures and dynamics in the region and the world.

Source: Syinat Sultanalieva, “Whose language is it anyway?” Two Old Grumpy Men on Ukraine, 30 March 2025

Lӓysӓn Ensemble of Yafarovo Village
Let’s Get Together Tonight: Mishar Tatar Songs from Orenburg Region

The Mishars are an ethnic subgroup of Tatars. They have their own dialect and their own culture. The main part of the Mishars live in the Middle Volga region and the Urals.

Yafarovo is a Mishar village located in the Aleksandrovsky district of the Orenburg region.

Lӓysӓn Ensemble members: Alfiya Asyaeva, Ramilya Adigamova, Alfinur Dibaeva, Elmira Mishina, Lira Salikhova, Laysen Fatkulina, Fairuza Shabaeva, Nurshida Yusupova, Gulsina Yusupova, Liliya Yakshigulova, Rishat Asyaev (button accordion player).

The ensemble’s leader is Alfinur Dibaeva.

Recorded in the House of Culture of the village of Aleksandrovka on November 18, 2024.

Released February 22, 2025

Source: Antonovka Records (Bandcamp)

Izhevsk long ago nabbed Tula’s de facto title as Russia’s arms manufacturing capital: the Kalashnikov Concern is headquartered there, producing shells, assembling drones, and making rifles. But in a seemingly parallel reality amid the rumble of the factories, young Izhevskers have opened an independent bookstore, and they have also been translating the Udmurt avant-garde of the twenties into Russian and publishing literary magazines. Who are these young people? And how was all of it possible?

“We’ll be having a children’s New Year’s party in there”

Five years ago, Albert Razin, an Udmurt activist and patriot, set himself on fire in the capital of Udmurtia, on the square outside the republic’s State Council building. Razin held a placard featuring a quotation from Rasul Gamzatov: “And if tomorrow my language disappears, I am willing to die today.”

In late 2024, I lived in Izhevsk a stone’s throw away from the spot where Razin had burned on behalf of the Udmurt language. It is the very heart of the city: the Eternal Flame, the republic’s government house, the opera house, a Rostic’s fast-food restaurant, the residence of the head of Udmurtia, and the Kuzebay Gerd National Museum are nearby.

Gerd (a pseudonym meaning “knot” in Udmurt; Gerd’s birth name was Kuzma Chaynikov) was a poet, folklorist, and probably the most important Udmurt of the twentieth century. In 1932, he was arrested along with other prominent members of Soviet Finno-Ugric ethnic groups as part of the fabricated SOFIN Case. [SOFIN was the acronym of the fictitious “Union for the Liberation of Finnish Peoples” — TRR.] The poet was accused of plotting to get Udmurtia and other autonomies to secede from the Soviet Union and establish a Finno-Ugric federation under the protectorate of Finland. Kuzebay was shot in 1937 at Sandarmokh in Karelia. He was exonerated in 1958.

The Gerd Museum’s website advertises a separate exhibition dedicated to the Udmurt national poet. The museum is located in the building of the former arsenal. The entrance to the main exhibit is on Kuzebay Gerd Square, where twenty years ago a monument to the poet was erected. Perched on a rock, a quite youthful Gerd gazes thoughtfully at the former military warehouse. He is writing a poem, apparently.

I am all alone at first, but schoolchildren wearing blue ties later come running into the museum. A museum worker, dressed in a traditional costume adorned with a monisto necklace, greets the children in Udmurt — Chyrtkemesi! — but she immediately switches to Russian and talks about the pre-Petrine history of Udmurtia, that is, before Izhevsksy Zavod (the name of the settlement which preceded city) arose in these parts. Count Peter Shuvalov built an ironworks there with the permission of the Empress Elizabeth. A little later, Izhevsk became the Russian Empire’s virtual arms capital (no offense to Tula).

The rooms I have visited recount this history as well as a little bit of Soviet history (artisanal carpets are intermingled with IZh motorcycles and cars — a total delight!), but I cannot go any further.

“But where is the Kuzebay Gerd section?” I wonder aloud.

“Ah, you wanted to see it?” responds the docent. “Unfortunately, it is impossible at the moment. It was in the room next to the ticket office, but it has been temporarily moved to the warehouse. We’ll be having a children’s New Year’s party in there.”

