Stage performance of Russian folk music and dance has symbolized notonly Russian folk culture, but Russianness itself for roughly 150 years.Performing Russia is the first book to investigate how and why intellectuals,entrepreneurs, and government policymakers have invented and reinventedRussian folk performance. Drawing upon extensive interviews with leaders,participants, officials, and villagers in nine cities and five provincial areas,Laura Olson explores Russian folk music as a negotiated site of national,local and personal identity. The book pays particular attention to the 1970sand 80s, when the anti-establishment folk revival movement becameextremely popular among students and intellectuals; and the post Sovietperiod, when the increased availability of private funds for folklore activitiesand national preoccupation with self-definition have contributed to theflourishing of folk performance. Olson explores the contemporary move-ment’s links with nationalist, Cossack revival, and other political groups, aswell as with aesthetic trends in the performing arts, such as avant-garde,pop, and world music. The book will be of great interest to both specialistsand general readers interested in Russian Culture.

Laura J. Olson is Assistant Professor of Russian at the University ofColorado, Boulder. She has been researching and performing Slavic folkmusic since 1987.

Performing Russia

BASEES/RoutledgeCurzon Series on Russian and EastEuropean StudiesSeries editor: Richard SakwaDepartment of Politics and International Relations, University of KentEditorial Committee:George Blazyca, Centre for Contemporary European Studies,University of PaisleyTerry Cox, Department of Government, University of StrathclydeRosalind Marsh, Department of European Studies and ModernLanguages, University of BathDavid Moon, Department of History, University of StrathclydeHilary Pilkington, Centre for Russian and East European Studies,University of BirminghamStephen White, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow

This series is published on behalf of BASEES (the British Association forSlavonic and East European Studies). The series comprises original, high-quality, research-level work by both new and established scholars on allaspects of Russian, Soviet, post-Soviet and East European Studies inhumanities and social science subjects.

1 Ukraine’s Foreign and Security Policy, 1991–2000Roman Wolczuk

2 Political Parties in the Russian RegionsDerek S. Hutcheson

3 Local Communities and Post-Communist TransformationEdited by Simon Smith

4 Repression and Resistance in Communist EuropeJ.C. Sharman

5 Political Elites and the New RussiaAnton Steen

6 Dostoevsky and The Idea of RussiannessSarah Hudspith

7 Performing Russia – Folk Revival and Russian IdentityLaura J. Olson

Performing RussiaFolk Revival and Russian Identity

Laura J. Olson

First published 2004by RoutledgeCurzon11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby RoutledgeCurzon29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 2004 Laura J. Olson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted orreproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafterinvented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN 0–415–32614–1

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

ISBN 0-203-31757-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-38757-0 (Adobe eReader Format)(Print Edition)

Illustrations viAcknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

1 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music in Pre-Revolutionary Russia 16

2 A Unified National Style: Folklore Performance in the Soviet Context 35

3 The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement 68

4 Revival and Identity after Socialism 106

5 Power and Ritual: Russian Nationalism and Representations of the Folk, Orthodoxy, Imperial Russia and the Cossackry 138

6 Performing Masculinity: Cossack Myth and Reality in Post-Soviet Revival Movements 160

7 The Village Revives 176

8 Making Memory: How Urban Intellectuals Reinvent RussianVillage Traditions 204

9 Conclusion: Folklore and Popular Culture 221

Appendix: List of Interviews, by interviewee and by location 236Notes 241Index 274

Contents

Figures0.1 Soloist and State Academic Ossipov Balalaika Orchestra,

Moscow, 16 January 1999 32.1 Folk chorus, celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Pushkin’s

birth, Moscow, 6 June 1999 512.2 Piatnitsky Choir Dancers and Orchestra, U.S.television

production ca. 1983 563.1 Pokrovsky Ensemble performs ‘Tsar Maksimilian’, Moscow,

12 December 1998 683.2 Andrei Kabanov and Ataman Aleksandr Degtirev at

‘Singing Rus’ Festival, Vorob’evka, 10 September 1998 793.3 Pokrovsky Ensemble performs in Engel’s, Saratov oblast,

20 July 1978 944.1 Stanitsa Ensemble, ‘Folklore Spring’ Festival, Moscow,

20 April 1999 1134.2 Iulia Fatiushina, ‘Foklore Spring’ Festival, Moscow, 20 April 1999 1154.3 Ivan Kabanov and Izmailovskaia Sloboda Ensemble, Moscow,

28 Ocotober 1998 1264.4 Ivan Kabanov and Izmailovskaia Sloboda Ensemble, Moscow,

28 Ocotober 1998 1274.5 “Little Spindle” Ensemble, ‘Ëlka’ Christmas concert, Moscow,

30 December 1998 1305.1 ‘Singing Rus’ Festival, opening ceremony procession, Vorob’evka,

10 September 1998 1405.2 ‘Singing Rus’ Festival, closing ceremony fireworks, Vorob’evka,

13 September 1998 1505.3 Men from Bolotnoe and Krasnoiarsk sing after a group fistfight:

local priest looks on, Bolotnoe, May 1999 1546.1 Zabava Ensemble with Cossack swordplay, Vladykino,

6 January 1999 1676.2 Cossack teachers at summer camp perform at a celebration,

Volgograd oblast (1995 video) 1737.1 Members of local singing ensemble sing for visitors; Elena Bogina

records, Kochemary, 29 October 1998 1807.2 Members of a local singing ensemble, Ermolovo, undated photograph 1887.3 Members of a local singing ensemble for visitors, Elena Bogina (right)

listens, Liubovnikovo, 17 October 1998 1978.2 Members of Zabava lead local children in dance, Vladykino,

6 January 1999 2148.1 Local young man in mummer’s costume, Vladykino,

6 January 1999 215

Illustrations

I wish to express gratitude first to the many people who aided my researchand travels in Russia. The Kabanov family, Natal’ia and Katia Giliarovy, theGlumovy, Kozlovy, and Karimovy families, Viacheslav Asanov, theMinyonok family, and the late Dmitri Pokrovsky, all offered immensesupport, hospitality and guidance and were the source of innumerableconnections. I am beholden also to Ol’ga and Galina Bologovy, ElenaBogina, Dmitrii Zakharov, Julia and Tania Smirnovy, Ol’ga Nikitenko,Elena Loktionova, Valerii Zhuk, Marina Mironova, Petr Dudin, VladimirPovetkin, Natal’ia Popova, the Bessonovy family, Elena Boronina, SergeiStarostin, Aleksei Shilin, Natasha Zhuravel’, Marina Novitskaia, ZinaidaGubareva, Valentina Kubrakova, and the Ivanovy family.

The Moscow Linguistics Institute sponsored me as a scholar, and myunofficial scholarly ‘home’ was the Moscow Conservatory; the Union ofFolklore Ensembles also provided support and materials. The AmericanCouncil of Teachers of Russian offered critical administrative help andfunding in Moscow. My research was also funded by the National Councilfor East European and Eurasian Research, the Social Science ResearchCouncil, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. I received essential andvery competent assistance from the Interlibrary Loan department ofUniversity of Colorado Libraries.

Barbara Engel gave me the idea to write this book and offered invaluableadvice and comments at many stages of researching and writing. MarkLeiderman’s and Eric Naiman’s comments and ideas on chapters and draftswere particularly inspiring.

I much appreciate the labors of those American colleagues whocommented on chapters and/or papers; they include Donna Buchanan,Rimgaila Salys, Natalie Kononenko, Elizabeth Kostova, Michael Finke,Julie Lancaster, and Thorn Roby. Martin Daughtry, Laurel Isbister, andArthur Joyce provided suggestions regarding methodological questions. Ithank my colleagues at CU-Boulder for taking on extra teaching and admin-istrative duties during my absences and while I was writing intensively.Warm thanks go to student assistants Greg Wuthrich, April Veen, andSvetlana Nevostrueva. My gratitude goes to this book’s anonymous

Acknowledgements

reviewers for Routledge-Curzon for their insightful comments and sugges-tions, to copy editor Jonathan Dore for his well-reasoned challenges to myarguments, and to editor Peter Sowden for ushering the book through tocompletion competently and efficiently.

For access to, and permission to use, field recordings and other unpub-lished materials I thank Natal’ia Giliarova, Andrei Kabanov, and ViacheslavShchurov. Every effort has been made to trace the rightholders of copyrightmaterial included in this book and to provide an appropriate acknowledge-ment. Any rightholder whose work is not appropriately acknowledgedshould please contact the author and the publishers so that such acknowl-edgement might be made in any future edition of the book. Unlessotherwise noted, all translations from the Russian are mine.

Research leading up to this project was supported by a Henry Hart RiceForeign Residence Fellowship from Yale University and a FulbrightResearch Grant to Bulgaria. My deep gratitude goes to members of the YaleSlavic Chorus, particularly Elizabeth Johnson Kostova, Vlasta Maric, andDenise Bowles-Johnson, and of Rozmarin, particularly Regina D’Amico,Barbara Andrews, and Susan Lucibelli, all of whom helped to stimulate mypassion for Slavic folk music. Countless thanks are due to Jean and CarlOlson, who helped to plant and cultivate the seeds of my love for folk music,and to Michael Henry, who generously offered support during the finalstages of the project.

viii Acknowledgements

On a cold evening in January, 1999, I found myself trying to avoid patchesof ice as I tramped through the dark streets of Saratov, the provincial capitalin southern Russia. I was accompanying two 16-year-old girls and a 12-year-old boy as they went Christmas caroling. The girls wore traditional ruralattire from the early twentieth century: hand-woven wool winter coats,embroidered at the openings, and flowered wool headscarves. The boy wasdressed for a traditional Christmas masquerade in a mask made out ofanimal skins and cloth. I wore a down parka and carried a digital taperecorder.

We looked for houses and apartments that showed signs of the occupant’spresence and knocked loudly on the door. As soon as someone opened, theteenagers burst into a traditional caroling song and a series of rhymesencouraging the householders to give generously. They held out a pillowcasefor any offerings. Since the tradition of caroling had long been extinct inmost rural areas (although its roots are in agrarian rather than urban tradi-tion) the young people knew they had to educate those whose doorbells theyrang. When one old woman asked what to give, Ksenia, the self-appointedleader of our group, told her, ‘Give anything you have, cookies, candies,anything. Earlier, in ancient Russia, there existed this ritual of caroling.’ Theold woman said she had not prepared anything and did not have anything togive. Ksenia cheerfully told her, ‘Happy holiday to you, then!’ Those whogave treats were rewarded with a rhymed blessing: ‘Let God give to thosewho live in this house! May you have many chicks and piglets. May your ryegrow thickly.…‘

At the time, I did not perceive the irony in our use of this formula: it wasjust part of caroling. In fact, I was focused on learning the words of therhyme so I could chant along. But now, on revisiting the scene in the light ofmemory, I see how profoundly out of place this bright invocation was, as itresounded through the dim halls of urban apartment buildings. These cityfolk did not believe in the magic of caroling, which traditionally wasthought to bring good luck to those who are not stingy with the carolers.And not only did the apartment dwellers not have chicks and pigs, but whatthey really needed was a promptly paid salary, a return of their recently-

Introduction

devalued life savings, and stable prices in the stores, all of which had becomea fleeting fantasy after the sudden and severe economic crisis of August1998.

This irony may have been perceived by those who slammed the door inour faces, and certainly by the one woman who yelled sharply through theclosed door, ‘You found some time to carol! We don’t need carolers!’ Tothese Ksenia addressed a traditional rhyming curse: ‘May there be devils inyour courtyard! May there be worms in your garden plot! May your littlechildren become sick with night blindness!’ Ksenia and the others hadlearned these songs and rhymes at rehearsals of the folk ensemble of whichthey were members. (CD track 1)

The teenagers did not seem discouraged by the lukewarm reception: theyreasoned that this was just the beginning of ‘restoring’ this tradition (thiswas their third year of caroling in town), and it would catch on after a while.The director of their ensemble was not so idealistic; she later told me theritual would probably never catch on, but it ‘didn’t hurt to do it.’ Personally,I was exhilarated: this was revival in action. It was not just a show, but asincere attempt to bring back a lost tradition. And clearly, it was spurred bythe children’s own initiative. It was not a program that someone had orga-nized for them, but a grassroots movement. As one of the young womentold me, explaining her involvement in the ensemble, ‘this is ours, it is some-thing Russian…In my opinion, we should preserve all this, because whoknows where we’re headed with our culture?’1

Eight days later, back in Moscow, I attended a concert that was alsosupposed to show and help to revive ‘something Russian.’ Called ‘Russia’sChildren Sing,’ it was a showcase of the best children’s Russian folk-singingensembles and soloists from all over the country. Most of the participatinggroups and soloists had won awards at previous contests. Here the winnershad the chance to perform in an opulent setting, the Tchaikovsky concerthall, and be accompanied by a prestigious folk orchestra, the OssipovOrchestra (Figure 0.1; CD track 2).

Since I had attended an earlier Moscow contest of children’s folk ensem-bles, I thought I knew what to expect, but I was disappointed nonetheless.Most of the children behaved on stage not like children, but like miniaturecopies of professional singers. They had mannered gestures and voices, andwere coifed, outfitted and schooled as if for a beauty pageant (indeed, mostwere girls). The ‘folk’ costumes were ornate and flashy, many with shiny goldornamentation. The orchestra’s presence and the hall’s plush setting helpedto intensify the atmosphere of professionalism. It was obvious this self-conscious, poised style was the goal for both the young people and theirteachers: this was considered to be the highest echelon of folk performance.Clearly, they were being groomed to enter the sphere of mass-producedpopular culture. If they succeeded in rising to the top, these children couldmake brilliant careers, like professional folk-pop singer NadezhdaKadysheva, whose concerts regularly attract huge audiences and whose face,

2 Introduction

framed by a Russian-style headdress, adorned chocolate bars and boxes ofcosmetic soap during a marketing blitz in 1998.

Folk music had not always been framed in this way. The notion thataccompanied soloists should sing – with emotions and gestures – a series ofsongs unrelated to each other in content dates back to the eighteenthcentury when opera and ballet, imported into Russia from Western Europe,were supplemented by intermission acts called divertissements. These actsbecame a self-standing genre of entertainment – what is known today inRussia as estrada, or stage show. In the nineteenth century, performers intro-duced Russian folk songs as an appropriate form to be sung on stage invenues ranging from the restaurants and bars frequented by the emergingmerchant class, to the clubs and theaters of the elites. Thus, folk musicbecame a viable commodity.

Despite its century-long tradition, the version of Russian folk musicoffered by the children’s concert was diametrically opposed to what I consid-ered to be truly ‘folk.’ Here, even though direct evidence of commercialismwas absent, I was dismayed to find its seeds in the glitzy dress and over-acting. Furthermore, I readily perceived the irony inherent in the use ofrefined voices, music, and costumes, in a setting and configuration usuallyemployed for the performance of classical music – to represent what wassupposed to be the culture of peasants.

Each of these cases exemplifies a different way of ‘performing Russia,’representing Russianness through performance of folk music and dance. Asinstances of the interaction between urban and rural culture in Russia, these

Introduction 3

Fig 1: Soloist and Ossipov Balalaika Orchestra

scenes are emblematic of the many intriguing issues that the performance ofcontemporary folk music raises for cultural historians. Among them aresuch questions as the intersection between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture; the rela-tion between the people (narod) and the intelligentsia in Russia; and theconstructed quality of memory and tradition in relation to post-SovietRussia’s re-examination of its cultural identity. This book is an attempt toaddress these questions by studying the historical and contemporarycontexts in which Russian folk music has been produced.

Although the two examples above might at first glance seem like differentphenomena, they are part of the same cultural dynamic. Despite my ownpersonal preference for the first mode and my distaste for the second, bothconstitute conscious uses of rural culture by urban dwellers for the purposesof cultivating a sense of national identity. Both reflect the same irony: in thelate twentieth century, urban young people are representing themselves as‘the folk,’ the Russian peasant of centuries past. Their performances suggestthe Russian intelligentsia’s appropriation of the culture of their historicalOther – the Russian peasant. Although the term ‘appropriation’ may soundpejorative, I mean it to serve only a descriptive function here. Just likeplaster casts of Roman sculptures that appear as decoration in Americanpublic places, the utilization of Russian folk music in urban settings todayconstitutes a borrowing of an art object. If the plaster sculptures are oftenused to advertise or increase the cultural capital of the possessors, soRussian folk music is used to advertise Russianness, to inject a feeling of‘something Russian’ into present-day culture.

It is clear that in the context of post-Soviet Russia, names, objects,images, and music with a ‘folk’ quality do increase one’s cultural capital. InChapter 5 I give several examples of how folk culture has become cachet inthe Russia of the late 1990s. In a particularly striking trend, some elemen-tary schools, including private schools attended by the children of ‘NewRussians’ (nouveau-riche Russian businesspeople), are now featuring classesin folk arts. Special teachers are hired to teach folk singing, dancing, andcrafts – during school hours, not just as after-school hobbies as was previ-ously the case. Children learn to improve their pronunciation and spelling byworking on folk proverbs, which formerly were the oral lore of uneducatedpeople. These children, and thousand of others across the country, arelearning to perform Russia.

But does this use of folklore constitute appropriation? My application ofthis term to the contemporary Russian context is problematic because ofhow Russians see themselves. Even though approximately 73 percent ofRussians live in cities as opposed to rural areas, the majority of them experi-ence regular connection with the rural world.2 Because migration patternsthroughout the twentieth century have emphasized out-migration from thevillages to cities, many Russians city-dwellers have been recent transplants.Since the second half of the nineteenth century there has existed a traditionwhereby many urban Russians make yearly summer visits to a dacha – or to

4 Introduction

the homes of parents or grandparents who have remained in villages.3 Theyrent houses and/or garden plots in villages near their city homes in order toescape from the urban atmosphere (including its heat and pollution) and togrow needed vegetables, often staying for months. If for two months out ofthe year one’s urban family uses an outhouse, collects water from a well, andeats home-grown vegetables, then one’s cultural identity is affected by thatexperience. One is less likely to think of oneself as living a life separate from– or substantially different from – that of farmers.

Indeed, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has beenmuch confluence between city and village culture. Villagers have assimilatedurban fashions and traditions, while city-dwellers have retained – with adap-tations – beliefs, habits, and customs from rural traditions.4 The linkbetween village and city is borne out by the usage of the word for ‘folk.’Today’s Russians – especially those not in positions of power or wealth – areapt to speak and think of themselves as part of the narod, the people, thefolk. As Nancy Ries has shown, the term narod conveys for Russians amythic conception of Russianness. It encompasses both a national identityand a class identity: ‘narod implies “the people” as distinct from those whohave power, or…those with wealth.’ Narod often means ‘the victimizedpeople,’ and implies that they are ‘faithful, devout, brave, simple, modest,honest, innocent, solid, strong, self-sufficient, all-enduring, long-suffering,and much deserving.’ While intellectual Russians might not seem likely toinclude themselves in this idea of narod, in fact as part of conversation theymight ‘identify themselves with it in a number of contexts.’5

Yet it has been my experience in conversing with academic Russians whowork directly with folklore that they are supremely conscious that they arenot ‘the folk.’ To them, ‘the folk’ are undereducated farm workers, thosewho most closely resemble the primitive peasants that Romantic ideologistshad in mind when they used the term. There is a palpable tension, then,between these two notions: the folk is both ‘us’ – the nation, the people –and also ‘not-us,’ – the primitive, uncivilized rural-dwelling lower classes.

The tension is present in the very meaning of the term ‘folklore.’ AsGerman Romantics defined the concept of Volkskunde, the ‘folk’ (das Volk)were peasants whose verbal and musical art would help to define the nation’sessence. They were considered to be a homogeneous mass, undifferentiatedby individual, regional or ethnic differences. Thus, their culture reflected thenational spirit; by contrast, the artistic production of the higher classes‘carried the stamp of individuals and thus was not part of Volkskunde.’6

Because the folk were assumed to live apart from the influences of industri-alized civilization, it was thought that they could show how people had livedin ancient times.7 By thus defining and naming ‘the folk,’ and collecting andstudying their oral and material artistic production, German intellectualscreated an Other that was, nevertheless, conceived as an essential part ofthemselves, and provided a means of viewing and defining themselves.Folklore was defined by the elites as that which was not theirs, and appropri-

Introduction 5

ated as that which must be their own because it defined their Volksgeist, ornational character. In Russia, during the past two centuries, folklore arti-facts have similarly been treated as tokens of ethnic and national identity.Indeed, since the late nineteenth century the appropriation of folk culture bymainstream culture has played an enormous role in shaping Russian culturalidentity.

In this context to buy milk from the farmer next door is not the same asto perform Russian folklore: the first is an everyday act of consumption,while the second is a conscious act of representation. The nature of folkloreis such that people rarely label their own aesthetic production as folklore. Inthis sense folklore is not folklore until someone else ‘hears’ it – that is, labelsit as such. Any use of folklore by those who call it folklore constitutes asearch for authenticity and/or for national origins. As recent cultural criticshave argued, notions of collective identity, essence, and authenticity arecultural constructs, invented for particular political reasons. Assertions ofgenuineness are ‘always subverted by the need to stage authenticity in oppo-sition to external, often dominating alternatives.’8 It is this process ofinventing authenticities and national symbols – and asserting them asnatural – that forms the focus of this book.

Thus, this is not a study of Russian folklore as such, but of folklorism. Idefine folklore along with many contemporary American folklorists as thegrassroots expressive practices of any group of people who share at least onecommon factor. Instead of limiting the ‘the folk’ to uneducated rural peopleonly, this definition recognizes that educated urban dwellers also often haverich folklore traditions – for example, urban myths, tavern jokes, funeralcustoms, and wart cures.9 By contrast, folklorism is the conscious use offolklore in popular, elite or officially sponsored culture. When the folklore ofrural people is performed on stage in venues organized by culturalproducers, it has become folklorism. Paradoxically, this is the case even ifthe performers are themselves rural dwellers. Folklore becomes folklorism assoon as it is consciously manipulated, scripted, organized, institutionalized,published or marketed. If the participants in a ritual are conscious of theirperformance as folklore – as something precious, authentic, and worthpreserving – then it is folklorism.10

Any attempt to revive an ancient tradition, then, results not in the literalreanimation of an extinct form of social intercourse, but in its metamor-phosis. This study does employ the word ‘revival’ because it is used byrevivalists themselves and is a commonly known term. Yet in fact, the desig-nation is a misnomer because traditions are not revived, but constructedanew. Traditions that have been reconstructed by revivalists are second-generation folklore – that is, folklorism.

However, as the German theoretician of folklorism Hermann Bausingerhas pointed out, just because something is second-generation folklore doesnot mean it is inferior. Folkloristic phenomena can, like folklore, serve thefunction of increasing group consciousness and consolidating group identi-

6 Introduction

ties. True, their main function is often that of entertainment; but, inBausinger’s words, ‘many customs have long had the character of entertain-ment.’ To criticize folklorism as commercial, fake, and second-rate and topraise ‘real folklore’ as archaic, authentic, and pure reveals the elitism of theauthor of the criticism. In any art-culture system, all the aesthetic categoriesexist not a priori but in relation to one another, and definitions are fluid:folklore can easily become folklorism.11 Indeed, ‘whoever plays ‘real folkculture’ off against folklorism’ by fetishizing the former and denigrating thelatter ‘thereby closes the circle in which folk culture is forced to mutate intofolklorism.’12As we will see in this study, during the past 150 years Russianfolk revivalists have engaged in this process of denigrating certain folkloricforms while asserting the authenticity of others. Their involved self-justifica-tions aside, however, the Russian folklore revival movement in the 1980s and1990s has developed its own spontaneous, authentic traditions that shouldbe regarded – but not fetishized – as true folklore. Not only does folkloreoften become folklorism, but folklorism may come full circle and becomefolklore.

A Search for Origins

As an intellectual who researches and performs folk music and dance, I amsubject to the cultural predicament described above, in which constructionsof the folk are taken as natural, folklorism is misconstrued as folklore, andcertain forms are fetishized while others are decried. My differing reactionsto the two events described at the beginning of this chapter display thisproblem: in the first case I felt I had stumbled upon ‘authenticity,’ whereas inthe second I was put off by ‘kitsch.’ Contemporary anthropological theorydemands that my narrative not only look outside myself at the actions andwords of others, but also self-reflexively to consider my own participation ina (both real and implicit) dialogue.13

I entered into this cultural dynamic in 1986, when I came to YaleUniversity to do my doctoral work in Slavic Language and Literatures. Thatyear my life was profoundly changed when I joined the Yale Slavic Chorus, agroup of 20 women who performed arranged Slavic folk songs in campuschurches. I fell in love with the open, strong voices, close harmonies andinteresting rhythms of this music, which sounded so unusual to my Westernear. I marveled at the complexity of the musical constructions we sang. Whohad created such amazing material? I wondered whether the picturesquestories we told during concerts – of women singing together throughouttheir lives, during childbirth and at each others’ funerals – were true. Andhow did this folk music compare with the American folk music I had grownup with, which consisted of songs popularized by such folk revivalists asPete Seeger and Judy Collins, and the four-part-harmony barbershop style-songs that my mother learned in her local Sweet Adelines chorus. What I had

Introduction 7

loved most about that folk music was its sing-along quality: in my family’sinformal context, one learned the basic melody and a harmony, and then wewould improvise an arrangement. I had loved the feeling of being musicallysurrounded by voices singing different renderings of the same song.

I did not find out where Slavic folk music came from until 1989, when Itook a year’s leave of absence from graduate school to explore the contextsof folk music in Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Russia with two recent Yale gradu-ates (Elizabeth Johnson and Vlasta Maric) who had previously conductedthe Slavic Chorus. They approached me with the suggestion to travel toEastern Europe to ‘find out what people really sing in villages.’ They, too,wondered about the sources of the music we had been presenting to audi-ences as ‘Slavic folk music.’ We began our research by traveling to Bosnianvillages with the middle-aged father of an acquaintance of ours, who hadfamily in those places. I was struck by how difficult it was to find peoplewho had kept rural singing traditions alive. Most villagers insisted they didnot sing folk music, but when pressed, would sing in their own local stylesongs they had learned long ago from the radio. When we finally managedto find some villagers whose local village singing traditions pre-dated expo-sure to radio, it turned out that they had belonged for decades to anaward-winning amateur performing group or KUD, Kulturno-umetni‹kodruštvo. Their music-making had been organized and shaped by a musicaldirector who had told them to add certain attention-getting musical orna-ments in order to win prizes at festivals.

The experiences of that year shattered many of my romantic illusionsabout Slavic folk music’s mystical connections with the agricultural lifestyleof peasants. It became clear to me that, in the form in which we had receivedit, this music had been carefully cultivated, shaped, and arranged in order toincrease its attractiveness. Who was the intended audience of this scrupu-lously managed music: local, urban, Western? What was the purpose for itsshaping in a particular way? Could one still say that it was a spontaneouslyproduced music-making practice?

My focus shifted. Instead of centering on the origins of the music, Ibecame more interested in the ways that Eastern European folk music hadbeen molded, and for what purposes. I became aware that ‘revival move-ments’ spearheaded by identifiable individuals had brought Slavic folk musicinto popular view – and had made it accessible and attractive to foreigners.These movements consisted of educated people who tried to ‘bring back’ancient traditions of the rural populations by teaching, performing, andpopularizing them. Usually such movements had underlying ideologicalgoals connected with shaping the culture of the nation. Throughout thetwentieth century, folk revival movements in many European countries andAmerica both reflected the values and goals of the urban intellectuals, andhad a profound effect on urban and rural popular cultures.

If the American folk music revival movement happened in the 1950sbecause post-war youth culture ‘intersected’ a tradition of folklore scholar-

8 Introduction

ship and performance, the Russian folk revival came about somewhat differ-ently.14 It began in the 1960s and 70s as a reaction against thepropagandistic ‘fakelore’ of Stalin’s era. At that time both writers andscholars approached peasant culture as an important source of sincerity andauthenticity. Seeking a genuine source of folk material, a few Moscow musi-cologists founded ensembles that traveled to remote areas and collected theirown repertoires directly from village musicians. One of these ensembleleaders was Dmitri Pokrovsky, who rose to celebrity status in the early 1980sas an underground performer of authentic Russian folk culture. WhileAmerican folk performers made their mark on the young people’s musicscene with commercial recordings and concerts, these early Russian folkrevivalists performed at small venues such as institutes and museums. Only afew recordings were made, and these did not receive wide promotion.

Despite the lack of public advertisement of the movement, by the mid-1980s there were thousands of similar ensembles throughout the SovietUnion. These amateur groups, composed of students and professionals,distinguished themselves from the officially sponsored ‘folk choirs’ that hadcome to dominate the Soviet understanding of folk music. Many did theirown fieldwork, going on trips to villages to collect and learn songs ‘from thesource.’ During the post-Soviet period, the goals of revivalists shifted some-what. Sincerity and authenticity were no longer principal concerns. Instead,awakening a sense of national identity became a goal of many producers ofRussian folk music, even if this meant that the music and dance wasperformed differently from the way it had been in villages.

Only recently have studies of European and American folk music anddance revival movements begun to assess their complex interactions withcultural and historical processes. Previous accounts of such movements –some by revivalists themselves – have emphasized the transparency of theneed for revival. According to these representations, revival is warrantedbecause industrialization has created a situation in which the rural-dwellingguardians of the nation’s ancient traditions are dying without transmittingtheir knowledge to younger generations (the ‘death of the folk song’ argu-ment, examined in Chapter 1). From this point of view revivalists are thosewho have the foresight to predict this potential loss and to stop it. AsGeorgina Boyes has written with regard to English revival, some histories ofrevival give the impression ‘of disinterested chance investigations and publi-cations leading to the discovery and re-introduction of a valuable, butsomewhat unexpected national treasure.’15

Indeed, my first experiences with revivalists in Russia left me similarlyawed by the ‘national treasures,’ and uninformed about the reasons forrevival’s existence, its assumptions and principles. In fact, in many casesduring my fieldwork in Eastern Europe I identified with revivalists, wishedto befriend them and help them in their endeavors. My identification withthe goals of revival has meant that I have had to work hard to recognize myown biases. As shown in my reaction to the Saratov Christmas caroling

Introduction 9

depicted above, I have had to distinguish between my initial reactions andthe later analyses to which I would subject my research. But this bias is notsimply a liability. In fact, my own revivalist tendencies have allowed me toimmerse myself more deeply into the world about which I am writing, andto understand the points of view of some revivalists. My dual stance ofinvolvement and intellectual distance has permitted me to become apassionate observer of East European folk revival’s complicated entangle-ment with various state-sponsored and alternative ideologies during thetransition to post-Communism.

Methods and Politics of Studying Folk Revival

I began studying the Russian folk revival movement in 1990, just before thecollapse of the Soviet Union. It was during my short visit to Moscow thatyear that Dmitri Pokrovsky arranged for me to watch his work with theprofessional choir that bore his name. He also introduced me to otherrevivalists working alongside him in the crusade to bring ‘authentic’ Russianfolk music to audiences. Pokrovsky died in 1996, and I regretted not havinghad more time to observe and interview him. But I had already establishedrelationships with other revivalists in Moscow whose work appealed to meeven more than Pokrovsky’s: I admired the more homespun, non-profes-sional character of these professors and researchers. I continued to keep intouch with and to arrange projects with these revivalists during trips toRussia in the summers of 1995 and 1996.

When I decided to make an intense study of the Russian revival move-ment, I chose to do so by immersing myself in it. For me Russian folkrevival was a living movement, led by folk music scholars, teachers,producers and performers. During seven months in 1998–99 I apprenticedmyself to a few such leaders: I followed them as they conducted classes andworkshops, I attended rehearsals, took private lessons, and joined them onfield expeditions to villages. I supplemented this experiential knowledge ofrevivalists’ methods and practices with interviews, during which I inquiredabout the history of their involvement with folk music, their motivations,methods, and philosophies. I attended many performances of folk musicensembles – ranging from children’s revivalist ensembles to adult profes-sionals, and including groups that can best be described as alternativerock-folk fusion and pop-folk fusion. Finally, I undertook a study of thedepiction of folk music revival in various published media: periodicals (bothspecialized and generalized), books, CDs, cassettes, LPs, and videos.16

In situating myself as an apprentice, as someone who wished to apply themethods of revival to my own work with singers and musicians in the US, Iattempted to maintain an attitude of respect for the people whose work Iwas studying. In recent years, ethnographic practice has come under criti-cism for asserting the primacy of the researcher’s Western discourse overnon-Western modes of thought. In order to minimize the hegemonic effects

10 Introduction

of interviewing, I used a hermeneutic approach, with open-ended questionsand ‘reflective’ responses in which the interviewer checks her interpretationof answers with the informant, thus allowing the informant to react to andpossibly refine the interpretation.17 In this study I have endeavored topresent my informants as individuals with distinct perspectives, and tosituate myself within the narrative by indicating the means I have used tocome by the knowledge I am presenting.18

Locating my own position within the narrative has proved importantespecially because of the global politics implicated in its writing. My statusas a foreigner was easy for me to overlook, especially during fieldwork withurban scholars of Russian folklore. Because I am a professor in a university,the scholars who made up the bulk of the leadership of the folk revivalmovement treated me like an equal. But in other situations my hosts high-lighted my nationality. Village revivalists often treated me like a special guest– they proudly arranged feasts in honor of my visit. In one village I wasasked to give a speech and to sing a Russian folk song before an outdoorcrowd of 300 festival attendants; in another I was interviewed for a televi-sion show. To rural revivalists and producers, I was a person who could drawmore attention to their revivalist activities. If they felt Russian youngpeople’s love for American culture enticed them away from Russian culture,then here was a possible antidote: an American who was fascinated withRussian folk culture.

The situation was different when I dealt with Russian nationalists,Cossacks, and proponents of Orthodoxy. My American nationality and mylack of Christian faith sometimes formed a perceived barrier between thesepeople and myself. I often feared that I would be verbally attacked for repre-senting a reprehensible force in the world; this feeling was exacerbatedduring my spring visit in 1999, which coincided with the US bombing ofSerbia. Russia has traditionally held Serbia as a close ally because ofcultural, religious, and linguistic affinities; Russians refers to Serbs as‘Brother Slavs.’ During this period, the Russian media focused on thedamage caused by NATO bombs, but rarely showed the images of fleeingAlbanians that dominated the US media.

Even before these events, I had been verbally harangued by nationalists,Cossacks, and Orthodox believers who saw the worldwide exportation ofAmerican popular culture as detrimental to Russian society. On one occa-sion, as I was leaving a wedding in a Cossack village in Volgograd oblastwith a Moscow musicologist and the local director of the Palace of Culture,a drunk man in a small car motioned to our van to pull over. He apparentlywished to confront me as an American, and angrily asked the loaded ques-tion, ‘Why is everything so bad here and so good there?’ After somediscussion he drove away without incident, but the event showed me thatmany blamed the US for Russia’s difficult economic position. Both of theseevents had occurred shortly after Russia’s financial crisis of August 1998,when the banks froze all assets, prices rose astronomically, and many

Introduction 11

paychecks were further delayed than usual, or simply not paid. Many peoplewere angry and/or afraid of what the future might bring.

Performance, Culture, and Identity

Such times of political, social, and economic upheaval often result inshifting values and cultural changes. But transformations of this kind arenot simple or linear. During the post-Soviet period, individuals and commu-nities continually renegotiate allegiances and meanings.19 Attempting toresurrect folk traditions has been one of the ways that some Russians havedealt with the uncertainty of the post-Communist transition, when ideolo-gies crumbled, geographical borders were re-drawn, and national identitywas questioned. Pre-Revolutionary history has taken on new importance asa source of meaning for Russians.20 In this context, it is important to keep inmind that cultural acts – such as music performance or the exhibition ofcultural symbols in public places – are not simply reflections of the self-conceptions and ideological goals of the performers. Besides embodying theparticipants’ goals, performance also helps to constitute identities and socialgroups. It is a medium in which cultural identity can be not only expressedbut enacted.21

By focusing on the active, ‘performative’ aspects of performance in thisstudy, I hope to invoke a conception of identity that is complex and multi-faceted. While earlier studies of ethnic and national groups have tended toview them as ‘internally homogeneous, historically continuous entities,objectively defined by their cultural, linguistic and racial distinctiveness,’more recent scholarly work has called these notions into question. Scholarshave recognized that identity is not given, immutable, and bounded, butconstructed, fluid, and heterogeneous. People see themselves as belonging tomultiple groups defined according to such characteristics as gender, relativeage within a group, social status, place of residence, occupation, and religion– as well as broader categories such as nationality and ethnic origin. All ofthese categories are not rigid but are given meaning by a particular historicaland cultural situation. Further, different contexts may elicit differentconceptions of identity, and various group allegiances may intersect innumerous ways.22

If identity is largely subjective and multi-dimensional, then how are we torefer to any notion of identity? Such references are bound to be oversimplifi-cations. Yet it is important to recognize the substantial force that identitycan have in motivating history.23 How Russians define themselves and viewthemselves in relation to other groups may have a significant impact on thetrajectory of the nation’s future. But it is important, when writing aboutcultural identity, not to fall into the trap of treating such a category asencompassing individuals entirely. Narratives about groups always have thetendency to generalize, to smooth over differences. Recognizing this pitfall

12 Introduction

and gesturing at the complexity of any given group identity is part of mygoal as a cultural critic.

With this aim in mind I have included in this study not only anti-estab-lishment revival movements, but also state-sponsored folk performances ofthe Soviet period and their inheritors in the post-Soviet period, and theeveryday music and dance of city and village dwellers. Since the current folkrevival movement began in the 1960s as a reaction against the hypocrisy ofthe Stalin era, it would be tempting to validate the work of these anti-Sovietrevivalists, while condemning the falsified representations of folk culturethat the Soviet system promoted. But to do so would be to oversimplify, andto ignore the important role that state-sponsored revival of folk music anddance has played in the creation of a viable art form. Similarly, it would beeasy to focus my study only on organized folk music performed on stage.But that would mean to disregard the important contexts in which sponta-neously produced music and dance function to reinforce groups andidentities. Since this study is primarily about folklorism, I have notaddressed folklore or even folk music and dance as a whole – that would beanother book entirely. Rather, in order to suggest an additional dimension, Ihave chosen to illustrate the ways in which official culture has become morelike spontaneous folklore – that is, to show the rough edges of the plannedand organized folklore, the ways that it spills over into grassroots communalactivity; and to illustrate how activities that have been scripted becomeunpredictable and reflective of characteristics and identities their plannersdid not intend.

