Artists held to account for taking Moscow's cash to perform

The National

3 days ago

Baklanova, along with most other people in the city, wasn't in the habit of going to air raid shelters for the first couple of years of the full-scale invasion, but that's changed given the intensification of attacks lately. 'It's also because the Russians have shitty, imprecise weapons, and I live very close to an old Soviet defence industry factory in central Kyiv, which they shell almost every time they hit our city. I know one of their missiles could easily miss the factory and hit my house. It's been very rough since things intensified, and Bella is on antidepressants because of it.'
A stalwart of the Kyiv electronic music and cultural scenes, Baklanova's roles have included communication and co-curation at Cxema, a Ukrainian independent cultural organisation and the biggest rave party in Eastern Europe, leading communications for Kyiv's K41 cultural hub, contributing to online and offline music and social activities including the Tight platform for contemporary music and visual art, and the LUST queer party series. She has also written for prestigious publications including Resident Advisor, Year Zero, Highsnobiety, Mixmag, The Wire, DTF Magazine and United24 Media.
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Soon after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she decided to start using her platform in the music industry to expose the dubious morals of two sections of the electronic music community: artists, most but not all of them from Europe and North America, who continue to accept bookings from Russian clubs and festivals, and Russian artists – most notably the Siberian techno superstar Nina Kraviz – who support the Putin regime, either openly or tacitly by remaining silent about its crimes.
Baklanova does this through social media, creating posts that list the artist and the event in Russia that they have agreed to play at, with the artists in question tagged. She has also been working on a website for some time that should be launched soon, on which it will be possible for promoters, agents or anyone else in the music industry to search artists' names and see if they have accepted Russian money.
There are two main cohorts of Western artist willing to accept bookings in Russia these days – ones who actively support the Putin regime and its war in Ukraine, and ones dazzled by the high fees currently offered to foreign artists by Russian events, and too ignorant of the situation to realise why they should refuse. The first group are heavily outnumbered by the second, Baklanova says.
A prominent example of the first is the New York artist Ron Morelli, the head of L.I.E.S. Records, one of the most influential and respected electronic music labels of the 2010s, and still a force in this decade too. He gave no outward signs of the direction in which his mind was drifting until last summer when he appeared on a podcast with heavy Maga sympathies and let loose a hurricane of far-right, anti-immigrant, misogynist bile, and fawning praise for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Morelli is on the bill for July's Outline Festival in Moscow – and is presumably very much looking forward to the experience.
'There are some people like Morelli, but the main reason people play there now is money,' Baklanova says. 'I have a friend who is an established artist in the European scene who was recently invited to play at Signal Festival near Moscow, and the proposed fee was €5000. In Europe, you get paid that sort of fee if you're a superstar, or if not a superstar then something not far below that.
'They're offering that kind of money to artists who'll play for €300 in Berlin, so the motivation is pretty clear. It's attractive for people who don't care about politics to go and play and cover their bills for the next year. And when we highlight this and criticise them for it, they start coming out with all this 'philosophical' stuff about how they're doing it to go and support the oppressed people of Russia. We've found that they'll say almost anything to avoid looking like what they are: greedy and ignorant.'
Even cursory knowledge of how the Russian government has treated its indigenous music scene since the invasion gives the lie to this straw-man argument. 'They oppressed and oppressed the existing scene there step by step and started to control it fully pretty soon after the full invasion,' Baklanova says. 'Now in Moscow, there's a huge new club which has opened with the support of Moscow's mayor and is booking foreign artists for huge fees using money from who knows where. There is no independent, underground culture in Russia now, and if there is, it is deeply underground and secret, and those running it wouldn't have the money or the ability to invite artists from the West to play.'
Any artist accepting a booking from a Russian club or festival now is, therefore, automatically lending their support to the culture-washing efforts of the Putin regime. There's no attempt to hide that fact either – reportage from last year's Outline was broadcast on the Russia-1 state propaganda TV channel. Baklanova posted the footage to her Instagram account. In it, the reporter boasts that 'despite the sanctions, the festival welcomes artists from the USA, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Switzerland'. As Baklanova asked the artists involved in the caption of her post, 'Do you feel like you've been used?'
So what is her message to any artist who might be considering taking a gig in Russia? Baklanova's answer could just as easily apply to Europeans and North Americans who have grown weary of hearing about the Ukraine war, or are even turning against the idea of continuing to support Ukraine.
'My message is to discover more,' she says. 'Watch more documentaries about Russia and Russia's intentions in this war and other wars. Be realistic and recognise that it's a matter of time before Russia attacks Europe, that you are not safe there and that it's better to listen to people who are going through this war.
(Image: Supplied)
'Also, the first and second years of the war were totally different to this year – people in Ukraine are exhausted, they have PTSD, and many of us have died. It affects everyone – one of my best friends died on the frontline at the end of May, and honestly I cannot connect these two worlds, the world where my best friends die defending Europe and the world where other Europeans are going and playing for the Russian occupants.
'So my message is to be more empathetic and realistic, and to make sure you keep your eyes on what is happening in Europe as well as what's happening in the Middle East, and keep remembering how cruel this war is.'
Baklanova's friend who died recently was a tattoo artist named Roma Sova who Baklanova worked with at K41, where he was part of the security team. He joined the army at the beginning of the full-scale invasion – one of many prominent people from Kyiv's creative scene who have fought and often died on the frontlines while people from parallel scenes in Moscow and St Petersburg carry on with their lives and book Western artists to play their clubs and festivals.
Roma featured prominently in videos from the frontlines over the past three years, and he was honoured with a banner after his death by fans of the famously politically engaged German football club St Pauli.
'He is a hero and he died a hero, for all of us,' Baklanova says.
'His sacrifice, and the sacrifices of thousands of others who stood up against this evil, shouldn't be ignored.
'Europeans and Americans shouldn't be carrying on happily with Putin-supporting Russians during this genocide while Russia continues doing business as usual, as if they haven't destroyed millions of lives.'