“Nobody the whole day”

Kuzebay Gerd is to Udmurtia what Pushkin is to Russia. One of the creators of the modern Udmurt language, Gerd also lived a very short life, thirty-nine years (five of them in Stalin’s camps). But over those years he wrote hundreds of articles, poems, plays, and prose works which became the foundation of the living Udmurt language.

The writer gained genuine recognition only during perestroika, and it is only recently that streets and museums have been named in Gerd’s honor and his legacy has been studied anew.

*Sonya, a clerk at Kuzebay Bookstore, puts up an event flyer.*

Kuzebay’s cheerful face can now be seen on posters, lapel pins, and even as an emoji on Telegram. The only independent bookstore in Izhevsk, and maybe in the whole of Udmurtia, bears his name — Kuzebay Bookstore.

Like its spiritual forebear, Kuzebay Bookstore thrives in spite of its circumstances. Today, it is an absolutely metropolitan store that is no shabbier than Vse Svobodny in Petersburg or Falanster in Moscow: Kuzebay stocks the same books on its shelves, and it has the same friendly vibe. But Kuzebay opened a year before the quarantine. Back then, it occupied a small corner at the Center for Contemporary Dramaturgy and Directing. Les Partisans Theater, in which the store’s co-founders, German and Ksenia Suslov acted, was also based there. Kuzebay achieve relative stability in early 2022, after moving to its current location.

*The Kuzebay Gerd Museum in the village of Bolshaya Gurez-Pudga, Udmurtia. The museum is located in a hut next door to the local school.*

“We were a quite small operation during the covid, so we didn’t give a shit whether we shut down or not,” recounts German Suslov. “We were open for deliveries. Back then, the state still paid me twelve thousand [rubles a month] for the fact that I was my own sole employee. I was like, Great, money’s coming in, cool beans. Things have somehow been growing ever since.”

German even now regularly works as a salesclerk and is awfully good at cleverly persuading people who stop by for the latest detective novel by Darya Dontsova to buy family sagas from House of Stories publishers. But the first person I meet in the store is Gosha, a tall thin salesclerk who looks like a Viking sporting a tiny cap. He sits in a cozy swing chair, playing chess on his phone. He is the only soul in the store.

*German Suslov, co-owner of Kuzebay Bookstore and editor-in-chief of* Luch magazine, at work.

“Is it so empty often?” I ask as I peruse Mushroom Kingdom, a wacky book by local artist Andrei Kostylev, better known as Bi-jo.

“Not nowadays, but it used to happen,” says Gosha. “This one [female salesclerk] and I even had a competition to see who had fewer people stop by the store in a day. It was a draw: zero.”

“No one at all for an entire day?”

“Yeah, it was winter, so not a single person came in. But there are always people coming in now. And even if there are no sales at the store, there are sales on Ozon almost every day.”

“The worst thing is poetry readings”

German shows up at Kuzebay about half an hour late for our interview. He is in a terrible rush, as always. The Moscow Non/Fiction Book Fair is coming up: Kuzebay is supposed to represent the publishing house and the store, and we have to send the books out in time. We pull a few boxes out of the car together, while Gosha sits down to check the books and put stickers on them. Like the many-armed Shiva, German simultaneously supervises the process, does the interview, eats a flatbread from the Tatar bazaar, pours tea for everyone, and chats with the customers who do come in.

German Suslov and Andrei Gogolev in the storage room of Kuzebay Bookstore

German has always been an energetic multi-tasker. Although he is not yet thirty, he has been a prominent figure in Izhevsk’s cultural scene for nearly ten years. He used to be an actor at the local independent theater Les Partisans, which exists to this day. But his restless nature needed something else besides theater and the history program at Udmurt State University.

“And so, I thought: the craving for theater, music, cinema was instilled in me by older comrades,” says German simply. “But what were my interests before the theater? I wrote poetry. So, I had to get into the business of poetry. And I quickly realized that no one here was doing poetry seriously.”

According to German, the literary scene in Izhevsk was rather fragmented ten years ago. There were no decent places for young people to publish and perform their work. After graduating from college, many people left for the big cities.

In St. Petersburg, a whole generation of young poets from Izhevsk emerged all at once in the early twenty-teens, including Tatiana Repina, Pyotr Bersh, Ilya Voznyakov, and Grigory Starovoitov, all of whom I know personally. Most of the members of that scene gave up writing poetry a long time ago, although Tanya Repina has achieved some fame, and my friend Petya Bersh continues to write and perform.