Western scholars long subscribed to a rather monolithic view of theSoviet art world, in which the Party wielded power and artists were made toconform to prescribed ways of representation. In this model, Soviet manipu-lations of folk music and dance would be seen as repressive, forcefulimplementations of might upon a relatively passive citizenry. That modelmust be viewed as partially accurate. But the Soviet system produced manyindividual performers and producers who either interpreted folk musicdifferently from the requisite norm, or freely pursued government-prescribedartistic formulas, yet imbued them with their own energetic and creativespirit. Indeed, recently, under the influence of Foucault and other post-structuralist thinkers, scholars have begun to question one-sidedrepresentations of the workings of power. In order to understand howpower may be enabling as well as limiting, it is important to see it not only inthe relation of the ruling elite to its subjects, but in the multiple andeveryday interactions of people and the myriad ways in which individualsconstruct their identities in the context of a society.24

Further, the Soviet culture system was not the only one that influencedand controlled the production of folk art. As James Clifford has argued, allcultural systems direct how we are to collect, display, and view cultural arti-facts. Such art systems are historical: what is considered high art at one timemay have purely practical or informational value at another. To take an

Introduction 13

example from American culture, Shaker crafts are now seen as valuable inpart because Shaker society no longer exists. Furniture pieces once used ashousehold implements have not only been viewed as ethnographic andhistorical representations of Shaker society; they were also exhibited as fineart in the Whitney Museum in 1986.25 Similarly, the Russian elite music anddance world has displayed folk music and dance in different ways at differenttimes. Within every art system – whether in contemporary Russia, in theSoviet period, in contemporary America or elsewhere – the categories of ‘thebeautiful, the cultural, and the authentic’ are conditioned by multiple factorsand are constantly in flux.26 Thus, even within the context of a seeminglymonolithic system such as the Soviet one, definitions of the above categorieshave been influenced by notions of social and economic class, Westernculture and Western views of Soviet culture, the pre-Revolutionary aestheticsystem, and many other factors.

Given the importance of historical contexts of contemporary revivalmovements, I present here both a history and a snapshot of the current situ-ation. A thorough history of Russian folk music and dance and ofappropriations of folk culture in elite culture has not yet been written, and Ihave not attempted to provide it: I hope that this study may spur others todo so. Yet since it is essential to perceive changes against a historical back-ground, my first three chapters investigate past revivalist practices thatestablished a tradition of evoking Russianness through the performance ofRussian folk music and dance. My methodology here is distinct from theexperiential, qualitative anthropological research described above. In thehistorical sections the required breadth has necessitated that I rely upon theresearch of other scholars; where possible, I have tried to bring distinctvoices together in dialogue to show the ways that interpreters have viewedthe past according to their own beliefs and agendas. Revival movementsconstruct traditions and attempt to establish continuities with an imaginedpast; my investigation aims to disrupt this smooth narrative of origins byboth uncovering the reasons for such historicizing, and discovering alterna-tive sources for present-day practices.27

Since this study is about depictions of Russianness in musical form, Ioffer audio illustrations of some of the musical practices and performancesabout which I write. Russian folk music (like most grassroots music practice)does not lend itself easily to Western musical notation. Contemporaryscholars and revivalists use notation as an analytical tool, but do notconsider this a complete descriptive picture of the original material.Transcriptions can be useful in order to compare and contrast melodies,engage in detailed discussions of polyphony, scrutinize ornaments, and soon. But since my main focus in this book is on the way these sounds are situ-ated in people’s lives, transcriptions are at best superfluous to my purpose.Many of the recordings I offer here capture much more than music: sincethese are not studio productions but live events, listeners can hear interac-tions among performers and between performers and audience. I have

14 Introduction

referred to the examples in the text and readers can obtain a CD by followingthe instructions at the website: www.colorado.edu/germslav/ Department/r-olson.htm.Examples published elsewhere are listed in the Discography.

Chapter 1 briefly describes the various types of Russian folk music anddance and the ways that elite art and folk art intertwined in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries. I argue that late-nineteenth-century revivalism inmusic and other arts did not so much restore life to dying folk arts as itcreated a separate tradition, which became known as folk art. Chapter 2examines the multiple ways that Soviet government policies manipulatedfolk music performance from 1917 through the 1960s. I focus upon the inter-action of the amateur and professional spheres, the folk chorus aesthetic,and the important role of the folk choir and orchestra in defining the natureof folk culture in the public imagination. Chapter 3 shows how the contem-porary folk revival movement emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s outof opposition to both government policies on folk culture and the scholarlypursuit of early-twentieth-century approaches to folklore, and how it devel-oped into a national phenomenon during the 1980s.

Chapters 4–8 address the contemporary post-Soviet period. Chapter 4explores the revival movement’s changes during post-Soviet years, and mapsout the art-culture system that defines the spectrum of folk revival practicetoday. Chapter 5 discusses how folk performance is used in the post-Sovietcontext for political aims, to cultivate associations with Russian nationalidentity. While many of the cultural producers who plan these events do notidentify themselves as nationalists, their work reveals a cultural nationalismthat goes unquestioned by the consumers of these constellations of images.Chapter 6 focuses on the ways that the folk revival movement has workedhand in hand with the Cossack revival movement, one of the most inter-esting and powerful such movements in Russia today. Because Cossacks areassociated with a strong masculine image, revivalists have cultivated theirculture as an antidote to the emasculation of Russian culture.

Chapters 7 and 8 approach the question of folk revival in a villagecontext. In the 1980s and 1990s urban-based folk revivalists continuallyworked with villages to replenish their repertoires and their knowledge offolk culture, and to lend support to the preservation of folklore in villages.Chapter 7 shows that villagers often responded positively to such incursions,embracing the validation of their cultures by revivalists seeking to undodecades of degradation; in one case the zeal and unconventional resourcesof a village revivalist exceeded those of his urban counterparts. Chapter 8focuses upon the divergent expectations that urban intellectuals and villagedwellers bring to the sites of their intersection. Today’s revivalists oftenengage in propagandistic, planned exhibitions of the folklore they wish topromote; nonetheless, the communities in which such productions aredisplayed evince the spontaneity and willfulness characteristic of grassrootsfolkloric practices.

Introduction 15

Contemporary audiences often accept performances of Russian folk musicand dance as representations of ancient rural traditions. However, manyaspects of folk performance were drawn directly from nineteenth centuryproductions that musicians consciously constructed to appeal to the tastesof elite and/or middle-class audiences and to further Slavophile and populistagendas. Musical producers not only sought to engender ‘Russian character’through their performances, but aimed to define and evoke ‘authenticity’through their manipulation of potent symbols of untouched folk nature.Their actions had direct effects upon the ways that folk music is viewed andconstructed today.

For example, the ‘folk orchestra’ – a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon inperformances of Russian folk music – was not part of village music-makingpractice, but was the brainchild of a late-nineteenth-century pettylandowner, Vasilii Andreev, who learned to play – and worked on‘perfecting’ – the balalaika, a folk lute which had appeared in Russianvillages in the seventeenth century. Andreev had the instrument’s bodyenlarged and neck shortened, and added fixed frets, which changed theinstrument’s timbre, increased its resonance and made it able to play chro-matic scales with secure intonation; later he had balalaikas made in differentsizes in order to play different parts.1 Starting in 1887 he formed anensemble of 7–8 balalaika players on four different sizes of instruments(piccolo, alto, standard, and bass), which played in St Petersburg halls andlater toured Russia. The concept became popular, and similar groups ofinstrumental musicians began to form and to play at city fairs.2

In the mid-1890s, Andreev added other folk instruments, including thedomra (a folk lute) and the gusli (a psaltery), to the ensemble, in order toincrease its musical possibilities and make it more attractive to listeners.3

The domra was similar in form to the balalaika, but was more ancient, prob-ably dating back 1000 years on Russian territory; it had been used inensembles that accompanied the skomorokhs (professional performers), buthad apparently died out in the seventeenth century. The story of the‘discovery’ of the domra illustrates the importance of a stamp of authen-ticity for revivalists like Andreev: in 1895 a very old, unknown instrument

1 The Invention and Re-inventionof Folk Music in Pre-Revolutionary Russia

was found in a hut in Viatka province by one of Andreev’s students.Andreev took the instrument to a scholar, A. S. Famitsyn, who had justpublished a study of the domra. In that work, Famitsyn had stated that thedomra no longer existed, and that there remained no image of it. Despitethis lack of basic information, Famitsyn identified the instrument as adomra, and Andreev ordered a series of new instruments modeled on it.4

Later authors disputed the authenticity of the instrument.5 Iurii Boikowrote in 1984 that Andreev had invented the domra simply because he wasseeking ‘new shades of timbre for his orchestra, under the obvious influenceof the mandolin.’ Indeed, ‘the domras were created based upon themandolin.’ One of the most characteristic and widely copied features of theRussian folk orchestra – its rendering of the song’s melody in the form of asustained tremolo on one string (usually played using a plectrum on a groupof domras, but also on gusli and balalaikas) – is in fact not a Russianmanner of playing at all. According to Boiko it was borrowed by Andreevfrom the Neapolitan mandolin orchestra.6

In addition to the domra and gusli, two kinds of folk flute, the svireli andthe brelka, were appended: the new orchestra now had its wind section, andcould render classical orchestral compositions; later ‘brass’ (in the form ofrozhki, wooden horns) and percussion (using a mix of Russian and Westerninstruments, such as timpani and tambourines) sections were added.7 As the‘Great Russian Orchestra’ it had great success for several years playingcompositions and arrangements of folk tunes by Andreev and professionalmusicians with whom he consulted, as well as ‘Russian classics’ bycomposers like Glinka and Tchaikovsky. Singers such as the famous basssoloist Fyodor Shaliapin and quartets of professionals were often featuredas special guests at the orchestra’s concerts, and the renowned Russiandancers from the ballet troupe of the Mariinsky Theater performed withthem occasionally. The seeds of the Soviet folk choruses with their choral,instrumental, and dance troupes were sown.

Andreev promoted his constructed notion of Russian folk music by orga-nizing orchestras of folk instruments in schools and the army – hoping thatthe tradition would spread and take root as soldiers, having learned to playthe balalaika in the army, brought the instrument home to their villages.8

Andreev gave a speech before each concert, and also wrote a letter to theeditor of a newspaper explaining his goal of ‘resurrecting these instruments’in order to ‘give the people a musical instrument which corresponds to theirway of life and character, and at the same time satisfies the demands ofcontemporary musical culture as much as possible.’9

Of course, Russian rural practice had its own instrumental traditions,which Andreev did not so much resurrect as change. The Andreev principleof organization – where specific instruments were assigned specific func-tions, and were modified so that they could better perform those functionsin the ensemble – was borrowed from Western classical music, and wasunknown in Russian village music-making. In ancient Russian villages,

The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music 17

instruments had been used as part of ritual music-making to accompanydancing and/or singing, and by professional entertainers, the skomorokhs, toaccompany their humoristic theatrical spectacles. By the nineteenth century,villagers used instruments both within and outside of ritual contexts. In anyof these situations, when players formed ensembles they combined instru-ments spontaneously, according to what was at hand. Instruments couldplay the melody heterophonically, like the voices in a folk chorus, or theirfunctions could be delineated as to melody, rhythm, or harmony – but anyinstrument could be called on to perform any of these functions.10 As Boikopointed out, ‘in distinction to the Andreev orchestras, the differentiation offunction in a Russian folk instrumental ensemble is not at all dependentupon the differentiation of the types of instruments.’11

Because playing in the orchestra required specialized training, Andreevcreated a network of schools to produce the musicians to staff such orches-tras. As a result, the gulf between rural folk musicians and trained folkmusicians, and in general between rural folk music and folk music producedfor the stage, increased. The Soviets intensified this situation, in part bymass-producing instruments that were better suited to playing in the orches-tral style, and by broadening the educational network.12

The effects of the revisions that Andreev made in Russian folk instru-mental practice were so widespread that they changed the nature of folkensemble playing not only in Russia but internationally. During Andreev’slifetime, musicians formed Russian-style folk orchestras and ensembles notonly in Russia, but abroad, for example in the US and France. Andreevhoped that the success of his orchestra abroad would improve publicopinion toward Russia and also increase the export of balalaikas.13 Duringthe Soviet period, not the instruments themselves but the method of stan-dardizing and combining instruments was imported to Eastern Europe andCentral Asia, where native instruments were brought together to formensembles – even in cultures where no tradition of ensemble playing existed.

Andreev’s modifications to folk playing changed what Russian, Westernand Asian audiences identified as folk music. As Boiko pointed out, theAndreev-style orchestras’ promotion of folk music affirmed ‘the falseimpression of their art as “folk” music.’ Audiences, including many Russianones, had no idea that the music they were hearing was not what self-taughtmusicians in Russian villages played. Russian newspaper reviews regularlyhailed Andreev’s performances as saving Russian folk music from extinction.One reviewer wrote that while the accordion and the ‘factory romance’ werecrowding out Russian music in the countryside, St Petersburg was preservingit through Andreev’s concerts: ‘Our Petersburg was more countrified thanthe countryside itself. Here the folk song and poetry have been preserved.One only had to see the general ecstasy in the hall during the performance ofRussian songs by the Andreev orchestra, to be convinced how warmly theheart responds to them.’14 Of course, the songs, instruments, and manner ofplaying were not preserved but were constructed specifically to convey to

18 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music

audiences used to classical music what one critic called a ‘pure Russian char-acter.’15

Andreev’s work was part of a widespread burgeoning of interest andactivity in Russian folk music revival during the period 1860–1917.Although Andreev’s approach was new, musicians had been incorporatingRussian folk music into the art of the gentry since the reign of Catherine theGreat; it was at that time that many of the conventions of ‘folk’ singing andplaying in an art context were established. Choruses of serfs kept bylandowners on their estates began to sing not only Italian songs but whatwere called Russian folk songs; later, in the nineteenth century, some ofthese choruses became professional and traveled all over Russia. In hometheaters, nobles had their serfs put on scenes imitating Russian village holi-days; sometimes the nobles themselves composed the scripts.16 Comic operaimported from France and Italy introduced folk life to the art theater, andRussian composers wrote operas that imitated Russian folk speech andsongs.17

The divertissements between acts of operas initiated a tradition of ‘folk’music performance on stage. Initially, divertissements consisted of arias fromoperas, but at the end of the eighteenth century performers began to includeRussian folk songs and songs composed in the folk manner as well asromances. These songs consisted of melodies sung solo by trained singers(sometimes of serf origin), accompanied by guitar or piano. The manner ofsinging was frequently very sweet and sentimental, according to the fashionof the time; the singers tried to convey emotion and drama through theirrenditions of the songs. Not only solos, but duets and trios (accompanied byinstruments) and choruses became fashionable acts. Often, the songsperformed at divertissements grew popular, and were sung by people of allsocial strata.18

So-called ‘Gypsy’ singers and choruses performed Russian songs andromances to great acclaim. These were Romani musicians who made theircareers based upon Russians’ fascination for the stereotype of thepassionate, bold, mysterious and independent ‘Gypsies.’ Although themanner of singing of the Romani choruses and singers was more intenselyemotional than that of the Russian ones, it is probable that the Russianstage-singers and choruses developed at least partially under the influence ofthe Romani style, and vice versa.19 The tradition of Romani musicians inter-preting Russian folk songs and romances became an important part ofRussian music-making, and remains so to this day.

In essence, the Russian concept of estrada (the stage) formed at this time.The notion of presenting various songs on stage as individual ‘numbers,’unconnected by a story line or any other factor, was new. The term ‘number’in this case derives from the structure of opera in the eighteenth century,which comprised a succession of several distinct musical movements, manyof which could also be performed separately in a different context. The termthen came to be used in divertissements and later, the estrada.20

The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music 19

Furthermore, the notions of folk songs sung solo or in duets or trios byprofessional singers with instrumental accompaniment, and the necessity ofperforming the songs in an overtly emotional manner, became standardduring this period, and remain so to the present.

Russian Village Music-Making

While performers and critics represented the music sung and played on stageas Russian folk music, Russian village music-making practice was quitedifferent. The oldest known pre-Christian folk music was sung in the contextof agrarian calendar and life-cycle rituals, presumably by both commonersand elites.21 Although this music has been classified as drama, since it wasaccompanied by theatrical gestures, work, or dance movements, it was neverperformed in a stage setting but by groups in which there was no delineationbetween spectator and participant. Its purpose was to bring about a magicalresult: an increase in harvest, the fertility of a bride, the worship of ances-tors. Such holiday songs included winter carols, fortune telling songs,Shrovetide songs, calls to summon springtime, Easter carols, songs for StGeorge’s day and Whitsunday, summer solstice and harvest songs. Worksongs accompanied agricultural work and (later) barge-hauling, log rafting,and crafts. Dance songs were associated with particular holidays andincluded circle dances, game dances, and dances with play-acting. Life cyclesongs included christening songs, lullabies, many different kinds of weddingsongs, and funeral laments.22

The style of singing was a cappella group polyphony, in which the textwas most important while the relatively simple melody served as a means ofconveying it.23 Texts were characterized by syllabic verse (in which thenumber of syllables per line and their division by a caesura are the dominantstructuring features) with a declamatory musical style: one syllable corre-sponded to each note. Musical structure varied tremendously from region toregion – musical dialects and micro-regions were often as small as a villageor cluster of villages – yet in general terms the main style was unison singingwith episodic splitting of the voices (in some areas a drone was used); themelody’s range was typically as narrow as a fourth. Remnants of this type ofsinging have been found in the repertoires of village ensembles throughoutthe nineteenth century and up to the present day. From these performancesit is evident that the manner of singing is not ‘emotional’ in the melodra-matic style of stage performance; instead, singers convey meaning throughmusical techniques such as ornamentation, variation, rests, and repetition.

During the period of Muscovite rule, from the fourteenth to the seven-teenth centuries, other kinds of secular traditional singing not directlyrelated to the agrarian calendar or to life-cycle rituals emerged, includingwhat scholars have termed the categories of epic and lyric. Epic songs –including epics or byliny, historical songs, ballads, and religious verses ordukhovnye stikhi – relayed legends or historical stories, while the texts of

20 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music

lyric songs, ranging from simple one-voiced pieces to polyphonic songs andthe complex, melismatic drawn-out song or protiazhnaia, expressed the feel-ings of a protagonist or expounded on a lyric subject. During this period thepoetic line acquired accents in fixed places corresponding to the strong beatsof the musical meter; the melodies had wider ranges and became morehighly developed, with an elaborate musical structure and much splitting ofthe voices.24 In these songs the music often eclipsed the text in importance.25

Both the ritual and non-ritual musical styles are distinct from the homo-phonic Western style that characterized eighteenth-century Russia’s urbanmusical practice, in which solo singing was accompanied by instruments andchoral singing was based upon the harmonic kant style that had come toRussian cities from Ukraine.26 In this style one part (usually the treble) leadsand other voices (or accompaniment) follow in parallel fashion, creatingharmonies that follow a functional progression according to the rules ofWestern classical harmony (such as tonic–dominant–tonic). By contrast, inRussian folk singing all the voices sing in a mixture of polyphony andheterophony, each singer improvising melodies (counter-melodies orpodgoloski) that are variants of the same tune.27 Although chords may beformed in the process, singers do not harmonize according to Western clas-sical norms, and sing notes ‘outside of the [standard] chords.’28 The voicesweave in and out, sometimes forming chords, sometimes moving in parallelintervals – including thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, and octaves – often begin-ning and ending in unison.29

In the practice of Russian village polyphony that musicologists haveobserved since the late nineteenth century, typically each singer performs aspecific function within the group. Especially in non-dance tunes, a leader(zapevala) introduces the song with a short solo line, at least one singer singsa higher counter-melody (podgolosok), and a body of singers generally singin the lower and middle ranges of the song. Singers cease singing and returnto the song at will. Each singer possesses a ‘vocabulary’ of melodic phrasesor notes that s/he sings, but s/he may combine these differently in responseto conditions such as who else is singing and what they are singing, what thesingers are doing while singing, and so on.30 In drawn-out songs (proti-azhnye pesni) the elaborate variation of the melody and text can produce anextremely complex texture: entire melodic phrases may be built upon thesinging of a single syllable; meaningless syllables (such as akh, okh, ekh, da,ai, or da) are added in the middle of words to extend a melisma; a sungvowel is changed in midstream (say, from o to e); frequently the singers‘move’ from one beat to the next at different times and articulate words atdifferent times.31

This polyphonic singing style, which began developing in the fifteenthcentury, was not fully ‘discovered’ by scholars until the late nineteenthcentury, although it characterized vocal music-making in many areas ofrural Russia.32 One likely reason was that early collectors were more predis-posed to look for songs that fit the city style they presumably knew best.33

The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music 21

The first collections, made in the 1770s–90s by Vasilii Trutovskii, MikhailChulkov, and Nikolai Lvov and Ivan Prach, were compilations of well-known urban and rural songs. When music was offered, the authors gaveonly single melodic lines, and added bass lines with three and four-partharmony – following urban practice. This music, a reconciliation of nativeRussian music with the Western musical system, was the kind of Russian‘folk’ music that was performed at divertissements.34

Despite their disregard of village musical practice, these early collectionsreflected an actual trend of mutual influence of urban and village music-making. Starting in the eighteenth century a confluence took place whennobles, merchants, and serfs attended fairs held on the estates of noblemenfor business and pleasure, and enjoyed the rural and urban-style music anddancing offered there.35 This trend intensified in mid-to late-nineteenth-century Russia, when peasant migration from villages to towns for work(permanent or seasonal), increased ease of transportation, and travelingfairs and craftspeople all brought people from various environments intocontact with one another. Other factors that helped to transform villagepractice were increased access to education, the publication of song texts incheap lubok (‘popular print’) versions, and the growing popularity andaccessibility of the accordion.36

Resulting changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries included theimportation of an urban lyric genre – the romance – into village singing.Romances imitated written poetry in their poetic form: they used syllabo-tonic meters such as iambs and trochees, and rhymed line endings. In manycases the texts were folklorized poems by known or anonymous authors. Inthe nineteenth century the cruel romance, with especially torrid textualcontent (often involving infidelity, betrayal, murder, and/or suicide), becamepopular in cities and villages.37 The melodies had a wide range and werebased on Western tonality; in the cities, they were sung solo with instru-ments that played a progression of harmonic chords. Rural communitieschanged these songs to fit the norms of their local tradition: they trans-formed the melodic structure and rhythm and sang them a capella,polyphonically.38 Another genre, the chastushka, a short rhyming verse formthat reflected current popular topics, sung by individual singers to balalaikaor accordion accompaniment, grew up in the nineteenth century in areaswhere city and country met, such as on the outskirts of large cities, andbecame a distinct feature of village music-making.39

Yet by the nineteenth century intellectuals no longer viewed this musicthat was the result of city–village confluence as folk music. Whereas eigh-teenth-century collectors did not distinguish or separate rural from urbanmusic (thus all popular music counted as ‘folk’), for nineteenth-centurycollectors ‘folk’ music referred exclusively to that of rural dwellers. ThisRomantic-influenced view remained prevalent throughout the nineteenthand twentieth centuries in Russia; it was only during the latter half of the

22 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music

twentieth century that some Russian scholars, influenced by new Westerntheories about folk culture, began to define it more broadly.40

Nineteenth-Century Views of the Folk

Enlightenment and Romantic (German Idealist) conceptions of commonpeople profoundly changed the ways that Russian elites pictured themselvesin relation to the peasants, and established many of the assumptions thatwould influence folklore study for the next two centuries. Elites began toformulate mythological versions of the peasant as a way of defining them-selves and their nation.41 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about the naturalgoodness of people living in a ‘state of nature’ spawned interest in rural andlower-class people, especially among liberals who wished to draw attentionto social and economic inequality.42 Johann Gottfried Herder wrote that theculture – and particularly the unconscious, ‘infantile’ music – of those whowere closer to the soil was the truest expression of a nation.43 Starting in theearly 1700s, Herder implored his contemporaries to collect German folklorein order to preserve ‘the voice of your fathers.’ He himself published his owncollections of folk poems, and others did likewise. This was the beginning offolklore collecting in Europe.44

Following German Idealist thought, the Russian Slavophiles’ views on thepeasant launched an extended period of intense study of the verbal andmusical culture of the Russian peasant. The collections of folk songs madeby Slavophiles and their collaborators emphasized for the first time theauthenticity of their rural origin. Unlike previous collectors, Petr Kireevskyexcluded city-style music and ‘imitations of folk style’ from his collections offolk songs. He expressed a consciousness of the inherent value of the ruraltexts, especially due to the likelihood of their imminent disappearance.45

Kireevsky wrote in 1838: ‘Experience has shown us that it is necessary tohurry with the collecting of these priceless remnants of olden times, whichwe can observe disappearing from the memory of the folk with the changesin its mores and customs.’46 It was a similar assumption of folklore’s immi-nent disappearance that motivated late-nineteenth century revivalists likeAndreev to ‘preserve’ folk music by reconstructing it.

As Robert Rothstein has pointed out, while it is true that a number ofaspects of music-making were changing in nineteenth-century Russia, thisdid not mean that the folk song was dying, as scholars of folk culture fearedthroughout the nineteenth century.47 In fact, the exaggerated cry of folk-lore’s imminent disappearance became a commonplace in all kinds ofwriting and thinking about rural culture – and in the popular imagination –not only in the nineteenth century, but in the twentieth as well. It is one ofthe most basic assumptions underlying revivalist thinking and practice inRussia.48 However, while the pace and the quality of change may vary atdifferent times, all culture always undergoes change. As Richard Handlerand Jocelyn Linnekin have written, ‘Western common sense…presumes that

The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music 23

an unchanging core of ideas and customs is always handed down to us fromthe past’; yet the result of this assumption, the notion of ‘tradition’ as anunchanging heritage, is misleading. ‘ “ [T]raditional” and “new” are interpre-tive rather than descriptive terms: since all cultures change ceaselessly, therecan only be what is new, although what is new can take on symbolic value as“traditional”.’49

Concern about the supposed ‘death of the folk song’ in Russia in thelatter half of the nineteenth century was linked with the increasing contactbetween urban and rural spheres. Folklorists and observers lamented suchchanges in terms that made clear the culprit was the city and the victim wasthe village. They characterized the city as an arena where Western fashionreplaced native Russian practice, or as a place of debauchery that pervertedthe village. One critic in 1895 ‘lumped together the replacement of old songsby new ones, the weakening of parental authority and of religiousness, thedevelopment of fashion in clothing, and the new freedom in relationsbetween the sexes.’50 A similar aversion to lower-class urban musical prac-tice and its association with Westernization and lax morals persisted in theSoviet period and in some branches of the late twentieth-century revivalmovement.

Late Nineteenth-Century Folklorism: Folk Motifs in HighCulture

In the 1830s Mikhail Glinka, a composer who worked within Italian andFrench classical traditions, utilized elements of Russian folk music – alongwith many other compositional techniques, such as oriental idioms – tocreate what came to be known as a ‘national’ musical style. BothTchaikovsky and the circle of composers known as ‘The Five,’ or the‘Mighty Handful’ (‘moguchaia kuchka,’ comprising) regarded Glinka as theirprecursor. As Robert Ridenour has argued, Mily Balakirev ‘modeled hisown compositions after Glinka’s example and fostered the same approachamong his students as the only legitimately ‘Russian’ way to write music.’51

Balakirev’s circle, consisting of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, César Cui,Modest Musorgsky, and Aleksander Borodin, pursued a style based uponRussia’s ‘reality’ – that is, the music of the common people – and widelyemployed folk motifs and Russian historical subjects.52 Both Balakirev andRimsky-Korsakov collected folk songs themselves for source material thatwould add authenticity to their works.53 However, the resulting ‘so-calledRussian style … was not linked directly to the tradition of Russia’s nativefolk music but to Glinka’s personal methods of composing’ and other influ-ences.54

The development of a national style in music in the 1860–70s reflectedthe rise of national schools in many of the arts during this period. The lossof the Crimean War in the 1850s and the social and legal reforms of the1860s led to a time of ‘broad cultural self-definition.’ The questions, ‘What

24 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music

is Russia and What will Russia be?’ intensely occupied Russian intellectuals.Cathy Frierson described it as a ‘ “transitional epoch,” which demanded thatfundamental elements of Russian culture be identified as a prelude toaction.’55 Some of the art movements were more oriented toward Slavophileviews, while others shared some of the views of the radical Populists whocrusaded to better the plight of the Russian peasant and went ‘to the people’in 1874, traveling to rural areas to cultivate active fellow socialists amongthe peasants. 56 Many of the arts exemplified features of both ideologies.57

Artists with Slavophile leanings favored historicism as a means to evokenational character: they passionately researched Russian and Slavic nativefolk art in their search for past forms that could stand for ‘Russianness’ inthe present. What artists chose from the past was often seemingly arbitrary,but in fact laden with ideological significance. The sixteenth century was thefavored time period for historicist borrowing in the performing arts, as inarchitecture – following Slavophile arguments for the purity and essentialvalue of Russian culture prior to its exposure to the West.58 Folk motifswere used to evoke ‘the entire historical legacy of Russia before westerniza-tion.’59

In opera and play productions, the desire for ‘archeological exoticism’ ledplaywrights, composers, costumers and set designers to pay great attentionto historical accuracy. In order to design the costumes and sets for produc-tions of Alexander Serov’s opera Rogneda in 1865 and 1867, for example,artists and archaeologists studied medieval manuscripts and frescos, andfound actual peasant costumes for the peasant characters.60 However, asAlison Hilton writes, the use of folk material in the arts constituted aconscious, almost academic ‘quot[ing].’ ‘The forms were valuable not inthemselves but because they served to make genre and historical scenes“national”.’ In constructing this generic, symbolic representation ofRussianness, artists paid little attention to the local specificity of the motifsthey borrowed. As with Andreev’s orchestra, the desired result was a ‘pureRussian character.’

The same was true of the works of the Mighty Handful, who, followingGlinka, took folklore as largely ‘an element of “content,” not “style”.’61

When the composers used elements such as folk songs and instrumentsevoking the Russian past they did not always preserve historical accuracybut instead intended to impart an aura of ‘antiquity and of national char-acter – of “authenticity,” in short.’62 In one of the first appearances of‘unadulterated’ folk song in opera, Rimsky-Korsakov took for his 1871opera [Pskovitianka] [The Maid of Pskov] a folk song from Balakirev’srecently published collection, complete with the harmony that Balakirevnotated ‘in the field.’ The song is used in a scene in which a Pskov citizenmockingly sings farewell while gathering around him those loyal to the causeof resisting Ivan the Terrible. This use of folk song was lauded by composersof the time because it did not use the melody just for ‘local color,’ conveyingan individual character’s state of mind, but conveyed the feelings of a ‘whole

The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music 25

people.’ Richard Taruskin notes: ‘it was Pskovitianka that really put the useof folk song on the operatic map, as embodiment of ‘the people’ in action.’Subsequent operas imitated Rimsky-Korsakov’s use of folk songs for largechoral scenes accompanied by action.63

Yet despite the use of harmony notated ‘in the field’ this ‘realist’ style hadlittle to do with the kind of folk music peasants actually sang and played. Inpoint of fact in his 1866 collection Balakirev notated folk songs only fromperformance by individuals, not groups (which would have produced thepolyphonic texture). He indicated a second voice in only a few cases, andeach piece in the collection is harmonized and ‘presented in the form of anexquisite little art song.’64 Russian polyphonic village singing – with itsmultiple, independent podgoloski – was not notated or theorized until thelate 1870s, when Iurii Mel’gunov collected songs from groups of peasants.The degree to which Mel’gunov’s work was revolutionary may be seen in thereaction of his contemporaries: Rimsky-Korsakov called the collection‘barbarous’ and said that in his compositions he had already used ‘and veryartistically, mind you, those so-called podgoloski he is supposed to havediscovered.’ Taruskin points out that Rimsky’s ‘podgoloski’ in fact followed‘conservatory rules of voice leading’ – that was what he meant by ‘very artis-tically.’65 One kuchka-allied critic admitted that Mel’gunov might be right,but called the result ‘ugly’ nonetheless. For the Mighty Handful and itsfollowers – as for previous collectors and composers – the singing style ofpeasants was far from aesthetically desirable.

Mel’gunov’s work reflected the late-nineteenth-century interest in scien-tific matters: educated Russians increasingly turned the new methods of‘objectivity, empiricism, and realism’ toward their study of the peasant.66

The burgeoning fields of sociology and ethnography helped to destroy therural idyll by studying the economic and physical factors that caused changein the village. Whereas previous folklore studies had viewed peasants as anundifferentiated mass, in the mid-nineteenth century folklorists and musicol-ogists began to pay attention to characteristics of the individual performer –initially as a means of establishing scientific authenticity, but increasingly inthe 1860s with the goal of understanding the changing character of folkculture and its relation to everyday life. The Moscow Society of Lovers ofNatural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography and the RussianGeographical Society, based in St Petersburg, organized expeditions with thegoal of undertaking ethnographic study of the entire country.67 In musi-cology, it became accepted practice for collectors to write down songs theythemselves had gone to villages to obtain, rather than writing songs theychanced to hear in the city; and after Mel’gunov the standard for folk-songcollecting came to consist of the transcription of all of the independent,improvised podgoloski of a song.68

Around the turn of the century visual artists, musicians, and choreogra-phers began to take a different approach to folk art in revival movementsand modernist compositions.69 The World of Art circle grew out of the

26 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music

work of the Wanderers and the kustar’ (small-scale home industry) craftrevival: art colonies on private estates at Abramtsevo and Talashkinoengaged in the restoration and study of Russian folk art and its applicationin monuments and productions such as churches, bathhouses, illustratedbooks, plays and operas. Their workshops produced carved furniture,embroidery and other textile arts aimed at elite consumers. Alison Hiltonwrites: ‘the artists were more interested in exploiting the myriad possibilitiesof folk ornament than in discovering its underlying formal principles,’ andartisans tended to mix styles from different areas of Russia and differenttime periods, and to borrow design from other media.70

Whereas the kuchka and other artists had used folk themes and motifs aselements of content adapted to fit within their own pre-existing aesthetic,artists now began to create a style based upon folk art. In painting, VasiliiKandinskii, Natal’ia Goncharova, and others researched folk art but did notundertake preservation or revival of it; instead, they evolved new, abstractartistic techniques from the folk designs.71 Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky,and World of Art members focused upon ballet as the ‘synthetic ideal’ towhich they aspired: in ballet, without spoken or sung text to engage therational mind, vivid impressions would be conveyed to the viewer through‘the movement of bodies and by the sets, costumes, and lighting’ and music,creating their own coherence.72 The Ballets Russes, which gave seasons inParis from 1909–14, produced many ballets incorporating Slavic folkthemes: the neonationalist Russian artists emphasized aspects of Russian artthat were striking to Western audiences.73

Stravinsky went on to create several vocal and instrumental works inwhich he transformed the syllabic patterns of ritual folk songs into complexrhythmic structures that have been called his ‘distinctive contribution tomodern music.’74 Unlike his predecessors, Stravinsky did not contain folkmusic within an art music format; instead, using a ‘mosaic’ technique inwhich he endlessly transformed melodic fragments from source tunes,Russian folk music became for him ‘an instrument of self-emancipationfrom the constricting traditions of Russian art music.’75 By the time hewrote the Rite of Spring, Stravinsky did not display his folk sources on thesurface of the composition as a mark of authenticity, as did the MightyHandful. Instead, as a true modernist, Stravinsky merged folk and art music,transcending both sources.76

Late Nineteenth-Century Folk Choruses

The new studies of folklore had another result besides modernist art. Theygave impetus to a revival of Russian folk music that took shape in thespheres of popular culture as well as refined art. Along with VasiliiAndreev’s newly invented Russian folk orchestra, these groups drew increas-ingly large and diverse crowds both in Russia and abroad. They had dualgoals: both to entertain, and to promote Russian folk music. Unlike the kind

The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music 27

of Russian revival that wove folk elements into newly authored architec-tural, musical, and art compositions, the choruses and orchestras mostlysang and played what was called ‘folk songs’ or ‘folk music.’ Such songswere not authored compositions but presumably had formed part of oraltradition (that is, music that was passed on from generation to generation).Thus, these revivalists laid claim to authenticity in a different way than didthe composers; they could maintain they were ‘resurrecting’ Russian music.However, they freely changed and adapted the forms of folk music theyemployed (including modifying instruments, musical structure, andcostumes). The material they presented in concerts was extremely varied,gathered from multiple sources, including both rural and urban folk songs,composed folk-style songs, and romances. The degree to which this materialwas presented as representing ‘Russian music’ – that is, music that reflectedthe Russian national spirit – varied from group to group. Some had mainlyentertainment in mind, while others saw themselves as promoters of ancientfolk traditions.

These late nineteenth-century choruses took their cue from the early nine-teenth-century folk choruses that sang on estates, at fairs, and as part ofdivertissements. Now, with the advent of manufacturing and the growth ofurban areas where people came to trade, the burgeoning restaurants andbars hired folk choruses to furnish an evening’s amusement. Thus, several ofthe folk choruses created during the late nineteenth century were mostlyinterested in getting a ‘regular gig.’ But out of this genre formed accordingto the tastes of bar patrons rose groups involved in more serious promotionof Russian folk music.77 Most famous were the choruses run by Agrenev-Slavianskii, Evgeniia Lineva, and Mitrofan Piatnitskii, and the orchestracreated by Andreev.

The Agrenev-Slavianskii chorus and others like it served as models for theSoviet folk chorus.78 Dmitri Agrenev-Slavianskii trained as an opera singerwith the Bolshoi Theater and in Italy, but his voice was too small to make acareer in opera, so he became a ‘folk singer’ performing solo with balalaikas.After getting involved in the Slavic Congress (part of the Slavic movementfor freedom and self-rule for all Slavic countries) in 1867, Agrenev formed achorus of Slavic singers and toured Slavic countries with a repertoire ofRussian, Czech, Bulgarian, Serbian, and other Slavic songs. The concertswere political in that they propagandized the aims of the Slavic Congress;the pseudonym Slavianskii symbolized Agrenev’s dedication to the Slaviccause.79 In 1870, he formed a Russian chorus which initially toured theUnited States; later it grew to 100 members and performed all over Russia,including the Caucasus and Siberia. The chorus gave many concerts forlower-class audiences, at provincial clubs, factories, schools, and hospitals; inSt Petersburg, it performed to an audience of 10,000 people at theTavricheskii gardens.80 In the mid 1870s Agrenev increased the chorus’s sizeto 150 members, and in the mid-1880s they completed a two-year tour ofEurope.

