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.
— 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.
— 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.
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.
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