“When I left in the early teens, nothing was happening in Izhevsk at all. There were no prospects,” Petya, who returned to his homeland in 2022, told me. “Everything has changed now, of course, and Kuzebay has played no small role in that.”

There was no Kuzebay Bookstore at first, though. In 2016, five actors from Les Partisans dreamed up the PoetUP Contemporary Poetry HQ to consolidate Udmurtia’s most interesting poets, give them a venue, and relaunch the literary scene in Izhevsk.

“The worst thing you can imagine is an open mic poetry reading. It’s hell on earth,” says German, laughing. “And even worse is an open mic poetry reading in Izhevsk with no prescreening at all. So, what did we do in 2016? We started selecting and inviting people. Yes, we would have embarrassing events too, but far fewer. What mattered was what we were striving for. We did not want it to happen that one person would read and all his friends would get up and leave when he finished.”

[…]

Excerpted from: Ilya Semyonov (text) and Natalya Madilyan (photos), “Why does a star gurgle?” Takie Dela, 23 January 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader. I would like to finish translating this fascinating long article (this is the first quarter of it) and publish it in its entirety on this website, but that would take a lot of time and hard work. In the real world, where I have worked as professional freelance translator for nearly thirty years, I would charge 600 to 850 euros to translate this article if someone commissioned me to do it. If you would like to support my work in general and read this article in full, please donate to me via PayPal (avvakum@gmail.com) or Venmo (@avvakum). If you cannot afford to donate money right now, you can help my cause by sharing my work on social media and with friends. Thank you!

Haku, Cover企画】MONO NO AWARE “かむかもしかもにどもかも!”

Source: Haku (YouTube)

Twenty-Five Years

25 years ago, on March 26, 2000, Vladimir Putin won the Russian presidential election, making him the official successor of Boris Yeltsin, who had resigned three months earlier. Putin, who was prime minister at the time and had served as acting president after Yeltsin’s resignation, won 53.4 percent of the vote in what is widely considered the last truly competitive presidential election in Russia to date. Over the next 25 years, Putin would only tighten his grip on power. To comply with the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms, he switched to the role of prime minister in 2008 while his ally Dmitry Medvedev occupied the presidency. After amending the constitution to extend presidential terms from four to six years starting in 2012, Medvedev made way for Putin to run in the 2012 presidential election. Putin won 63.6 percent of the vote, securing a third term in Russia’s highest office.

After winning re-election again in March 2018, Putin once again faced hitting the constitutional term limit in 2024. To address what became widely known as “the 2024 problem”, Putin proposed wide-ranging amendmen[t]s to the constitution in January 2020, which included a change to presidential term limits. While making the rules stricter on paper by limiting Russian citizens to two presidential terms in their lifetime — disallowing the shuffling between positions that Putin had employed in 2008 and 2012 — the amendmen[t] was designed to disregard past or current terms, effectively erasing Putin’s first four terms. The new rule paved the way for Putin to run again in 2024 and to seek re-election in 2028 if he so chooses, which could keep him in power until 2036.

If Putin remains in power beyond 2030, he would become Russia’s longest-serving leader, surpassing Joseph Stalin, who led the Soviet Union for 29 years between 1922 and his death in 1953.

Source: Felix Richter, “Putin’s Grip on Power,” Statista, 25 March 2025

Tequilajazzz frontman Evgeny Fedorov explains to Konstantin Eggert, the presenter of DW’s #Trendy, why Putin is a genuinely grassroots president, what Fedorov’s wealthy fans asked him to play at company parties, and how Russian chanson masqueraded as Russian rock.

Konstantin Eggert: You and I are speaking in Vilnius, where your manager had to look for quite a long while for a venue for your gig because many people turned him down. Does this bother you?

Evgeny Fedorov: Of course it makes me sad. We realize that, in our case, it is unfair. There are artists playing both sides of the fence who are traveling around the world to make money. We are vocal opponents of the war and everything that has been happening in Russia. So it’s a little bit offensive to us, but we realize that this is the price the times make us pay and nothing can be done about it.

— How easy is it for an artist in exile to survive?

— It’s gotten harder. I can’t say that we were a big box-office band. Our music is specific: we’ve always had a fairly modest audience, and we’re used to it. Business wise, we are now cut off from the Russian market and can’t tour Siberia and the Far East. It’s not a big deal, because on 25 February 2022 I personally announced on social media that we would stop doing concerts in the Russian Federation. It was a deliberate (not hysterical) step on our part. We have been coping with these difficulties. We have a small but very loyal, attentive, smart fan base. As it turned out, a significant number of them left the country with us, and so I see in the audience the same people who used to come out for our concerts in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

— In one interview, you spoke about the muteness that overcame you when the full-scale invasion began. Is that muteness completely gone now?

