Russian police officers escort Diana Loginova, a teenager arrested after videos went viral of her singing anti-Kremlin songs in St. Petersburg, on Nov. 11.Anton Vaganov/Reuters
The scene could hardly have looked more innocent: a young woman playing a keyboard and singing for a small crowd on the streets of a European city. But in Vladimir Putin’s Russia – almost four years into his invasion of Ukraine – Diana Loginova’s performance was a dangerous act.
The 18-year-old, who performs under the stage name “Naoko,” was arrested on Oct. 15, shortly after videos of her singing anti-war songs on the streets of St. Petersburg went viral on the Russian internet.
The other two members of her band, known as Stoptime, were detained the same day. All three have been released twice since then, only to be immediately re-arrested each time.
Ms. Loginova’s alleged crimes were in the lyrics she sang, amplified by the dangerous moment in which she sang them.
“You’re a soldier,” begins the chorus of one song that Naoko and Stoptime performed, as their audience in the centre of Russia’s second-largest city quietly sang along. “And whatever war you’re fighting – I’m sorry, I’ll be on the other side.”
Stoptime, a group of young Russian street musicians, received jail time and a fine on Oct. 29 for a performance in St. Petersburg earlier in the month.
Reuters
The performance led to Ms. Loginova being fined $520 for “discrediting the Russian army.” She was separately charged with “hooliganism” for using obscene language in another song. The reasons for her most recent re-arrest, on Nov. 10, have not been made public.
Marat Gelman, an exiled art gallery owner and onetime adviser to the Kremlin, said the scenes from the streets of St. Petersburg were more dangerous to Mr. Putin’s rule than any political protest.
“Putin’s propaganda has lost this generation of people. And it is very important because these children were born in Putin’s time. They grew up in Putin’s time, and they became musicians in Putin’s time,” Mr. Gelman said in a telephone interview from Montenegro. “These musicians and their listeners, they are not dissidents. They are a generation which is saying no to all of this, to Putin’s ideas, to what Putin has tried to do.”
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You’re a Soldier was originally recorded by Monetochka, a Russian singer and songwriter who left the country shortly after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Monetochka was later added to the long list of artists and other figures considered to be “foreign agents” by the Russian Ministry of Justice.
Naoko and Stoptime also performed another banned song – Swan Lake Cooperative by Noize MC – heavy with political inferences. A black-and-white performance of Peter Tchaikovsky’s famed ballet Swan Lake was played on a loop on Soviet TV screens after the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders, as battles for succession took place away from the public eye, as well as during a failed 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.
“Singing in the streets, songs about the fact that they want to see the Swan Lake ballet on the TV, means they want revolution,” said Olga Borisova, a member of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot, which shocked Russia more than a decade ago by performing a protest song inside a Russian Orthodox cathedral in the centre of Moscow.
Ms. Borisova, who now lives in London, was convicted along with four other members of Pussy Riot in September by a Moscow court for spreading “false information” about the Russian military, with Ms. Borisova receiving an eight-year prison sentence. The in-absentia charges stemmed from Pussy Riot’s own 2022 anti-war anthem, Mama, Don’t Watch TV, which includes the lyrics “It’s time for us to complete the revolution/Let Moscow burn” and ends with a spoken “Ukraine, I love you.”
Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, right, Yekaterina Samutsevich, left, and Maria Alekhina, centre, sit behind a glass wall at a court in Moscow, Russia, on Aug. 17, 2012.Mikhail Metzel/The Associated Press
While Stoptime’s music has a quieter, sadder sound than Pussy Riot’s pounding punk, Ms. Borisova, 31, said the speed at which videos of Stoptime’s performance had been forwarded around the internet caused the Kremlin see the band and its followers as a threat.
“When you see young, cute girls and boys singing songs in the streets of St. Petersburg, very gently, you think ‘Oh, it’s so innocent.’ Then the country shows you, ‘No, no, no, no, no, it’s not innocent. You’re not supposed to like them. You’re not supposed to support them.’ And then people start to self-censor.”
History has shown that protest music can break down walls built by even the most authoritarian of regimes. Mr. Gelman, 64, recalled how the rise of rock music in the late 1980s in the Soviet Union heralded the coming changes, even before Mr. Gorbachev unleashed the forces of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) that are widely credited for helping end the Cold War.
Then and now, the change originated in St. Petersburg, a graceful city of canals just 160 kilometres from Russia’s border with Finland. While that frontier is now tightly sealed – with Finland joining the NATO alliance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine – St. Petersburg has always been Russia’s most westward-looking city.
“In the 1980s, we all listened to Petersburg rock,” Mr. Gelman said. “Musicians from Petersburg were our heroes, even before perestroika. Maybe perestroika came about because of Petersburg rock.”
A woman walks along Palace Square in St. Petersburg.Dmitri Lovetsky/The Associated Press
Few expect change to come soon, just as few could foresee the fall of the Soviet Union until it suddenly collapsed in 1991. In the meantime, the modern Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent has widened so rapidly that even some of its staunchest supporters have been caught up in it.
For 25 years, Sergei Markov was one of the loudest pro-Putin voices inside Russia and especially in Western media, where his fluent English and penchant for speaking in soundbites made him a go-to source for journalists seeking to understand what was happening inside the Kremlin walls.
Mr. Markov was an adviser to Mr. Putin in the early 2000s, when the long ruling Kremlin boss was still consolidating his power, and later sat as an MP for the United Russia party founded by Mr. Putin.
But in August Mr. Markov was added to the same list of “foreign agents” as Monetochka, a list that now includes more than 1,000 individuals and organizations. Mr. Markov’s reported transgression was to speak too favourably of Azerbaijan at a time when the country’s government was involved in a dispute with the Kremlin over the deaths of two Azerbaijani nationals in Russian custody.
Among other measures, each new posting on Mr. Markov’s clamorous Telegram account is now preceded by a warning that “this material was produced and distributed by a foreign agent” and thus should only be read by those 18 and older. Designated foreign agents are also prohibited from playing any role in election campaigns, or the education of minors.
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When contacted by The Globe and Mail, Mr. Markov declined to be interviewed, and said he was trying to get the designation lifted. “I was and am a supporter of Putin and his policy,” he wrote in a message.
Mr. Gelman said Mr. Markov’s fall from grace showed the new level of paranoia that has spread inside the Kremlin since the start of the war in Ukraine. Mr. Markov, he said, had stuck to the Kremlin’s message in his Telegram posts, but had made the mistake of putting that message into his own words.
“In Stalin’s time, it was absolutely the same. The second wave of repression targeted the Bolsheviks,” Mr. Gelman said, referring to the Communist faction that initially propelled Joseph Stalin’s predecessor, Vladimir Lenin, to power in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
“Today, it is not enough to love Putin. It is important that you love Putin in a specific way. No steps to the right, no steps to the left.”