28 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music

The chorus, which consisted of adult men and women as well as boys,had great success both in Russia and abroad, and was responsible forincreased interest in Russian folk songs. After concerts, Agrenev typicallyreceived from audience members requests for written copies of the chorus’ssongs.81 The repertoire of the chorus included Russian byliny (epic songs),laments, folk songs about girlhood, weddings, and parting, barge-haulersongs, chastushki (sung limericks), joking songs, and other Slavic folk songs.Many of these have become standards of the Russian folk song repertoireinternationally: ‘Ei ukhnem,’ ‘Kalinka,’ ‘Vdol’ po Piterskoi,’ and others.Most of the songs were arranged by Agrenev’s wife, Ol’ga Agreneva-Slavianskaia, in a style that reflected Western harmonic arrangement ratherthan Russian folk polyphony.82 The performance manner was similar to thatof professional classical choruses, with clean intonation, strictly controlledtempo, and varied dynamics – the chorus was well known for its effective useof piano and pianissimo.83 Agrenev died in 1908, but the chorus continued toperform, under the direction of his daughter, until 1922.84

In the early 1870s Tchaikovsky criticized Agrenev’s choice of repertoirefor including ‘city-square romances having nothing to do with folk songs’and ‘pieces with piquant, slang texts.’ Tchaikovsky also lamented the poorquality of the arrangements, which distorted the true character of the orig-inal songs; he said they were a cartoon version of the Russian folk song.85

Despite what some saw as the ‘vulgar’ nature of certain of Agrenev’s reper-toire choices and the ‘dilettante’ nature of the arrangements, criticsacknowledged that the chorus did succeed in promoting Russian songs, andparticularly in raising awareness of Russian music in Western Europe.86 Infact, most of the reviews of the chorus in Russian and foreign newspapersthroughout the 1870s and 1880s were positive, and emphasized the chorus’sexpression of the true ‘Russian spirit.’87 In 1896 Maxim Gorky, lauding itfor bringing the spirit of ancient Russia to the stage, wrote that theSlavianskii kapella ‘restor[ed] the seventeenth century with its boyarcostumes and resurrect[ed] the old Russian folk song.’88

Whether or in what way the Agrenev-Slavianskii chorus in fact engagedin ‘restoration’ and ‘resurrection’ is certainly debatable, and was debatedduring the Soviet period and after. Writing in the 1950s, the Soviet criticKuznetsov mostly follows Tchaikovsky’s lead and criticizes the chorus forcheapening the Russian folk song with the addition of vulgar songs andpoor arrangements. However, he applauds the chorus’s costumes and itsaddition of gestures and acting to the performance of songs. Agrenev hadnot liked the typical costume of Russian folk choruses, that is, as he called it,rough ‘kaftans, hemp sarafany and lapti [birch-bark sandals].’ He brought ina historian, a folklorist, and an artist to design costumes modeled after thedress of seventeenth-century boyars, whose robes were exotic-looking andrichly decorated. The women wore the highly ornamented sarafany ofboyars’ daughters, with cylindrical hats festooned with pearls and trans-parent veils. Later, the chorus varied its costumes according to the material

The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music 29

sung: it would appear in peasant dress for some songs, in seventeenth-century robes for others, and in the rags of the barge-haulers for itsrendition of ‘Dubinushka.’89

With the costume changes came dramatic rendition of the songs’ texts:either some of the singers would mime the actions depicted in the song, orthe entire group would be involved in the action of a scene. The stage wasdecorated and furnished to help render the physical context of the scene,and dance was used for expressive purposes. Agrenev called this ‘the expres-sion of the song in picture form’ [zhivopisno-kartinnoe vyrazhenie pesni], andhe considered it an important part of stage performance. For Kuznetsov,who articulated the Soviet official viewpoint of the 1950s, such innovationsmeant Agrenev’s performances more closely reflected true Russian villagesinging practice – especially in contrast to those of some other choruses ofthe late nineteenth century, which were stiffly academic. He argued thatalthough Agrenev might have skimped on ‘authenticity’ in other ways, hecaptured the spirit of the Russian song and allowed all members of Russiansociety to appreciate it.90

In 1965 Feodosii Rubtsov, whose criticism of the Soviet folk chorus lay atthe foundations of the contemporary folk music revival movement, tookdirect issue with Kuznetsov’s assumption. He wrote that in village singingpractice the expression of a song is not accomplished through gesture thatreflects the song’s content.

[In lyrical songs] the authentic folk tradition does not admit any ‘repre-sentation.’ These songs are ‘played’ only with the voice, which duringthe performance deepens and develops the musical content though thecounter-melodies [podgoloski]…In other song genres, their ‘representa-tion in actions’ occurs only relative [to other aspects]. For example,wedding songs are not staged, instead the actions are accompanied bythe songs…In other words, it is not the content of wedding songs thatfinds its expression in actions, but the opposite: actions which are doneaccording to folk tradition dictate and determine the content of thesongs which accompany different moments of the so-called weddingplay.91

Lamenting the fact that people have often ascribed to folk-song traditionspractices that actually belong to the estrada, Rubtsov criticized the use of‘acting-out songs’ in the practice of the Soviet folk chorus: the songs ‘arenot sung in the authentic folk manner, but, as a rule, are staged – oftencrudely, showing not folk-life, but some kind of parody of the latter.’92

Writing in 1965, Rubtsov implied what Nadezhda Zhulanova (a member ofthe folklore revival movement) would say outright in 1999: ‘the origins ofthe kind of stylization of the folk song which we see in…contemporary folkchoruses and ensembles of song and dance, can be found in the ‘pseudo-

30 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music

folk’ trends in pre-Revolutionary concert estrada, the typical model of whichwas…the chorus of D. Agrenev-Slavianskii.’93

All of the participants in this dialogue evince a central characteristic ofrevivalists: the attempt to define authenticity in order to ‘distinguish therevived practice from other musics and to draw attention to its supposed‘time depth.’94 Kuznetsov cited Tchaikovsky as an authority on authenticityin the folk song, while Rubtsov traced the lack of authenticity (pseudo-folknature) of the Soviet estrada back to the Agrenev-Slavianskii chorus.Meanwhile, Agrenev-Slavianskii reached back further in history for his defi-nitions of authenticity, by having his chorus don seventeenth-century robesand mime songs. Tchaikovsky located authenticity in the culture of thecountryside (where, it was presumed, folk-life had not changed for centuriesand thus reflected ancient practices), not of lower-class town-dwellers, wholived under the ‘vulgar’ influence of modern industrialization.

In opposition to the Soviet chorus, the revivalists of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras trace their origins not to the Slavianskii chorus but to the workof a folklorist/musicologist at the Moscow University Musical-EthnographicCommission, Evgeniia Lineva, who revolutionized the collection of folksongs in 1896: she was the first to use an Edison cylinder machine forRussian folk-song collecting in the field.95 Subsequent revivalists haveargued that her work allowed the tradition to be fully discovered, appreci-ated, and disseminated. In the 1880s special group expeditions wereorganized by the Geographical Society’s newly founded Song Commissionand by Moscow University’s Musical-Ethnographic Commission of theSociety of Lovers of Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography.Later, while the St Petersburg Song Commission was still transcribing songsby ear, the Moscow group began to use the phonograph introduced byLineva.96

Lineva was herself an opera singer who had had a successful career bothin Russia and abroad; her family were populists and revolutionaries, and shewas influenced by populist ideas. She spent the greater part of her career (30years) on the study and promotion of Russian folk singing, and collectedover a thousand songs.97 Living in America from 1892–6, Lineva formed aRussian chorus composed of fifty singers, each dressed in a different peasantcostume, that sang daily at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. One of theirprograms utilized scenery, dialogue, gesture, and singing to enact a Russiantraditional peasant wedding.98 This kind of theatricalization differed fromthat practiced by the Agrenev chorus because it situated the songs within aritual context. The singers did not act out the texts of the songs but ratheracted out the ritual of which the songs were a part.99

Hoping to ‘restore the ancient Russian folk song and bring it into generalusage in all classes of society,’ Lineva organized and directed folk choirs atfactories in St Petersburg and Moscow, and gave speeches encouraging thewidespread organization of folk choruses in villages and towns.100 The choirshe formed and directed at the Musical-Ethnographic Commission gave its

The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music 31

own concerts in Russia and abroad, and also participated in ethnographicconcerts that she organized. In 1906 Lineva created the first folk-musicdepartment at the newly founded Popular [Narodnyi] Conservatory, aimed ateducating workers in music.1012 It was the first time that the study of folkmusic had been placed on a par with the study of other musical subjects.102

Like Lineva, Mitrofan Piatnitskii combined an initial interest in classicalmusic with collection, study, recording, and performance of folk songs, buthe was not primarily a scholar, and did not include pedagogy in hismethods.103 Piatnitskii studied to be an opera singer, but also sang localvillage songs from Voronezh province, where he grew up. He had a careersinging Voronezh songs in the village manner on stages at Moscow fairs,where he was quite popular. Because of his knowledge, in 1903 he became amember of the Moscow University Musical-Ethnographic Commission;during the next decade, he published collections of his own songs and ofsongs he recorded on wax cylinders as he traveled throughout variousprovinces of Russia. In 1911 Piatnitskii gathered village singers from threeprovinces to form a chorus that was well-received by Moscow’s elite; itinitially performed infrequently (ten times between 1911 and 1914). In orderto preserve the choir’s ‘standards’ Piatnitskii forbade the choir and its indi-vidual members to accept jobs as entertainers in restaurants and nightclubs;instead, all members continued to do agricultural work during the warmmonths.104

Piatnitskii did not want his chorus to be like the numerous other profes-sional folk entertainers, whose renditions of folk singing were moreinfluenced by the demands of the stage than dictated by the rules of tradi-tion they had learned in their home villages. Unlike Agrenev-Slavianskii’schorus, Piatnitskii’s group performed in village costumes traditionally wornby the peasantry in their own regions.105 Initially, the chorus sang withoutany particular staging or thematic presentation. Soon, however, under theguidance of a musicologist, V. Paskhalov, the group did incorporate thetechnique of acting out songs, as Agrenev-Slavianskii’s Kapella had done.The songs were divided into ‘kartiny’ [pictures] showing a particular theme:one of these, ‘An Evening Beyond the Outskirts of the Village’ [Vecher zaokolitsei], still in the repertoire of the chorus today, used stage decorationsshowing a meadow beyond which was visible the far-away village; anotherfeatured a village wedding and was set in a peasant hut.106 Kuznetsov, theSoviet critic, points out that this technique helped viewers imagine thecontext in which the songs would be sung. 107

It is not clear how the acting out of songs changed the manner in whichthe Piatnitskii singers presented themselves on stage or interpreted the songsthey sang. Apparently, however, the music producers of the time saw actingout as a necessary supplement to choral folk singing – probably because ofthe operatic tradition and the work of the Agrenev-Slavianskii chorus. Itlikely eased the difficult task of ‘translating’ the symbolic language of ritualinto a form that could be understood by urban-dwelling audiences. In any

32 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music

case, the Piatnitskii chorus experience makes it clear that theatricalization offolk song performance was here to stay. It continued to develop and becamestandard during the Soviet period and beyond.

Conclusion

The approach and style of the Agrenev-Slavianskii chorus and the AndreevOrchestra were models for the Soviet-era folk chorus and orchestra – eventhough the Soviets were not uncritical of some aspects of these early ensem-bles. The rules of the folk music estrada formed a tradition that the Sovietsaccepted as Russian tradition. From our vantage point, this continuitybetween nineteenth and twentieth centuries may seem remarkable, but tocontemporaries it probably was not. The Slavianskii chorus performed until1922; Andreev’s students led his orchestra after his death in 1918. Clearly,audiences appreciated the way they performed.108

Whether the Soviets fulfilled the dreams of the nineteenth-centuryrevivalists or distorted their work is open to interpretation. The musicproduced by Agrenev and Andreev and others had already become clichédby the time the Soviets came to power, but the mass-production, uniformity,and low standards wrought by Soviet policies meant the further entrench-ment of the cliché. In fact cliché often exists alongside revivalism, and it mayoften be the form of revival that most people are familiar with. The EarlyMusic movement of the 1970s and 1980s in the US and Europe similarlyshifted away from an exclusive focus on authenticity and toward ‘anaccepted current in the musical mainstream,’109 complete with ‘personalitycults and fan magazines.’110 Folk music revival developed similarly inRussia.

Lineva gave a different spin to the concept of revivalism, and the inher-itor of her work was the late twentieth-century folk revival movement, whichopposed Soviet folk-music practice. Lineva did counter ‘aspects of thecontemporary cultural mainstream’ in promoting her own view of authen-ticity, and like many leading revivalists researched and taught the notion oftradition she wished to promote.

While musically the Piatnitskii chorus’s early performances incorporatedmany of Lineva’s principles of folk polyphony, in terms of performancestyle the chorus reflected the theatrical presentations of Agrenev-Slavianskii.Unlike any of these revivalist groups, the Piatnitskii chorus was notcomposed of urban intellectuals who consciously learned to sing in the folkstyle, but of peasants who had originally learned to sing in family andcommunity singing contexts. Thus, the chorus belonged more to the tradi-tion of grassroots ensembles of village-bred musicians than it did to theprofessional choruses.111 However, despite the fact that the participants wereoriginally rural dwellers, their music clearly was folklorism, not folklore.

Of all the groups in the arena of Russian folk music in the early twentiethcentury, none has been more hotly debated and interpreted among both offi-

The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music 33

cial Soviet circles and revivalists than the Piatnitskii chorus. This was likelydue to the group’s continued existence beyond the revolutionary period andits promotion by Soviet official culture in the 1930s, when several of the coreaspects of the group’s practice changed. While the Soviets claimed thePiatnitskii chorus as their own, late twentieth-century revivalists argued thatthe Soviets changed and distorted the essential nature of the choir, whichwas originally much more akin to their notion of authenticity andrevivalism. This debate, the issues underlying it, and the complex contextsurrounding it form the subject of the next chapter.

34 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music

Soviet Views of Folklore and Rural People

Russia’s late-nineteenth-century radicals, the populists, cultivated utopianviews of the peasant majority as ‘the key to Russia’s future’; the twentieth-century Bolsheviks took a different stance entirely. Following in Marx’sfootsteps, Lenin dismissed the Russian institution of the peasant communeand wrote of peasants as competitive ‘isolated producers’ living in an essen-tially capitalist economy, who were prone to bigotry, superstition,subservience to authority, and abuse of women.1 Yet he also argued that inthe competitive economy that flourished in the countryside, ‘not less thanhalf’ of the peasants belonged to the ‘rural proletariat.’2 Due to this tensionthe Bolsheviks undertook a two-pronged position toward the peasantry,both treating them as recalcitrant and also trying to instigate a class waramong them. Starting in the 1920s the Bolsheviks increasingly emphasizedthe Party’s proletarian identity, and promoted ‘working-class upwardmobility.’ Until the completion of collectivization, the possibility foradvancement was not extended to peasants.3 This meant that politically, theurban proletariat was favored while the peasantry was treated as a backwardcategory that needed to be overcome in order for society to move forward.

Such a view of peasants was consistent with the Soviet policy towardnationalities, as Yuri Slezkine has shown. Marx’s view of socialismprecluded nationality as a viable category, but Stalin stepped forward in themid-1920s with a project of ‘Socialism in One Country,’ under whichsocialism would be developed among the peoples of the Soviet Union,without international scope. Because the Bolsheviks believed the formerlyoppressed nationalities deserved a right to self-determination they decidedto develop the non-Russian nationalities. During the period of the NewEconomic Policy (NEP) the Soviets made use of folklorists, linguists, andethnographers to help identify and promote 192 ethnicities and nationalities.These scholars adapted alphabets, wrote dictionaries, established canons ofliterature, music, folk culture, and art; in short, they gave each ethnicity acoherent, distinct identity. Members of non-Russian nationalities werepromoted to leadership roles in party, government, judicial, trade union, and

2 A Unified National Style:Folklore Performance in theSoviet Context

educational institutions, and their rural populations were to be ‘proletarian-ized.’ According to this theory the Russians had previously been theoppressor under the Russian Empire and did not deserve such rights oropportunities. The Russians were considered the ‘developed [and] dominant’nationality – thus, the ‘irrelevant’ nationality comprising everyone besidesthe identified nationalities.4

Soviet theorists planned to embrace temporarily the ‘backwardness’represented by ‘peasants, traders, women, all non-Russian peoples ingeneral, and various “primitive tribes” in particular,’ proposing that oncethese people had developed sufficiently, their backwardness would becomeunnecessary.5 This tolerance toward backwardness did not extend to theRussian peasant, who was ‘tolerated but not celebrated, used but notwelcomed’ because leaders assumed the very category was backward andthat there was no way the peasant could develop ‘as a peasant.’ In short,‘ethnicity-based affirmative action in the national territories was an exactreplica of class-based affirmative action in Russia. A Russian could benefitfrom being a proletarian; a non-Russian could benefit from being a non-Russian.’6

Of course, this policy enormously affected the ways that Russian folklorewas viewed, studied, and performed. Initially after the revolution scholarsenergized the field of folklore, arguing that verbal lore was ‘the living voiceof the contemporary peasantry,’ and that the study of folklore by artistsoffered a chance to bring creative work ‘closer to the people.’7 Especially inthe early 1920s, scholars actively undertook group expeditions andpublished comprehensive, multi-disciplinary studies that showed a broadrange of distinctive practices – including material culture, lore, and music-making – of Russians and other nationalities.

But folklorists also came under attack because they often worked with –and therefore were associated with – rural teachers and intellectuals, a groupthat was the target of criticism by Communists since it was assumed theycame from families of prosperous peasants and/or were involved in rivalpolitical organizations.8 The government recognized that folklorists couldeducate rural teachers and cultural workers, and in this way gain greaterinfluence on local populations – which was potentially important sinceleaders possessed very few reliable ways of reaching the peasant population.Political pressures helped to ensure that when folklorists went on expeditionsinto the countryside, they functioned not only as collectors but as propagan-dists of the new Soviet viewpoint, which centered on a critique of the Tsaristregime. However, prejudice against the Russian peasantry was so strong asto prevent the Soviet administration from taking full advantage of the folk-lorists’ potential intermediary role.9

During the latter half of the 1920s, Russian folklore activities werecurtailed while increasing energy was poured into the collection, study, andperformance of the folklore of non-Russian peoples. The activities of folk-lorists and other professionals working in the Russian countryside were

36 A Unified National Style

increasingly criticized by the proletarian literary and musical organizations –the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP in its Russianacronym) and the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) –formed after the revolution, which tried to create a new, specifically ‘prole-tarian’ culture, distinct from the culture of the former ruling classes. Theproposed culture would have nothing in common with lower-class urbanpopular culture, considered ‘vulgar,’ or with rural culture, seen as a throw-back to former social relations (and therefore as potentially harmful to itsconsumers and producers).10 To be sure, proletarian cultural organizers putfolklore to use for specific purposes: for example, they used folkloric satiricalstories about clergy to denigrate religion.11 And as previously, folkloristswent into the Russian villages to collect and study folklore and other villagefolk arts. Yet members of the radical proletarian organizations increasinglycriticized these publications, and managed to stifle publishing of folklorestudies and performance of Russian folklore from 1925 through the early1930s.

In 1928, with the end of the NEP, the toleration of backwards ‘survivals’ceased, and the policy toward the rural populations of all nationalitiestoughened. Now each nationality was exhorted to search for and eradicateits own bourgeois elements, and the government began intensively to employthe notion of a ‘kulak’ (rich peasant) as a weapon against backwardness, inRussian as well as other national populations.12 But the kulak conceptfomented a ‘more or less phony class war’ that had ‘genuine divisiveeffects.’13 Although there were indeed richer and poorer peasants, the differ-ences were subtle and varied from region to region, and it was often not truethat the richer peasants exploited the poorer ones.14 The ultimate purposewas to collectivize as many households as possible by setting peasant againstpeasant.15 When in 1930 Stalin declared outright that the kulaks as a classwere to be ‘liquidated,’ ‘Communists and Komsomols descended on thecountryside en masse to get rid of the kulaks, collectivize the village, closethe churches, and generally kick the backward peasantry into the socialisttwentieth century.’16

The situation changed dramatically after 1934, when Stalin proclaimedthat the country had ‘ “divested itself of everything backward and medieval”and become an industrialized society based on a solid socialist founda-tion.’17 The reality was far from the truth. Sheila Fitzpatrick writes aboutthe ‘Potemkin village’ created by the Soviet mass culture machine, a decep-tive façade of happy and prosperous rural life to cover up the reality of the‘hungry, drab, depopulated, and demoralized’ Russian village of the 1930s.18

According to official rhetoric, socialism had been achieved and class nolonger existed as a legitimate category. However, one remnant of the pre-socialism days was allowed to remain – nationality.19 Socialism nowincluded the ‘brotherhood of the peoples,’ the idea that all (except theRussians) were equal. The Soviets invested enormous time and energy intothe production of national consciousness among the citizenry. It was not a

A Unified National Style 37

Soviet national consciousness – the relations between the various peoples inthe Soviet Union were spoken of as ‘internationalism’ – but the conscious-ness of the distinctiveness of one’s own ethnic group, or narod. This was awatershed time for Russian nationality: rather than being a neutral back-ground to set off the other nationalities, Russian nationality emerged as anethnic group in itself. 20 In fact, Russian now stepped forward as the domi-nant nationality – more ‘equal’ than all the rest.

For the first time the Russian language was instituted as a secondlanguage in all non-Russian schools, a patriotic version of Russian historybegan to be taught in schools, patriotic Russian historical novels, operas andfilms became popular, and nineteenth-century Russian authors were cele-brated. The change seems to have been initiated partly because the countrywas not reproducing enough labor to fulfill the demands of increasingindustrialization. Stalin sought a return to family values, including patrio-tism, as an antidote to a falling birth rate and a rise in juvenile delinquency.Another reason for the change was the threat of fascism in Europe and thepossibility of war. 21 Indeed, during the war and the post-war years, thepromotion of Russian nationality intensified. It became a commonplacethat the Russian people’s inherent patriotism, courage, optimism, andstrength allowed them to defeat the Fascists during World War II.22

This change enormously affected the study, performance, and use ofRussian folklore. Whereas prior to 1934 folklorists received little popularattention for their work on Russian material – and in the late 1920s andearly 1930s had difficulty publishing their work – after 1934 songbooks andfolk-tale collections were widely popularized and articles about folklore werepublished in newspapers and major literary journals.23 Folk music as enter-tainment and as amateur activity had been allowed prior to 1928, but wasbanned or criticized from 1928 to 1934. After this watershed year, however,the leadership actively encouraged folk choirs and orchestras.24 Rural life,rural culture, rural people, and national ‘traditions’ became important topicsthat were no longer to be ignored or belittled.

A New Definition of the Folk and Folklore

Rural culture made its mark in a big way during the Stalin period, in filmsand novels, in architecture, on the Soviet crest, and in paintings and sculp-tures: images of rural happiness, collectivity and abundance emphasized theoptimism of a glorious new era of productivity for Soviet agriculture. In thenew myth, the Soviet peasant was generous, hardworking, honest, morallyupstanding, intelligent, cultured, and contented.

Why this emphasis on the rural dweller and agriculture in Stalin-eraculture? Most of the population of the Soviet Union was rural and engagedin agriculture. Stalin’s collectivization policy aimed to manage these villagedwellers and their agricultural products in an orderly and predictablefashion, like the industrial system. Collectivization ostensibly accomplished

38 A Unified National Style

this by making 25 million individual farms into 200,000 collective ones.25

The image of the enlightened peasant in socialist-realist culture helped tocreate a myth that could provide a model for rural dwellers, and a hope forurban people.26 In this myth, rural people would be nearly indistinguishablefrom urban workers; in fact, they would work, live, and build socialism sideby side, as in Vera Mukhina’s 1937 sculpture The Worker and the CollectiveFarm Girl. This myth predicted a glowing future for the society in general: ifeven the rural dwellers (formerly known to be backward) were model citi-zens, then the progress of the society must indeed be great.

As positive images of the Russian peasant and Russian folk culture werepropagated in order to cultivate patriotism, the very conception of ‘folk’(used as a modifier, narodnyi in Russian) changed. Since official policydictated that the peasants of the Soviet Union had now been transformedinto agricultural workers, and that all workers, industrial and agricultural,were equally valuable, it followed that the term ‘narodnyi’ now referred to allthe people, and would be best translated as ‘people’s’ or ‘popular’ ratherthan ‘folk.’ Thus, in the 1930s the term ‘narodnaia muzyka’ ceased officiallyto mean folk music, and now meant the music of the people, that is, ‘anykind of broad-based popular music.’27

The definition of folklore changed after 1934 as well. Pre-Revolutionaryscholars had defined folklore as the oral lore of illiterate rural dwellers; afterthe Revolution, RAPP and RAPM had discouraged folklore because it wasa source of ‘survivals’ of pre-Revolutionary bourgeois thinking.28 Startingabout 1932 when those organizations were dissolved, cultural leaders beganto define folklore as the orally transmitted lore of the working masses, andto acknowledge that because of its close association with the masses andbecause it was orally transmitted (and therefore remembered), folklore had apotentially great role to play in disseminating party doctrine. MaximGorky’s remarks at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 linking folk-lore with literature and the doctrine of socialist realism were enormouslyinfluential. Just as socialist realism would be grounded in reality yet wouldprovide heroic models for others to emulate, so folklore provided heroes whowere both ordinary people and also possessed extraordinary strengths.Gorky bewildered the writers at the congress by exhorting them to modeltheir works after folklore.29 After this speech there was a tremendousincrease in the attention paid to folklore in the fields of literature and theperforming arts. It marked the beginning of a redefinition of folklore,authenticity in folklore, and the functions of folklore. In fact, these remarksshaped all of Soviet culture and set up folklore as a crucial reference point.

As Ursula Justus has argued, Gorky’s redefinition of folklore as realistliterature and the corresponding linking of folklore and literature estab-lished a lineage for the new socialist culture: rather than a policy forcedupon the masses from above, socialist realism was supposedly a return totrue origins. A new canon was established for all of the arts. Folklore was toserve as the central touchstone for socialist realism, followed by the art of

A Unified National Style 39

ancient Greece, the Italian Renaissance, and the Russian realist school ofthe nineteenth century.30

The socialist realist requirement ‘that writers “learn from the classics,”putting the techniques of nineteenth-century Russian realism at the serviceof the proletariat and the party’ was underpinned by the Marxist view thatthe high culture of the landowners during feudalism and capitalism was‘created on the basis of the exploitation of the labor’ of the proletariat, andthat therefore it now properly belonged to the masses.31 Socialism wouldsupposedly recoup this culture for the new classless society. Scholars nowviewed folklore, too, through the prism of the nineteenth-century realismthat supposedly descended from it. This meant that the work of folkloristswas situated within academic literature departments and overseen by theWriters’ Union, dividing folkloristics from ethnography and musicology andessentially wiping out the ‘sociological’ study of folklore and its attempts toplace folklore within the context of village culture and society.32 It alsomeant that folklore was most valuable as a source for the creation of compo-sitions in the sphere of high culture. This definition had major repercussionsin the ways in which folk art was produced and constructed from the 1930sto the 1980s and beyond; I explore this aspect in the following section, ‘HighCulture’.

Finally, the linking of folklore with realism meant that it was supposed tobe ‘realistic’ in the sense dictated by the definition of socialist realism.Gorky said that folklore was by nature simple, clear, optimistic, accessible,national, and came from the masses; the new socialist realist art would bemeasured against these characteristics.33 But as folklorists well knew, pre-Revolutionary folkloric texts were often cryptic and complex, lamenteddifficult personal or societal situations, and were based upon a world-viewthat placed great importance upon supernatural processes and beings. Iffolklore was to be a tool to increase patriotism and to draw on the newnotion of a ‘popular’ culture, it needed to be edited and reconstructed inorder to suit the context of a socialist society. The new interpretation offolklore emphasized the struggle of the peasants and workers prior to therevolution and their current status as members of modern Soviet society. Asduring the 1920s, songs and stories which criticized aspects of pre-Revolutionary Russia were desirable, but after Gorky’s remarks it was notenough that folklore should criticize what had been; it also had to extol thecurrent reality, including the Revolution, mechanization, and party leader-ship. Folklorists began to search for such songs, stories, and epics. Theyfound some in relatively new genres such as chastushki.

Most genres of folklore, however, did not reflect new Soviet life as theauthorities wanted it depicted. Unacceptable types of folklore includedgenres deemed part of bourgeois society, such as cruel romances and crim-inal songs; genres that reflected a pagan or superstitious world-view, such asritual folklore, erotic folklore, and incantations; and folklore reflecting aChristian world-view, such as Christian ritual songs and spiritual songs.34

40 A Unified National Style

Although official policy dictated that more attention would now be placedupon the folklore of workers rather than peasants, in practice this did nothappen.35 Certain urban songs did suit socialist ideological goals: the songsof protest of the late nineteenth century and chastushki. However, much ofurban folklore – the songs of bars and cabarets, criminals’ songs and lore,jokes, myths and stories of the workplace and the street – included contentthat was considered decadent, irreverent, or politically dangerous by theSoviets. Because large parts of these genres of folklore were not to beincluded, then, rural folklore had to be reinvented.

However, the invention of folklore was problematic. In the decade beforethe Revolution, folklorists had debated the role of individuals in creatingfolklore. Moscow folklorists had proposed that studying ‘the creative role ofthe bearer of folklore’ would help to understand changes introduced into afolklore tradition, while St Petersburg folklorists persisted in seeing folkloreas the expression of national groups.36 But both schools had agreed thatindividual performers were ‘bearers’ of tradition, who of their own volitionintroduced changes into traditional texts and melodies. They did not actu-ally create whole texts or invent traditions. After 1934 Soviet policy-makersdramatically changed that interpretation. Since Gorky had defined folkloreas the creative expression of the toiling masses and equated it with literarycreation, individuals could now create it. After all, if the new creators werefrom the masses, then folklore was ‘theirs,’ and by the same logic anythingthey created was potentially ‘folklore’ (the term used was ‘people’s creation,’narodnoe tvorchestvo).

There was a problem with encouraging illiterate rural folks to write new,politically conscious folklore texts or songs: they often lacked the necessaryexpertise, or knowledge of Soviet ideology. In order to expand opportunitiesfor the creation of folklore, authorities encouraged both professionals andamateurs to create new songs and texts in the folk style. The origin of thecreator did not matter: even if a composer or writer was a member of theintelligentsia, she or he still could create in a style that would be acceptableto the masses. Professional composers would ‘add voices’ to (i.e. harmonize)folk melodies, would use folk texts for new compositions, or would make uptext, melody, and accompaniment ‘in the folk style.’ The few amateurcomposers in villages and small towns simply set new texts to old melodies.

Scholars also took on new roles as ideological re-educators of folkperformers. They were sent to work one-to-one with rural tellers and singersof folktales and epic songs to help them create new texts glorifying aspectsof the government or leaders. Radios were installed in the homes of folktellers, newspaper subscriptions were set up for them, and they were accom-panied on tours to Moscow and Leningrad. The results were epic folksongslauding technological progress, party heroes and enemies, and the militarymight of the Russian people. The scenarios of many such song texts werethe ‘Potemkin village,’ the prosperous and happy collective farm. Thesesongs were published in collections of songs and folk poetry, in ‘thick jour-nals,’ and in newspapers.37

A Unified National Style 41

If pre-Revolutionary scholars had valued authenticity in folklore,defining it as the orally created and transmitted art of specifically identifi-able individuals whose work represented a traditional local stylecharacterized by variants in vocabulary, poetics, and stylization, that wasnow changed. In fact, in the period leading up to World War II, the idea ofauthenticity was not often addressed in published writings about folklore,because the boundaries of what was being considered folklore werewidening: more and more newly composed material was being held up asprime examples of folklore. It was no longer truly oral since, as Miller pointsout, the new songs and texts were researched in advance and either writtendown or specifically worked on by their composers over a certain period oftime.38

In fact, the epic songs created during the Stalin era have been dubbed‘fakelore’ or ‘pseudofolklore’ because they were made deliberately for polit-ical ends and because in many cases they were not even the expressions ofthe people to whom they were ascribed. The editor of a collection of songsby one bylina singer stated that he helped the composer, a woman in her 60sfrom the shore of the White Sea, ‘place certain events in their correct histor-ical sequence.’ He eliminated ‘abstractions which have no relation to thebasic theme…superfluous repetitions and…descriptions which at certainpoints were too long and drawn out,’ and took out ‘the peculiarities of theWhite Sea dialect.’39 This folklorist’s attempt to make the folklore he‘collected’ ostensibly more aesthetically appealing, more true to ‘reality,’ andmore readily accessible to anyone speaking standard literary Russian, as wellas the work he did to make the folklore ideologically correct, characterizedthe approach to folklore during the entire Soviet period (both during andafter Stalin) in general. The Soviet brand of folklore became bleached of itsparticularity and its local flavor, and lost its connection to the natural andspiritual worlds (including both Christian and pagan supernatural founda-tions). Miller writes: ‘the goal of Soviet folkloristics from the time of Stalin’sdeath through the 1980s remained essentially what it was in the 1930s: thepromotion of works by folk performers and collectives that express the joyand optimism of Soviet life and loyalty to the country, Lenin, and theCommunist party.’40

The ultimate goal of official cultural policy was eventually to diminishthe role played by the folklore of the past. That goal was largely successfulnot only due to the authorities’ demands for and promotion of new folkmaterial, but also because new cultural and social policies changed the veryfunctions of folklore. In the society envisioned and created by Soviet leaders,folklore’s official functions revolved around glorifying a state-sponsoredideology. Most of its former functions were obsolete: connection with thenatural world was no longer needed since the world was now said to be ruledby rational, scientific models and nature was harnessed by engineering toserve human goals. Tractors, not wood-nymphs or sacred springs, were to becelebrated. New holidays were created to encourage celebration, but these

42 A Unified National Style

existed to support the new ideology. Some of them marked political events(e.g. the First of May and October Revolution Day); others were createdspecifically to replace religious or agricultural holidays (e.g. New Year’s andHarvest Holiday). In the new versions of old holidays, religious and super-stitious rituals were discarded or converted into secular ones, and newcontent was provided to link the holiday to the building of Socialism.

Folklore was no longer really folklore. Instead of being a spontaneousgrassroots expressive activity, folklore now provided content for artisticactivity in the fields of singing, instrument playing, dancing, and crafts. Tothe extent that it was actively practiced, it was primarily as a hobby or aprofession. In short, folklore had become folklorism.

Of course, when we imagine the transition between the old and new usesof folklore in the Russian countryside, it is important to keep in mind thatthe functions of folklore are always changing. It is not the case that ancient,pagan folklore flourished during the Tsarist era and that this living traditionwas suddenly eradicated and replaced by something new and wholly artifi-cial in the Soviet era. As we saw in Chapter 1, since the mid-nineteenthcentury intellectuals interested in the expressions of rural people had bothinsisted that folklore was dying out and devised means of saving it,inevitably transforming it in the process. Furthermore, as it turned out,during the Soviet period people’s beliefs and habits were not eradicated, butadapted to new circumstances and belief systems. Old traditions continuedto be practiced alongside the new traditions, and people fashioned newgrassroots versions of official traditions that allowed for the expression ofcommunity cohesiveness, family structure, spirituality, and so on. Thus, onemay speak not only of ‘folklorism’ in the Soviet period, but also of trulyauthentic folklore – the spontaneous expressive practices of groups ofpeople – such as the tattoos and songs of Soviet prisoners, the witty orbawdy chastushki of middle-aged urban dwellers, and children’s rhymes. Theinterweaving of old and new traditions in some of these practices reflected akind of ‘double belief ’ similar to the fusion of Russian Orthodoxy andpagan practices that characterized popular religion prior to the revolution.41

I will now look more closely at the official management of folklore in the1930s through 1960s, and the ways that people responded to such treatment.In the following discussions, although I will be speaking mainly of what Ihave defined as ‘folklorism,’ I will continue to use the term used by thesources themselves – that is, ‘folklore’ (most often expressed during thisperiod as narodnoe tvorchestvo).

High Culture

Informing all of the policies directed toward the management of folklore inthe 1930s through 1980s was the relation between folklore and high culture,outlined in Gorky’s 1934 speech. Realist traditions were favored as modelsfor the new socialist realism; but in music, since its inherent abstraction

A Unified National Style 43

meant that ‘realism’ was not possible in the way it was in painting or litera-ture, heavy emphasis was placed instead both upon the folk music collectedby, and the folk-inspired compositions written by, late-nineteenth centurymembers of the Russian ‘national school.’ Even though this was really partof the Romantic movement in Russian music, it was suitable because itreflected the beginnings of a critical approach to the Tsarist political system;the music was apparently straightforward and would be accessible to theuneducated majority of the population; and it suited the requirement thatthe arts be ‘national.’42 Romantic West European classical music – such asBeethoven, Brahms, or Mendelssohn – also served as a model. The academicestablishment and other cultural institutions actively promoted the legacy ofthe Russian national composers: their music was widely played on radio andin concerts, huge festivals were held on anniversaries of the composers’births, and the conservatories in Moscow and Leningrad were re-namedafter Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, respectively.43 In fact both in thesupposedly ‘proletarian’ policies set by RAPM in the 1920s and the formula-tions of the Composers’ Unions from the mid-1930s on, classical musicformed the model to which all performers and composers should aspire, anda standard of cultural competence which the masses should be made toacquire.44 This was true in dance as well, where the dances popular invillages were officially discouraged or forbidden as ‘second-rate junk’ whileapproved lists recommended simple gymnastic exercises set to ‘folk dances’written by nineteenth-century classical composers.45 Thus, the reigning hier-archy of musical styles was roughly the same as it had been in the latenineteenth century.

This was a paradox. To follow in the steps of Tchaikovsky or Borodinmeant essentially to imitate those masters, which could lead to a creativedead end that did not enhance the development of Soviet music. Morefundamentally, the past was tacitly being held up as a goal for a societywhich wanted to create itself anew. Attempts to create modernist styles in allof the arts, despite a brief flowering in the 1920s, were branded as bourgeoisand decadent from the 1930s through the end of Stalin’s reign. By contrast,art of the past recalled the golden age of Russian culture, a time whenRussia participated fully in the culture of the West.