— No, it’s not gone. It has become obvious that I have to reinvent myself, to devise a new language, both creatively and literally. It’s just inappropriate even to remember now some of the things I wrote songs about. I have to change a lot, and this applies to all areas of my life.

Konstantin Eggert interviews musician Evgeny Fedorov, Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 26 March 2025 (in Russian)

— What do you mean that you have to change? You once said that writing protest songs wasn’t your thing.

— I’m not good at it. I tried to voice my rage and grief, all the emotions that were overwhelming me, but it sounded stupid and unnatural. Despite the fact that they were my emotions, I couldn’t express them adequately in songs. We wrote only one [protest] song, “A Machine Full of Evil.” These were the first lines I wrote down in a notebook after the war started. I was watching a war newsreel from Ukraine, and this line came to my mind: “A machine full of evil was crawling.” It’s the only song on the subject where it’s quite obvious to everyone what it’s about. We don’t use any Aesopian language in it.

— Do you think that most people in Russia are just running this “evil machine”?

— No, of course not. I see a huge number of people who were not able to leave [Russia] for various reasons. Some of them deliberately stayed behind to try and destroy the system and to help each other survive. But I’m still horrified to see what a humungous number of people wholeheartedly support this crap.

Tequilajazzz, “A Machine Full of Evil” (2023)

— Among them are people with whom you have collaborated — [Vyacheslav] Butusov, [Konstantin] Kinchev, and a considerable portion of today’s Z-patriots from the cultural realm. Did you already feel at that time that this could happen? Or are those people just interested in the money?

— Almost none of them was a surprise to me. They had obviously been drifting in that direction. You could see that they were going over to that side, they had got their own personal confessors. […] The guys were fusing with the regime, it was out in the open for everyone to see, and nobody surprised me. You know, I had a dream a couple of times that Putin and I were in an office. He says, “Zhenka, sit down, I’m going to take care of business and then we’ll go fishing.” Something like that. I remember the nasty delight I felt in the dream. How cool, I’m hanging out with Putin himself! That courtier’s joy of being near power. I woke up, horrified to discover that I had it in me too, that no one was immune.

The more popular an artist is, the more often they are in the regime’s domain. I have friends who played at ex-President Medvedev’s dacha. I realize that if my music had suddenly appealed to Putin and I had been invited, I cannot rule out that a metamorphosis would have happened to me, and that I would suddenly have been possessed by this despicable joy of being around powerful people. I thank God and our firmness, which we have maintained all these years, and our aesthetic commitments and our ethical commitments, too, that we escaped the danger.

We played company parties three times in our lives. Each time it was a former fan of ours who, as a university student, used to pogo at our gigs, but then had struck it very rich, and so for his birthday or for his company’s birthday he had engaged our band and asked us to play our most hardcore alternative songs. It was always quite funny, because it was obviously the wrong music for a company party. It was just that the guy had bought himself the kind of hardcore show which he couldn’t permit himself to attend now, because he was a “big man,” surrounded by security guards, and so on. But God spared us from all those parties organized by the presidential administration and all those people who were trying to craft the new imperialist mindset.

— Is Putin a people’s president?

— I wish I could joke about it, but I look at people, how they relate to him, and everything that is happening now, and it seems that he is in fact a people’s president, because this type of president did not “go viral” for nothing and enjoys such popularity. It means that he resonates with the people, so that means he is a people’s president.

— What resonates?

— The jokes, the quips, the anecdotes. The man thinks in memes from Soviet movies. He knows how to speak this language and this appeals to people. I remember that my normal, sane friends, when Putin started making all those jokes, squealed with delight: “What a great joke he made!” I said, Guys, what’s wrong with you, it’s a purely cop joke, filled with contempt for people and the belief that no one is without sin, that “everyone shits somewhere,” that everyone is dirty, and if they aren’t, they should be made dirty. I think his practice is based on that.

— And even the war, all the Cargo 200s coming home, doesn’t change that?

— Those people are certain they are fighting for a just cause, they have been convinced of it. We all grew up completely convinced we were the kindest and most generous [people in the world], that we couldn’t be wrong. It’s a very cozy room from which it’s hard to escape and realize that we [do not do] the most magnanimous things. And when we save nations, we are just saving a lane for business.

