History is written by foreign hands: musical interlude

War is coming, Cold and wet, long and cruel. Run, brother, run (1997). Andriy Kuzmenko, the Ukrainian Skryabin. Where to find the truth when brother turns on brother

Time for some music. We’ll have a look at the good - Andriy Kuzmenko - and the bad/ugly - Svyatoslav Vakarchuk. Nationalism, corruption, euromaidan mysterious car accidents, and predicting war back in the misty year of 1997. Kuzmenko was the only popstar who decided to say the truth about all these things, and he may have paid for it with his life.

I’ve written here several times about Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, the popstar who got in and out of politics. His ultra-liberal, pro-western Holos party was the favorite of the Atlantic Council.

Vakarchuk himself had little time for Ukraine and flew off to California, where he threw himself into studying the works of his beloved Fukuyama. The latter also made many statements praising Vakarchuk and hoping he would become Ukraine’s president.

Unfortunately for the Atlanticists, Vakarchuk’s abilities don’t seem to go beyond taking his shirt off at concerts. He gave up on politics rather quickly. And while he presents himself as patriot number one nowadays, he only finds time to do world concert tours.

Back in the 2000s of course, he often played in Russia. Ukrainian social media users often like to poke fun of this air-headed hypocrite by posting old videos of him speaking in Russian and defending his Russian compatriots.

Vakarchuk made a return to headlines last year when his fans got mobilized at his concert, which didn’t bother him at all. It also emerged that his brother works as a mobilization officer.

Music in Ukraine has long ago become an arena for politics. I’ve written here about nazi rap and nazi punk. And just about all popstars have become some kind of variation on Vakarchuk.

But there was one popstar who certainly had principles - Andriy Kuzmenko, also known as Skryabin. Unlike Vakarchuk, Kuzmenko didn’t go on to live a coddled life in California. Instead, he died in a car accident in 2015.

When you listen to the lyrics of his songs, let alone his final interviews, it isn’t hard to see why many believe his death wasn’t accidental. He felt no fear whatsoever in criticizing the most sacred myths surrounding the war and the euromaidan ‘revolution of dignity’.

Social war

Skryabin was unique in the fact that his songs addressed the issues faced by the majority of Ukrainians - poverty, emigration, the struggle to survive.

The following lines are from his song ‘Ruin’, whose music video features scenes from Skryabin’s impoverished west Ukraine. His lines about how ‘everyone else plays roles in a film about fools’ ring particularly true in a truly apocalyptic era where the president is a former TV comic:

My country has Kyiv, Volyn, and the Carpathians,
Donbas and the Black Sea, Odesa and Lviv.
And in it, only the deputies live lavishly,
While everyone else plays roles in a film about fools.
Clenching their teeth, people stand and let the motorcades pass,
Earning only a bottle of wine in a month.
A Ukrainian’s greatest joy – to make it to tomorrow,
We’ve all been in trenches for years, though this isn’t war.

And my country is a complete ruin,
Proudly walking in caps and sweatpants.
And my country is a complete ruin,
How can one not love their land that much?..

No wonder one of the top comments on the above reads:

This is one of the few true patriots of Ukraine who is remembered in both Lviv and Donetsk.

Another of his most famous songs is called ‘we got screwed’:

I think, dude, we got screwed!..

I had a Country, I loved it
For its cornflower eyes, for people—like ships.
I spent half my life with it,
Pressing my body against its warm earth.

Na-na-na, na-nai-na, na-na...

But now it's terrifying here—I’ve fallen out of love,
Its eyes turned gray and angry, its ships rusted.
We dreamed of making this place a paradise,
But now we realize—we just got screwed!

Chorus:
Like fools, they tricked us behind our backs,
Did their deeds, flushed us away,
Me and you—straight down the drain,
Flushed us away!
They just screwed us over,
Like fools, they tricked us behind our backs,
Did their deeds, flushed us away,
Me and you—straight down the drain,
Flushed us away!

There are many of us, I’m not the only one,
We'll board the train and scatter everywhere.
Let someone else search for happiness
Among the crows that peck at you.
Because here—we just got screwed!

Maidan

Skryabin was one of Ukraine’s few unifying figures. Singing in Ukrainian, and hailing from the Lviv region, he certainly didn’t conform to the stereotype of the ‘aggressively ethnonationalist west Ukrainian’. On the contrary, in songs like ‘warm winter’ (2009), he sung:

Dark clouds have covered our sky,
Greedy people take everything for themselves.
And you and I—saddened to the core,
Fighting like flies against a wall.
It’s a disaster, nothing like this exists elsewhere,
They play with us like puppets,
Pit us against each other,
Make up new laws for us.
For us, it's destruction—for them, just a joke.
Listen, brother, something's been wrong here for a long time.

What difference does it make who is who?
What language we speak—it’s all the same.
Just let us live in peace.
We’re fed up with your evil.
We’ve all been the same for a long time.
You’ll never understand
That east and west stand together.
Just let us live in peace.
In peace! (In peace!)

We never know what to expect from you,
Every morning, waking up is terrifying.
The radio only brings bad news,
Repeating every half hour.
A warm winter—
In that country, there’s not even snow.

Aesthetically, the contrast is stark - where Skryabin’s music videos featured ordinary, working class Ukrainians, Vakarchuk focuses on rarefied urban hipsters, the privileged nationalist minority he belongs to:

Thematically, compare Kuzmenko’s call for unity to Vakarchuk’s ‘Shoot’, which Azov enjoys using in its military porn mashups. ‘Shoot’ was released in 2013, when Ukraine’s western-funded media was doing its best to stoke the fire of social unrest against then-president Yanukovych. Vakarchuk, unlike Kuzmenko, enthusiastically played his part in warming up violently divisive passions during the euromaidan. The lyrics of the song:

Shoot!
Tell me, why are you afraid
To take this final step?
Come on!
Let it be the way you want.
I’ve already paid for my lesson…
Farewell, my little angel.
Go on! Pull the trigger.