But to hold pre-Revolutionary high culture as a model for the new Sovietculture was not only a paradox: it was a problem. How could elite culture bemade more accessible and attractive to the new mass audiences who weresupposed to be consuming it? When workers were encouraged to expresstheir opinions about Soviet culture in the 1920s, they criticized many clas-sical operas and ballets as boring and obsolete. But they did like music andtheater that were based upon folk themes or had easily understandable plots.They appreciated melodies that one could sing after leaving the theater.46

Socialist realism solved the problem of how to accommodate the tastes ofthe millions by creating a new culture that ‘synthesized the “classicalheritage” with the average tastes of the masses.’47

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As Evgeny Dobrenko has argued through analysis of the film Volga Volga(1938), in such a synthesis of the classical and folk styles the folk musicianswould learn ‘how’ to play – so that the song sounds fuller, more cultured –and the classical musicians would learn ‘what’ to play. The final version ofthis synthesis would be a symphonic arrangement of a folk song that ‘raisesThe Song to the status of High Culture, transforms it into a super-genre.The Song acquires that triumphant, powerful sound that marks it as asacred text.’48

It was precisely this ‘encounter and cultural compromise’ of the two polesof elite and mass culture that characterized the culture of the Soviet Unionfrom the 1930s to the 1980s. Official Soviet culture was not simply imposedfrom above. The Soviet educational system as well as the system of distribu-tion of art created new consumers and producers of art by exposing them toa canon of works and a means of interpreting those works. Thus, socialistrealism ‘ “hauled up” the masses from one side and art from the other sideand drove them closer to each other.’ The result was a culture that waslargely based upon the taste of the masses: ‘the disaster of mediocre taste.’49

This was a modified, castrated version of high culture. It was the cultureof ‘crêpe-de-chine, ballet and Chopin’ – the markers by which society couldjudge one’s upward mobility.50 And the possibility for advancement wasgranted only by the education system: ‘in order to create The Song, “one hasto study”.’51 This was especially true in the field of music, where literacy andcompetence had formerly been the provenance of only a dedicated few andclassical training took years to complete. Soviet musicologists were aware ofthis and wrote frequently (especially in the 1920s and 1930s) about thenecessity to educate the public in the basics of music – Western classicalmusic. They wrote equally frequently about the necessity to compose musicthat was simple enough for ordinary people to understand and appreciate.52

Through the 1920s, to the 1940s, a progression could be seen in theapproach to classics. In the 1920s the classics were deemed too inaccessibleby the mass audience; in the 1930s critics wrote that the masses themselvescould and should create music, whether folk or classical. In the 1940s educa-tion was stressed, and by the late 1940s the emphasis was on creating Sovietclassics that synthesized and dissolved the opposition of low and high art.53

The push for the masses to ‘re-appropriate’ their national heritage in theform of folk-inspired Romantic classical music in fact reflected the culturalestablishment’s direct appropriation of the ideological goals of the MightyHandful. Those nationalist composers had striven to use folk motifs in sucha way that the Russian people would recognize the pieces as their own, butthey set the pieces in the Western classical style so that the listeners would, inthe process, receive a kind of education in European music. In this way, thecomposers felt they would ‘bridge the gap between the Russian masses andthe Westernized cultural elite.’54

In both art music based upon folk motifs and popular folk songs andmusic arranged by composers, the principle was the same: the folk melody

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served as ‘raw material’ for an artistic creation. A Soviet musicologist wrotein 1946:

The task of a Soviet composer is not only to repeat a folk melody, justfitting it to contemporary musical forms … The composer may do more– [he can] reveal the ‘hidden potentials’ of the work, which was made byan ‘ingenious’ folk author ‘who hides inside himself sparks of divinity,’as Rimsky-Korsakov put it; [he can] see and uncover that which the folksinger had as yet indistinctly guessed, vaguely felt.55

The implication was that folk music might be extremely valuable, but itsvalue would be unseen unless a composer could ‘polish the gem’ and revealthe true beauty hidden under the rough exterior of the folk song. At thistime Soviet publications on music often quoted Glinka’s phrase, reflectingessentially the same attitude: ‘Music is created by the people, and we, artists,only arrange it.’56 Although Glinka’s phrase appears to give precedence tofolk music, and configures the ‘artist’ as a mere arranger, this was a typicalRomantic rhetorical stance that reflected the myth of the artist as acraftsman who simply provided a channel for higher wisdom (in this case,the wisdom of the people, who themselves offer a conduit for nationalculture). The ubiquitous Soviet call for ‘polishing the gem’ of folk art in artmusic reflects essentially the same Romantic view.57

Thus, folk art’s newly elevated cultural status in the 1930s–40s cameabout partly because folk music was seen through the prism of the middle-brow version of high art. What rural folk music and dance might actuallylook and sound like, and what it might actually mean to its traditional prac-titioners, was not considered important by cultural policymakers. Rather,folk flavor or quality – in a novel, a musical composition, ballet, or anamateur music and dance performance – served as a marker of nationality(narodnost’) which was an obligatory characteristic for all Soviet art; and itoffered a source of cultural capital to its composers, performers, and orga-nizers.

Folklore as Hobby

Starting in the mid-30s, the government heavily promoted folk culture as ahobby for people of all ages. It was part of a program spanning all the arts,called ‘amateur artistic activity’ (khudozhestvennaia samodeiatel’nost’):Soviet citizens were encouraged to get involved in the creation of art. Thispolicy would demonstrate that each individual was fully self-actualized andactive in the work of building the ideal society, and would show the prowessof the Soviet people: not only could they build a successful, industrializedsocialist society, they also excelled at sports and the arts.58 The message inthe government’s program, which could also be seen in films and novels ofthe time, was that everyone could sing, compose music, write novels and

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poetry, act and dance. It would be a nation of cultured and cultivated‘Renaissance’ men and women. A 1965 article on the All-Russian Review ofVillage Amateur Artistic Activity illustrates this point, and shows the degreeto which the policy remained in place even after Stalin: ‘A combine operatoris a choreographer, a milk maid is a poetess, a metal worker is the director ofthe show, a livestock expert is the conductor of the orchestra, a shepherd is asinger – all these have become not just isolated facts, but a portentous signand a norm of contemporary village life.’59

From a practical point of view, amateur artistic activity would alsooccupy people’s leisure time in a productive fashion and involve them ingroup activities to enhance the feeling of belonging to a great nation-widecollective. In fact, the word used to refer to these groups was ‘collective’(kollektiv). Finally, and most significantly from the government’s point ofview, the activities were meant to re-educate the masses in communist waysof thinking, to ‘fight the capitalist “birth-marks” in people’s conscious-ness.’60 In order to do this, the activities had to have content that wouldactively teach communist ideas. This is why there was such a widespread andconstant call for new songs and plays for amateur artistic activity. The mostubiquitous call was for folklore that would reflect the cheery mood of offi-cial culture. Much of pre-Revolutionary folklore was seen as too sad forcontemporary use.61

It was a mass movement. By 1940, there were two million participants inartistic clubs in the USSR. The performing arts were quite popular: theaterand dance groups, choruses, bands, and orchestras that played a mix oftraditional folk, composed music, and arranged classics were established atfactories and collective farms. Music was proclaimed the ‘most popular’ ofthe types of amateur artistic activity.62 It reached this status partly becauseof the efforts of the government, which poured considerable energy into the‘development of musical culture.’ Concerts were favored by officials inprovincial cities and villages since the amateur musical groups were the onlysecular competitors for the church choirs.63 And a kind of choral singingcalled ‘mass singing’ was singled out as the best way to attract masses tomusic, because it was a collective activity that could be done by any numberof people simultaneously, without much special training.64 Composers andconductors were sent to factories and movie theaters to lead mass singingduring breaks: they handed out printed copies of Soviet mass songs, andworkers (or audience members) sang along.65 Regional and national compe-titions, called olympiady and smotry, encouraged such activity. Leningradwas the site of the yearly musical olympiads from 1927–37; the number ofparticipants there was said to reach 10,000, and competitions nationwidereached 40–50,000. The mass quality of the movement was emphasized byevents such as the ‘multi-national chorus and orchestra’ composed of severaltens of thousands of participants at the 1932 Moscow Olympiad.66

Professional folk choirs like the Army Ensemble and the Piatnitskii Choirwere held up as models to the amateur choirs, and in 1937 several of the

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largest and best amateur choirs were professionalized.67 It was difficult forthe amateur choirs to imitate professional groups – after all, they lacked themusical training, the highly schooled conductors, the time, and theresources. Instead, prior to World War II, they often had directors who hadno training at all, or had formerly been church choir directors; after the war,when training became more widely available, such directors often finishedthe equivalent of a high school or vocational school (often a ‘cultural-enlightenment school’ [kul’turno-prosvetitel’naia shkola] or a music highschool [muzykal’noe uchilishche]). This person received a salary from thestate for his or her work promoting amateur culture – which allowed author-ities greater control over repertoire choices.68 Another means of control andstandardization was the network of Houses of People’s Art, formed in 1936on the basis of the former Houses of Amateur Art. These centers in regionaland oblast capitals were charged with making available materials andtraining for directors of amateur clubs.69

While prior to Gorky’s remarks cultural organizers had discouragedperformance of old folklore, beginning in 1934 they exhorted choruses toperform more folk music.70 The ensembles obtained new Soviet songs andapproved folk songs from sheet music or from the pages of special maga-zines for cultural workers. The folk songs published and composed forpopular use at this time were devoid of local characteristics: a 1936 book ofRussian folk songs aimed specifically at ‘amateur clubs and lovers of folksong’ takes much of its material from nineteenth-century collectors who hadnot written down the dialectal forms of the text nor the complex polyphonywith which the villagers had sung. ‘Second and third voices were added’ to asingle melody in most cases.71 A review of several song books published inthe 1950s with recommended repertoire for kolkhoz (collective farm) folkchoirs showed that many contained no or very few folk songs; those few folksongs that were included were often arranged for several voices or for voiceaccompanied by piano (an instrument that was rare in villages).72 The folk-singing groups who used this material obtained identical costumes fromfactories set up specifically to mass-produce Russian folk costumes for stageuse. Often the costumes were stylized to ‘update’ them. Instruments weresimilarly mass-produced, and were of notoriously poor quality.73 Thepurchase of such costumes and instruments was funded by the sponsoringkolkhoz or town cultural budget.

Such a chorus or orchestra would perform at local holiday events held inthe village ‘club’ (klub) or House of Culture, the town Palace of Culture, oroutdoors in the town or village square on a stage specially set up for theholiday. Children’s groups rehearsed and performed at the Palace ofPioneers. Much money was poured into the construction of these buildingsstarting in the late 1930s, with the aim of bringing the production ofamateur culture more tightly and consistently under government control.74

The number of clubs in the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative SocialistRepublic – the area corresponding to modern Russia) grew from about

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18,000 in 1927 to 74,000 in 1940; of these, 93 percent were in villages.75

Their significance for village and small-town life can be seen in their designand the variety of activities they typically housed. For example, in 1965 onemedium-sized town in Smolensk oblast described its new House of Cultureas ‘a bright two-story mansion with huge windows’ and its main hall as ‘aspacious auditorium with 400 seats’; it housed weekly movies, amateurconcerts, lectures from the People’s University, entertainment programs, andthematic evenings; regular debates, dance evenings, and balls; monthly cere-monial registration of newborns; and weddings.76 The club was supposed tofunction as the center of the new socialist cultural life, and to represent thenotion of people living communally. In 1964–65 the image of the contempo-rary club was debated in a periodical for cultural workers, and one of thecontributors called it a ‘a public domestic hearth’ [obshchestvennyi domashniiochag] – a kind of ‘home away from home’ where one can come to ‘satisfy[one’s] spiritual needs.’77

Resistance

Looking back upon this history, we might imagine that it would have beendifficult for many amateur performers of their own local folklore to beenthusiastic about telling, singing, dancing, or playing something completelynew, and for scholars to actively promote what many viewed as fakelore.While younger people, exposed to the new Soviet art in the context of theschools and clubs, may have easily adapted to new material, the shift musthave been hard for adults to make. While evidence of direct resistance tosuch policies is scarce, we do know that some scholars persisted in trying topromote the old, traditional folklore that they valued. For example, tworeenactments of peasant weddings – using local, traditional material – at the1936 All Union Choral Olympiad drew quite a bit of official criticism.Despite the reproach, both of the choir directors involved continued to useunarranged traditional material in their work; one of them, Anna Rudneva,subsequently had a successful career as a Moscow musicologist, partlybecause of her scholarly credentials (she had graduated from the MoscowConservatory with a degree in choral directing and music theory). The other,A. Kolotilova, the director of the Northern Russian Folk Choir, sufferedprofessionally when critics wrote that she used local material because shelacked the musical training to use newly composed songs.78

Amateurs took a somewhat different approach. In published materials on1930s competitions in Ivanovo province, Robin LaPasha noticed that tradi-tional folk music remained popular with audiences despite officialpromotion of new material. Through ‘careful ideological “packaging”,’many amateur village choirs were able to maintain in their active repertoiresancient folk songs. One kolkhoz choir presented a ‘montage on the themesof “Yesterday and Today” ’ in which the older members of the group sangold folk songs, while the younger members sang contemporary songs. For

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the elders, this strategy ‘provided protection against interference with thetraditional repertoire,’ and they were spared the task of learning new songs,which they may not have preferred to their old songs or may have founddifficult due to their poor (musical and verbal) literacy skills. Meanwhile, thegroup’s younger members were spared the task of learning songs in thecomplex local traditional style, but increased their own visibility by drawingon the popularity of the old folk-song styles.79

It is possible to speculate that the actions of the performers formed akind of tacit resistance – or at least enacted self-assertion in the context of aregime that aimed to remove such possibilities.80 Izalii Zemtsovskiirecounted a remarkable story from the post-Stalin Thaw era, told to him bya culture worker in Pskov oblast, in which villagers simply refused to workwith new material. In 1957, after the worker attempted to forbid traditional,local dances in the local club (following the orders of the village administra-tion), ‘the people walked out of the club.’ The worker was forced to appealto the higher authorities in the village, who subsequently recanted andallowed the older dances. Despite official policy, then, there were cases ofsuch ‘boycotts’ of the new material. Of course, the above occurrence tookplace during the ‘Thaw,’ after Stalin’s death, yet as we have seen, versions ofit, perhaps not so pronounced nor so publicly admitted, took place duringStalin’s reign as well.81 If, as Zemtsovskii pointed out, the worst aspect ofthe poor organization of the amateur artistic system was the fact that it didnot take into account people’s initiative,82 then such stories show that atleast some people did display enthusiasm for their ‘own’ music-making prac-tices, and were aware of their own power to choose. Indeed, my own fieldresearch in the 1990s revealed that while many village folk choirs stillenjoyed the songs promoted by the Soviet cultural system, some groups hadretained old traditional repertoires throughout the Soviet period. Thesevillagers did not view their having done so as resistance; I encountered onlyone village group whose participants stated flatly that they ‘did not likeSoviet songs.’83

Despite such exceptional signs of resistance to official cultural policy,however, the campaign to perform folk culture on a mass scale with quasi-professional polish was largely successful, since the mode of presentation ofRussian musical folklore became more and more widespread and uniform.Whereas in the second half of the 1930s some provincial kolkhoz choirswere primarily presenting old songs and rituals,84 after World War II thisincreasingly became a rarity. In 1962, there were 9 professional folk chorusesin the RSFSR, and hundreds of thousands of people involved in non-professional choirs that aspired to be like the professionals.85 The folkchorus way of presenting folklore on stage became so standard that even inthe late 1990s, when the state no longer poured resources into the mainte-nance of the folk chorus phenomenon, the majority of amateur folkensembles, including village and children’s ensembles, still copied several ofits stylistic aspects.86 (Figure 2.1)

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Gender

The Soviet presentation of folk music and dance was highly gendered.Russian village singing was traditionally done by both genders, but publicsinging in organized choirs has been associated with women at least sinceafter World War I and the Civil War, when two factors contributed to agender separation in singing. First, the young adult male and female popula-tions were separated for long periods of time: male soldiers learned newsongs and sang together with their regiment for the purpose of passing thetime, maintaining spirits or keeping step while marching, while females whostayed at home in villages were more likely to retain local styles and tocontinue to celebrate traditional agricultural holidays. When men returnedfrom war, the new repertoire they had learned in the army differed signifi-cantly from what their female family members were singing. The malerepertoire and singing style was more ‘national’ while the female tended tobe more ‘local.’87 Second, the male population declined enormously as aresult of these wars.88 With a lack of men, village women were forced to singin groups of women or by themselves. Meanwhile, instrumental music,which had always been associated more with men than with women (withsome local exceptions) remained largely the province of males.89

As a result of these changes in village practice, amateur village choruseswere largely made up of women, while men populated the newly formingfolk orchestras. This situation coincided with Soviet policies that placedheavy emphasis on factory work as the most valuable labor in the new indus-

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Fig 2.1: 200th Anniversary of Pushkin’s birth

trializing state, and increasingly brought women’s work from the domestic tothe productive sphere. The resulting ‘cult of (masculine) productive labor,’combined with the ‘degradation of (feminine) domestic and reproductivepursuits’ meant that ‘Soviet society was characterized by a reverence fortraditionally masculine values at the expense of conventional femininity.’90

If we add to this equation the association of women with the (debased)agricultural labor and men with the (favored) factory sphere – as depicted,in the 1930s and later, in works of art featuring female kolkhoz workerspaired with male factory workers – we can see that rural women weredoubly condemned.91

During the 1920s images of females in political iconography often hadnegative connotations: for example, in a famous Civil War-era poster byMikhail Chermnykh, ‘The Story of the Bagel and the Baba,’ an oldpeasant woman refuses to give a bagel to a Red Army soldier who is on hisway to fight the Poles. She represents the ‘ignorance, stupidity, blind self-interest, and petty bourgeois greed’ of the mythological baba.92 In thiscontext it can be argued that when, during the 1920s, RAPM tried to eradi-cate the folk chorus, it did so partly because of its association with villagewomen, who were viewed as an extremely backward element in Russianrural society.93 RAPM members thought that the women’s choruses’common repertoire of old folk songs about personal relationships wouldencourage a pre-Revolutionary mentality among listeners. Organizers triedto encourage the formation of amateur men’s choirs – in imitation of theRed Army and Don Cossack Choirs – because of the prestige that the malegender would have brought to folk singing, but in most of the Russian terri-tory they were unable to find all-male village choirs.94

Starting in the mid-1930s, when folklore was ‘in favor,’ women’s villagechoruses were officially encouraged. These choirs won prizes at olympiadsand obtained favorable reviews, despite their singing of old folk songs. Infact, as LaPasha argues, during World War II the women’s singing of oldsongs about home created an image of domestic stability that was useful tocultural organizers.95 Still, despite official promotion of rural women’ssinging, women who maintained an old, local vocal style reported that theywere often ridiculed for the way they sang (see Chapter 7). Their practicesdid not fit the new image of folklore, which called for arranged or composedpieces, often with accordion. This push toward the professionalization andstandardization of folk music was gradually more and more successful as itattracted younger people, who adapted more easily to it. These policies thatsought to transform village music into a more refined art may be seen aspart of the society-wide debasement of the traditionally feminine.96

Professional Folklore Performance during the 1930s–40s

It was perhaps paradoxical that the widespread Soviet program called‘amateur artistic activity’ was part of the push toward professionalism. As a

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reviewer of the 1948 All-Union Review of Kolkhoz Musical AmateurActivity stated, many of the performers ‘approached the level of profes-sionals.’97 Indeed, amateurs were becoming professionals. The singers offolk epics previously sought as ‘informants’ for folklorists’ ethnographicstudies now became professional writers, members of the Writers’ Union.98

Professional folk choruses, orchestras, and dance groups recruited their newmembers from amateur groups. Within the army, for example, the bestperformers from the ensembles that performed at their own smotry formedthe ‘basis’ for its huge professional ensemble, the Red Army Song andDance Ensemble of the USSR.99

Very popular on radio and in live performance was the Piatnitskii PeasantChoir. In 1936, it received a new image in accordance with the government’spolicy on folk art, and instead of a choir of peasants it became a heavily-promoted professional group singing newly composed works about Sovietlife. To reflect the new way the government chose to view the choir’s identity,the word ‘peasant’ was removed and the choir renamed the PiatnitskiiRussian Folk/Popular [Narodnyi] Choir.100 After Piatnitskii’s death in 1927,a composer, Vladimir Zakharov, was appointed as co-leader of the chorus in1931. Zakharov helped to change the chorus’s image: previously themembers had not read music and had sung in an improvisational style; now,they were forced to learn to read music and lost their right to improvise.101

Zakharov and the assistant director, Petr Kaz’min, taught them diction andto sing on pitch and with uniform vocal quality.102 He also graduallychanged the chorus’s repertoire from unarranged village traditional songssung unaccompanied, to music composed in the folk idiom especially for thechorus. The chorus’s new repertoire included many song and dance numbersaccompanied by a large folk orchestra, and to that end the group acquiredseparate orchestral and dance ensembles. Whereas the chorus started at astrength of between 20 and 30 people, by 1946 it consisted of 200performers in the choral, dance, and orchestral groups, and its ‘studio,’which prepared new cadres.103 In general, the music-making practices of thechorus were now modeled after a Western classical professional group ratherthan a Russian village ensemble, as it had been previously.

The general goal of changes such as these was to create a new Sovietnational identity that united everyone, worker and peasant, bureaucrat andintelligentsia, into an archetypal image of the ideal Soviet citizen.104 A 1946article expresses this goal with its praise of the Piatnitskii chorus as one thatno longer presented songs characteristic of particular regions of Russia(such as the Smolensk, Riazan, and Voronezh gubernii that it had previouslyspecialized in), but of all Russia. Zakharov and Kaz’min ‘noticeably broad-ened and enriched the performing style of the chorus. In the never-endingvariety of northern, Volga, Voronezh, Smolensk, and other songs they wereable to find the pan-Russian [obshcherusskii] principle uniting all thesesongs, and to use that principle as the basis of all their creative work.’105

Linked to the idea of the chorus’s pan-Russian character was the notion that

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to reflect specific local dialects would be backwards and vulgar, while to singin standard literary Russian would make the chorus accessible to all.Similarly, the article stated that the chorus reflected the Russian nationalcharacter with its ‘depth of soul, boldness, sweep, sharpness of feeling.’106

Another author wrote that the chorus’s popularity was understandablebecause the listeners ‘recognize themselves, their thoughts and feelings inRussian song.’107

While the Piatnitskii choir – and the other professional choirs establishedin the Soviet Union’s republics – represented only the folk music of a singlenationality, it became a representation of a Soviet identity. In accordancewith Stalinist nationalities policy, performing arts troupes propagandizedthe indigenous cultures of all nationalities: such a display of cultures all‘equally’ pursuing the traditions of their own ‘people’ would show thecommon democratic inclinations of all the national groups, and woulddemonstrate the ‘friendship of the peoples’ concept. Since Russian was themost privileged nationality, in the late 1930s the formulators of state artspolicy baldly pronounced its music to be the most important. In a furtherexpression of the primacy of Russian culture, the musics of all the peoplesin the Soviet Union (and of Mongolia and, later, Eastern Europe) weremolded so as to be based upon the (supposedly Russian) practice of singingor playing polyphonically; this was true even of peoples whose singing tradi-tions featured only unison or solo singing and instrument playing, such asthe Kirgiz, Chubash, Iakutak, Azerbaijani, and Tatar peoples.108 To singand play in groups was seen as more reflective of Communist ideology; soloor unison traditions were denigrated as remnants of bourgeois ideology.However, all such forced imitation of Russian tradition was in fact simpleadaptation of the polyphonic traditions of Western art music, which havetheir roots in church music.109

In viewing the performances of the Russian professional folk choruses,one is struck by the size, the separation of duties, and the costumes: thesewere large choruses with separate orchestras and dance ensembles, whoappeared in stylized, identical costumes, sang and played mostly arrangedmusic, and performed choreographed dance numbers. The performancesshowed a marked gender separation: women sang in the chorus, men largelymade up the accompanying orchestra, and while there were both male andfemale dancers, the males were given more flashy, athletic solos while womenmostly danced in groups. I suspect that part of the choruses’ popularity hadto do with the sheer vocal power of their large size (often the chorus aloneconsisted of more than 50 people), their professionalism (they sang, playedand danced their parts ‘cleanly’ – for example, they sang with unified vocalplacement, vowel matching and pitch accuracy), and their emotional expres-siveness (they made liberal use of varied dynamics and theatricalproduction). These were the qualities that struck me when I saw live andvideotaped performances of Soviet-style folk choruses in the 1990s, and theyare also some of the qualities discussed in the literature about folk chorussinging. (Figure 2.2)

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The choruses were widely promoted by the Soviet cultural networkbecause they propagandized Soviet values, which one Soviet-era study of thestate folk chorus listed as: ‘beauty,’ ‘youth,’ ‘strength,’ ‘skill,’ ‘labor,’ and ‘loveof the Motherland, the Communist party, and the people.’ According to thatstudy, the goal of the professional folk chorus was ‘the creation of a similaremotional and psychological state among the viewers, which in the finalanalysis leads to the birth of an optimistic, joyous mood. This promotesgood work and a bright attitude towards life.’110 Thus, the choruses were torepresent the Soviet Union itself – or at least its mythic image. With theirsize, they were a model of mass participation in culture; with their separa-tion of duties, where everyone is an ‘expert’ at some aspect of performance,they represented professionalism; and with their uniformity and precision,they exemplified discipline. The happy expressions on the faces of theperformers symbolized optimism. Their singing and dancing, like theRussian opera and ballet, featured elements rendered in precise unison bythe entire group, as well as bursts of energetic solo work. These groups allrepresented the New Soviet Man and Woman, who would be cultured,moral, upright, and talented.

Both in dance and in music, stylistic elements ‘migrated’ from number tonumber and from group to group, so that often even national characteristicswere not preserved, or were reduced to clichés performed by troupes fromeach of the republics – demonstrating the ‘brotherhood of the peoples’ prin-ciple. Often, musical and dance numbers were described with thematicnames such as ‘Harvest holiday’ or ‘At the Kolkhoz Farm’; the subject’srendition was given in the form of a simple pantomime of related move-ments.111 In singing, the spotlight was on female soloists; in dance, it wasmale dancers who ‘showed off.’ In this way, the choruses represented bothcollectivity and individual prowess – an important combination especially inthe Stalin period, when individuals were encouraged to excel beyond believ-able measure in the context of the Stakhanovite movement. Theexaggeratedly athletic nature of the dances – especially the solo male parts –emphasized energy, strength and youth, and bravado or daring.

The Folk Orchestra and the Legacy of Classical Music

The tastes of elite pre-Revolutionary audiences comprised the main sourceof the Soviet folk orchestra’s traditions – and its cultural capital. BecauseSoviet folk orchestras were modeled after Andreev’s orchestra – which copied Western orchestral practice – their repertoires did not reflect ancienttraditional Russian custom, but followed pre-Revolutionary folk orchestralpractice and repertoire. Thus, whereas amateur choruses could be relativelyspontaneous affairs and could present music-making akin to village practice,amateur orchestras could not, since they required instruments and (mostoften) written music, a conductor, and space to practice and perform. Bothamateur and professional folk orchestras were constantly in need of supportfrom authorities.112

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Orchestras of Russian folk instruments were favored during the 1920s tothe early 1930s push for displays of high levels of culture in the provinces,and in fact had been encouraged to include more classical music in theirrepertoires. For example, in the mid-1920s the repertoire of the amateurStompelev Great Russian folk orchestra in Iaroslavl’ – which was lucky tohave a professional musician as conductor – contained works byTchaikovsky, Glinka, Bizet, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Grieg, Chopin, and severallesser-known Russian composers from the late nineteenth century. Similargroups often commonly played Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart.113 All ofthese classical works were arranged for performance by an orchestra of stan-dardized folk instruments. Probably partly because of the association of folkorchestras with classical music, they were not favored whenever officialpolicy called for folk ‘nostalgia,’ such as the period 1934–9. As a result,during those periods folk orchestras adopted more folk songs in arrange-ments by nineteenth-century composers, such as ‘Dubinushka’ byRimsky-Korsakov. Ironically, they were adapting for folk orchestra folkmusic that had originally been appropriated by composers and arranged for

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Fig 2.2: Dancer with Piatnitsky Choir

classical symphonic orchestra.114 Having undergone the process of appro-priation, such music had acquired greater cultural capital than the originalfolk songs themselves had.

Perhaps as a result of the new cultural cachet accorded to the folk chorusin the late 1930s, the folk orchestra took on an entirely new role – that ofaccompanying the folk chorus. When the Piatnitskii Chorus added a fullorchestra in 1938, it set a standard for professional and amateur folk choirs,but also moved Russian music further away from its village roots. Althoughin village music-making, traditions of ensemble singing accompanied byinstrumental playing existed, the more common form of village singing wasa cappella.115

One of the initial musical functions of the Andreev Russian folkorchestra was to render folk songs in a different form from the sung version:they were arranged to make up for the lack of singing and words by varyingthe melody and introducing contrasts in register, dynamics, and otheraspects.116 To be sure, the Andreev orchestra had included numbers in whichit accompanied singers, most often soloists. However, the idea of accompa-nying a chorus, introduced only in the Soviet period, was qualitativelydifferent from Andreev’s original intention – after all, the idea behind instru-mental accompaniment of singing is usually to fill in voices which are felt(because of reigning aesthetic standards) to be lacking in the vocal rendi-tion. In terms of either Western or Russian folk aesthetics, if a chorus wassinging, it could theoretically produce all the voices that were ‘needed.’However, an orchestra’s range and its ability to create a wide variety ofsounds were greater; thus, the addition of an orchestra to a choral perfor-mance would increase the ensemble’s ability to perform more complexarrangements. Complexity was valued because it reflected the aesthetic stan-dards of Western classical music.117

In fact, there was a precedent for this kind of ensemble in Western clas-sical music – in the opera, where choral singing is often accompanied by theorchestra. In the nineteenth century, Russian composers had brought thefolk song to the stage in this form, using either composed melodies in thestyle of folk songs, or actual folk melodies set to music. In such operas, typi-cally, a chorus of women dressed in colorful and ornate stylizations of folkcostumes would sing (and often dance) while the orchestra played accompa-niment. A folk-song scene was almost de rigeur for Russian operascomposed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the romanticiza-tion of ‘the people’ reached its height among the intelligentsia. Thus, thenew combination of folk chorus and folk orchestra drew the Soviet choruscloser to the high art of the nineteenth century and increased its culturalcapital in that way, while still drawing on the nostalgia conjured up byanything associated with ‘the folk.’118

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Professionalism and the Education System

In order to create an institutionalized art form for the state, the Sovietgovernment attempted to make the world of the arts a forum dominated byprofessionals with appropriate training and credentials. The push for profes-sionalism in the arts came about with the Central Committee’s resolution of1932, which abolished the many proletarian literary and artistic organiza-tions and established single unions for each of the arts.119 These unions setstandards to define professionalism; in music, the union deemed the abilityto read Western musical notation a minimum requirement of a professionalmusician. 120 By that definition, most folk performers who had learned theirtrade by traditional means were not professionals, even if they couldproduce skillful renditions of a variety of folk tunes or dances.Professionalism was a corollary of the general move toward the industrial-ization of Soviet society: the new workers needed to be properly trained inorder to advance the goals of the planned economy. There was a large-scalepush toward technical education.121 Professionalization in the performingarts was also a means for the government to increase its control overamateur artistic activity, which had proved surprisingly unwieldy andchaotic in practice.122

Education was one of the ways that professionalization was enacted andalso enforced. Education became a mark of success, the only way to enterthe professional world. It was so crucial that opportunities for furthereducation were offered as a prize for the winners of the amateur olympiadsin the performing arts.123 In music, a professional’s qualifications weredefined largely by education, and the network of educational institutions ofall levels was developed intensively. A Western observer noted that thenumbers of serious music students in the Soviet Union by the late 1960swere ‘staggering.’ For example, there were 2,219 children’s elementary musicschools (there had been 40 in Tsarist Russia), 187 intermediate musicschools (including 11-year music schools and technical music institutes), 24college-level conservatories, and 1,000 evening music schools (the latter withenrollment of about 150,000).124 As a result of this emphasis on education,the qualifications necessary to be a musician (or dancer, artist, or writer –since this was true of all the arts) were supposedly uniform throughout theSoviet Union. One of the aims of this mass musical education with apyramid structure was to identify exceptionally talented people at a youngage and channel them into specialized elementary, intermediate, and highereducation.125 The notion of ‘talent’ was based upon a student’s performancein examinations and auditions – which tested students based upon standardsthat had not changed since the Tsarist era. Early Soviet calls for ‘proletariza-tion’ of the student body (spearheaded by RAPM) had not substantiallyaltered the entrance requirements nor the skills taught in these schools.

In folk music, professionalism continued to be defined throughout theStalin period and into the Brezhnev period as new training and educational

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programs were opened, refined, and tailored to the growing need for leadersof amateur folk ensembles, teachers of folk music, and performers in profes-sional folk choruses and orchestras. Starting in the 1930s, most musicschools at the elementary, high school, and college level offered programs ofstudy in folk instruments, which trained musicians to perform in or conductfolk orchestras and ensembles, and to teach folk instruments in clubs andschools.126 In both dance and music, standards were borrowed from the clas-sical academic curriculum. Those majoring in folk dance took a fullcurriculum from age 12 to 17 that prepared students for national danceensembles or teaching careers.127 Since the dance style of the folk danceensembles incorporated folk steps into a character dance matrix that waspartially based upon ballet, students’ training was modeled after this char-acter dance style.128 Future folk singers and teachers at both the high schooland conservatory level had no separate program, but studied alongsideacademic singers. All vocal students had to learn to perform classical musicas well as folk music.129 Similarly, those who wished to conduct folk choirscompleted a degree in directing that prepared them for conducting academicmusic, and some classes were given in folk music.130 Thus, in schoolsthroughout the country, it was assumed that folk singing was simply abranch of academic singing – a problematic assumption that took folksinging even further from its traditional roots. Yet this situation of folksinging and dance in an academic setting mirrored the status these arts weregiven by composers and performers at the end of the nineteenth century. Asa musical style meant for consumption by elites, the classical setting of folkmusic and dance increased the cultural capital of the genre, which wasotherwise debased by its association with uneducated peasants.

The academic situation of folk music and dance changed somewhatstarting in 1947, when the first cultural enlightenment schools were opened.These institutions, which were formed under the joint auspices of theMinistry of Education and the Ministry of Culture, were specially designedto train workers and teachers in the areas of library work, art, music, dance,and theater for cultural institutions and trade-union clubs in villages andtowns throughout the USSR. All students received instruction in politicalagitation as part of their training, since as future culture workers one oftheir main jobs would be to ‘agitate’ – that is, to teach people aboutCommunist Party policies and platforms, and motivate them to be active inpursuing the Party’s goals. In the 1950s and 1960s the network of culturalenlightenment schools was expanded to include institutes of culture, whichoffered similar training at a more advanced level. The music programs ofthese schools were not as demanding as those of the music high schools andconservatories; rather, the students were specifically trained to work in thefield of amateur music activity. For this reason, greater emphasis was placedupon folk music, and it was possible to major in folk music withoutobtaining full-fledged academic musical training.131 At a higher educationallevel, a special program for folk chorus conductors was organized at the

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Gnesin Institute in Moscow in 1966.132 Later, the government opened otherspecific programs at technical-school and conservatory level for thosewishing to sing in or conduct folk choruses, many of which continue tooperate to this day.133

Given the establishment of these special academic programs, one mightassume that there was no shortage of professionals for the staffing of folkactivities, once graduates of the programs started work. It was likely truethat the most desirable positions – as singers, dancers, or instrumentalistswith the professional choruses – were easily filled. Such positions offeredopportunities for travel (within the country and, especially in the 1980s,abroad), housing and the right to live in a city, regular opportunities toperform in large venues, and the possibility to rise up in a hierarchy thatpegged rewards to well-defined marks of achievement. The ‘star system’ inthe performing arts meant that certain individuals received extraordinarymaterial rewards for their work. By contrast, positions in villages offerednone of these perquisites and locals without special education often filledthem. We know this thanks to articles written by folk musicologists in the1960s (precursors to the oppositional revival movement that arose in the1970s), which lamented the poor training of personnel hired to organizeculture in villages. In a 1965 survey of Leningrad oblast houses of cultureand clubs, for example, Zemtsovskii found that only 16 percent of theemployees had specialized training, while the majority either possessedgeneral high school diplomas or had not finished high school (and a few hadnot been to high school at all). Zemtsovskii pointed out that this low level oftraining was largely responsible for the fact that culture workers commonlydiscouraged local traditional music-making in villages, and replaced it withpoor-quality stylizations.134 Zemtsovskii’s assumption was that more highlyeducated professionals would be better able to appreciate the high quality oflocal, traditional folk art, and would help promote it.135

Although Zemtsovskii’s purpose was to critique the way folk music wasorganized, he drew on a principle widely expounded in pro-regime literatureon folk music: that such music required professional handling. Soviet musi-cologists commonly used the words ‘high level of culture,’ or ‘high artisticlevel’ to praise the folk singing of professional and amateur folk choruses.136

Writers rejected the ‘decadence’ of popular urban music (said to belong tobourgeois culture in its decline) and created an image of folk music as pure,lofty, and clean. One critic likened Soviet-era choruses and orchestras toAndreev’s late nineteenth-century folk orchestra in possessing a noble spiritthat never stooped to being ‘cheap, overly free/familiar, or aiming at externaleffect.’ Descriptions of folk art frequently used the concept of‘sderzhannost’,’ that is, ‘restraint’ or ‘reserve.’137 Writings about folk chorusesstrongly implied that the folk manner (or people’s popular taste), if freedfrom the control of professionals, might tend toward decadence and crass-ness. Given this perspective, professional folk choruses offered a means toensure that folk music would always remain tasteful and ‘contemporary,’

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that is, faithful to Soviet ideology. Essentially, such literature likened Sovietfolk art to high art and distinguished it from kitsch by insisting that itavoided the ‘vulgarity’ of low art. But the Soviet ‘people’s creation’ was infact kitsch in that it ‘appropriate[d] the material of folk art in a way thatneuter[ed] the transforming possibilities of high art.’138

The notion that professionalism would guarantee the high moral qualityof Soviet art underlay the Soviet concept of ‘patronage’ (shefstvo), whichwas repeatedly referred to in articles about amateur artistic activity from the1930s to the 1980s. Professionals were meant to have patronage overamateurs; the city was meant to have patronage over the village. In practicalterms, professional composers, choruses, orchestras, and the like wouldestablish mentoring relationships with corresponding amateur ensembles.They would share music with and give advice to their amateur ‘youngerbrethren’139; they would arrange lectures, classes, and concerts for them, orinvite them to the city for consultations.140 In more abstract terms, thenotion of patronage implied a hierarchy in which villagers and amateurswere the beneficiaries of the important blessings of their educated, city-dwelling, professional comrades. Ironically, ‘amateur’ village carriers of localfolk traditions were implicitly told that ‘their’ traditions were ‘safe’ in thehands of professionals. A 1968 book entitled City Culture – to the Villagemade this clear: ‘The keeper of folklore, the desired guest of the cities andvillages of the oblast, is the Ural Russian Folk Chorus, which brings thedistinctive folk art of the Urals to the masses.’141

As Zemtsovskii and others have pointed out, the masses had already beencreating distinctive folk art for centuries, and continued to do so.Participants in grassroots music-making practices did not need professionalsto ‘keep’ their traditions for them nor to ‘bring’ them to them. In fact manyvillage folk music groups with older participants did continue to sing thetraditional music as they had previously – albeit now often under theauspices of organized clubs and for the purposes of entertaining on stage,not just for themselves. As I have said, old folk music remained quitepopular, and the most requested and applauded pieces at the olympiadswere part of pre-Revolutionary folklore, not the new concoctions of theSoviet system.142 Yet the majority of village dwellers were profoundly influ-enced by the widespread notions that a professional folk chorus was the bestrepresentative of local traditions, that villagers should emulate the profes-sional chorus, and that old, unarranged, traditional music was inappropriatein the new modern times. But because villagers often could not read music,lacked academic musical training and access to instruments and traineddirectors, they were unable properly to master the music they were urged tocreate.