— In January 2000, when Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitsky was abducted in Chechnya, I realized the new regime were the enemies of the media, and therefore the enemies of everything else that was decent. Did you have a moment when you realized that this was a catastrophe?

— September 1999, the apartment building bombings. It was quite obvious this was regime change, that [the bombings] had been necessary to bring that person to power. I lived with that horror for twenty years, trying to resist, not allowing myself to flirt with Russian chanson, with underworld things, with what Russian rock later turned into — this fusion of the guitars, the image, and the courtyard songs of Russian chanson with all the paraphernalia of chthonic values — with vodka, herring, the banya, and so on.

— You once said that the need for protest songs ended in the 90s and the bourgeois era of just being creative dawned. Was it a good time for you?

— It’s generally normal for people to do creative work and sing love songs. The need to write protest songs is not normal. We liked the fact that rock and roll was no longer a genre persecuted by the KGB and that it was safe to play. We sang about ugly things, often without delving into lofty matters. Our music is about different aspects of human life, both lofty and absolutely ordinary, even shameful. That’s normal. What is happening now is not normal.

— If you look at the last thirty years, what Russian music, literature or cinema has stuck with you?

— A few Boris Grebenshchikov albums for sure. Now I’m just cut off. I can’t listen to anything that I liked three years ago. I turn on my favorite album and realize I can’t listen to it because it takes me back to a life which no longer exists. I’ve become an “anti-old fart.” Because old farts listen to the music of their youth and choose to stay in their time bubble. My bubble has burst. I’m listening to the stuff teenagers and young adults listen to, to weird experimental stuff that doesn’t sound like what I used to enjoy.

I’m reading a lot of hundred-year-old émigré prose right now, which has suddenly become timely. It’s interesting to compare [my experiences with] the experiences of people who left [Russia] between 1918 and 1920. There is this sense of horror at the darkness that surfaced and deluged everything, the mundane details, the executions, the horror at this outbreak of self-righteous darkness, spewing saliva, blood, and shit… The horror is quite comparable.

— Let’s imagine that tomorrow Putin falls, we make peace with Ukraine and give them back the occupied territories, and the political prisoners are released. Would you be willing to go home?

— I don’t want to see those mugs. Where will all these cops, FSO officers, and the people who are in league with them go? A huge number of my friends in Russia are in a terrible situation. What is it like for those people who are on our side, but who are [in Russia]? How do they survive? How do they each struggle in their own way, often just on an aesthetic level? I have a quite pessimistic view of the future. I don’t believe that any of this will change quickly, if it didn’t change in the few years of freedom that Russia had, which people didn’t savor, but decided to go back to the Brezhnev-era twilight.

Source: Konstantin Eggert, “Fedorov: People in the Russian Federation have been convinced they are fighting for a just cause,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 26 March 2025

Tequilajazz, One Hundred Fifty Billion Steps (LP, 1999)

Evgeny Fedorov is a Russian musician, composer, and producer. Having played and composed music from a young age, he is a well-known and highly regarded figure in the Russian alternative rock scene. Since late August 2024, he has been in ICORN residence in Stockholm after openly criticising Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Evgeny Fedorov joined his first band Объект Насмешек (‘Object of Ridicule’) in 1986 and became very popular in the final years of communism, touring and performing across the USSR until the band broke up in 1991.

In 1993, Fedorov formed another band Tequilajazzz for which he continues to be the lead singer and bass player. The band has recorded and released numerous critically acclaimed albums and has toured all over the world.

In addition to Tequilajazzz, Fedorov has been involved in several other music projects, including Optimystica Orchestra and Zorge, and has composed music for Russian films and TV series.

After openly criticising Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Fedorov was harassed and threatened with legal action by the Russian government. He was publicly condemned on state-controlled Russian television.

At the end of August 2024, Evgeny Fedorov began an ICORN residency in Stockholm. He continues his work from Kulturhuset Stadsteatern.

Stockholm ICORN City of Refuge

Stockholm has hosted writers and artists at risk since 1998 and has been an ICORN City of Refuge since the network was established in 2006. Since 2012, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern has been managing Stockholm’s ICORN programme, so far hosting 12 ICORN residents, including Faraj Bayrakdar, Arya Aramnejad, and Zahra Hussaini.

