Arkady Kots, The Belarusian Collection
Dec 28, 2020

We support rebellious Belarus. We hope that Belarusian workers, “social parasites,” women, students, pensioners, and the entire Belarusian nation wrest power from the bat-brained dictator and don’t surrender it to anyone.

00:00 – Solidarity
03:20 – Bella Ciao
06:28 – Walls
10:11 – Prison Song
13:01 – Song of the Jewish Partisans (“Zog nit keyn mol”)
19:22 – There Is Power in a Union
22:56 – Women’s Song (“L’hymne des femmes”)
25:19 – Counterattack
29:19 – Lusya
33:06 – Forest Song
35:55 – Peramozham
38:53 – Fog
41:10 – Who Shoots at Workers
44:44 – Nothing Works Without Love

#ArkadyKots #Walls #BelarusianCollection

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“We Will Have to Fight for the Future!”
Arkady Kots premieres an album in support of Belarusian protesters on the Novaya Gazeta website
Yan Shenkman
Novaya Gazeta
December 28, 2020

Nikolay Oleynikov, musician, artist, and soloist in the group Arkady Kots:

We have been following the protests in Belarus from the outset. We were happy when our song “Walls” became one of the main [protest] songs there. And we were about to go to Minsk, everything was ready, but then the guys who invited us and promised to organize several concerts at factory gates wrote: “Stand down, all the factory gates have been occupied by the police.”

It is a pity that we were not able [to do the concerts], but it increased our desire to help Belarusians from here.

We saw that our government basically supports Lukashenko, and we thought it important to sing on behalf of those Russians who are unequivocally against the rout of the elections, against the savage crackdown, who support an independent Belarus, a country near and dear to us. Both our new songs and old ones gradually formed a statement that eventually turned into The Belarusian Collection.

First we understood how to make a Russian version of a song we had been trying to do for a long time—“Solidarity,” by the English punk band Angelic Upstarts, written in the 80s in support of the Polish trade unions. It has this interesting moment, atypical for protest songs, especially leftist ones—a reference to religion. “And we’ll pray for our nation through its darkest times,” they sing in the original. Sincere faith can drive a protest very far: priests played a big role in the Polish Solidarity  movement of the 70s and 80s. That victory, by the way, has shown its flip side today. The conservatives [in Poland] are trying to deprive women of the right to abortion, the right is in power, and the system is clearly distant from what the trade unionists fought for back in the day against the regime and the bureaucracy. But when we see how the priests in Minsk have been supporting the protesters, hiding them from the riot police in churches, this is what we want to sing.

Well, and then there are the workers who came to the forefront of the political struggle in Belarus at some point: that’s another great story, of course, and, I hope, it’s a story that hasn’t ended. Without the workers, a revolution is doomed: new elites seize power and continue to exploit people under new slogans.

We saw how our friends from the leftist party A Just World were bullied and imprisoned: two years ago, we recorded our version of the famous Chilean anthem “Venceremos” in Belarusian (“Peramozham”) for them. Masha Shakuro, who is from the Minsk group Boston Tea Party and, simultaneously, the captain of the Belarusian national rugby team, spent two weeks in prison. Two years ago, she and her band to Moscow for our festival Punk Against Electroshock Torture.

We were involved in PartiZan Fest, which, due to the pressure the authorities put on the clubs, could not be held live. Consequently, the festival was broadcast on TV Rain, and they managed to raise $30,000 for victims of the crackdown in Belarus.

In parallel, we have been recording with European musicians. The Partisan Album features anti-fascist songs from the Second World War, which, of course, included the Belarusian “Forest Song” (“Birches and Pines”), as well as our version of “Bella Ciao,” which contains a reference to the Belarusian partisans. Then there are two completely new tracks that you will hear in this anthology: “Jewish Song” by Hirsch Glick, a poet of the Vilna Ghetto, and the experimental composition “Counterattack,” set to a poem by the Warsaw Ghetto poet Władysław Szlengel, who died during the Uprising. The video for “Counterattack” was made by the Belarusian artist and historian Aliaksandra Osipova, who is from Pinsk. Although she realized that she was taking a risk, Aliaksandra agreed to direct a short film for this track. “The main idea was to combine the moving masses of color and the masses of people, to show the tension between the universality of the struggle and the concreteness of the gestures of resistance and defiance,” she says.

It is interesting how at such moments non-obvious connections and identities are actualized, and it turns out that you have many friends with Belarusian roots. Guys from the diaspora have given us “honorary Belarusians” certificates. I sing in Belarusian as a sign of anti-imperial solidarity, while Kirill Medvedev recalls his great-grandfather Semyon Ilyushenko from near Vitebsk, who fought in the Red Army under Frunze, and then created Soviet jet fuel in a sharashka.

In this covid year, it is as if the old map of Europe has been redrawn for us. New lines are emerging, Soviet and non-Soviet roots are connecting into something new, into a future for which we will still have to fight, and not only with songs.

Speaking of fascism. The other day, our bandmate Oleg Zhuravlev, a sociologist and co-founder of Arkady Kots, was brutally beaten and robbed by the cops in Petersburg, after which he was kept out in the cold all night in a cage with the window wide open. And yesterday exactly the same thing happened to the Petersburg historian Pavel Demchenko, in the very same 28th police precinct on Marat Street [in downtown Petersburg]. Now the guys are combining their cases, and communicating with lawyers to make as big a dent as possible in police lawlessness. The Russian police have recently been rapidly rushing down the road to hell, trying to compete with Lukashenko’s police, apparently.

In the meantime, I want to congratulate everyone on the passing year, a year of many terrible deaths, extreme violence and heroism. I hope the future will be peaceful and beautiful. Listen to The Belarusian Collection!

Translated by the Russian Reader. Image (below) courtesy of the Arkady Kots Bandcamp page