The results of this situation included many village choruses that producedartistically bad imitations of professional folk choruses. One observerreported:

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They’d organize a chorus, rehearse for two weeks, and then – [sendthem] off to perform. And even though the club members sang off-key,with untrained voices, it was indeed loud. True, from such ‘artisticaccomplishments’ the clubs very often fell apart during the secondmonth of their existence, or served as a kind of ‘revolving door’ forhundreds of people, who visited the club out of nothing to do, looked inon the club for 3–4 rehearsals and disappeared without a trace.143

I encountered an example of such poor-quality results of the amateurartistic policy in my fieldwork in 1998: a village group of eight middle-agedand younger women (born 1946–78) had lost the ability to sing a cappella,according to the tradition of their mothers’ generation. They had beentrained by their director to sing Soviet arranged songs with accordion. Tome and to the Moscow musicologist accompanying me the group soundedmusically very bad: several of the members sang off-key – but very loudly.144

Kitsch

The performances of the Soviet folk choruses (including their orchestras anddance ensembles), like much socialist realist art, exemplify kitsch – anartistic product that imitates the methods of high art but is primarily aimedat ‘remaining accessible to a large audience.’145 Often, kitsch attempts toconvert the audience to a particular point of view, and reinforces the ‘corevalues of a political regime or ideological system’ by treating those values asa ‘closed, harmonious entity which has to be endowed with beauty to bemade more effective.’146 Instead of challenging audiences, the performancesof the Soviet folk choruses offered a pat, refined view of ethnic heritage,rendered in the form of a pleasant multi-sensory experience. Their repertoireand style became clichéd because they were repeated so often and werespread by the educational system. They represented the core values of thepolitical regime (such as optimism, professionalism, discipline, the glory ofworking collectively), and they called upon mythical patterns with deeproots in the culture (the folk). In fact, folk music, dance, and crafts are proneto kitschification. Critics have linked kitsch’s nostalgia for the traditionaland folksy with Romanticism.147

Folk art is the ideal art on which to base kitsch, because the very conceptunderlying folk art – the Romantic notion of ‘the folk’ – exemplifies the illu-sory notion of what Milan Kundera called ‘the smiling brotherhood.’148

Because elites conceived of ‘the folk’ as a homogeneous mass of ‘simplepeasants’ who were supposed to represent the national spirit, they denied orignored the existence of real peasants, with individual personalities, differ-ences, and flaws. In the imaginary, sentimental realm of ‘folk culture,’everything is ‘from times of yore’ and reflects the collective life of a peopleendowed with wisdom, goodness, and innocence. The Romantic conceptionof folk culture thus does exactly what Kundera says kitsch does: ‘kitsch is

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the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of theword; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unac-ceptable in human existence.’149 Kundera notes that the kitsch impulse existsin all societies, but because totalitarian society banishes all doubt, individu-ality, irony, and socially deviant behavior, it is difficult for its citizens toescape the ‘kitsch inquisition.’150 As a Czech dissident, Kundera denigratedkitsch as an art form that was imposed upon society; but he recognizekitsch’s universal appeal: it charms the sentimental streak in us, the part ofus that wants to remember the past with nostalgia or to imagine that life isalways happy and easy.151 Indeed, to say that Soviet folk art is kitsch is notto ridicule it. I believe that one of the reasons for Soviet folk art’s broadappeal and longevity is precisely its kitsch nature.

Grassroots folklore is both more complex and also more spontaneousthan kitsch; it is not created or promoted purposely to further ideologicalgoals. 152 Kitsch folk art is usually altered or simplified: certain featuresaccepted as typical of the folk art of a given culture are isolated and mademore obvious; or those features may be applied for a different purpose thanthe one they originally played in the folk work of art. For example, in kitschversions of folk singing, a certain vocal technique that is part of a traditionin a certain region is often over-utilized in arrangements or folk-basedcompositions. In Russian state chorus singing, vocal yicks and whoops indance songs – vocal additions that in grassroots folk singing represent spon-taneous outbursts of enthusiasm or encouragement – are not spontaneousbut planned, and are so common that they have become hackneyed. Thegeneral sound of the chorus is also more academic (using a smoother andmore refined manner of singing) than the typical sound of villagers, which isrougher and less legato. While it represents the music of peasants and isaimed at the masses, it endeavors to look or sound like high art.

As in Nazi Germany, kitsch was institutionalized across all art forms inthe Soviet period, especially under Stalin. Both regimes denigrated theconcept of kitsch as vulgar, yet used kitsch art in a manipulative way tolegitimize the political system, cultivating ‘exalted sentiments to control thefeelings of ordinary people.’ Both in cultural products and in socialprograms, Stalin and Hitler manipulated the insecurities of the rising pettybourgeoisie, containing and controlling their aspirations for higher socialstatus. In the Soviet context, a kind of state capitalism was instituted: thesystem which purported to distribute property equally actually used prop-erty as a political tool by offering it to those who demonstrated loyalty orusefulness to the regime.153 As we have seen, this principle was used to culti-vate the professionalization of folk art as well as other arts. Kitsch issimilarly manipulative in that it promises the lure of higher social status byoffering the lower classes a kind of art that formerly belonged only to theupper classes. Folk art – people’s art – was now not the art that commonpeople made up for themselves, but the kind of art that professionalsarranged, choreographed, composed, performed, taught, and organized. It

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was modeled after the folk art that composers and performers had createdfor the elites in the late nineteenth century.

Folklore ‘Revival’ in the Post-War Period

If in the 1930s and during the war the performance of folk music and danceserved both to cultivate the image of a New Soviet Man and Woman and tolink that image with a constructed national character, then starting in thelate 1940s with the growing isolationism of the Cold War cultural criticsturned with renewed force to folk performing arts as a symbol of Russiannationality. In the process, the image of the professional folk ensembles wasreconstructed with a slightly more lyrical quality that was interpreted asmore traditional. Yet for all the rhetoric about returning to tradition, in factfolk art was becoming even more refined in accordance with the demands ofhigh art.

The changes after 1948 could be seen both in the sphere of high art andin pronouncements specifically about folk performance. There were repeatedcalls for Soviet composers to imitate Russian ‘folk polyphony’ and the oper-atic and orchestral settings of folk tunes of the Russian national school ofthe late nineteenth century. These calls spread to the world of folk perfor-mance: an explosion of articles exhorted choruses and instrumentalensembles to go back to the melodies and improvisation of folk roots ratherthan present music that was ‘mechanical’ and divorced from a folk basis. Indance, choreographers also began to speak of the necessity to adopt a‘cantilena’ (lyrical) style and a ‘raised culture’ of dance that would empha-size its ‘poetic’ character. Both dance and music critics rejected the strident,uniform folk presentations of the 1930s.

All of these critiques were part of the 1948–52 purge campaigns, designedto eradicate the liberal intellectuals’ practice of ‘kowtowing before theWest.’154 The campaign began in music with a resolution issued by theCentral Committee of the Communist Party, ‘On the Opera GreatFriendship by Muradeli.’ Although the opera in question seemed to meetideological demands by showing different cultures (it was set in Georgia andinvolved various Caucasian ethnic groups and Cossacks as well as Russians)and depicting an important historical event, the party condemned the operafor its formalism. Muradeli had not used folk material that would have char-acterized the various ethnic groups; instead of being melodic, the music was‘discordant’ and based upon ‘dissonances.’ In general, the resolution beratedSoviet composers for rejecting ‘polyphonic music and polyphonic singing’and paying insufficient attention to ‘melody’ in their modernist, ‘formalist’compositions. Finally, it specifically criticized modernistic music forviolating ‘the system of many-voiced singing harmony distinctive of ourpeople.’155

Although these formulations were addressed specifically to composers ofclassical music, they are relevant to this discussion because they draw

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explicit attention to the Russian tradition of folk polyphony (mnogogolosie)as a basis for Soviet art music. The resolution uses both the term‘polyphony’ (polifonia), referring to Western polyphony, and the nativeRussian term mnogogolosie, which is translated above as ‘many-voicedsinging harmony’ (I find it simpler to translate it as ‘folk polyphony’). Whilethe resolution does not explicitly exhort composers to directly apply the folkpolyphonic system to their compositions, it states that their refusal to usepolyphony at all is a violation of the tradition of folk polyphony which is atthe foundation of ‘our’ music – that is, Russian music.

This promotion of folk polyphony had a purely ideological basis – it wasa plea for patriotism in the context of the new Cold War isolationist strate-gies. It argued music should not be based upon modernism – associated withthe ‘depression,’ ‘psychopathology, sexual perversion, [and] amorality’ of theWest – but upon folk music, which promoted patriotism and optimism.156

Yet while the resolution exhorted composers to use the simple melodies ofthe Russian people, it also called for a return to the traditions of the Russiannational school in classical music. Although it appealed for polyphony basedupon folk polyphony, it referred not to Russian folk polyphony itself, but theversion of it that Russians – and the world – had come to know and lovethrough the compositions of Glinka, Musorgsky, Balakirev, and the like.157

The linking of Soviet music with folk roots was not an actual promotionof folk culture but was meant to validate Russian culture and Russia’s claimsto sovereign nationhood. The resolution lays bare the hidden imperialism ofthe Soviet project, in which the musical traditions of all the peoples in theSoviet Union were supposedly ‘enriched’ by their emulation of the (presum-ably Russian, but really Western) practice of singing or playingpolyphonically. Articles on folk polyphony that appeared after the resolu-tion reflected the need to remember the cultural traditions of Russians: theirintent was to establish that Russian polyphony existed independently ofEuropean traditions and arose before the influx of European influences onRussian music.158

It makes no sense for Russian folk polyphony to be advanced as thepremise upon which compositions of art music – even those played or sungby ‘folk’ orchestras or choruses – should be based.159 Russian folkpolyphony is an improvisatory art in which each singer performs a specificfunction within the group. Complex, improvised, a cappella singing with thecharacteristics I have outlined in the previous chapter cannot be likened tocomposed works for accompanied chorus.

But after the 1948 resolution critics in both high- and low-brow journalsdid clamor for the use of folk polyphony in Russian folk music, includingarranged and orchestrated folk songs. One commonality was the call formore contemporary classical compositions – by professionals or amateurs –that would utilize the traditions of Russian folk singing. In 1951 an editorialanalyzing an all-Union smotr of amateur performing arts emphasized thatthe goals of the 1948 resolution were being fulfilled: ‘Polyphonic singing has

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become a usual event; many collectives are shifting to singing withoutaccompaniment’; it concluded that their development in this direction washelping them to learn complex Soviet, Russian, and West European compo-sitions.160 This editorial makes the ludicrous assertion that if folk groupscould handle singing polyphonically then the logical next step – and thedesired result – was to tackle Tchaikovsky.

The situation in dance was analogous. After 1948 critics urged choreogra-phers not to perform the vulgar ‘Gypsy’ dances, ‘waltzes and tap dances’associated with the decadent West and America, but to base their ‘newSoviet national dance’ on ‘authentically national [narodnye] dances.’161

Rather than either showing unadulterated folk dances on stage or indulgingin the ‘fantasy’ of the choreographer by adding showy ‘tricks’ to folkcompositions (as critics said had been the fashion), a few choreographersbegan to compose entirely new pieces based upon regional folk dances – amethod that remained a favored technique for bringing folk dance to theprofessional stage in the coming decades. For example, NadezhdaNadezhdina created ‘flowing, slow dances’ for the ‘Birch Tree’ ensemble thatshocked a public used to ‘stirring rhythms, fast tempos,’ and ‘fast turns andjumps.’162 Many of these pieces had poetic names such as ‘Birch Tree,’‘Swan,’ ‘Golden Chain,’ ‘Dance with Little Bells,’ and depicted an entirepantomimed scene – often a story involving various forms of flirtationbetween women and men. The dances were based upon regional folk dancesand performed to music composed specially for the program.163

Yet as liberal intellectuals made clear in their writings after Stalin’s death,all the attention to polyphony and to traditionalism in dance did not in factrepresent a ‘revival’ in Russian folk traditions. In music, little was composedor performed that approximated to the Russian folk polyphony system. AsFeodosii Rubtsov pointed out, most folk chorus members throughout thecountry had not learned to sing polyphonically and were consequentlyafraid to sing a cappella. They found folk songs boring and shortened theverses, rather than learning to vary their singing from verse to verse.164

Instead of traditional folk songs from their own villages or regions, amateurchoruses sang the works of Soviet professional and amateur composers,often the conductors of the choirs themselves. One critic wrote that the‘musical language’ of these songs was so ‘devoid of individuality’[obezlichen] that it was hard to tell them apart: ‘in 99 out of 100 cases the‘lyrical genre’ is limited to the excessively sentimental [dusheshchipatel’nyi]waltz in 3/4 time’; melodies were ‘hackneyed,’ and the structure of thecompositions was that of standard Western harmony, without any thoughtof folk polyphony. Particularly clichéd were solo and choral works accom-panied by accordion. Composers avoided the local styles of their regions infavor of a generalized Soviet musical stereotype.165

The official press and government also began to criticize the folk chorus.In the late 1950s–60s folk choruses were re-evaluated in the press, the size ofsome of the professional folk choruses was cut,166 and in 1961 the board of

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the Ministry of Culture issued a ruling stating that in their search for ‘super-ficial success’ and stage appeal (estradnost), the choruses had introduced toomany songs that were musically far from the folk character.167

All of these post-1948 changes – the supposed return to folk polyphonyand the adaptation of regional dances – did not in fact reflect a return totradition but constituted part of the country’s ongoing attempt to ‘raise thecultural standard.’ Indeed, the periodical literature of the time was full ofsuch phrases, indicating that the main point of both professional andamateur folk arts was to bring the tastes of audience and participants closerto the standards of high art (as the Soviet culture institutions had defined it– that is, excluding ‘formalist’ and ‘modernist’ works). Because criticsconstantly contrasted the vulgar dances of the West and of the past with thecurrent (polyphonic, lyrical) trends in folk music and dance, we know thatthey considered these latter styles to be connected with Soviet high culture.Journals aimed at the directors of amateur arts clubs published multiplecalls for more of the new traditional – yet refined – choral and dancecompositions, for more educated specialists, and for programs that wouldhelp educate the consumers and participants of amateur arts in high cultureand the political goals of the Party.168

Yet despite such calls, the government not only did not make an effort tochange the mass-produced character of the folk-chorus phenomenon, itcontinued to support the manufacture of the folk chorus. In fact, it strength-ened the structure needed to support the folk chorus phenomenon byopening more educational programs dedicated to providing trainedpersonnel to lead and staff professional and amateur folk choruses, orches-tras, and dance ensembles. After 1948, the number of folk choruses rosetremendously.169 Today, many of the folk music educational programs estab-lished during the Soviet period continue to exist, in some cases withoutmajor changes in leadership or personnel. Whether or not these areprimarily oriented toward the production of cadres for the folk choruses is amatter of some debate among present-day revivalists.170 My impression ofthe work of the folk chorus departments, based upon my observations ofsome of their performances and rehearsals in 1991 and 1998–9, is that theyare primarily oriented toward graduating professional singers, conductors,and teachers who will promote the approach to folk music made popular bythe Soviet professional folk choruses.171

It was not until the late 1960s–early 1970s that Russian folk polyphonywould be performed in the context of art music – in the context of a devel-oping oppositional movement that promised to revolutionize theperformance of folk traditions. Until then, the performance of Russian folkmusic and dance remained much what it had been – polished renditions ofmelodies set to vocal harmonies and/or instrumental accompaniment,performed in choreographed, theatricalized settings.

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Precisely because the whole strength of a folk song lies in free improvisation,a learned performance of a folk song – even by the best artists – can nevercompare with that of true folk performers.

Evgeniia Lineva, 1904

3 The Origins of the Russian FolkRevival Movement

Fig 3.1: Pokrovsky ensemble performs “Tsar Maksimilian”

In 1986, a group called the Pokrovsky Ensemble gave a performance ofRussian folk music in a classroom at Harvard University. The audience wasmade up largely of professors, graduate students, and undergraduates of theSlavic Department. I was a graduate student at the performance, visitingfrom Yale University. As befitted the academic setting, the performance wasaccompanied by short lectures on various aspects of Russian folk singing.For instance, the ensemble’s leader, Dmitri Pokrovsky, told the audience thata bylina (epic song) was sometimes sung chorally instead of by a solo singer,and might last several hours; that with the choral rendition, the words wouldbe so stretched out that one might sing a single word for several measures.The audience members had heard of the existence of byliny, and might evenhave read a text about the heroic exploits of Dobrynia Nikitich, but prob-ably none had ever heard a bylina sung. I certainly had not, and it seems tome now, looking back, that I had never considered the possibility that theycould be sung. Byliny were just texts in books assigned for courses in ancientRussian literature. When the five men in the group of ten singers performedthe song, I was enthralled. It had something of the character of a seachantey, but the musical texture was unfamiliar and exciting. The manner ofperformance was also unusual. The singers in simple linen peasant shirtsappeared to be fully immersed in their musical communication with oneanother and with the audience. They swayed slightly and used arm gesturesto punctuate certain beats or words. Everything about their bearing seemedcompletely natural, not forced or showy.

For me and for many Americans who went to concerts of the PokrovskyEnsemble during its tours, this was our first brush with old Russian folktraditions. We might have seen professional choruses on television or atrestaurants for tourists in Moscow or Leningrad, but this was different. Thiswas not just entertainment and these were not just songs. Pokrovsky wastalking about ancient traditions that were still living, about the ways thatsinging imitated bird sounds or reflected geography. We did not know thatwe were witnessing not just the performance of folk music but the heyday ofan important cultural movement in Russia.

The movement consisted of groups like the Pokrovsky Ensemble in nearlyevery major city in Russia, often headed by folklorists or musicologists andaffiliated with institutions of higher learning or cultural organizations. Inorder to study and promote Russian folk culture, they led expeditions tovillages, sponsored concerts and holiday festivals in the open air, organizedclasses and whole schools of folk culture for students of all ages, publishedpamphlets, books, cassettes, and videos. By the late 1990s, between one andthree million people were involved in activities surrounding authentic folk-lore in Russia.1

How did this small explosion of interest in the roots of Russian culturecome about? What were the origins of this vibrant, if somewhat small andselect young people’s movement?

The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement 69

The Khrushchev Era and Village Prose

Perhaps the most important impetus to revival was the end of the Stalin eraand the beginning of the Khrushchev era. As Tamara Livingston hasargued, most musical revival movements take place ‘in opposition to aspectsof the contemporary cultural mainstream.’2 The American folk revivalmovement of the post-war years was heavily involved with labor and leftistmovements; only in the 1960s did it gain a more mainstream, commercialcharacter. The Russian movement started as a reaction against Stalinistculture, but was never affiliated with any specific political agenda. Rather,during the Thaw period of the late 1950s and 1960s, when it became possibleto discuss some of the mistakes of the Stalin era, intellectuals sought newsources of value. Some turned to the West as a reaction against the isola-tionism of the Stalin era. Urban young people became increasinglyinterested in jazz and rock music, foreign films, and Western clothing styles.Some intellectuals turned to Russian peasant culture as an important sourceof sincerity and authenticity in Russian culture, since it was presumed tohave remained untouched by the hypocrisy and doublespeak that character-ized Soviet public life under Stalin. Rural culture seemed like a possibleplace of refuge from a system that had become obsessed with industrializa-tion at any cost.

This time saw the birth of a new literary movement called ‘village prose,’which was characterized by ‘the revival of Russian national and religioussentiment, a search for national values, a concern for the environment, and anostalgia generated by the loss of traditional rural life.’3 The mythologicalsystem set up in this movement echoed that of the pastoral, with its contrastbetween city and country life and implicit criticism of the former. In workssuch as Solzhenitsyn’s short story ‘Matryona’s House’ (1963), writers envi-sioned village dwellers, particularly elders, as conveyors of true values suchas kindness, modesty, and simplicity, and held them up as sources ofredemption for an urbanized society concerned with greed and care forappearances. Writers represented in great detail village life, including super-stitious beliefs, folklore, and local dialects – often with a large measure ofromanticization. Many authors based their narratives on their remem-brances of childhood in the village; the recollections are cast in the glow ofnostalgia, while collectivization and World War II represent the only bitternotes in the picture. Memory played a large part: ‘the focus in Village Proseis on the radiance not of the future, but of the past’ – and that past wasrepresented by a place, the village.4

The Russian folk music revival movement was characterized by a similarnostalgia and a foregrounding of the chronotope of the pre-Revolutionaryvillage: it represented the living past and a source of values for the present.For both movements, it was important to re-imagine the rural sphere: ineffect, these intellectuals protested the Potemkin village of Soviet propa-ganda and countered that image with one they felt represented the genuine

70 The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement

Russia. If the Soviet village was a place of change and modernization, thevillage of the revivalists’ and village prose writers’ imaginations was a locusof cyclical time, ancestors, and childhood.5 While the prose writers conveyedthis symbolic rural place in the form of memoiristic, essayistic, and fictionalnarratives, the revivalists did what earlier generations of populists had done:they went to the village and attempted to bring it back to the city. Theydressed in ornate ancestral costumes bought from peasants, performed songsand dances they had learned from peasants, and recounted stories of theirtravels and what they had learned among the village dwellers. Like thevillage prose writers, they became mediators between the village and the city,cultural intermediaries who could translate village life into something under-standable and desirable, as well as exotic and complex.

The critical accounts of collectivization put forward in village proseworks coincided with what the revivalists saw before their eyes as they trav-eled to ravaged villages.6 It is likely that some in the folk music revivalmovement were inspired, or their burgeoning ideas informed, by the writingsof the village prose writers.7 Prior to Gorbachev, there was very little schol-arly information available about the state of affairs in villages. One eitherhad to travel there or read the literary village prose accounts in order tounderstand the magnitude of the effects of Soviet policies on the integrity ofvillage life.8 In a few cases, the movements worked together: for example,when the Pokrovsky Ensemble appeared in a 1982 film based upon ValentinRasputin’s quintessential village prose novel Farewell to Matyora, therevivalists’ restoration of ancient Russian traditions was used to illustratethe rich heritage that would be lost when the entire village was flooded inorder to make a hydroelectric station.9 In the film, dressed as Russianvillagers, the ensemble sang a village dance song and danced with wildabandon on a summer holiday, contrasting sharply with the mournful eventsdepicted soon after. The film’s sharp message regarding the ecological andcultural value of the Russian village reflected a common concern for bothvillage prose writers and folk revivalists.10 Nationalism was another founda-tion shared by the two movements: the village prose movement was led bysome writers who were outspoken in their nationalistic views, and similarviews were often expressed by members of the revival movement.11

Young People’s Musical Culture

Another movement in Russian culture during this period, the ‘bard’ orguitar poetry movement, represented the extent to which Russian culturewas being revived during the post-Stalin era. Both the bard movement andthe folklore revival movement drew crowds of young people to unofficialgatherings (tusovki), sometimes shared between the two groups. ‘Bards’ werepoets who sang their own poetry to their own accompaniment on guitar,performed at various unofficial venues in cities, and circulated their work bymagnitizdat, that is, through unofficial publication on homemade recordings.

The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement 71

Although some of the poets were professional writers, the bard movementwas by and large an amateur movement, similar to the folk revival move-ment.

The music was not folkloric but occasionally drew from folk sources suchas urban and criminal songs; many of the songs actually did constitute folk-lore in the sense that they were memorized and played by ordinary citizens,and became an important part of oral culture. Indeed, the bard movementwas so similar in character to the American folk revival movement of the1960s and 70s that many Americans think first of Russian bard music whenthey think of Russian folk music. In the songs of the bards, the texts wereprimary and the music secondary in importance: the music was character-ized by its underscored lack of professionalism, and the casual, evenmediocre guitar technique and untrained voice served to distinguish it fromthe professionalized music cultivated by the Soviet official amateur artssphere.12 Although the folklore revival movement was primarily a musicalmovement, it cultivated a similar culture of spontaneity and homespunness,and likewise induced like-minded young people to sing in groups in casualsettings.13

While the two movements – the guitar poetry and the folk revival move-ments – overlapped during the 1980s with shared venues, events, andaudiences, they have generally remained separate phenomena. This is notsurprising, given that the bard movement is basically urban music andreflects an urban, Westernizing point of view, while folk music revivalemphasizes rural culture as a source of wisdom and value for contemporaryyoung people, and is linked with a Slavophile cast of mind.14

The Discourse of Folklore Revival

Unlike the guitar poetry movement, the revival movement in Russian folkmusic did not begin with the work of unofficial poets. Instead, it was mostlyinitiated by academics in the fields of musicology and folklore. This hasgiven the movement a somewhat academic character and less grassrootsappeal. In order to sing bards’ songs, one needed only a tape recorder tolearn them and a guitar to play them.15 To sing Russian village folk songs,urban youths needed to learn special ways of singing, to travel to villages,and to have the desire to pierce the ‘exotic’ traditions existing in their back-yards. Academics who studied village culture possessed the necessaryknowledge and experience, and could serve as guides: as a result, most ofthe ensembles are headed by a folklorist, musicologist, or a person with adegree in another subject who has made him or herself a specialist on folkculture.

The theoretical foundations of the movement were laid during therenewal of interest in the study of folklore during the Khrushchev period,but it took a decade or more for the performance of folk music and dance tobegin to reflect revivalist convictions.16 A movement gradually coalesced out

72 The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement

of the isolated actions of individual musicologists and musicians. Eventhough the movement now has as its primary focus performance of folklore,the discourse of revivalism helped to give birth to a core ideology with whichrevivalists could identify themselves.17 At first writings centered on criticismof the way folklore had been produced and presented during the Stalinperiod and afterwards. They redefined folklore, identified important areas ofresearch in folk music, and called for re-evaluation of governmental policiestoward folklore. Later, starting in the 1980s, an abundant literature waspublished explaining how to collect and learn to perform folk music, formrevivalist groups, and present folklore on stage.

Immediately after Stalin’s death, criticism began to be heaped on theSoviet conception of folklore. Dozens of folklorists who had been involvedin the production of new Soviet epics glorifying Stalin and Lenin now spokeout to criticize the way that such folklore had been created. One reviewer ofa Stalinist-era history of Russian folklore called the pseudofolklore pieces‘stillborn forgeries of folk creation that cannot be regarded as folklore.’18 Intheir writings, folklorists redefined the conception of folklore to exclude thecreations of one person, and criticized the view that folklore was essentiallya branch of literature. Instead, they now stressed collectivity of origin,anonymity, traditionality, and orality.19 Furthermore, while during theStalin era folklorists and other scholars had regularly advertised the activeand robust character of Soviet folklore, now folklorists began to assert thattraditions were dying out. They saw a general lack of interest in folk tradi-tions in the countryside; only the older generation still sang traditionalsongs, while ‘songs of Soviet composers and songs from foreign films hadcompletely replaced traditional songs among the youth’ in certain regions.20

This story of folklore’s imminent disappearance was to be a major impetusfor the revival movement.21

Criticism of Folk Music Performance

As we have seen, this period was characterized by a ‘crisis’ in the genre offolk chorus performance. Critics began to call for the inclusion of tradi-tional, unarranged folk music in the repertoire of the choruses; their callswere couched in stronger and more specific terms than were the govern-ment’s pronouncements on the subject. As the critic A. Koposov wrote in1962, the job of the choruses was supposed to be ‘the propaganda of thebest models of contemporary and ancient vocal, instrumental, and dancefolklore.’ But what they were showing was not ‘folk creation’ but ‘their owncomposing’ (not narodnoe tvorchestvo but svoe sochinitel’stvo). Clearly, bymentioning authorship of folk creation, Koposov referred obliquely to thecreation of ‘pseudofolklore’ during Stalin’s reign, and implied criticism ofthe Stalinist ‘cult of personality’: composers of works for folk choruses, inforegrounding their own compositions and not that of the nameless folk,were seeking credit for themselves. Koposov also critiqued the folk chorus

The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement 73

sound for its ‘superficial “smoothness” and “decorousness” ’ – implying thatthe application of Western aesthetic standards to the performance of folkmusic was inappropriate. 22

Another musicologist, Feodosii Rubtsov, criticized the system created tomanage amateur folk performance in the Soviet Union and the trainingoffered at the cultural-enlightenment schools, where students did not evenreceive the equivalent of a high school education. Such workers were onlyqualified to ‘implant approved themes’ in folklore, while Rubtsov called formore inclusion of music from local traditions in the repertoires of the villageamateur folk choirs.23 The notion that small villages might have their own‘word’ to say on the broad scene of Russian folk culture became a rallyingpoint for the revivalists. Such calls made a deep impression on youngstudents of folklore at the time, who were still obliged to learn Soviet-stylefakelore in schools. Dmitri Pokrovsky would later remember that in the mid-1960s, it was still considered necessary for graduates of the folk-conductingdepartment of the Gnesin Institute to sing a folk song about Lenin andStalin at their final recital – only by then, Stalin was edited out of thesong.24

Rubtsov also deconstructed the very notion of ‘amateur artistic activity’[khudozhestvennaia samodeiatel’nost], of which a more literal translationfrom Russian would be ‘artistic do-it-yourself-ism.’ He pointed out that theterm refers to activity that is not ‘done by oneself ’ but organized by bureau-crats. Yet when kolkhoz workers sing on their own initiative – such as atwork breaks or parties – no one is interested in it and it is not consideredfolklore.25 Rubtsov implicitly pointed out one of the paradoxes of the entireSoviet project: although much of the Soviet rhetoric glorified the leadingrole of the workers in building a Soviet state, in fact workers received onlynarrowly defined, prescribed roles. Folklore was supposed to be a grassrootsartistic form in which ordinary people could express themselves creatively;but in fact, it was organized into a pedagogical and entertaining show,performed by and for ‘the people,’ but always ultimately controlled from thetop.

Scholars Redefine Authenticity

Rubtsov’s article laid important groundwork for revivalist discourse aboutRussian folk traditions. By terming the amateur artistic activity organizedby Soviet government personnel ‘for show,’ and the music-making that takesplace during people’s leisure time ‘authentic’ folk music, he challenged folk-lorists to rethink their definition of folklore. He conceded that folklorists,officials, or organizers might not like the music that people sing ‘after hours’– it might seem to be naive or ‘bad’ art – but there is a reason why peoplesing it: it could have a ‘hidden meaning’ (podtekst) that made it valuable tothe people who sing it. I present a summary of Rubtsov’s redefinition ofauthentic folk music here:26

74 The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement

As this example shows, revivalist discourse was constructed as a directinversion of the binary oppositions that were a mainstay of Soviet culture.In this sense it was typical of the intellectual discourses of the Thaw. Forexample, Rubtsov’s essay echoes many of the ideas in VladimirPomerantsev’s 1953 article ‘On Sincerity in Literature,’ which naivelysuggested that while critics and famous writers were afraid to speak thetruth, the masses were inherently sincere and moral – an idea which turnsthe Soviet promotion of the masses on its head by depoliticizing it.27 IfSoviet socialist realism proclaimed that ordinary workers who obtainedpolitical consciousness through experience or education could becomesuccessful leaders, Thaw critics declared that intellectuals – leaders – shouldlearn from the innate authenticity of the common people.

Thus, ‘authentic’ folk music was defined as that which had managed toexist outside or in spite of the Soviet framework of amateur artistic activity.Rubtsov implicitly called for revival based upon the assumption that theculture-at-large had been corrupted by hypocrisy and cheapness. He andothers showed that a totalitarian government system run by poorly educatedpeople (with poor aesthetic taste) had established its own mock revival,which was in danger of obliterating that which was truly valuable. Such an

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Table 3.1

Soviet-organized Folk Music Non-organized Folk Music Consists of songs created and implanted ‘from the top’

Demand for particular songs comes ‘from the bottom’

Takes place on stage and in rehearsal only Takes place spontaneously, at breaks from work, after work, at parties

Includes composed songs or older melodies set to texts with ‘contemporary content,’ often with Soviet-era stereotypes (‘kolkhoz,’ ‘agronomist,’ ‘tractor’)

Includes old city songs, ‘cruel romances’ and chastushki

Is not folk music. ‘Songs never were, are, nor will be created as folk songs.’

Is truly folk music. A folk song is ‘a song that the people remember, don’t allow to die.’

Is sung for others, at reviews and concerts Is sung ‘by oneself’ and ‘for oneself’ Is ‘for show ‘ [pokazukha]; characterized by ‘falsity,’ ‘vulgarity, banality’ [fal’sh; poshlost’].

Is ‘authentic,’ ‘sincere,’ ‘spontaneous.’ The masses themselves are not capable of falseness; everything they do is sincere, even if it is naive or artistically weak.

Is the responsibility of the ‘professionals and quasi-professionals’ who lead and direct amateur artistic activity, write and arrange songs, create performances.

Is an invisible phenomenon: not studied and nearly unknown, and therefore not supported, yet is more interesting and worthwhile than organized music.

interpretation of the situation gave strong impetus to the younger generationof folk musicians to stop the process of destruction of Russian folklore.

The notions that Soviet-organized folklore was ‘for show’ and that anational heritage was being destroyed became central to revivalist discourse.The concepts of ‘authenticity,’ ‘sincerity,’ ‘purity,’ and ‘time depth’ have beenlinked in other folk music revival movements. Livingston writes:‘ “Authentic” music is believed to have been passed on through the genera-tions outside of (or in spite of) mainstream markets. The ideology ofauthenticity, which combines historical research with reactionary ideasagainst the cultural mainstream, must be carefully constructed and main-tained.’28

But some strands of Soviet revival differed from this generic description:in particular, Rubtsov’s definition of authentic folk music does not linkauthenticity with ‘time depth’ or ‘purity.’ Rubtsov intentionally broadenedthe Romantic definition of folklore by recognizing that songs which had‘folk’ status would change continuously. Folklorists needed to value andstudy everything that people sang, because what they sang was folk music.This view of authenticity – which was adopted by the ‘liberal’ faction of thefolklore movement, but not its more conservative members – stems from the‘sociological school’ of folklore study that was active during the first twodecades of the twentieth century. Although the views were seen by theirproponents as Marxist, they were in disfavor throughout most of the Stalinperiod.29

The sociological approach, based upon the acknowledgment that folkloreis part of the culture of specific geographical regions and classes, contrastedwith the Romantic view of folklore, in which only that which was sung orspoken by village dwellers prior to or apart from their contact with civiliza-tion (city culture) was valuable as folklore. It claimed that change wasnatural and unpredictable, not necessarily detrimental; and asserted thatwhatever people sang and however they told stories or pronounced incanta-tions – and even whether they dispensed with those practices – was ofinterest as folklore.

This approach also acknowledged the interrelated nature of culturalphenomena, known in Russian as ‘syncretism.’ Many folklorists working inthe 1920s recognized that the way people made their living, their proximityto a city (as well as the culture of that city), and myriad other factors,affected the songs they sang as well as the clothes they wore, the way theybuilt and decorated their houses, and so on. Furthermore, they said thatvillage culture, more than urban culture, was distinguished by its interrela-tion of different aspects. For example, folklorists noted that in peasantrituals there was no fixed demarcation between performer and spectator: allwere participants. By contrast, in city culture, performers are separate fromthe passive spectator. Further, in the village, no one was a specialist in onearea of artistic activity. Singers did not simply sing, and tellers of tales didnot simply narrate texts: they accompanied their performances with gesture,

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mimicry, and movement. Those who could sing were often good at playingan instrument or dancing. In musicology, it was important to study not justthe texts and music of village singing but also the principles of performance,the dynamics of the group, the ‘rules’ upon which their improvisations werebased, and so on. In order to make such multi-dimensional studies ofpeasant culture, in the 1920s teams of researchers in different fields of studyset out to work together on specific regions.30

A noted proponent of these views and one of the ideological fathers ofthe folklore revival movement of the 1970s was Evgenii Gippius, a musicolo-gist who began his work on folklore in the 1920s. In 1926–7, as part of ateam of researchers in such fields as anthropology, ethnology, art, literature,linguistics, music, and theater, Gippius helped create an in-depth study oftwo regions in the Russian north, near the Onega and Pinega rivers. Theteam, from the Sociological Commission of the State Institute of theHistory of Art in Leningrad, set out to ‘study all aspects of the artistic lifeof a village.’31 Gippius wrote that because folk music is constantly changingin an ‘organic’ and ‘irrational’ process, because of its natural ‘spontaneity’(stikhiinost’), he found it necessary to use the ‘descriptive method’ ofmusical study, in which one tries to ‘record [in transcription or record-ings]…everything that sounds.’32 Although Gippius’s own method of studywas not sociological but more formalistic, his work and those of hiscolleagues on this project was informed by the underlying views of the socio-logical school outlined above.

Gippius and others were essentially prevented from pursuing this line ofstudy during the Stalin period, since investigations of non-verbalphenomena, or of the contexts in which these phenomena were performed,were not seen as part of the study of folklore but as part of ethnography.Both folkloristics and ethnography were exhorted to perform mostly prac-tical tasks – the former had to encourage contemporary authors of folkloretexts, while the latter had to discourage religion.33 To be sure, the Sovietapproach prided itself on its contemporary, realistic conception of folkloreas that which is sung, played, and narrated in cities and villages nowadays. Itformally rejected the Romantic view that folklore was the ancient lore ofpeasants. 34 However, its heavy focus on the content of folklore and itsunderlying assumption that folklore was best used as propaganda meantthat those studying anything deemed ideologically improper, or those notpaying due attention to the content of folklore, were silenced with heavycriticism.

As early as 1931, Soviet scholars criticized the sociological approach tofolklore.35 By 1948, soon after the shake-up in the world of music, Gippiuswas singled out for criticism by a Moscow organizer of amateur culture. In1949, a three-page article in the official journal of the Union of SovietComposers reviewed Gippius’s entire career and found him guilty of havingused ‘bourgeois’ formalistic and sociological study methods. Gippius wastoo interested in style and not attentive enough to the ‘content’ of songs.

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78 The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement

Furthermore, the critic wrote that Gippius ‘recommended carrying outcollection and study of songs without regard to their artistic value…Onlylocal styles were studied, there was no attempt to determine the unifiednational style of the Russian folk song.’36 Indeed, in 1928 Gippius hadwritten that his work ‘shows finally the whole uselessness of studying anabstract “unified style of the Russian song”.’37 By 1947 he adopted the‘party line’ in order to save his life, and recanted his earlier view that a folk-lorist must be interested in ‘everything that sounds.’ Acknowledging thatfolklore must serve the purpose of mass education, he wrote that ‘not every-thing that is narrated and sung is folkloric (narodnoe) in its form andcontent.’38

Both before and after his criticism, Gippius was highly respected by theMoscow and Leningrad intelligentsia in the fields of music and folklore. Hewas one of the intellectual founders of the folklore revival movement duringits early period, the 1960s and early 1970s: many of the young scholars whoworked with or under him were profoundly influenced by his views on folk-lore. It was precisely Gippius’s syncretic approach and his interest in localstyles rather than a ‘unified national style’ that interested these youngscholars. The fact that he had been criticized by the Soviet establishment didhim no harm in the eyes of the young generation of scholars in the 1960s: infact, his reputation as someone who had more or less kept intact his schol-arly views throughout the difficult years of the Stalin era probably raisedhim in their estimation.