Currently, Stockholm offers three ICORN residences simultaneously. Alongside Evgeny Fedorov, music artist Mun Mun from Myanmar and poet and short story writer Raafat Hekmat from Syria are also continuing their work from Stockholm and Kulturhuset Stadsteatern.

Source: “Musician Evgeny Fedorov in ICORN residence in Stockholm,” International Cities of Refuge Network, 17 March 2025

Russia ranks poorly in transparency, corruption, and democracy in many international indexes. Researchers at The Economist ranked it 150th out of 167 countries in its Democracy Index last year, highlighting the country’s lack of political diversity and frequent election manipulation. Russia also received a worrying score for corruption in NGO Transparency International’s most recent annual report, where it ranked 154th out of 180.

The Kremlin regime’s repression and journalistic censorship are also reflected in a ranking on global press freedom, with Reporters Without Borders placing the country 183rd out of 208 last year—a score that is hardly surprising, considering that Russia still regularly imprisons journalists, including on the grounds of “espionage.” The government also restricts access to the internet and critical content online.

Source: Anna Fleck, “Freedom, Corruption, Democracy: Russia’s Poor Record,” Statista, 26 March 2025

Desperate for Your Love

Montserrat Caballé Festival

7 p.m., 28 March 2025, Oktyabrsky Concert Hall

Duration: 2 hours

Performers: MONTSERRAT MARTÍ CABALLE (soprano), OSCAR ENCINAS (tenor), LUCÍA GARCÍA (soprano), CARLOS COSÍAS (tenor), OLGA PUDOVA

A Russian premiere!

THE MONSERRAT CABALLÉ FESTIVAL

On 28 March 2025, the Oktyabrsky Concert Hall will host a magnificent musical celebration, the first Monserrat Caballé Festival, dedicated to the great Spanish opera singer.

Specially for this event, renowned artists from Spain — relatives, friends, and students of the legendary opera diva — will come to Russia for one evening only! For their one and only performance they have chosen the beautiful St. Petersburg, our country’s musical capital, and the Oktyabrsky Concert Hall, where a distinct atmosphere always reigns.

Monserrat Caballé, whose name has come to symbolize impeccable vocals and subtle artistry, has left an indelible mark on world culture. Having performed over 100 opera roles and almost 1,000 different musical works, she has forever remained in the hearts of not only connoisseurs of exquisite classical music but also fans of musicals and fans of pop rock for performances like the title song from the album Barcelona, the international mega hit she recorded with Queen lead signer Freddie Mercury. Monserrat adored Russia and often visited our country to give concerts. The Caballé family thus decided to hold the first music festival named after her in our country.

The Monserrat Caballé Festival is meant to preserve the superstar’s historical legacy and introduce the public to today’s talents, the most popular performers continuing the Spanish school of opera’s rich traditions.

Among the performers are the great singer’s daughter, MONTSERRAT MARTÍ CABALLÉ (soprano), and the famous Spanish voices OSCAR ENCINAS (tenor), LUCÍA GARCÍA (soprano), and CARLOS COSÍAS (tenor). OLGA PUDOVA, a guest soloist at the Bolshoi and Mariinsky theaters, a phenomenal coloratura soprano who has already conquered Europe’s principal opera stages, is a special guest from Russia.

The artists will be accompanied by OLGA PUDOVA, well known to Russian and international audiences, and the famous conductor MIKHAIL GOLIKOV, People’s Artist of Kabardino-Balkaria. Creative teams from St. Petersburg and Moscow will also be involved in the concert.

The Monserrat Caballe Festival is not only a tribute to the legendary singer but also a grand exuberant celebration, aimed at a wide range of spectators and embracing all generations and the most varied musical tastes.

Don’t miss the opportunity to gift yourself an unforgettable evening full of vivid emotions, beautiful melodies and Spanish passion!

Source: Bileter.ru. Translated by the Russian Reader

On 20 October 2012, during her tour in Russia, Caballé suffered a stroke in Yekaterinburg and was quickly transferred to the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona.

Source: “Montserrat Caballé” (Wikipedia)

In his Literary Life, [Joseph] Brodsky’s friend Lev Loseff explained the background of “A Halt in the Desert,” a poem about the destruction of a beautiful old building: “One night Brodsky watched the first stages in the razing of the Greek Orthodox church from the apartment of his friends, two sisters from a Tatar family,” and called the poem “a meditation on the symbolic significance of what has just happened: Russia has broken with its Christian and Hellenistic cultural heritage.” Brodsky writes:

So few Greeks live in Leningrad today
that we have razed a Greek church, to make space
for a new concert hall, built in today’s
grim and unhappy style. . . .
it is sad that from this distance now
we see, not the familiar onion domes,
but a grotesquely flattened silhouette.

The deliberately created “fresh ruins” and “open altar wounds” recall the recent wartime devastations. The biblical allusion in “Thou who doest sow” suggests the threat of retribution in Hosea 8:7, “they have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Brodsky concludes by hopelessly asking:

What lies ahead? Does a new epoch wait
for us? And if it does, what duty do we owe?–
What sacrifices must we make for it?

Loseff claimed that Brodsky condemns “the collective guilt of a nation that produced this regime, that refused to accept the historical alternative, the heritage of Greece and Greek democracy.” But the Russians did not refuse to accept the heritage of Greece. They were not consulted and had no choice. An atheistic Communist system had been imposed on them by deadly force after the Revolution of 1917 and brutally maintained by all successive regimes. It was now the poet’s responsibility to preserve this culture.

Source: Jeffrey Meyers, “Brodsky’s Travels: From Leningrad to Venice,” Fortnightly Review, 8 November 2020

The Betrayal of Ukraine: Week 2

Tomorrow in Ukraine, Russian soldiers will attack Ukrainians. Russian drones and bombs and rockets will target Ukrainian homes. A criminal war of aggression will continue.

Tomorrow in Saudi Arabia, Russian officials will discuss the future of Ukraine with a handful of Americans, delegated by a president who sympathizes with the Russian view of the war. The Russians will have the luxury of talking about Ukraine without the presence of Ukrainians.

The headlines are about “peace negotiations.” But what is really going on? How should we think about this unusual encounter in Saudi Arabia?

Here are ten suggestions, drawn from years on working on relations among the three countries, and from some recent personal observations at the Munich Security Conference.

1. Be critical of the words on offer. Question the word “peace.” The term used in the media is “peace negotiations.” The United States and Russia are not at war. Russia is at war with Ukraine, but Ukraine is not invited to these talks. Russian authorities, for their part, do not generally speak of peace. They present the talks with the United States as a geopolitical coup, which is not the same thing. The highest Russian officials have repeatedly stated that their war aims in Ukraine are maximalist, including the destruction of the country. Informed observers generally take for granted that Russia would use a ceasefire to distract the United States and Europe, demobilize Ukraine, and attack again. This is not a plan that the Russians are working very hard to disguise. It is a simple point, but always worth making: there could indeed be peace tomorrow in Ukraine, if Russia simply removed its invasion force.

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Antiwar Pianist Polina Osetinskaya Canceled in Russia’s Cultural Capital

Polina Osetinskaya. Photo courtesy of YouTube channel “Yuzefovich” (via MR7.ru)

Christmastime Encounters with Polina Osetinskaya, a festival which was to be held on January 5, 6 and 8 at the Petersburg pub Fontanka 69, has been canceled, as reported January 5 on the pub’s Telegram channel.

“Due to circumstances beyond our or Polina Osetinskaya’s control, the festival will not take place,” the organizers said. The pianist had planned to perform pieces by Bach, Debussy, and Desyatnikov.

In its social media post, Fontanka 69 also said that the festival had been conceived by its director Denis Rubin as a way of financially supporting Osetinskaya. “Live performances are the main source of Polina’s livelihood,” emphasized the organizers.

The pub’s post also says that the tickets purchased for the festival could be returned and refunded on the ticket seller’s website. “We would be grateful if you would be willing to hold on to your tickets and support the artist in this way,” the authors of the post emphasized, however.

This is not the first time Osetinskaya’s concerts have been canceled in St. Petersburg. In September 2022, the pianist was not able to perform on stage at the Great Hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Instead, Eugene Izotov played a concert organized by the Employment Promotion Fund.

Osetinskaya spoke out against the special [military] operation on social media on 24 February 2022. Later, as a trustee of the Oxygen Foundation, she signed an appeal by Russian NGOs to stop the SMO.

Source: “Pianist Polina Osetinskaya’s Christmas Concerts in Petersburg Cancelled,” MR7.ru, 5 January 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Polina Osetinskaya performs the first two movements of Leonid Desyatnikov’s Reminiscences of the Theater (1985)
at 142 Throckmorton Theatre, Mill Valley, California, 4 June 2006