The Pokrovsky Ensemble and the Beginnings of the FolkloreRevival Movement

Andrei Kabanov, one of the founders of the Russian folklore revival move-ment, recalled how he came to work with and was influenced by Gippius.Gippius had taken a break from active folklore study, and when he cameagain to the study of folklore at the Folklore Commission of the RSFSR (anorgan of the Union of Composers) in the early 1970s, he looked forstudents. Kabanov was a recent graduate from the Moscow Conservatory, inhis mid-twenties, and he became one of Gippius’s ‘loyal’ followers. Gippiusgot the younger scholar a job as a senior consultant at the FolkloreCommission in Moscow. Kabanov recalled: ‘I came to him with ideas andsongs and material, and went for kefir [fermented milk] for him, and wenttogether with him to the dacha, in short, we saw each other every day.’ Sucha close personal as well as working relationship was not uncommon amongolder and younger scholars in Soviet academia. The older scholar involvedhis pupil in every aspect of his work: they went on expeditions together andattempted to put together collections of material from various regions ofRussia. Kabanov recalled that Gippius’s approach of working deeply in asingle region, seeking to put together a typology of songs, was notwidespread at the time:

He had the conception of local styles. Gippius yelled about this andinsisted on it. It wasn’t so obvious as it seems now. In those days, therewas a task set: for instance…to make a volume of ‘Wedding Songs ofRussia.’ Such a thing can’t be done. The wedding is different everywhere.And to put it all in one volume means not to know what’s what. Or, takethe opposite example. A volume of ‘Work Songs and Refrains [pripevki].’But there are no work songs at all. There are only refrains, or songs that

The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement 79

Fig 3.2: Andrei Kabanov and Aleksandr Degtirev at the 1998 festival

turned into refrains…. And to go on an expedition only looking forsome little refrains, and not recording the whole style, it’s like seeingonly one dot on the sphere, and not understanding the sphere. Maybeyou go to the next village and record another dot, but that refrain canonly be understood inside that sphere, you don’t see what role therefrain plays in the system in which there’s also the wedding song, thechastushka, etc.39

The significance of studying local styles was enormous, practically revolu-tionary in the context of Soviet folklore study, and it became one of thefoundations of the revival movement. Of course, it flew in the face of theSoviet view that there was a unified national style. Furthermore, it wasessentially antithetical to the notion of the Soviet folk chorus, which sangcomposed songs in literary Russian. And finally, it was antithetical to theSoviet project itself: while Gippius was interested in identifying the culturesof tiny places – villages not even on maps – the Soviet government wiped outsuch places by resettling villagers in large villages connected to huge collec-tive farms. The study of local styles provided the essential material on whichthe revival movement was based: if it were not for this analytical work, therevivalists would have had nothing to revive. When, through the work ofteachers like Gippius, future folklorists and musicologists were exposed tothe existence of an extraordinary richness in local cultures, they were fasci-nated and inspired.

In the course of his investigation of local traditions, Gippius had studiedthe hidden rules or laws by which folk songs are sung in a specific way. Later,other musicologists, notably Anna Rudneva (an influential researcher andprofessor at Moscow Conservatory), also took specific interest in howvillage singing collectives (kollektivy) sang.40 This preliminary work broughtnew attention to traditions of village folk singing; it suggested that folkmusic was as challenging and valuable as classical music. These researchersshowed that the polyphony of village singing was extremely complicated anddifficult to reproduce, since each member of a village ensemble improvised adistinct part that behaved as an independent melody, and each melodydiffered from, yet was dependent upon, that which other members of theensemble were singing. Furthermore, each melody or part would vary eachtime the group sang the song. The musicologists theorized that there was asystem of collective singing in place, the rules of which were extremely diffi-cult for outsiders to understand.41

All of this was noted by the young scholars of the time, many of whomhad taken classes with these theorists at the Moscow Conservatory or theGnesin Institute. Thus, it is probably not coincidence that 29-year-old musi-cian Dmitri Pokrovsky came to Gippius and Kabanov at the FolkloreCommission in 1973 with a plea for folk song material – with the intent tosing it. At that time, very few people thought to sing the music that wasbeing collected. Kabanov himself did not think of it: he was concerned with

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the complexity of a melody, the genre, the musical structure of a song. Heremembered: ‘This music that was recorded by us [in villages] was intendedfor composers, so that they could get some kind of melodies out of it,pitches, and then they’d compose real music: “Now listen to this music, doneby Soviet composers.” [The music we recorded] was meant for composers torework so that choruses could sing it, folk choruses, – but the way it soundeditself wasn’t taken into account.’42

In fact, there were already people singing the music straight from thefolklorists’ transcriptions – without its having been arranged first – but onlya very few. As Natalia Giliarova put it, most of the young musicologists whocollected this music did not think they could sing it, because they were notsingers. They had been taught that in order to participate in a given musicalactivity, one needed professional training.43 One person who was trained,Viacheslav Shchurov, a choral conducting major at Moscow Conservatory inthe early 1960s, did try to sing the music he collected on folklore expeditionswith a trio of male students. He recalled that in 1962, his trio was givenGippius’s seal of approval. A few years later, as a teacher at the GnesinInstitute in Moscow, he organized a group of students to sing this music.44

After this group performed on television, Rubtsov sent Shchurov a lettersaying that he had re-thought his position on the folk chorus: it seemed thatRussian folklore could indeed be shown on television and in concerts, butonly in the form in which Shchurov had presented it. Shchurov’s work musthave seemed like a breath of fresh air.

When one listens now to the 1968 recording of Shchurov’s ensemble, onesees the difference from the folk chorus style: the music is understated,without abundant vocal ‘tricks’ such as yicks or hollers, and without thesweetness characteristic of the folk chorus. However, the vocal quality issimilar to that used by the folk chorus; and overall one has the impression ofclassically-trained students singing village folk songs from written music(even though these are their own transcriptions). The parts are sung verycleanly; ornaments are neat and perfect, like mordents written on paper. Thesingers do not generally improvise their parts. Most of the songs soundpretty; some employ dynamic shapes such as a crescendo in the middle ofthe song and a diminuendo at the end. Kabanov was not impressed with it atthe time: ‘They’d sing like academic singers – a different tune, but some kindof solfeggio was present nonetheless. Clean, clean singing, maybe loud, butaverage.’ Indeed, Shchurov himself would later write that he and his singersused a ‘softened, academicized vocal manner.’45

Kabanov must have expected similar results when he was approached byPokrovsky, a balalaika player who had graduated from the Gnesin Institute,where Shchurov worked, and was now employed there as a balalaikateacher. Pokrovsky and his ensemble had regular work performing folk andjazz music for tourists in the Golden Room of the restaurant of the HotelRossiia. The ensemble included his wife at the time, Tamara Smyslova, aformer soloist of the professional Omsk Folk Chorus; three accordionists;

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and a classically trained trumpet player.46 When Pokrovsky announced thatthey intended to learn to sing the songs as the musicologists had transcribedthem from their recordings, Kabanov thought to himself, ‘it’s nonsense,nothing will come of it.’ Nevertheless, Kabanov gave Pokrovsky two songs,which he had notated from his own recordings: one was a bylina from theTereg Cossacks, ‘Ne po moriu’ (Not by sea); the other was Kabanov’s‘arrangement’ of different versions of the Don Cossack song ‘Svetit mesiatsrano s vechera’ (The moon shines early in the evening).

Many would agree that Pokrovsky’s reappearance at the FolkloreCommission with the group of six singers a month later marked the begin-ning of the folklore movement in Russia. Kabanov remembers:

And then a month or so later, he came. It was something tremendous. Iremember it now. I remember where they were standing, and how it was.That is, I was sitting [here], and Gippius was there, and LeonidPereverzev, a specialist in American music…So, imagine, one, two, three,four young men, [Pokrovsky,] and Tamara…. We had heard several [folkgroups] – the Gnesin Institute, Shchurov’s ensemble…‘Solovka.’ Theydidn’t fire up any particular impressions at all…. And suddenly these –to this day I remember that the sound itself amazed me. It was – it cametumbling down – it was incredibly powerful. It was probably loud, butthe loudness wasn’t it, although it was loud…. [It had] the effect of ahuge chunk of emotions tumbling down, suddenly, without stopping,on the listener…. This was hysterical, aggressive, but one’s own,completely engrossing, like as if – you should impress people [with yoursinging], but instead you say, ‘why should I impress them? I exist.’Strange feeling.

Kabanov’s comments show that Pokrovsky was able to convey a feeling ofauthenticity. ‘Impressing people’ was what the Soviet folk choruses did;Pokrovsky’s group did not participate in that showiness. They seemed tomanage to avoid two pitfalls: being understated and academic, likeShchurov’s group, and being loud and showy in a swaggering way, like thefolk chorus. Pokrovsky’s group presented themselves as they were – saying‘here I am,’ like people communicating with other people. According toKabanov and many others in the folklore revival movement, without this‘hysterical, aggressive’ yet ‘completely engrossing’ sound of the PokrovskyEnsemble, there might not have been a mass youth folklore movement. Thesound carried people away, infected people. Kabanov recalled: ‘It didn’t justcarry me away, it carried everyone away. After a concert, for 30, 40 minutes,we’d feel like we had taken drugs.’47

Not only was the sound new; Pokrovsky had also figured out how tomake the village songs come alive, to turn notes from a page into livingmusic. Kabanov observed:

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[They sang] my song, that I recorded. And suddenly it sounds like I’venever heard it before. I didn’t hear it that way from the old men [in thevillage where I recorded it]. For me it was valuable as a melody, as agenre. As a local style. But living, as something that stirs me up, Icouldn’t understand how it could be like that…. It was immediatelyobvious that he was doing some kind of improvisation. You had theimpression that it was all yours, and here you have four young men, andPokrovsky and Tamara …and it’s like you have six people, allcomposers. And most importantly, it was my song, after all, I had heardit 10 times, and transcribed it, and knew it well.48

This comment implicitly reflects on the stereotype that had existedthroughout the Stalin period and later, that groups which sang only ancientfolk songs would come across as a ‘museum.’49 Pokrovsky’s key role in theyouth folklore movement was that he showed that ancient folk music did nothave to be a relic, passively presented in the form of dry, dusty, uninterestingexamples of ‘how our forefathers lived’; emotionally speaking, it could bemore ‘alive’ than newly composed music.

Where did Pokrovsky get his ideas about this amazing sound? Whence theidea to sing this complex, polyphonic folk music that hardly anyone had everheard, in this engaging and outlandish fashion?

As Pokrovsky’s former wife Tamara Smyslova described it, there were twoimportant influences in Pokrovsky’s choice to sing Russian village music.First, he had had contact with villages: starting in the late 1960s, he hadgone on expeditions with his mother, who was an ethnographer – aresearcher and teacher of folk art. Like Pokrovsky, many of those in thefolklore revival movement said that they became interested in folk musicduring fieldwork expeditions, which were obligatory parts of training inmusic, linguistics, and literature in the Soviet Union from the post-WorldWar II period onward. Many students on such expeditions had never been ina village before; here they became acquainted with the daily life, culture, loreand music of Russian villages, which differed so greatly from urban culture.

Second, Pokrovsky and other leaders of the youth folklore movementreceived exposure to Russian village singing, instrumental music, dance, andritual through concerts of village folk performers held in Moscow and othermajor cities with active centers of folklore study. The concerts were orga-nized by folklorists and musicologists, who would bring to the city groupsthat they had worked with in the field. At the concerts, these folkloristswould typically provide commentary on the music and rituals presented.Starting in 1966, a series of concerts was held at the Moscow House ofComposers, and attracted a large audience: by the second concert the audi-ence was overflowing, sitting on the stage. Viacheslav Shchurov, one of theorganizers of the concerts, remembered the impression of freshness andgenuineness made by the villagers on the jaded Muscovites. A young female

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artist friend of his said, leaving the theater, ‘Finally they’ve shown usMoscow invalids [distrofiki] some real people!’50

Many of the young people in the audience were hearing ‘true’ folklore,rather than the state’s stylized versions, for the first time. Smyslova remem-bered that her folklore teacher from music high school invited her to one ofthese concerts, and she brought Pokrovsky along. Afterwards, he was ‘firedup,’ and became excited about introducing authentic instruments and vocalstyles to his group’s repertoire.51 This music was made even more accessibleby the work of musicologists like Shchurov. Based upon the popularity ofthe concerts, Shchurov began to put out records featuring just one or twovillages each.52 To have accessible collections of the folk traditions of singlevillages meant that amateur folk music lovers could study and come to knowthese traditions in great detail.

Further, collections of notated songs from expeditions had started to bepublished, whereas previously, ‘there were almost no collections of folksongs.’ The pre-Revolutionary and Soviet-era collections of Lineva, Gippius,Rudneva, Rubtsov and a few others were the only ones that showed howpeople really sang in the villages, including the regional distinctions in theirrenditions. Shchurov remembered: ‘That is why the impression of the rich-ness and variety of style and traditions of Russian singing appeared only inthe 1950s, when we started to go on expeditions. Suddenly a previouslyundetected, unknown layer was discovered…. Suddenly there was an oceanof new information about that which previously people did not even knowexisted.’53

Pokrovsky himself wrote about the reasons for the formation of hisensemble in more theoretical terms, which refer back to Gippius and hissyncretic studies of folk culture. When Pokrovsky made his memorableappearance in front of the Folklore Commission of the Union ofComposers of the Russian Federation in 1973, his apparent intention wasnot only to receive approbation for a new performing ensemble, but also topropose acting as an experimental ensemble that could help the Commission(of which Gippius was a part) to learn about the rules of folk singing. TheCommission accepted this proposal and ‘adopted’ the ensemble, giving themunofficial sponsorship.54 In a 1980 article Pokrovsky described the group asan experiment that was still ongoing. The group would learn songs fromtranscriptions made by musicologists, then travel to villages and sing thesongs with the people from whom the material was originally collected.Through their interactions with village groups, the experimenters would tryto discover the essential rules for singing particular local styles of villagepolyphony, and the functions of the various musical parts within the collec-tive. The group would aim to discover ‘on what level does the feeling of stylearise, on what level does the feeling of the work arise, on what level are theworks recognized or not recognized?’55 They worked together with Kabanovas a theorist who would analyze the style and structure of the material,

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while the group would try to put his theories about the structure of thesongs into practice.

This kind of work was entirely new. Although in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries groups such as Lineva’s and Piatnitsky’s had sungvillage-style, polyphonic, unarranged choral music, and Lineva had evenworked with urban performers in her chorus, now urban intellectuals weregoing to villages specifically to learn how to sing from peasants. To be sure,musicologists had sung on their expeditions, but it was not the same asspecifically studying and learning in the presence of villagers. Giliarova,director of the folk ensemble of the Moscow Conservatory, made thedistinction (my question is in italics): ‘I remember in 1970 we went [on anexpedition] along those roads in Riazan’ oblast…and we sang those songsfor ourselves. But we sang like theorists sang – [that is,] not at all.’ Badly? ‘Ofcourse, badly. We sang for ourselves, because we were musicians and weliked to sing it. But it wasn’t singing.’ Giliarova’s comment reflected some ofthe assumptions expressed in Lineva’s comment that forms the epigraph tothis chapter. In Lineva’s pronouncement, it is impossible to sing like folkperformers; they will always be ‘better.’ Pokrovsky showed that even if thatwere true, it still did not mean that performance of folk music could not beaesthetically interesting.

According to Giliarova, her group and many others like it would not havestarted had it not been for the Pokrovsky Ensemble.56 She and others in themovement recounted numerous stories of shy, polite urban young peoplelearning to sing – that is, literally and figuratively ‘finding their voices’ – invillages. Many of the ensembles in the revival movement utilized Pokrovsky’sbasic approach of learning how to sing from villagers.

Later, looking back on his work, Pokrovsky called it ‘populism’; indeed,it had a lot in common with the populist movements of the late nineteenthcentury.57 In this case, the populism consisted not only in ‘going to the peas-ants,’ but in bringing the music back to share with other intellectuals in thecities. Pokrovsky was the first to view this kind of work as experimentalscholarship: previously, no performing group had presented themselves as alaboratory which could help to reveal truths about folk culture. In 1998,Kabanov was still carrying on this tradition by holding ‘laboratories’ inwhich urban young people would sing alongside village dwellers.58

Pokrovsky wrote in 1980 that the premise for this experiment was that the‘rules’ which govern participation in any folklore presentation are unwrittenand not consciously known. One cannot ask singers why they sing a certainway, or participants in a wedding why they say or do a certain thing.Pokrovsky proposed that, given such a state of affairs, it might be importantto study folklore ‘from inside.’ Of course, he wrote, such study is not easybecause there is no ‘school’ from which one can learn, and furthermore,anytime an outsider tries to enter a folkloric situation (such as a wedding)his or her presence changes that very situation. Thus, an entire ensembleseparate from the village group but learning from and imitating them, would

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be able to model the ‘most important laws of folklore presentation,’ to‘produce the processes and situations which come up in authentic ensem-bles.’59

In their visits to village ensembles, this experimental group could use theirnovice status as a way of learning about the music. They would substituteone of their singers for one of a village group’s, sing the song, and ask thegroup for their reaction. Or they would simply sing the song themselves, ‘astranscribed,’ and ask for the group’s reaction. As Pokrovsky described it,songs learned in this way were often not recognized by the people fromwhom they were originally collected: when one ‘keeps all the elements of thetradition, that is, when one keeps the melody, the texture, and the rhythm,but takes away the micro-form – the transitional processes between thestable…sounds – then the work is practically not recognized by the folkperformers, they see it as belonging to another culture, it loses aestheticvalue for them. Even more, to their ear the work sounds very stronglydistorted.’60

Pokrovsky’s statement suggests the existence of a large gulf in under-standing between village and urban dwellers. To learn a song from notes onpaper – no matter how exactly and carefully – was not the same as learningit by doing. To the villagers, music sung from notes was not ‘their music.’But Smyslova remembered several instances when in fact the villagers didgive good advice to their urban ‘students.’ ‘For example, Pokrovsky wouldask that I, as a dishkant [descant], would sing instead of their dishkant….And I remember, when I was in one small village [in a Don Cossack region],khutor’ Iamenskii, the babushka told me, ‘You [should] weave more, weave.Why are you standing still with your voice? Wag it, weave it more.’ And Istarted to weave, to wander around more with my voice, and I felt that itbecame easier for the others who were singing with me, and for me, too, ofcourse.’61 Of course the metaphorical, nebulous direction ‘to weave’ (in thesense of zigzag) must have had enormous ideological implications for theformer folk chorus soloist, since it involved improvisation while her wholemusical education had discouraged spontaneity.

As students or apprentices of village singers, this experimental ensemblecould do research into the means by which members of a village communitylearn to sing. It had long been unclear to researchers how Russian folksingers mastered the tradition. It was known that there was no tradition ofspecific training in singing (such as apprenticeship). There were severalknown cases when people just ‘started singing,’ with full knowledge of thetradition, in middle age. In general, researchers wondered why the ‘best’singing collectives, those that sang the most ancient and the most complexrepertoires, were largely made up of middle-aged people. Studying thesinging traditions of the Don Cossacks, Pokrovsky and Kabanov came upwith a theory that the very polyphonic structure of the music itself was‘educational.’ Less experienced singers would sing along with more experi-enced singers and learn as they sang. The least experienced members of the

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collective could fulfill the singing function of the ‘bass,’ which was fairlystraightforward, did not move much, was characterized by ostinato (persis-tent repetition of a musical phrase) and unison singing. Meanwhile, the‘masters’ in the group would fulfill one of several functions: they would actas a musical leader, starting the song and singing ‘bass’ but improvising in amasterful way and never repeating the same line twice; or they might be adishkant, expressing him or herself creatively in a ‘solo’ part above all theother voices; or a ‘dispatcher,’ who moves around and improvises in therealm of the ‘bass’ and ‘tenor,’ and who knits the group together aestheti-cally.62

One of the methods of analysis utilized by Pokrovsky’s experimental groupwas an invention that had recently started to be used by musicologistsstudying choral folk singing – what they called the ‘multi-track recording’.They used several audio cassette recorders simultaneously, each one recordinga different member (or two members) of a village singing collective, capturingeach individual part in all its variations (they described the technique as‘multi-track recording’ – ‘mnogokanal’naia zapis’ – although it did not involveseparate tracks on a single tape as that term implies).63 Musicologists wouldtransport village singing groups from various parts of Russia to Moscow andLeningrad, and would record the singers at their institutions; or, when thetechnology, personnel and transportation existed, they would bring therecorders to the performers. Using the recordings, they would painstakinglytranscribe each part into Western musical notation. It was transcriptions ofthis detailed nature that Pokrovsky’s group obtained from Kabanov; theyalso had their own group recorded on multiple tracks so that their workcould be more accurately analyzed.64 (CD tracks 3–5)

This gesture of recording themselves might suggest that the PokrovskyEnsemble singers viewed themselves as taking on the status of folk infor-mants. Indeed, the group went on to teach other newly forming folk musicrevival groups all over the Soviet Union. However, as Pokrovsky has said,this work in disseminating the craft of authentic Russian folk singingconcentrated on creating ‘singing folklorists,’ not in creating imitations ofthe Pokrovsky singers.65 In their turn, the Pokrovsky Ensemble memberswere not, strictly speaking, imitating the villagers they learned from, butwere trying to discover the secrets of local traditions. As they learned a givensong, the Moscow singers did not try to become the person whose part theylearned; rather, they tried, as an ensemble, to recreate how the song wouldsound if they could imbibe the hidden rules of the tradition themselves.They aimed to create a performance of a given song that would theoreticallysatisfy the villagers from whom it was ‘borrowed.’ The subtlety of thisapproach partly explains the broad success of the Pokrovsky Ensemble: theysatisfied intellectual audiences’ expectations of complexity and freshnessbecause were always creating, always original, always ‘themselves.’ To besure, for some folklorists and musicologists, being ‘oneself ’ in the perfor-mance of folk music is wrongheaded because it involves adapting rural

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music to the aesthetic tastes of urban audiences. Judgment of the PokrovskyEnsemble’s approach forms one of the bases of the folklore movement’smain ideological split; I discuss this point in Chapter 4.

Artistic Dissidence

For the first five or six years of its existence, the ensemble was underground;and for three or four of those years, the KGB actually prohibited theirperformances, while at the same time a KGB agent was organizing under-ground concerts for the group, and was getting large audiences to attend.66

This bizarre twist emphasizes the extent to which dissidence was an essentialcomponent of the Soviet system under Brezhnev. While the group was not‘dissident’ per se, its activities were not officially sanctioned; such was thestatus of many artists who did not fit into Soviet mainstream culture in thatperiod. Pokrovsky has said that he did not know why the group was not offi-cially allowed to perform: ‘People are always asking me now why we wereprohibited, and I can never give them an honest answer. I have to makethings up. I say, “It’s because we sang songs that weren’t about the SovietUnion or Communism, and people couldn’t understand the words,” and soon. But I really don’t know why. It just happened.’67 Although the group’sunderground status may have come about as a result of chance occurrences,in fact there were good reasons why the official system could not supporttheir activities.

Smyslova’s depiction of their concerts in the late 1970s helps to explainboth in what ways the group was dissident and in what ways this unofficialstatus worked to their advantage. They had a dedicated audience, intriguedby that which was forbidden, and their underground status offered them alot of artistic freedom. For example, Pokrovsky had studied religious musicon his own, and introduced spiritual music to the group’s repertoire. ‘We hadconcerts at the Znamenskii Cathedral near the Hotel Rossiia…which at thattime was a concert hall; we gave a concert there every month. And therewere legends circulating around Moscow, at the end of the 70s, that someunderground ensemble gets together at the cathedral and sings spiritualmusic.’ Because of the long-standing Soviet persecution of religious expres-sion, the publication of spiritual material was not allowed, not to mentionits performance in public. The audience at the underground concerts wasloyal and would attend regularly, which permitted Pokrovsky to experimentwith different concert programs and methods of presenting folklore.Smyslova’s description of their early concerts is worth quoting in full (withmy questions in italics):

We showed folk songs, folk theater, songs from various oblasts ofRussia, and a spiritual program, and a program of drawn-out songs[protiazhnye pesni]. Drawn-out songs had to be in their own program,since [Pokrovsky] dreamed of singing drawn-out songs from beginning

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to end. He’d say, why should we only sing five verses, or only threebecause it’s too long. Look at the text, why is it that people used to singit all? And in this program we sang songs from the beginning to the end.

How many songs did you sing in such a concert?

I’d have to look. But as a rule, not too many. We had to educate theaudience…. He’d speak about the songs, where we collected them andfrom whom, but the content of the song is hard to tell. He’d say, youlisten to what the precentor [zapevala – the singer whose solo openingphrase begins a song] sings. Mostly, he sings the whole content, andthen it is developed [raspevaetsia]. They sing on additional vowels, a o ei, it’s generally singing on vowels. And the drawn-out song has a lot ofthis inner development [raspeta vnutri]. He’d say, the content isn’t thatimportant. But as a rule, the precentor will tell you it. For that reason,the audience would sit there and listen to what the precentor said.

Did the audience react well to what you sang?

Well, we had our own audience, we had prepared them for that. AndPokrovsky never tried to entertain. I see that nowadays, everyone tries tomake the public laugh, to entertain them. But he always made theirminds work, so that they’d exert themselves. And I think that when aperson starts to understand that which he couldn’t understand earlier,which was unattainable for him, there’s a joy in that, and a person startsto feel differently about himself.

…[Pokrovsky] was a scholar, so he didn’t have texts learned by rote,written especially for the concert; he improvised the whole time. He’dconstantly study new data, his research would show here. And I reallyloved to listen to his commentary on the songs. Because I always discov-ered more and more new ideas of his.68

Smyslova’s description suggests that from the beginning, one of the mainenterprises of the ensemble was to educate – an important task since themusic they were presenting was at first totally unknown to the urban intel-lectual audiences. Making the concerts into a lecture-demonstration was ameans of assuring that they had an audience who would listen appreciativelyto their experimental performances; and it was also a means of telling theaudience how to listen and why this was important. After all, the kind offolklore Soviet audiences had previously been exposed to was couched inslick, entertaining performances of upbeat dances, patriotic marches andlyrical romances. Anyone could understand it: there were no unfamiliardialects, no mysteries, no traditions with unspoken complex rules or ancientritual beliefs. The Pokrovsky version of folklore could have beenmonotonous or even boring, since it was so unfamiliar and since part of the

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tradition often involves the rendition of long texts that might be incompre-hensible to urban dwellers. In practice, however, it was not monotonoussince the performances underlined and exaggerated certain interestingaspects of the traditions presented; and Pokrovsky’s lectures, whichpresented theories about the music’s style and the underlying reasons whythe tradition evolved the way it did, placed the material into aesthetic, intel-lectual, historical, and ethnic contexts. Pokrovsky emphasized therelationship between geography and musical style, and drew links betweenancient Russian pagan traditions and those of other Slavic peoples.69

In fact, this new presentation of Russian folklore was not only exotic andunfamiliar to audiences, it was also implicitly critical of the notion of folklorethat had been propagated by the Soviet system. All by itself, the PokrovskyEnsemble was redefining the notion of the narod, the Soviet system’s sacredcow. Within the Soviet cultural system, only the Party, and academic institutionswith the (blessing of the Party), not individual artists could redefine wholeintellectual categories. Yet the image of folklore shown by the PokrovskyEnsemble was complex, polyphonic, mysterious, exotic, and characterizedby excess – far from the symbolic expression of health, labor, optimism andorder that the folk choruses represented. The identity that the PokrovskyEnsemble presented was not that of the New Soviet Man and Woman: thesesingers created their own identities on stage, emphasizing improvisation,acting on one’s free will (volia), and unconstrained sexuality, not uniformityand asexuality.70

The situation was ironic. An urban intellectual, Pokrovsky, was educatingaudiences composed of other urban intellectuals – people reared on classicalWest European arts, who had listened to Beethoven, read Voltaire, and beento the ballet – and who also valued jazz and rock. As Pierre Bourdieu pointsout, it is precisely intellectuals who have obtained a specific kind of culturalcompetence through their education, who are able and likely to aestheticize,to consider ‘as form rather than function, not only the works designated forsuch apprehension, i.e. legitimate works of art, but everything in the world,including cultural objects which are not yet consecrated – such as, at onetime, primitive arts, or, nowadays, popular photography or kitsch – andnatural objects.’71 In essence, Pokrovsky was consecrating a new object asart. His lectures helped the new audiences appreciate these cultural artifactsin relation to an artistic tradition. With his comments on the structure of themusic, the importance of the text versus the melodies, and the like,Pokrovsky called attention to these new works of art as form rather thanfunction. Thus, urban intellectuals began to appreciate folk performance notas something qualitatively different from classical performing arts, but assomething just as complex and interesting as composed, modernist music –and as possessing its own equally important aesthetic rules.

In short, the aesthetic model presented by the Pokrovsky Ensemble hadmore in common with modernism than it did with the realism demanded bythe Soviet artistic system. In the early twentieth century, visual and performing

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artists had turned to ethnographic material as a source for their modernistproductions in an attempt to counter the bourgeois cultivation of a ‘stableand “correct” sense of self.’ The culture of the lower classes, associated withthe carnivalesque spirit that incorporated spontaneity, crudity, ‘inversion,grotesque body symbolism, festive ambivalence, and transgression,’ lentauthenticity to modernist artistic expressions that embodied aesthetic andsocial protest.72 In an analogous artistic protest, Pokrovsky’s carnivalesquepresentation of Russian folk culture opposed the middle-class values of theSoviet art system. Not surprisingly, this version of folk art did not pleaseeveryone. Both officials and others in the world of folklore performancefound it distasteful, while many young people found it exciting.

Shchurov, one of the Pokrovsky Ensemble’s most vocal critics, disapprovedof the group’s distortion of Russian traditions. Since Pokrovsky used mate-rial that Shchurov himself had seen performed in villages, he readilyperceived the difference between how he thought village performers sang ordanced, and how the Pokrovsky Ensemble interpreted it. He describedseveral examples:

Well, Aleksandr Medvedev and I went [on a folklore expedition] to theRiver Viveda. And we were present at a competition of chastushkasingers in the [village] club. And there the chastushka singers come outone facing the other and start to make fun of each other…and they hadhigh voices, very shrill, and they were having a really good time andwere quite mischievous. And Medvedev showed the recording toPokrovsky. And he made a concert number out of it, which they kept inthe repertoire until recently. Two chastushka singers come out with suchhigh, screechy voices, and start to exclaim so fast that you can’t under-stand a word: ‘de-de-de-de-de-de-da’! [demonstrates]. This device wastaken to the absurd, to idiocy. It turns out that people in the audiencelaugh, but they don’t laugh at the fact that people are making fun ofeach other, they laugh at the unusual form of a chastushka number….[Pokrovsky wanted] to show how strange village people are, howstrangely they sing. And with that to surprise and shock the city spec-tator.73

In this and other performances, Pokrovsky made words unintelligible (healso did this with the folk play Tsar’ Maksimilian, for example) in order toincrease the exoticism of the performance and, as Shchurov pointed out, toarouse a feeling of alienation or defamiliarization [ostranenie] in the listener.Many times Pokrovsky claimed he made such changes in order to ‘restore’ancient traditions. That was true of a popular choral number from thevillage of Foshchevatovo in Belgorod oblast, where Shchurov had doneextensive fieldwork.

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In that village they sing with two choruses, it’s a special form where one[chorus] says, we’ll sing the words [rasskazyvat’], and you sing thechorus, lioli lioli [lioliokat’], and it comes out as a kind of canon.Among the folk, in real life, they sing together and support each otherduring the singing of the song. But Pokrovsky presented it so that theythrow themselves at each other, they kind of fight with each other, likeroosters. These go, and then those go, and they jump at each other. Butit’s just a concert device, it looks funny and amusing from the audience,but it has nothing to do with truth. It’s again just a stage device tointerest and surprise the audience.

So it doesn’t have the character of a competition?

No.

Maybe he simply understood it that way?

No…he thought it was like that at one time. That originally it had thisform, and he connected it with some traditions in the Balkans, and saidthat it represented ancient Slavic forms that were now lost, and here heis apparently restoring it and showing it.74

Pokrovsky was interested in uncovering ancient forms, and used contempo-rary musical and dance performances as a basis for understanding – andimagining – underlying structures. The scholarly basis for this wasPokrovsky’s association in the 1980s with ethnolinguist Nikita Tolstoi, whoengaged in ‘reconstruction’ of ancient Slavic culture using folklore, linguis-tics, and ethnography. Pokrovsky’s attention to the Poles’e region of Belarusand western Russia, for example, was inspired by Tolstoi’s belief that thiswas an ‘archaic zone’ where one could find evidence of a ‘stable system’ oftraditional culture.75 Yet Shchurov and some of the other musicologists Iconsulted believed that Pokrovsky’s theories had no scientific basis. As amodernist, Pokrovsky allowed himself to experiment, distort, and exag-gerate in order to shock a middle-class public reared on middle-browrenditions of classics. Clearly, the allure of the primitive was important forPokrovsky, and his educated audiences were hooked: they adored the notionthat the songs performed on stage were not just ‘numbers,’ songs in aconcert, but evidence of the carnival nature of their own cultural roots.

An important part of that carnival quality was the implicit sexuality inthe Pokrovsky Ensemble’s performances. Many revivalists disliked themanner in which Pokrovsky sexualized the south-Russian dance numbers,and told me that I should not imitate them in my own performances of thesesongs. For example, Anzhelika Glumova and I watched a video in which thePokrovsky singers appeared in a concert together with the middle-aged andolder members of an ensemble from a village in Belgorod oblast. She

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pointed out that when the villagers danced, they moved their arms, legs andspine, but kept their hips straight. The Pokrovsky singers, on the other hand,waggled their hips from side to side and moved so energetically that thewomen’s breasts shook.76 Speaking of a similar dance song, Kabanov toldme that Pokrovsky ‘drives [his singers] into hysteria,’ while Shchurov said ‘hewould bring them to thundering rhythms, and they would start to rant andrage on stage…And this would remind one of the dances of a religious sect,they’d drive themselves to a fury, and try to make the audience that way, too,to whip up some kind of crazy tempo with violent rhythms – but thatdestroys the nature of the folk song.’ With the projection of emotionality,raw sexuality, and a kind of ritualized altered state, Pokrovsky woke up hisspiritually sleeping audiences and offered them glimpses of traditions thatrepresented a more primitive version of modern Homo Sovieticus.

Zhanna Kabanova agreed that the Pokrovsky Ensemble distorted Russiantradition, but she argued that the distortion was a fortuitous one. The sexu-ality of the Pokrovsky singers was what drew her – and many others – toRussian folklore in 1980, at age 17.

I saw Dmitri Viktorovich [Pokrovsky] and I was dumbfounded, youunderstand, inside me everything started boiling. Such men [muzhiki]were standing there on the stage, they were so good-looking in thosesongs, through those songs they showed all their virtues – I had neverseen such an energetic mix. There were girls there in whom I admiredabsolutely everything. You understand? It was such ecstasy. People toldme, come on, kid, calm down, your sexual maturation is ahead ofschedule, it’ll pass. Yes, it did pass. But I simply remember that if itweren’t for that shock, I wouldn’t have gone into folk singing. He[Pokrovsky], with his open sexuality – yes, one can say that, they wereexcessively open – he opposed the folk chorus, which was completelysexless, which is absolutely nothing. That is, they all could have beenprostitutes in [the folk] chorus, but they so hid it, you understand,behind the folk song, it was so cheesy (nastol’ko mnogo sliunei bylo unikh), Laura, and false, that I didn’t want to be like them. It was betterto be open. To be bright like [the Pokrovsky singers], you understand?Free.

I identified with Kabanova’s assessment of the Pokrovsky Ensemble – I, too,had been attracted to several of the performers when I first saw their perfor-mance. But I was surprised that she deemed the Soviet folk chorus sexless,because one of its typical traits is the staging of flirtation. In the ‘acting out’of folk songs, female performers make exaggerated flirtatious gestures tomales on stage or the audience; men show off their masculinity throughtheir dancing prowess. For Kabanova, the extremely artificial, staged natureof such gestures robbed them of sexual attractiveness, while the life energyof the Pokrovsky performers created the impression of ‘open sexuality.’

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Apparently it was an approach to sexuality which many young people cravedas much as their elders disdained it.

In this sense, the Pokrovsky Ensemble and those who were inspired by itmirrored the approach of modernist artists and ethnographers to the ‘primi-tive’ world: they tapped the world of village culture as a source of wisdomabout the body. If Freud argued that civilization protects humans fromuncontrolled sexual impulses, many Europeans believed that the corollarywas also true: that ‘uncivilized’ people (the lower classes and members ofprimitive societies) were exempt from the repression of sexuality. Somefantasized that civilized people could overcome their own alienation fromtheir bodies through contact with such cultures. Marianna Torgovnickwrites: ‘What the postmodern West seems to want most from the primitive[is] a model of alternative social organization in which psychologicalintegrity is a birthright, rooted in one’s body and sexuality, and in which afull range of ambivalences and doubts can be confronted and defusedthrough the culture’s rituals, customs, and play.’ Margaret Mead, forexample, used her study of sexuality in Samoa to comment on the restrictivemiddle-class attitudes towards sexuality in the United States.77 The young,educated Russians who flocked to Pokrovsky’s performances may likewisehave sought a release from the prudishness of the middle-class culture of theStalin era.

Pokrovsky’s redefinition of folk art may also be seen in the context of thecontemporary move in the Western art world to change the way ‘primitive

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Fig 3.3: Pokrovsky Ensemble in 1978. Pokrovsky(L), Smyslova (R).

art’ is exhibited in museums. As Torgovnick has written, whereas previouslycollections amassed as the spoils of colonialism were housed in ethno-graphic settings in museums of natural history ‘en masse,’ ‘displayed in asemblance of context, as functional pieces,’ exhibits of primitive art today‘resemble jewelry stores,’ showing objects in glass cases against solid colorbackgrounds, isolated by dramatic spotlights. ‘The displays aestheticize theobjects and present them as the valuable, jewel-like things they havebecome.’78 While Pokrovsky’s presentation aestheticized folk culture andoffered village works of musical art as ‘jewel-like things’ that were valuablebecause of their aesthetic form and their reference to universal humanvalues, he also retained the ethnographic focus, always framing the pieces asbelonging to a local, regional, and Slavic tradition. This ethnographicframing gave a kind of legitimacy to the experimental project of recoveringfolk art as high art.

Certainly, Pokrovsky saw his goal as the restoring of folk art to its properrecognition – in concerts and workshops, scholarly and philanthropic work.He mounted a campaign to make the Soviet government treat village crafts-people as professional artists, and lobbied on behalf of at least one folksinger, Efim Sopelkin, attempting to procure a government salary for him.But as Torgovnick shows, attempts to bring primitive art into a higher realmare not as revolutionary as their authors often believe. Although ‘ “eleva-tion” of primitive works into art is often implicitly seen as the aestheticequivalent of decolonization, as bringing Others into the “mainstream”,’still, such promotion of low to high ‘in a sense reproduces, in the aestheticrealm, the dynamics of colonialism, since Western standards control theflow of the ‘mainstream’ and can bestow or withhold the label “art”.’79

Indeed, the raising of ethnographic material to the level of high art wasonly one of Pokrovsky’s projects. He also did innovative work in the sphereof experimental artistic performance – the cream of the high art world –both at home and abroad. Shchurov reported that when Pokrovsky was juststarting out he had told him he wanted to create ‘folk-rock’ since it waspopular in the West. To Shchurov this was a betrayal of Russian culture, butPokrovsky was interested in the connections between musical genres; and hewas also interested in making a living, which the group did by creating aversion of Russian folk music that would intrigue foreign (particularlyWestern European and American) audiences. They completed numeroustours abroad in the 1980s and early 1990s, performing in university townsand large cities all over the US, participating in festivals such as theChristmas Revels and a joint Soviet-American music festival with thecomposer Rodion Shchedrin in Boston in 1988, and conducting workshopswith several American folk groups.

The group explored the connections between folk and rock, folk and jazz,folk and classical, folk and avant-garde music. Indeed, the loud, ‘aggressive’voice characteristic of the group, as well as its bold use of improvisation,could be likened to some of the aesthetic principles of rock and jazz, while

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the defamiliarization that characterized their concerts linked them with theavant-garde. The ensemble collaborated with the American new-age jazzmusician Paul Winter during a concert tour in 1989 and recorded a disc onwhich every track begins with an a cappella Russian folk song performed bythe Pokrovsky Ensemble and ends with the Winter group’s improvisationinspired by the folk song. To this listener, the disc was disappointing becauseWinter did not sufficiently allow musical interplay to emerge between thetwo musical improvisational modes – the Pokrovskys’ folk and the WinterConsort’s jazz. Subsequent attempts at fusing Russian folk and jazz musicby other groups in the 1990s were musically more successful (seeConclusion, pages 225-8).

In other projects, the Pokrovsky Ensemble explored the ways in whichtheir village vocal techniques could be used in folk-based classical pieces bycomposers such as Shchedrin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev,Musorgsky, and Igor Stravinsky. Contemporary composers Alfred Schnittke,Vladimir Martynov and others approached them with new material. In all ofthese projects, the aim was defamiliarization, since these pieces were tradi-tionally sung in academic voice. The coup de grace was their research on andperformance and recording of a new interpretation of Stravinsky’smodernist composition based upon Russian folk vocal material, Svadebka(‘The Wedding’, 1923, better known in the West by its French title, LesNoces).80 The Soviet line on Stravinsky was that he did not take folkloreseriously, and used it only to ‘spice up’ his pieces and ‘shock’ the bourgeoispublic with the ‘wild exoticism’ of his national culture.81 Pokrovsky coun-tered that cliché by showing in concerts, an academic paper and anunfinished dissertation, that in this composition Stravinsky – without usinga single quotation from a song – used ‘folkloric thinking’ based upon thetraditions of the southwest Russian wedding. In a sense the modernistStravinsky was the perfect alter ego to the modernist Pokrovsky, both ofwhom wished to shock the bourgeois public. As Maria Nefedova, currentlyco-leader of the ensemble, pointed out, the Pokrovsky interpretation ofSvadebka was revolutionary: ‘with The Wedding’ [Pokrovsky] broke througha wall that always existed between folklore…and the ‘higher’ genres – opera,academic music.’82

The group also became involved in several unconventional theaterprojects: from 1980–82, Pokrovsky and the singers worked with the (subse-quently exiled) theater director Iurii Liubimov on an innovative new ‘folk’production of Aleksandr Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov at the TagankaTheater. The ensemble forged such strong connections with Liubimov that itremained under the sponsorship of the renowned theater after Pokrovsky’sdeath in 1996.83

The impressive accomplishments of the group in artistic experimentationwere an integral part of its appeal to audiences and to would-be folk singers.But despite Pokrovsky’s zeal for dissemination of his methods and material,the ensemble’s descendants by and large operated in a different artistic

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realm. While they took from the Pokrovsky Ensemble an eclectic folk reper-toire and new methods of learning and singing Russian folk music, almostnone of them possessed the artistic breadth, or the electric energy, of theirteachers.

Dissemination

Livingston wrote that ‘revivals almost always have a strong pedagogicalcomponent in order to pass on the tradition in a controlled manner.’ ThePokrovsky Ensemble engaged in pedagogy in a number of ways: as we haveseen, it made its concerts into an opportunity for educating audiences. Yet ifconsecration of a new art form was the Pokrovsky Ensemble’s mission, itunderstood well that this task could not be accomplished through concertsalone. The oppositional and folk-spirit oriented philosophy of the groupdictated that people try this kind of singing for themselves. And peopleclamored for it: after concerts, audience members who had gotten ‘fired up’about the music would ask how they could learn to sing it in this manner. Asa result, in 1979 Pokrovsky and others from his ensemble formed a‘Pokrovsky Ensemble Studio’ and registered it as an official club at a Houseof Culture in Moscow; the official status meant that the studio’s leadersreceived a small salary for their work. During the 1980s the group hadseveral such studios at whatever Houses of Culture were available: at theSociety of the Blind, the Dukat Tobacco Factory, the Red Textile Workers,and the Saliut Factory in Moscow. Every week, 20 to 30 young peopleranging in age from 18 to 30 would come to sing, dance, and join a newsocial circle. When the studios were established, Pokrovsky started toannounce them in the ensemble’s concerts, inviting anyone in the audience toattend.84

As Kabanov describes it, the studios were not run like a class or club infolk singing: instead, they were open to anyone, no matter how well or badlythey sang. People came one time or many times, as they pleased, and no onekept track of attendance. ‘It was fooling around [balovstvo] – not really, butit wasn’t serious…. This was a kind of experiment – maybe it’ll work, maybenot. No one controlled us or yelled at us.’85 The casual attitude and thenotion that anyone could sing were new in the Soviet context. Among theofficially-sponsored choirs, even the amateur ones reflected the profession-alism of the utopian Soviet society in that they had professional directors,followed a schedule, and had a regular roster of participants. By contrast, inthe eyes of the studio leaders, the studio’s approach represented an attitudemore typical of folk culture itself: everyone was a participant. Kabanovwould later flesh out and implement more intensively this theory thatanyone could sing, no matter their given talent. In 1998, he reflected that hewas ‘still checking this [thesis] every day’ by having people without a musical‘ear’ participate in group singing. This experimental, anti-professional atti-tude reflected the burgeoning movement’s oppositional character, and more

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generally exemplified the intelligentsia’s predilection for formal experimenta-tion and rejection of accepted conventions.

Like the ensemble itself, which had become a professional group, thestudios performed and went on expeditions – except that these amateursperformed for free, and went on expeditions during their leisure time. Out ofthe Moscow studios came several future members of the professionalensemble, and many of the future leaders and participants in the folkloremovement.

The Pokrovsky Ensemble also worked on disseminating their music andapproach outside of Moscow. After existing as an unofficial performinggroup for five or six years, the group received a contract with RosKontsert,the Russian Concert Agency, in 1978. This meant that the group wouldtravel and perform all over the country, often in out-of-the-way places.Pokrovsky recalled, ‘We’d have an official performance and no one wouldcome. But the next day, we’d arrange a performance for students in a conser-vatory or university or college. Students knew about us already. We haddiscussions, and we started to use the time that we spent in towns to teachstudents how to work with folksingers. We had expeditions with localstudents; we started to create groups like our group.’86

Pokrovsky’s comments indicate the extent to which their music requiredan educated audience. Working people neither knew of nor appreciated theirwork, but many students did. As I have indicated, the group’s oppositionalprofile, as well as its intense sound and energetic demeanor, helped it toattract young audiences. But the audiences’ high degree of erudition wasalso a key factor. This profile was to change in the 1990s, when the revivalmovement gained more recognition and geographical coverage. At that time,with the increased popularity of things Russian, children of working-classparents began to participate in the activities of local Russian folk-revivalensembles as well, alongside their classmates from middle-class-intellectualhomes.

In the early years, however, the teachings of the Pokrovsky Ensemblestudios were targeted specifically at young members of the intelligentsia. Itwas as if Pokrovsky sought to make the intellectual less intellectual: lesstimid, more gregarious, more willing to work and express with his or herhands and body. In sharing his ‘method,’ Pokrovsky would not simply sharesongs and show how to get material from local villages; he and other leadersof the studios would try to ‘bring the sound out’ of the participants. Thenotion of bringing out a person’s sound is inherent in the Russian technicalterm for vocal placement or production, zvukoizvlechenie (literally, ‘thepulling-out of sound’); but the members of the newly forming revival move-ment used a transitive expression, which implied acting on someone througha process: vynimat’ zvuk iz kogo-to or to bring, take, or pull the sound out ofsomeone.87

In the practice of the ensemble and the studio Pokrovsky did much exper-imenting with ways in which a person could be made to sing ‘like outdoors.’

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The group managed this to the extent that they performed in stadiumswithout amplification.88 Pokrovsky accepted into the group people who didnot know they could sing, including one young woman with a universitydegree in languages and literature who ‘spoke in a whisper.’89 The process ofbringing out the voice involved the same technique as is generally taught foracademic or stage singing, but with greater force. The power of the soundwas said to reside in the lower abdomen; singers were encouraged to use themuscles in such a way that they could feel a slight engagement of theirsexual organs.90 When I visited a rehearsal in Moscow in 1990, Pokrovskytold the women that the technique of such singing was like throwing up, andhe demonstrated the physical movement of vomiting. He made one womanget down on her hands and knees and walk around like a cat or dog whilesinging, in order to feel the force needed to produce the visceral sound.91

Kabanov and many others in the revival movement carried on Pokrovsky’stradition, so that I heard from more than one leader of a Moscow ensemblefond memories of the time they discovered their voice: ‘Remember whenKabanov brought the sound out of me?’ It was presumed that the voice thatwas being brought out was a person’s natural voice, the expression of his orher true individuality.

Thus, although one of the group’s oft-repeated phrases was ‘sing like inthe village,’ it was clear that urban young people were not being asked tosound like 50- or 60-year-old villagers. Instead, they were being asked toproduce an emotional, exciting sound, one that stirred them and audiences.According to Kabanov, this was like a theatrical mask; they were foolingthemselves when they told themselves that they were imitating local tradi-tions. ‘That was [Pokrovsky’s] fantasy – and thank God it was his fantasy,because you don’t need to copy anything from the old folks, no one wouldhave followed that. Nowadays, children will listen to a little of that just outof curiosity, but they love more to listen to Zhanna [Kabanov’s wife, ateacher of folk singing at an elementary school and at the Gnesin Institute],because they see her, hear her, and that’s it.’ Kabanov referred to a principlethat he himself held dear, and which represents a continuation of his workwith the Pokrovsky Ensemble: namely, that strict imitation of village tradi-tions is never productive. Urban dwellers cannot become villagers andshould not try to do so. ‘One must work with one’s own content,’ Kabanovwould say repeatedly in explaining his philosophy to me.

This philosophical issue pointing to identity and its implications, and themoral question of how to conduct folk performance, proved to be anotherpoint of controversy in the movement. Purist and liberal factions developed.Those who followed the lead of the Pokrovsky Ensemble took a liberalapproach to folk culture: they believed that they could perform materialfrom many regional traditions, that nearly any material was fair game aslong as it was interesting to audiences, and that exposing audiences toelements of ancient pagan and Christian traditions was worthwhile in and ofitself. Meanwhile, the purists tended to specialize in one regional tradition,

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mastering it as well as possible; they believed that certain material (particu-larly material with hints of eroticism, or songs that originated in writtentraditions, such as romances) was not valuable and should not be shown onstage; thought that entertainment was not a worthy goal; and finally,attempted to educate audiences rather than simply to expose them toRussian folk material. I explore the philosophical differences between thesetwo basic types in Chapter 4. What follows is a discussion of the conceptsthat were important to the founding members of the movement, and todayare held in common by almost all revivalists.

Syncretism and Collectivism [sobornost’]

Two central concepts for the folklore revival movement were syncretism, theview that all folk phenomena are inextricably related; and collectivism(sobornost’ – a central concept in Slavophilism), the notion that Russianrural culture is collective in nature, and that folk traditions necessarily reflectthat social structure.

The Russian folk revival movement is itself syncretic in that it is morethan a revival of Russian folk-music traditions. Revivalist performing groupsthat only sing and play instruments are very few; limitation to music alone ischaracteristic of some of the professional groups (e.g. the Moscow groupRusichi). The majority of the amateur groups involve themselves in manyaspects of village traditions, such as costume (including weaving andembroidery), everyday life, cooking, childcare, healing (including incanta-tions and herbalism), craft making, holiday rituals, folk theater, dance, andtale telling. Their performances reflect many of these interests.

As Smyslova described, the Pokrovsky Ensemble’s early concerts repre-sented many aspects of village life: for example, the group researched andperformed folk theater pieces such as The Boat, Kostroma, and TsarMaximilian. On their field expeditions, they learned how to dance in thelocal manner; subsequently, in their performances, they always danced thosesongs that were originally accompanied by dancing (dance songs, pliasovye).Unlike the Russian folk choruses, they did not employ a choreographer tore-arrange steps from village traditions into a harmonious stage piece;92 thesteps and movements were not done uniformly and in unison; and they didnot employ a separate group of dancers to do the dances. Just as in a village,everyone in the ensemble danced and sang or played instruments; all dancemovements were improvised according to the local style. Furthermore, thegroup learned about local holidays and ancient pagan and Christian prac-tices and beliefs, and Pokrovsky talked about these in his lectures, linkingthem with the song traditions. Often the group acted out rituals in theirconcerts (for example, Christmas rituals or wedding scenes). They alsoincorporated into concerts verbal texts (fairy tales or humorous tales) told indialect.

This approach was continued by the other ensembles formed according to

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the Pokrovsky model. In 1998–9, I was repeatedly told by ensemble leadersthat true folk performers do not ‘specialize’ in one aspect of the tradition. Ifa man is a master singer, chances are he can dance well, play a clay flute, tellstories, whittle toy figurines, and weave birch-bark sandals. If the master is awoman, in addition to singing, dancing, and telling stories, she might be ableto play pan pipes [kugikly], calm a crying baby with an incantation, find theright herbs to heal a cough, knit wool socks, and weave rugs. For thatreason, many of the youth ensembles are run in such a way that everyonelearns to do many aspects of the folk arts, with a gender division. Forinstance, in the Moscow children’s Veretëntse (Little spindle) folklore school,the boys become proficient in sword fighting, folk theater declamation, andplaying folk horns [rozhki] while the girls learn to play pan pipes and makecostumes, and become acquainted with folk methods of child care. Theurban children learn in rehearsals and classes what rural children of theirgender might have learned, in previous years, through exposure to adults’activities. In the ensemble, children of both genders learn to sing and dance,but they focus on different traditions in their same-sex classes: the boysimmerse themselves in Cossack men’s singing while the girls learn the songsthat make up a wedding cycle.93

As the director of this school, Elena Krasnopevtseva, pointed out in a1990 article, learning several aspects of a tradition helps students to under-stand it more deeply and to become more proficient in those aspects. That is,as students learn the basic rhythmic structure of the folk song in a particularlocale, they also find that similar structures are present in dance, in instru-ment playing, and in the patterns of woven belts, embroidery, orwood-carving. ‘Assimilation of a new, more difficult (in terms of material)type of practice is supported by the fact that the child already knows thehidden general structures of the new material.’ Eventually, because of theirbroad and deep experience of the tradition, students are able to becomemasters in specific areas. ‘Because folklore is a syncretic culture, its instruc-tion has an orientation from the whole to the parts’; students must start witha sense of the whole in order to begin to focus on the details. This philos-ophy of training goes against the grain of standard methods of musiceducation in Russia, which train technical skills separately from perfor-mance.94 In the syncretic approach, performance and technical skills arenever separate, but skill grows out of participation in performance.

Krasnopevtseva’s article linked syncretism with collectivism, showing thatthe two are inseparable parts of folklore and also of the educational process:in learning folklore, ‘the orientation [from the whole to the parts] is realiz-able only through learning in groups [ansamblevoe obuchenie], both ininstrument playing and in singing. In learning through this oral method onemust first and foremost pay attention to the general emotional character ofcreating together, and only later give attention to the details.’95 She under-lined not only the group character of Russian folklore, but the emotionalcontent of group activity.

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This orientation towards group creative activity lay at the foundations ofthe folk music revival movement. Although Krasnopevtseva did not use theterm sobornost’ (collectivism), other revivalists do refer to it specifically.96

Slavophiles argued that by nature Russians live collectively; they benefitfrom identifying with the group rather than considering their interests sepa-rately from those of the group.97 This concept was applied to Russian villagemusic-making as well; in the early twentieth century Lineva wrote:

A folk choir…consists of singers who pour out into the improvisationtheir own feeling, who each strive to display their own personality, but atthe same time care about the beauty of the whole performance. Even thebest folk singers do not like to sing alone. ‘You can’t sing alone,’ I oftenheard, ‘it’s better in an artel.’ This expression ‘to sing in an artel’ is verycharacteristic of the folk style of singing. In a singing artel everymember is both a performer and a composer…. If the ideal of a disci-plined chorus is the submission of the whole to the personality of theconductor, then a folk chorus represents, on the other hand, the freemerging of many personalities into one whole…. A folk chorus sings not‘like one person’ but like many people, inspired by their common feelingof love for the song, pouring out into it their grief and joy.98

Lineva’s pronouncement negotiates a paradox: every singer expresses his orher individual personality, yet each one gives his or her attention, love, andcare to the whole. This idea became a leitmotiv of the folk revival movementin the late twentieth century, and formed another contrast to the way Sovietfolk choruses performed. If, in the Soviet folk chorus, the push towardprofessionalism tended to promote certain individuals as soloists, then theserevivalist singing groups eschewed solos, soloists, and all kinds of specializa-tions and hierarchies in favor of group singing in which everyoneparticipates. If Soviet-style folk singing in choruses involved submitting tothe direction of the conductor, then revivalist groups sang without aconductor, and often without obvious leadership. In fact, the revivalistseschewed even the terminology of the Soviet folk choruses: their groupswere not ‘choruses’ but ‘groups’ or ‘ensembles.’99

The Pokrovsky Ensemble’s group structure did not necessarily reflect thenotion of collectivism, since it had a clear leader.100 However, in the musicalcontext, the leadership shifted; the group was not conducted by Pokrovskyand not every song was led by him (often the precentor, the zapevala, fulfillsthe function of a musical leader, and Pokrovsky was not always theprecentor). Also in terms of music, the group initiated an important ritualthat helped to create a musical semblance of sobornost’. The group beganevery rehearsal by singing a single pitch in unison (often on the vowel ‘e’)while standing in a circle. This was very different than the scales and exer-cises used in Western-oriented singing groups to warm up the voice.Kabanov remembers: ‘I thought it was nonsense, anyone can sing one note,

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but exercises, scales, that’s something! But ‘eeeeeeeh’ [demonstrates], what’sin holding that? But there’s so much there to work on!’ As Kabanov analyzesit, the use of unison and the attention to breath were probably two ofPokrovsky’s greatest contributions to folk singing practice. Together, thesetwo practices created a group that was emotionally knitted together: ‘Inunison there is a whole world. There are overtones, there is coordination ofyourself with the ensemble, you feel another person, you adjust, you’realways in dialogue. There’s protection: you protect and you are protectedwith the use of that circle. And there’s a play of vowels, there’s attention tobreathing, he’d say, “breathe with your abdomen, the lower the better,breathe out”.’101 Probably the kind of emotional closeness Kabanov talkedof here was another reason for the Pokrovsky Ensemble’s success inperforming. Group members who felt themselves ‘protected’ in this way werelikely able to take risks, to expose themselves on stage, to be emotionallyopen to the audience. According to Kabanov, however, it was not the unisontechnique alone that caused the feeling of protectedness. It was in the natureof folk performance and the folk song for the individual to feel protected inthe context of the collective. In sobornost’, one does not feel the group as ahindrance to one’s freedom; rather, one feels that one’s relation to the collec-tive provides the safety that allows the expression of individuality.

Such a sense of collectivity was a goal, if not a reality, to many of thegroups in the folklore revival movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Many usedthe Pokrovsky technique of beginning every practice by singing a single tonein unison. Whether or not sobornost’ was created through this ritual, theexistence of common rituals (such as the unison singing) throughout themovement helped to link the individual performing groups into a coherent‘movement’ with its own traditions. Indeed, as I will argue, although thismovement was intended to ‘preserve’ Russian folklore, in reality one of itsmost important features consists in its creation of a culture and a folklore ofRussian folk revival.

Regional Roots and Genetic Memory

Besides local village singing traditions, Pokrovsky was interested in ‘roots’ –regional heritage. The Pokrovsky Ensemble concerts were designed to getpeople thinking about their ethnographic heritage in a different way thanthey had previously. Apparently, this campaign was successful: Pokrovskypartly attributed the group’s popularity to the fact that they gave audiences asense of national identity based upon an ethnographically defined regionalidentity.

Before, what was supported and what was put on the stage as seriousculture was something that looked or sounded Russian, but was reallyjust a Russian variant of Western culture…By contrast, we wereshowing something that was born in Russia; something that had roots in

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Russia. And most important – we didn’t sing Russian folk songs. Wesang Smolensk songs, Belgorod songs, Don Cossack songs. The intelli-gentsia wouldn’t have accepted us if we had presented Russian musicmerely as ‘Russian.’ We – and our audiences – were very far from beingnationalists.102

In other words, the audiences were by and large composed of urban artisticintelligentsia who tended to be politically liberal. He implied that althoughthese people were not nationalists, they were hungry for a sense of identitythat was ‘truly’ Russian, not having its roots in Western culture. The Russianfolk choruses had offered a version of Western culture; but the new revivalistensembles were giving a glimpse of Russia’s cultural roots, which wereregional in nature.

For Pokrovsky it was not enough to know if one was Russian orUkrainian; he wanted to know where one’s ‘people’ were from. Only thencould one know one’s roots. Pokrovsky would say that he himself hadCossack roots and attributed his interest and aptitude for Cossack music tothis fact. Smyslova’s mother had been from the Don River region, so shealso said this was why she felt an affinity for Don Cossack traditions.Smyslova remembered that in the late 1970s they took two new women intothe ensemble, one studying to be an actress and the other a literature andlanguage student. It turned out that the actress was from Minsk (the capitalof Belarus), and Pokrovsky wanted her to sing Western Russian songs. Hesaid, ‘we need to look for our common Slavic roots at the border withBelarus.’ So they went as an ensemble to this area to study this style (unfor-tunately, in 1986 the area received heavy doses of radiation from theChernobyl’ accident, but not until the group had collected sufficient materialto include in their repertoire). As for the literature student who spoke ‘in awhisper,’ Pokrovsky tried to find ‘her’ tradition. ‘It turned out that her fatherwas from Belgorod oblast, and when she went for the first time to Belgorodoblast, never having been in a village, and just went as if to her…unknownrelatives, where her father is from – it turned out that she had a colossalvoice.’103 The implication was that if one could ascertain one’s regionalroots, one would naturally feel ‘at home’ in the indigenous traditions fromthat area – and might find one’s true voice.

This notion of regional ‘roots’ probably had its origins, again, in opposi-tion. Pokrovsky’s comment above makes clear that he meant to defineRussian culture against the mainstream Soviet-inherited definition of it.Whereas Soviet nationalism implied a closed notion of tradition that wasinscribed inside a master narrative of the nation’s role on the world stage, forPokrovsky tradition was ‘open’ – it was a potential that was realized whenan individual discovered his or her ethnographic roots. This notion of anopen tradition with a regional basis was connected with the basic aestheticstyle of the ensemble: for Pokrovsky, to distort a given tradition by exagger-ating its most aesthetically complex or brilliant aspects guaranteed that that

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tradition would be recognized as a viable art form in the world of high art.To look at it another way, the polyphonic, mysterious, excessive presentationof folk art guaranteed the material’s (and the group’s) artistic fertility – andhence preservation of the tradition. Further, to set different local or regionaltraditions side by side in concerts meant that all such traditions were seen asequal in value, and equally aesthetically appealing. Although Pokrovskysought the ‘true nature’ of Russian or Slavic identity by searching for Slavicroots near the border of Belarus, the group’s performances of regional stylescomprised an attempt to question and redefine Russianness and Slavicness.The result was not a monolithic notion of a region or a nation but amodernist pastiche.

Following Pokrovsky, most groups in the folklore revival movement heldlocal or regional identity to be a central concept; many revivalists attributedtheir interest or affinity toward a given tradition to their family roots. Yetunlike the Pokrovsky ensemble, many of these groups adopted the ‘museum’approach and tried to master a single regional tradition (or a few traditions)hoping that close study would produce a closer copy. They had adopted thenotion of regionalist roots without espousing Pokrovsky’s playful aestheticstyle. In fact this approach to regionalism was often coupled with the kind ofnationalism that Pokrovsky decried.

Many of these purist regionalists adhere to a mythic notion of ‘geneticmemory’, according to which every Russian possesses unconscious knowl-edge of folk traditions that can (and should) be awakened through exposureto folklore. Whereas Pokrovsky understood tradition as ‘that which must bedistorted in order to be preserved’, this essentially Romantic nationalist viewconceives of Russian treadition as a fixed object of study.

This stance is exemplified by the work of Moscow ensemble Cossack Circle,which only performs music of Cossacks, and does so in an extremely ‘authentic’manner-presenting tradition as relic.104 In 1988 the ensemble’s leader, VolodiaSkuntsev, elucidated the ideological goals of ensembles like his: ‘We need towake up the genetic memory of our compatriots any way we can, to pesterthem, even surprise them with “memories”. It’s impossible that our peoplewould agree to the substitution of our culture, with its deep, thousand-year oldroots, for someone else’s defiantly garish unceremonious,... in short, foreignculture. But that disastrous process of substitution is ongoing’.105

Here Skuntsev repeats a commonplace in the mythology of Russian nation-alism and Slavophilism: that Russian culture is at risk of disapperaring becauseof invading foreign cultures, but that Russians will not allow this to happen,because their culture lies deep in their collective memory. Such a view becamepopular in the Russian nationalist revival of the glasnost era; the emphasis onRussia’s renewal through folk culture became a cornerstone for folk revivalistsduring the post-Soviet era.

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During the 1970s and early 1980s the folklore revival movement opposed thegovernment-sponsored version of folklore and remained loosely organizedand free-wheeling; in the late 1980s and 1990s that situation changed. Withglasnost, preservation of the national heritage became something of abuzzword, and revivalists succeeding in winning some governmental andpopular attention to their concerns. By the late 1990s not only oppositionalrevivalists, but nearly everyone in the folk performance field, used thelanguage of revival. Yet it is debatable whether the popular performance offolk music and dance became more oriented toward preservation. In somerespects it remained a cliché that had changed little since the Soviet era. Asone critic observed, ‘Communist kitsch has found a solid niche in Russianpopular culture.’1

Meanwhile, revivalist leaders needed to search for a new identity for their‘youth folklore movement’ in the new economic and political system. Wouldthe movement still be oppositional, and if so, whom or what would revival-ists oppose? How would revivalists – concerned with preserving a preciousaspect of the Russian past – deal with the onslaught of products, images,and ideas from the West during the transition to a market economy?Although many embraced new sources of funding and were willing to caterto the demands of a broader audience, others maintained a purist approachand shied away from any semblance of showiness. The result was a splitbetween two camps within the movement.

Folk Performance in Post-Soviet Mainstream Culture

The legacy of Soviet culture was heavily prominent in post-Soviet culture,especially in the mid- to late-1990s. Audiences seemed nostalgic for Soviet-style kitsch; burlesques of Soviet symbols belonged only to ‘a fewsubcultures.’2 In the minds of many Russians, folk performance was stillassociated with the professional folk singers who had made successful solocareers within the Soviet system, such as Ludmilla Zykina and NadezhdaBabkina (and her ensemble, Russian Song – Russkaia pesnia), and profes-sional folk music and dance ensembles like the State Academic Kuban

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Cossack Choir, the State Academic Piatnitsky Russian Folk Choir, and theState Academic Moiseev Ensemble of Folk Dance. With the addition of thenew-generation pop-folk star Nadezhda Kadysheva (and her group, GoldenRing – Zolotoe kol’tso), these singers and groups dominated mainstreamfolk during the post-Socialist period, and took advantage of expandedopportunities for self-marketing.

The new market consisted of private sources of funding, both Russianand foreign. Performers listed private companies and radio stations as spon-sors for their concert tours. For example, Kadysheva’s 1998 concert seasonwas partly sponsored by a cosmetics company: a box of perfumed soap withher picture was offered as a souvenir for concert-goers. Kadysheva receivedawards and acclaim both in Russia and abroad; she claims that hers is theonly group to have performed in all the Disneylands in the world.3

The style of some of these mainstream performances has become moreheavily influenced by Western pop performers. While Zykina remainedmostly within the Soviet folk style she helped make famous, Babkina addedan electronic pop beat and bass accompaniment to many of her folk songs,producing a genre dubbed ‘folk show’; her 1995 album Cossack Nadia wasentirely in the estrada manner. Kadysheva’s 1998 performances resembledthose of American pop star Madonna in their use of solo and ensembledancing and evocative stage decorations. Costumes consisted of exagger-ated, updated, colorful, shiny, and heavily decorated versions of folk dress;the band was a mixture of pop and folk instruments. At one point in theconcert I attended, the balalaika player hopped around the stage like a rockguitar player. Most striking was the running commentary by the bandleader, Aleksandr Kostiuk, Kadysheva’s husband. Throughout the concert,he pumped up the audience to a frenzy by appealing for expressions ofappreciation: his repeated cries of ‘Nadezhda Kadysheva for the first time inthe Kremlin!’ were met with wild applause and catcalls, and during theconcert Kadysheva received several dozen bouquets from audiencemembers.4 There was something ritualistic about this star worship.Obviously the audience of well-dressed middle-aged people and children didnot attend the concert simply to hear folk music. They would not have beensatisfied had they wandered into the staid, educational performances ofmost revivalist groups – nor would Kadysheva’s sponsors have poured asmuch money into them. Instead, sponsors and audience were drawn to thepop star as much for her beauty, outrageous costumes, energy, and celebrityas for her catchy arrangements of well-known Russian folk songs.

The professional singers cultivate a different aesthetic than do theamateur revival groups, yet they situate themselves as revivalists whopreserve and promote Russian folk music. While all three singers mentionedabove belong to the world of pop music, they hold degrees in Russian folksinging from the Gnesin Academy, an institution whose stated goals sincethe 1960s have included the preservation of authentic Russian folk musicand dance. The singers’ professional activities reflected this ethic: in 1989

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Babkina took advantage of increased support for folk-oriented activities toestablish a school of folk arts with the same name as her ensemble. In 2001she built the Moscow State Musical Theater of Folklore ‘Russian Song’whose stated purpose is to showcase the folk musics of all the peoples ofRussia and to teach folklore to children; she hoped ‘the seeds of Russiannessthat I try to plant in their consciousness will sooner or later bear fruit.’5

Zykina taught at the Gnesin Academy and was on the board of directors ofmany government and private organizations dedicated to cultural preserva-tion.6 Kadysheva’s group bore the name National Theater of Folk [narodnyi]Music and Song, which suggests a serious orientation to folk music,although in an interview she did admit that her group is not a ‘folkloreensemble.’7

Because these mainstream performers market themselves as preservation-ists, and because some of their methods indicate genuine desire to supportwhat they view as Russian folk culture, I argue that in the post-Sovietcontext they constitute a parallel strand of folk revival. While the PokrovskyEnsemble’s impetus gave birth to a grassroots movement that garneredappeal among the artistic intelligentsia, the Soviet cultural sphere – with itsemphasis on star-worship and professionalism – formed a genre of folkperformance characterized by tremendous popular allure, solid ties with popmusic and estrada, and use of commercial performing venues and recordingand broadcast opportunities. I will refer to this kind of folk performance as‘mainstream’ or ‘popular entertainment-oriented’ folk performance and theother as the ‘oppositional’ folk revivalist strain or (as they call themselves)the ‘youth folklore movement.’ Unlike the mainstream, the oppositionalmovement typically lacks resources and remains limited in scope – ordinarilythe audiences are composed of people who are themselves involved in folkperformance.

Yet increasingly in the 1990s and new millennium, oppositional revivalistsare beginning to learn how to attract private business sponsorship. It is clearthat in the post-Soviet period the ability to procure such funding is linked toone’s ability to accumulate cultural capital by evoking Russianness – that is,by ‘performing Russia.’ The funding and cultural capital situations in post-Soviet Russia are beautifully illustrated by the parallel stories of twodocumentary television programs that ran regularly in the 1990s. One seriesof documentaries about authentic Russian village folk practices, calledWorld Village, began in 1991 and was taken off the air in 1997 because it didnot fit the optimistic, entertaining profile – with a heavy Russian theme –that the studio bosses wanted. The director of the series, MoscowConservatory-educated Sergei Starostin, tried to show ‘live episodes fromthe lives’ of villagers with as little commentary as possible, which sometimesmade the programs a bit challenging to understand, though they were veryartistically done.8

By contrast, the light-hearted, celebratory program called Play,Accordion! featured a showy approach to folk music as it presented short

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segments of interviews with master accordion players or village ensembles,examples of their playing and singing, and mass musical gatherings setoutdoors against a picturesque rural backdrop. Moscow Institute ofCulture-educated Genadii Zavolokin produced the weekly show from 1986until his tragic death in a car accident in 2001, and it had (and still has) adevoted audience, especially among pensioners and village-dwellers.9

Explaining the popularity of Play, Accordion and the lesser popularityexperienced by World Village, Starostin said: ‘We couldn’t exploit a symbol.Zavolokin exploits a symbol’ – the accordion, a ‘national symbol’ of folkculture. ‘[But] we worked on a local level: if I talked about the wedding, Ididn’t talk about the wedding in Russia in general, I talked about it in aparticular village in Riazan oblast.’10 According to Starostin, folk revivalistsworking in the sphere of popular culture simplistically ‘exploit symbols’ ofRussianness, while the oppositional revivalists avoid the use of broadsymbols by staying close to the specifics of a particular local tradition. Butnot all oppositional revivalists stay close to a specific tradition, and it isperhaps difficult to avoid ‘exploiting a symbol.’ Starostin’s program itself,though it did situate details of folk culture in particular geographical loca-tions, still mythologized folk culture by emphasizing that a unique treasureis preserved by the wise village dwellers who are its guardians (see Chapter 8for more discussion of current uses of television documentaries).

Ultimately, both the popular-culture and the highbrow versions of folkrevival cultivate and manipulate cultural symbols. The kind of myth-makingespoused by oppositional folk performers is not ‘better’ than that of thepopular-entertainment oriented ones; in fact, as Bausinger has argued,modern popular culture may be in some sense more authentic because itfulfills some of the important functions of folklore, such as the consolida-tion of groups and identities. Folklorism that narrowly clings to authenticityby treating ancient traditions as sacred relics paradoxically can cause folk-lore to lose some of its genuine social functions and become a conscious,sentimentalized presentation.11 In post-Soviet Russia, this is true of bothmainstream and oppositional folkloristic groups.

Starostin said he learned a lesson from his experiences with the televisiondocumentary: if folklore was to be shown to a mass audience, it had to beeasy to understand. What Zavolokin showed on his documentary and whatKadysheva shows on stage at her concerts is easily digestible, familiar, andupbeat, pleasing alike to children, the over-50s, and young people raised onMTV videos. Clearly, in order to appeal to a broader spectrum of the publicand to attract necessary revenues, folk revivalists have had to learn either tobe like their more showy counterparts, or to work alongside them.

A Festival of Folklore Collectives of Russia

As oppositional revivalists increasingly began to work together with main-stream folk performers, their performance manner changed. The Pokrovsky

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Ensemble had held its concerts alone or together with performers of ‘highart’ genres such as poetry and jazz, and presented an artistically ‘open,’modernistic take on folklore; but in the 1990s both oppositional and main-stream groups endeavored to depict ‘Russianness.’ The oppositional groupseschewed the folk-pop and folk-kitsch styles pursued by mainstream groups,yet fought among themselves about the correct way to present Russiannesson stage – a goal that precludes the kind of artistic experimentation charac-teristic of modernism. In this new context in which mainstream andoppositional groups were vying for cultural capital, they mutually influencedeach other’s performance style. Mainstream groups looked less uniform andemulated some of the methods of the oppositional groups, while many ofthe latter discarded the academic ‘concert-lecture’ approach and aimed toentertain and entice audiences.

The nationally broadcast opening and closing performances of theFourth Annual Moscow ‘Folklore Spring’ Festival, which took place 20–24April 1999, showed the resulting spectrum of folk performance styles. Thefestival was sponsored by Gazprom, the gas company that in 1998produced 94 percent of Russia’s gas and sat on a quarter of the world’sproven gas reserves; the state owned 40 percent of its stock.12 Other spon-sors included Gazprom’s financial offshoot, Gazprom Bank, a group ofcompanies under the name Aktseptnyi Dom, three radio stations – RadioRossii, Ekho Moskvy, and Radio Retro – and the state television company,Telekanal Rossiia. The festival was organized by faculty from the GnesinRussian Academy of Music in Moscow, and featured performing ensem-bles from all over Russia, including 5 professional choirs and danceensembles, 30 student and amateur groups, and 11 groups sponsored byGazprom.

The Gnesin Academy played a very interesting mediatory role in theorganization of this event, evidence of the event’s broad ideological spec-trum and wooing of commercial sources. For decades, some professors atthe academy have served in dual capacities as teachers of the mainstreamfolk style and as active members of the oppositional folk revival movement.In this situation, they worked alongside the event’s corporate sponsors andmedia consultants to produce slick performances that were well-publicizedand broadcast through television and radio to a mainstream audience.Meanwhile, they invited most of the best oppositional-style groups toperform and teach workshops at the festival. The organizers claim that theysupport all kinds of folklore performance; yet the festival favored a ‘showy’approach in its televised opening and closing concerts, while simultaneouslyenacting the message that flashy groups needed to learn from theiracademic colleagues. The performances at the festival encompassed most ofthe differing philosophies in the folk revival movement today, and provideda setting for dialogue between leaders of the movement – dialogues thatwere enacted in their performances and verbalized during workshops andin conversations off stage, in corridors and cafeterias.

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An initial performance both established the festival’s revivalist philosophyand set the tone of ideological and commercial kitsch. In front of the closedcurtain bearing the insignias of the festival’s sponsors, a male actor dressedin peasant garb came on stage to the sounds of Russian Orthodox churchbells and a Russian folk orchestra. As colored lights played on the curtainbehind him, the actor pronounced a melodramatic speech in archaic poeticlanguage, praising the strength and importance to Russia of the folk song,and describing how the folk song had been vilified – recalling the ‘Death ofthe Folk Song’ argument and the Soviet-era commonplace that the Tsaristgovernment did not preserve folklore.13 This kitsch used all possible meansto approximate high art without actually challenging the audience to thinkfor itself in the way that high art aims to do.

The MCs who followed the peasant actor made clear that the festival’stone was to be optimistic and inclusive: if there was an unnamed foe of folk-lore, it existed outside the confines of this event. They stated that theRussian people did, in fact, value their priceless heritage, and were keeping italive to this day:

Male MC:…probably from our very childhood, as soon as we start tocomprehend the world, even up until now, we immediately fall into, areimmersed into the incredible world of songs, folk tales, byliny, every-thing that is called by the beautiful, majestic word folk epic…it’shabitual as air…but in reality it’s penetrated with great spirituality.

Female MC: Because it shows up in everything…first and foremost inthe reverent attitude of our people to the surrounding nature, to theuniverse, to God.

This speech directly recalled Soviet clichés about folklore (but with a post-Soviet twist in the mention of God). The notion that folklore is ‘habitual asair’ did not betoken a broad definition of folklore but rather a romanticnotion common in Soviet and late-nineteenth-century pronouncements thatRussians are innately more ‘folkloric’ than other nationalities, and havealways loved and cherished their folklore despite adverse conditions.14 Thismyth of the continuation of folk tradition despite obstacles is an importantone in post-Soviet Russian culture, and can be seen in the inclusion of folksong and dance performance in everything from commercials to politicalevents.

The post-Soviet version also differed from the Soviet cliché in reinforcinga trademark rather than an official State ideology. When the MCsproclaimed that this festival was intrinsically related to the ‘revival of thenation, the revival of its economy, the revival of the national consciousness,’the insignias of Gazprom and other sponsors prominently displayed on thestage served to complete the association of priceless heritage with futureprosperity. Indeed, Gazprom’s sponsorship of the festival clearly grew out of

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its desire to cultivate its image as ‘Russia’s “last treasure” and springboardfor Russia’s future rise.’15 In a sense, Gazprom performed a role similar tothat of the Communist Party during the Soviet period: it bestowed supportand conferred meaning on all proceedings. Yet here the ‘Party’ was a privatebusiness that wished to advertise its name and associate itself with Russianvalues in order to increase its cultural capital.

Yet of course, this commercialization of folklore went unstated; in factthe rhetoric of the actor and the MCs exemplified what Bausinger has iden-tified as the essential stance of folklorism: to pretend that the ‘real issue’ istradition, denying ‘the connection between culture and industry.’16

Meanwhile, in reality revivalists – the organizers of and participants in thisevent – are in post-Soviet Russia completely dependent upon this realm ofcommercialism and technology for their livelihoods and for the means toaccomplish their goals of preservation and education.17 The organizers ofthe festival presented folklore in a way they knew would be expected andappreciated by the mainstream audiences Gazprom wished to reach – whichwas by and large the one that was made ubiquitous in the Soviet period.

Yet even if the style of many of the presentations reflected the Sovietapproach, there were clear signs of the cultural changes that happenedduring and after glasnost. The first two musical numbers emphasized theroles of Orthodoxy and avant-garde culture in the new post-Soviet era. TheGnesin Academy Folk Choir performed a Russian Orthodox hymn urging‘Holy Russia’ to ‘preserve the Orthodox faith.’ The students’ singing of areligious song did not have so much a religious as a nationalist character,which could be seen in their folk costumes, the song’s reference to ‘HolyRussia,’ and the fact that the song was a later (nineteenth century) composi-tion, composed specifically to encourage patriotic sentiment.18

After the hymn, the Gnesin students presented a rarely performedmodernist vocal piece by Igor Stravinsky, based upon folk music:Podbliudnyia (literally, ‘Saucers,’ but better known in English as FourRussian Peasant Songs, 1917). By performing this piece (and in folk ratherthan classical voice placement), the Gnesin Academy showed its updated,non-Soviet take on folklore and its place in Russian music – in essence, theydefined themselves as oppositional revivalists, following in the footsteps ofthe Pokrovsky Ensemble, which had also performed Podbliudnyia19

Displaying its academic, ethnographic orientation, the concert featuredthe performances of some respected oppositional revivalists. Ensemble Volia(Freedom) of the Voronezh Conservatory was especially striking as it sang adrawn-out song (protiazhnaia) and dance song from the villages where itdoes fieldwork. The participants’ singing, gestures, dancing, and costumeswere nearly indistinguishable from those one would hear and see from eldersin the source villages. Even at this writing two years later, when I watch theirperformance on the videotape I made in 1998 I am moved by the strength oftheir voices, the complicated polyphony they created, the ease of their spon-taneous gestures, and the understated joy they expressed in their

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performance. These performers have not simply copied the songs and dancesthey study; they have assimilated them and made them, in some sense, theirown. (CD track 6)

An even greater degree of what Andrei Kabanov calls ‘radiance’(izluchenie) was evident in the performance of Stanitsa, the professionalCossack ensemble of Volgograd, composed of professional singers and formerand current students at the Volgograd branch of the Samara State Academyof Culture and the Arts. Besides its urban members, the ensemble alsoincludes a ‘master’ singer, a young man who grew up in Cossack village tradi-tion and learned to sing from his relatives. Stanitsa’s six female and eight malesingers performed two musically difficult Cossack drawn-out songs; themanner of performance reflected the serious subject matter of the texts, yetthe performers expressed their individual feelings through posture, and handand arm gestures. The overall impression was one of simultaneous dignity andwarmth. The ensemble won the audience’s loyalty with a romance in waltztime, widely known in Russia as ‘I believed, I believed’ (‘Verila, verila’), duringwhich the group’s leader, Ol’ga Nikitenko, constantly appealed to the audiencewith arm gestures to join in singing the refrain. By the middle of the song theaudience was singing audibly; they burst into applause when one of the femalemembers of the ensemble, dressed in a simple calico cotton skirt and blouse –traditional Cossack costume from the late nineteenth century – began

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Fig 4.1: Ensemble Stanitsa

waltzing with the slick-looking male MC wearing a satiny shirt and pleatedtrousers. (Figure 4.1; CD track 7)

Yet such spontaneity formed a stark contrast with the performance ofstudents and graduates from the Petrozavodsk Music School, who presentedarranged, choreographed folk songs accompanied by a small folk instrumentensemble (composed of six male players), in the style of the Soviet folkchorus. The eight women singers wore nearly identical costumes, featuringbrilliant colors and simplified decorations, sang with a unified, brightsound, and danced with well-rehearsed and synchronized movements.During one song with a text about a girl noticing a good-looking boy fishingat the local pond, the performers acted out a similar story: some of the girlspretended to gossip while some of the male instrumentalists strode towardsthe girls, trying to attract their attention. At one point the two accordionistsalternated playing the melody at two different speeds, in a kind of instru-mental ‘duel.’ The girls ‘preferred’ the faster rendition and flocked to thataccordionist. The song text was repeated from the beginning, and the musicpicked up tempo and changed from straight three-part harmony to a morecomplicated vocal arrangement. The girls waggled their heads and shouldersas they danced. During one dance segment they performed complicatedformations and steps with upper body in a classic pose from the vocabularyof Soviet folk dance: arms akimbo, fists placed forward on the hips so thatthe shoulders and elbows come forward.20 Their final bows – they bowedtwice, striking different poses each time – were graceful and in perfectsynchronization.

The girls’ footwork and their coordination and synchronization wereimpressive: they were singing at full voice while dancing (although the moredifficult dance sequences were reserved for instrumental interludes). Theaudience appeared to find their performance rousing: during their final bowsand stage exit, the spectators clapped in unison for a few beats, as if to callthem back for an encore.

Similarly synchronized, choreographed performances, with clean singingof arranged songs, were given by the Folk Chorus of the Gnesin College andtwo ensembles from the Moscow State Shnittke Institute and College. Theperformances of the Moscow State University of Culture and theIppolitovo-Ivanovo State Musical-Pedagogical Institute and College showedthat these two schools aimed to be less synchronized, arranged, and chore-ographed than their counterparts; but even so, I noticed that their gestureswere obviously ‘learned,’ and did not seem natural. In an apparent attemptto present village culture as whole – instead of simply performing enter-taining songs as was the Soviet model – the University of Culture linked itssongs together thematically with skits performed in village dialect and withcopious, exaggerated gesturing. I found this kind of connecting uncon-vincing because, as in the performance of the Petrozavodsk ensemble, thethematic links were tenuous and it was clear that the performers werepretending, not expressing their own feelings.

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The festival opening ended with a dramatic number in which a youngfemale solo singer, Iuliia Fatiushina, performed a composed, sentimentalsong about Russian churches as a symbol of national strength. Her appear-ance in the concert was a publicity stunt: earlier in the evening the audiencehad been told that thanks were due to the festival’s sponsors, Gazprom andGazprom Bank, because they not only paid for transportation of many ofthe ensembles to Moscow for the festival, but ‘care about talented children.’Gazprom had paid for Fatiushina to attend the Gnesin Academy, and

Gazprom’s German business partner, Wintershall, had helped produceFatiushina’s CD in Hamburg. (Figure 4.2 above)

Fatiushina wore a heavy red brocade sarafan decorated at the bodice withdark gold lamé brocade and at knee-height with gold sequins. Her kokoshnikwas also garnished with gold braid, sequins, and pearl beads, and had ahuge gold lamé ‘halo.’ The song – performed to the same pre-recordedaccompaniment that had formed the background to the actor’s speech at thebeginning of the program – told of seeing a church without a cross, askedsuch questions as ‘How are we going to live?’ ‘What do we have left?’ andexpressed sadness and pessimism: ‘My heart aches. I have no strength left.’But the refrain was optimistic: ‘It has not disappeared, it has not becomedepleted / The strength given to our native land; / They have not died out,they have not burned down, / The Russian churches covered in road dust.’Fatiushina used studied, dramatic gestures to intensify the song’s emotionalimpact: she slowly raised and lowered her right hand, holding a lace hand-

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Fig 4.2: Iula Fatiushina

kerchief with a sewn-on loop around her middle finger. At moments sheappeared to stare off into the distance to signify the song’s spiritualmeaning, at others she dropped her head toward her chest to indicatesadness. A few of the lines of the song were spoken to intensify theirdramatic effect. At the end, Fatiushina repeated the song’s refrain severaltimes as, lit by a spotlight, she walked up the pitch-dark aisle into the audi-ence, while television and private video cameras swung around to catch viewof her. After the song was over and Fatiushina had received polite applause,the stage lights came back on again for the MCs’ final speech; they werestanding in front of a new stage backdrop depicting a Russian church.

The festival was dedicated to the revival of the folk song, but whatFatiushina was singing was neither folk music, nor was it about folk music.Her costume obviously descended from the Russian folk costume, but was amodern, flashy rendition. The accompaniment, played on folk instrumentsaccording to the Andreev orchestra tradition, was pre-recorded. Incombining a folk flavor with estrada style, Fatiushina was well on the way toa career like that of Nadezhda Babkina or Nadezhda Kadysheva.

Although I had expected diversity in the program, I wondered howrevivalists who supposedly opposed the Soviet folk choir phenomenon couldparticipate in a festival that packaged folklore in such a way. At a conferencepreceding the festival, Natal’ia Erokhina, the festival’s artistic director,defended the choice when an audience member complained that heavily styl-ized, professional performances were included in the festival. She answered:‘I agree, but we had to invite [them]. We invited them not as students but asprofessionals. This mosaic exists, we can’t deny it. We can’t say what isbetter.’21

Indeed, the festival itself never indicated what was ‘better,’ but it didappear to indicate what was more important by beginning and ending thefestival with heavily staged, dramatic presentations. The wide differences inapproaches to folk performance within the festival went unexplained by theproduction’s MCs, who uniformly announced and complimented theperformers. Nor did the glossy printed program illuminate contrasts in stylesof performance: the descriptions of most of the ensembles emphasized theirfaithfulness to Russian tradition. Furthermore, the festival’s spatial organi-zation enacted the subtexts that there are two separate worlds of folk revival,and that the academic, oppositional-oriented ensembles need to teach thestage-oriented (stsenicheskii) ensembles how to present folklore on stage. Allof the oppositional groups held their workshops and concerts at theacademic buildings of the Gnesin Academy and the Central Writers’ House,while the collectives sponsored by Gazprom and the professional choirs heldperformances in the conference halls of Gazprom’s corporate headquartersin Moscow. Only one of the Gazprom ensembles was invited to give a work-shop; presumably the festival’s organizers – who thereby showed theirallegiance with the oppositional strand of revival – felt that the stsenicheskiistyle was not worth teaching.

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’Folk’: A Problem of Terminology

That the festival’s packaging glossed over differences in performers’ philoso-phies and styles while its structure manifested those differences is reflected ina terminology problem. In 1998–9 I noted a contrast between the wordsused to describe performers’ goals and their manner of presenting folk mate-rial. Even if ensembles present folk performance bleached of individualityand local color, they still proclaim they are ‘preserving the original tradi-tions’ of their region or of Russia.22 This phenomenon arose because theoppositional folklore movement heavily influenced the way that folklore istalked about and portrayed. Folk groups use Soviet-era rhetoric about folkpreservation, but have also adopted new ideas and terminology from theoppositional revivalists.

In Soviet parlance and in post-Soviet official language the adjective naro-dnyi does not distinguish between ‘people’s,’ ‘national,’ and ‘folk’ artisticcreations.23 However, in the terminology of the oppositional revivalists,which is increasingly being adopted in the common parlance of the intelli-gentsia, narodnaia muzyka’ now refers to the kind of music that the statefolk choirs and estrada soloists perform, while the term folk’lornyi is used torefer to village folk music. As one revivalist described the situation: ‘Duringrecent years…in order to somehow distinguish themselves from the [main-stream groups], the collectives who perform folk music have started to callthemselves ‘folklore’ [groups] (folk’lornyi)…. But this does not take care ofthe situation with names: even the collectives of the Piatnitsky-Andreev[mainstream] type have started to call themselves ‘folklore,’ due to which thesituation has become definitively confused.’24 For example, the adjective‘folklore’ was used by many of the mainstream groups that sang at theMoscow festival, as well as in the name of the festival itself.

Still, the oppositional revivalists now almost always use narodnyi in aderogatory way, and have invented additional slang terms to differentiatethemselves from the ensembles concerned with popular entertainment. Theyalso use the adjective stsenicheskii (stage-oriented) to refer to groups like thePetrozavodsk school or Iuliia Fatiushina; when talking among themselvesthey use even stronger, slang derogatory expressions to refer to the souvenirversion of Russian folk culture, such as the Russian word for ‘cranberry’(indicating something fake); ‘a la Russe,’ (fake Russian style); samovar,sarafan, balalaika, or lozhki-povarëshki (spoons and ladles). This kind ofslang is part of the spontaneous folklore of the folk revival movement, andcontributes to the building of group cohesiveness and an oppositional iden-tity.

While the youth folklore movement makes fun of mainstream-styleperformance, the popular-entertainment groups have been emulating theoppositional groups in fairly substantive ways.

The Mainstream in the Post-Soviet Era: What Folk ChorusStudents are Taught

Most of the folk choruses who performed at the 1999 Moscow ‘FolkloreSpring’ Festival sang with the standard folk chorus sound and approach,and were linked with the Gnesin institute in that their leaders were trainedthere. Even the geographically remote Petrozavodsk ensemble shows how acertain sound and approach have become standard throughout Russia: theensemble is affiliated with the Rautio Petrozavodsk Musical School’s folkchorus directing program, founded in 1978 by a former Gnesin student, L.Solov’eva.25

The sound with which members of Russian folk choruses and profes-sional soloists sing is not produced naturally, but learned. The country’smusic and culture schools are run on the assumption that singers must beable to sing all types of folk music and composed music. At Gnesin, folksinging students are given the equivalent of academic musical training, butwith a specialization in folk styles. They learn to distinguish and demon-strate the various regional styles of Russian folk singing; to vocallydemonstrate the written musical parts in a song to each section in a chorus(bass, tenor, alto, and soprano); and to smooth over the breaks in theirranges (between chest and head voice), making a uniform sound at anyrange. As Giliarova told me, the technique which these schools teachproduces a ‘white sound’ that is lacking in individual timbre andpersonality.26 Ekaterina Dorokhova, who studied at Gnesin but in theDepartment of Music Theory, called it ‘that awful sound.’27 Kabanovaattributed this faceless sound to the way students are taught at Gnesin:‘because one choir-master or leader directs the choir, and the choir meetsfour times per week for 1 1/2 hours, therefore the choir acquires a psycholog-ical dependency on the choir-master. The choir itself isn’t conscious that ithas started to sing with the voice of that director.’ (CD tracks 8–9)

Gnesin also teaches its students that the meaning of the song resides in itstext. One could see this principle in the Petrozavodsk ensemble’s perfor-mance. I was explicitly told by a Gnesin professor, the head judge for aMoscow competition of children’s folk ensembles, that acting out the song’stext is the ‘ideal’ in the presentation of folk music nowadays.28 However,acting out a song’s text is a fairly primitive stage technique. The Gnesin stan-dard ignores significant developments in combining folk music and theater.For example, the Pokrovsky Ensemble and many of its followers used folktheater liberally in their concerts, and exaggerated some of its elements toproduce striking renditions of folk theater classics.29 Folk theater almostnever acts out the literal meaning of a song, but uses thematically-linkedsongs for specific purposes in the course of its play-acting. Andrei Kotov’sSirin Choir, an offshoot of the Pokrovsky Ensemble that specializes inancient Russian religious and spiritual folk music, studied the methods ofavant-garde Polish theater director Jerzy Grotovskii and participated in

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cutting-edge theater combining ancient Russian chanting and village singingstyles.30 Although such high-art work might be seen as inappropriate for theGnesin graduates who are trained to delight mainstream audiences all overthe country, there may be signs of imminent change: starting in the late1990s Kotov was hired by Gnesin to teach students some of the techniqueshe has gathered, and he gave a workshop on body–voice integration andrhythmic improvisation at the festival.

While it largely represented a continuation of the Soviet approach to folk-lore, the Petrozavodsk ensemble showed the influence of the oppositionalmovement in a few ways. Its vocal group consisted of only 8 women,following the practice of oppositional revivalists who choose to approximatethe smaller size of spontaneously formed village singing collectives.Furthermore, the women in the Petrozavodsk group took a more syncreticapproach than that of the Soviet chorus by both dancing and singing.Stylistically, however, the Petrozavodsk group’s dance movements werebased upon Soviet clichés, were entirely synchronized and showed little indi-vidual deviation. In this, too, they were not typical of all student groups:whereas previously dancers trained in classical dance taught standardizedmoves to folk choruses,31 now some student choruses are working withchoreographers like Alexei Shilin, a trained theater director who has traveledto many rural areas of Russia and collected videotaped examples of folkdance and movement. 32 In fact, this new conceptualization of folk dance asthe integration of movements, posture, and gesture (a combination forwhich Russians use the term plastika) rather than the learning of set steps(indicated by the term ‘choreography’) has changed radically the way folkdance is seen and taught. One of the initiators for such a change wasEvgeniia Rudneva, a professional ballerina and the daughter of the musicol-ogist Anna Rudneva, who worked with the Pokrovsky Ensemble in the 1980sto stage their dances.33 Whereas the Pokrovsky Ensemble avoided allsynchronization, the pieces which Shilin choreographs for Gnesin use someof the typical features of folk chorus performance – synchronization,blocking, and set steps. Still, the movements he teaches are based on thenatural motions typical of village dancing rather than on ballet or characterdance; and within Shilin’s schema, there is room for individual interpreta-tion.

Moscow musicologist Dorokhova saw many changes in the way the folkchoruses are presenting folk music today: ‘except for the State choruses, inthe student ensembles – for instance, in Gnesin – there is no such thing asthe folk chorus in its pure form anymore.’ To be sure, the student ensemblesstill sing with ‘that awful sound,’ and Dorokhova predicted that they willcontinue to do so ‘until the leaders from the older generation leave.’However, the student choruses have changed much in the areas of repertoire,movement, and costume. Whereas previously Soviet choruses used arrangedor composed versions of folk tunes and promoted a pan-Russian view offolklore, now many are performing unarranged songs that were collected in

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villages, and telling audiences about regional distinctions in folklore. (CDtrack 10)

Finally, the student folk choruses no longer dress like the typical Soviet-era standard. Instead of ‘those clichéd kokoshniki,’ students now tend towear costumes that resemble traditional village garb from the early part ofthe twentieth century.34 Some still wear factory-made costumes meant forprofessional or amateur choruses, but others have found hand-madeclothing from villages, and still others make their own costumes based upontraditional designs. Each student wears his or her own costume representinga different regional or local style. The effect is of more individuality, spon-taneity and diversity on stage, qualities that are seen as a welcome change bymany revivalists.

The Fracturing of the Oppositional Revival Movement in the1990s

While all the oppositional groups favor a non-standard sound, non-standardcostumes, unadulterated traditional music from Russian villages, and dancethat approximates the unchoreographed movement of Russian villagers, notall agree on what kind of sound or costumes should be adopted, and whatkind of music or movements are appropriate. The situation was different inthe early 1980s, when most of the groups were inspired by the PokrovskyEnsemble and were generally united in their opposition to a monolithicstate-sponsored presentation of folklore. By the mid-1980s and 1990s severalstrong leaders of the movement had emerged, each of whom had evolvedtheir own philosophies and ways of performing folklore.

The youth folklore movement today may be divided into two maincamps: liberals who generally follow the approach of the PokrovskyEnsemble, and purists who disdain what they call the stsenicheskii method ofpresenting folklore. This grouping roughly corresponds to the ongoing‘Westernizers’ vs. ‘Slavophiles’ debate in Russian culture. These categoriesare not absolute: it is not unusual to find an ensemble that follows someaspects of the Pokrovsky style but approaches tradition as an ancient relic(such as the Saratov group whose work I examine in Chapter 8). Still, thesecategories work as a rough guide; and they characterize a split in the move-ment that the participants themselves brought about during the academicworkshops that took place as part of the Moscow ‘Folklore Spring’ Festivalin 1999.

The sections below examine the current trends in the movement, focusingupon how these groups define and portray authenticity in folklore, how theyview spontaneity and self-expression, the roles and myths of the village, theplace of sexuality in folklore and folk performance, and approaches to stageaesthetics.

Authenticity

If in the 1960s Rubtsov helped to set off the oppositional revival movementwith his definition of authentic folk music as that which people sing in theirleisure time (as opposed to what they sang in officially organized situations),during the post-Soviet period most Russian folklorists and musicologistsshied away from such a broad definition. They would not include all songsthat any people sing, but only ancient songs sung by rural people – thosethat have ‘survived the test of time.’ This view is an essential tenet of theirrevivalist philosophy: if folklore is not by definition something old, therecan be no need to revive it.

What had happened since the 1960s? Rubtsov’s revolutionary view hadnot changed how Russian scholars defined folklore. The oppositional thrustof his argument that ‘the masses know best’ (that is, whatever commonpeople sing in their leisure time is folklore) did not have lasting power in thecontext of a movement that was essentially nostalgic and academic; hispopulist view lacked appeal to a Soviet intelligentsia that was reared on theidea of the superiority of high culture. Practically speaking, for academicfolklorists and musicologists to espouse Rubtsov’s idea would have meant tomake themselves unnecessary: in order to maintain their hold on thecultural capital that folklore offered them, they had to preserve the idea thatfolklore was too old and complex for ordinary people to understand orperform without professional help. In this sense many professionallyeducated revivalists departed from Pokrovsky’s and Kabanov’s thesis thatanyone could perform and research folklore.

It was also the case that the character of officially sanctioned and leisure-time folklore had changed. During the post-World War II period peoplesang, played, or danced officially sanctioned Soviet folklore in official situa-tions, while older folks enjoyed performing pre-Revolutionary songs andtraditions during their leisure time. During glasnost the government encour-aged middle-aged and older villagers to bring to life old traditions forofficial situations, but by that time the elder generation had grown up withSoviet popular culture as their ‘own’ culture. What they sang for official situ-ations was the music of their mothers’ (pre-Revolutionary) generation, whiletheir leisure time musical activities revolved around popular Soviet songsthat they had heard repeatedly on the radio.

Many of the folklore ensembles featured in the Moscow festival – notonly the purists – refuse to sing these popular Soviet-era songs because theydo not consider them authentic folklore. For them Soviet-era songs aredifferent from pre-Revolutionary romances because there are no local varia-tions to the Soviet songs; people heard them on the radio, and for the mostpart sing them just like they heard them. Giliarova explained, ‘everyonesings them the same way.’ Such songs are not in need of preservation, sinceanyone can just switch on the radio or put on a record. 35

I disagree with this view, since when I witnessed celebrations in cities and

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villages, the participants did not sing Soviet-era songs in the same way asthey are sung on the radio. They not only sang harmonies that were notincluded in the radio renditions; they also sang the songs with variations ofinterpretation that expressed their individual personalities, their relation-ships with each other, and the mood of the event. Further, their choice ofthese songs reflected aspects of their world-view – a function of sponta-neous folklore. Giliarova and the others who professed this view did notnecessarily disdain Soviet-era popular culture, but they held fast to theconcept of ‘oral tradition’ (i.e. not transmitted by recorded means) preciselybecause of the trend during the Soviet era to force folklore to be composedand mass produced. To Russian revivalists, composed and packaged folkloreis fakelore.

In other national revival movements as well, folklorists exclude as inau-thentic any music or texts that have been technically mediated (that is,learned from a written or recorded source). Yet, as Bausinger has argued,this judgment contributes to the disintegration of folk culture by measuringit ‘only according to an image to which it can no longer conform.’ Of coursefolklore needs artificial, conscious reviving if one defines it as a relic. Yettechnically mediated folklore can be very active and spontaneous. Byexcluding the popular culture of contemporary rural dwellers as ‘impure’folklore, folk revivalists create an artificial product that they represent as‘natural’ because it is ostensibly free from technological influence.36

The view that Soviet-era music and dance are not true folklore is thenorm among Russians working in the field of folklore today (even amongliberals).37 Yet purist folklorists and musicologists define authenticity evenmore strictly: they include as folklore only those songs that pre-date theinfluence of written, composed songs and texts. A debate over this questionarose at the Moscow festival when a folk performing group from Perm toldthe audience that it regularly collects and includes cruel romances in itsrepertoire, since they are widely sung in villages. A man in the audiencecommented that if folklore ensembles were to sing romances, then in 40years all that would be left of Russian folklore would be ‘The Apple andPear Trees Bloomed’ (‘Rastsvetali iabloni i grushi,’ also known as‘Katiusha’), a popular Soviet song composed in 1938.38 This man made adeliberate parallel between the pre-Revolutionary romance and the Soviet-era composed song since both genres are based upon written texts. Heimplied that if revivalists sang songs outside of the ‘oral tradition,’ theywould eventually contribute to the death of Russian folk music. Such a banon romances – which is quite a common view among revivalists39 – hearkensback to early Soviet prohibitions against middle-class culture, and also tothe predictions of late-nineteenth-century folklorists about the imminent‘death of the folk song.’

In fact, the rejection of romances ultimately has its roots in eighteenth-century Romantic views of folklore. At the festival, Anatolii Mekhnetsov,professor and director of the Folklore Ensemble of the Department of Folk

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Music at the St Petersburg State Conservatory, argued against the liberalview that folklore is grassroots communal expression, and equated folklorewith high art. For him, folklore’s value does not lie in its ability to involveeveryone, to express the participants’ values, or to cultivate self-expression;instead, it reflects the strength of the Russian people, and as such should bepreserved in its most ancient form and researched by well-trainedspecialists.40 Although Mekhnetsov’s views might seem extreme, in fact theelite, educated audience at the festival expected antiquated folklore – theywanted to be shown old wedding songs, not ‘Katiusha’.41 Bausinger callsthis tendency to require folklore to show us the ancient past the ‘law ofrequisite freezing’ and contrasts it with folklore’s natural tendency tomodernize and constantly shift – when not controlled by intellectuals.42

Nationalism

In the 1990s, both mainstream and oppositional folk groups talked of‘genetic memory’ and of their desires to preserve or evoke ‘Russianness’through their stage performances. Many adhered to the view expressed by ajournalist interviewing Babkina: ‘a foreign language matrix and foreignsounds negatively impact a person’s brain and health. And in this sense, byreviving and developing the Russian song, you [Babkina] preserve the rootsof our distinctive culture, you strengthen the foundations of the nation.’43

While Mekhnetsov and Babkina – whose views about authenticity werediametrically opposed – would disagree over whether her pop-based songsconstituted something ‘Russian,’ still each was aiming for the same goal – tofix and supply ‘Russianness’ to a public drowning in things Western.

Only a few oppositional groups that pursued a Pokrovsky-inspired liberaland playful approach to folklore succeeded in avoiding such nationalism.For example, the above-mentioned group from Perm, Songster Workshop(Pesel’naia artel), employed avant-garde theater techniques in their perfor-mances, and both collected and sang Russian cruel romances and otherfolklore from the 8 nationalities living in their oblast. Although they wereregionalists with family roots in villages who prided themselves upon theirdeep understanding of Perm folklore (including dialect, handicrafts,costume, and verbal lore), they did not view tradition as ‘given’ but as some-thing that was necessarily changing before their eyes. Because they hadconstant exposure to village culture as children due to spending summerswith their grandparents, these members of the provincial intelligentsia didnot fetishize villagers or village culture, and they felt enough at home in thetraditions to use them creatively for stage performance, incorporating someof the Pokrovsky Ensemble’s and Kotov’s theatrical techniques. One mightassume the source of the group’s liberal approach lay in the village roots ofits members: they may not have felt the need to prove their authenticity.However, this was not generally true of groups with village roots; otherstook purist or mainstream approaches. Instead, I suspect that in this case as

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in others, the group’s liberal character came from the views and personalitiesof its leaders. (CD track 11)

Similarly, Krasnopevtseva’s Moscow children’s group, Little Spindle,emphasized individual creativity within certain parameters: the childrenlearned to make up their own counter-rhythms, interacting musically withthe group while clapping and stamping their feet; to project vocally; and tocommand attention when they speak or sing. To create a carnival atmo-sphere on stage, the children used a variety of instruments, a folkdeclamation style for spoken text, and elements of folk theater, includinggrotesque, larger-than-life-size puppets. Although they were regionalists,focusing upon vocal and dance traditions from a handful of villages inBelgorod and Kursk oblasts, their approach to the material was relatively‘open’: it aimed at making the children completely at home in their adoptedtradition so that they could become freely creative. Along with studyingancient practices, the group also performed more recent texts, such asromances. The ensemble had performed extensively in Western Europe, theUnited States, and Asia, and Krasnopevtseva remarked that the children’sunderstanding of the folklore of their adopted villages allowed them toappreciate the folklore of other nations.44 (CD track 12)

One of the defining characteristics of the liberal camp of the folklorerevival movement is their facilitation of individual expression within thegroup. Whereas Mekhnetsov argued that he does not ‘display himself,’ that isprecisely what these performers are trying to do – ‘show themselves’ onstage. They believe that the essence of the folk song’s meaning lies not in thebeauty of its complex text, but in the meaning that it has for each individualperformer. This approach can contribute to ‘openness’ since it implies thatthe tradition can be changed through its contact with urban performers.

Self-Expression

While this view echoes the sociological school’s emphasis on the individualperformer, its roots lie in the anti-establishment impulse that initiated thefolklore revival movement in the 1970s. As two folk music scholars put it,the official Soviet approach was conceived to counter the totalitariangovernment’s ‘fear of personality, of anyone being one’s own person, sincesuch persons are unpredictable and stand out from any solid, uniform,authorized, or dependable collective body.’45

The Soviet approach to the arts contained a contradiction, however, inthat the state promoted both uniformity and also a ‘star’ system underwhich certain individuals were rewarded and promoted. In the post-Sovietperiod, survivals of the officially state-sponsored aesthetic were now meetingthe demands of modern audiences reared on pop music and Western televi-sion and participating in folk music’s further commercialization. This newaesthetic system incorporated the ultimate star system. Would revivalistsoppose or support the post-Soviet aesthetic?

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Faced with the demands of Western audiences, purist revivalists havebecome more entrenched in their opposition to individualism. Meanwhile,some liberal revivalists have taken steps toward embracing audiences’ newdemands by emphasizing folklore’s spontaneity and possibilities for indi-vidual expression. Leaders such as Andrei and Zhanna Kabanov,Krasnopevtseva, Ol’ga Nikitenko, and many others follow in the footstepsof the Pokrovsky Ensemble by using spontaneity and individual self-expres-sion to attract more viewers and participants. Their acts on stage are morelively and accessible and less academic than those of the purist revivalistgroups; meanwhile, these performers avoid the pitfalls of Soviet andcommercial sponsorship of the arts by shunning both organized uniformityand the showy star approach. They maintain that their emphasis on self-expression does not entail the spotlighting of a talented few, but ratherhighlights the creativity and self-assuredness of all the participants. Theyclaim they are adapting an element of village folk performance tradition,under which spontaneity, inventiveness, and naturalness were a way oflife.46 To be sure, these groups do cultivate an approach to folklore that canbe ‘sold,’ especially abroad in Western Europe, where many of them havebeen on tour – not least in order to make money. Folklore is indeed acommodity for them, and is a particularly viable one in situations in whichtourists wish to ‘see’ Russian culture. Yet they maintain that they haveavoided crass commercialism.

This tension between putting on a good show and cultivating self-expres-sion and authenticity of feeling may be seen in Andrei and ZhannaKabanov’s children’s group, Izmailovskaia sloboda. Reflecting the Kabanovs’aversion to the Soviet system and the suppression of individuality which ‘wehad for 70 years,’ Kabanova commented: ‘What’s important is supportingthe personality [podderzhka lichnosti], [doing things in such a way] that thepersonality should be visible.’

The group’s performance of chastushki – a living genre whose worth isquestioned by purists – illustrates this approach. The children choose theirown chastushki from published collections, borrow them from one another,or make up their own texts based on the patterns they have assimilated.Kabanov said he purposely does not give students an academic appreciationof the song they are learning; they appreciate it in their own way. Kabanovfrequently repeated that, as a leader of a children’s folklore ensemble, ‘youmust not work with the content of the song or of the grandmother who sangit. You must work with the content of the children.’ The same philosophyholds true for adults. As Kabanova described, the chastushka is vitallyimportant precisely because it is a living genre with which the participantscreate a meaningful dialogue: ‘They fight, they declare love, they play, theysimply giggle. That is, the chastushka is like a form of self-expression…. Webase [our outlook] more on each child’s solo performance; for that reason,the chastushka is very important for us.’47 (CD track 13)

Their use of ‘solo’ performance differs considerably from Fatiushina’s, which

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Kabanova believes encourages a ‘show-off’ attitude far from the collectivityof the folk tradition. Rather, each individual creates within a collectivesetting, and the folklore milieu gives everyone a chance to shine. Yet oftenwhen they performed, the Kabanovs’ 10-year-old son Ivan, an extremelytalented singer and dancer who had evolved his own interpretation ofCossack dancing, (justifiably) stole the spotlight. (Figures 4.3 and 4.4)

As the Kabanovs proudly repeated, the children’s performance of chas-tushki is spontaneous since it is different every time – except when the orderof verses is set in advance in order to produce a good show. Usually there isa battle of wit between girls and boys. A girl sings a funny chastushka

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Fig 4.3: Ivan Kabanov

insulting boys (e.g. they do not know how to kiss), and a boy counters withone about girls (e.g. his girlfriend was so fat she did not fit into the car). Thechildren interpret the chastushki in their own way: for instance, on stage at afestival performance in Voronezh oblast, the Kabanovs’ six-year-olddaughter Anastasia sang a chastushka with the words ‘The boy costs 3 rubles/ But the girl costs 3,000.’ A representative of the Russian Ministry ofCulture who was present in the audience felt this song was in very poortaste, as it hinted at the prostitution of the girl. I wondered if he might beright. But later, after hearing Anastasia sing the song in several differentcontexts, I became convinced that for her, the song simply spoke about the

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Fig 4.4: Ivan Kabanov

greater value of girls than boys, and thus fit in with the teasing function ofchastushki for the children.

Still, Anastasia’s chastushka underlined what was for me one of thecentral tensions in the project of revival: how does one avoid ‘selling oneself ’as a stage performer? In fact, it is probably impossible not to do so. InRussian culture as in the West, the stage can be likened to a marketplace inwhich performers sell their charms and talent in order to engage audiences.It was precisely this aspect of the stage that led Mekhnetsov to tell Kabanovthat children do not belong on stage at all, because to do so cultivates a‘professional’ attitude and goal that can morally ruin a child. Yet to a largeextent for all folk revivalists stage aesthetics, not ancient folk traditions,dictate what they show on stage.

The Aesthetics of the Stage

Russian folklore was not meant for the proscenium stage. Music and dancewere entirely participatory, and in most settings there was little or no separa-tion of performers and audience. In Tsarist Russia the performance ofRussian folk music and dance developed under the influence of the stagearts; the Soviet folk chorus was a direct descendant of this situation. Howcould revivalists distinguish themselves from the manner of performance oftheir predecessors? How could they reconcile the fact that they representRussian folklore on stage?

The Pokrovsky Ensemble solved the dilemma by embracing the aestheticsof the stage. They used exaggeration to generate performances that held theaudience’s interest; introduced sharp contrasts in mood and tempo; made useof folk theater; and remained in a state of high, concentrated energythroughout the performance. The charismatic personality of Pokrovskyhimself helped link the disparate parts of the program. The group also culti-vated techniques that drew in the audience, such as taking a round-dance offthe stage and continuing it in the theater’s corridor. In the 1990s othergroups, like Dorokhova’s Russian Music, Krasnopevtseva’s Little Spindle,Kabanov’s Izmailovskaia Sloboda, and Nikitenko’s Stanitsa dispensed withthe degree of exaggeration characteristic of the Pokrovsky Ensemble, butused other techniques to engage audiences – such as cultivation of individualcreative expression, the use of folk theater and puppets, and involving audi-ence members or extending the performance beyond the stage. (Figure 4.5)

Many purist revivalists criticized the Pokrovsky Ensemble – and otherswho descended from it – as too stsenicheskii because of their use of suchtechniques. 48 Yet even liberal ensembles tried to avoid a stsenicheskiiapproach, and used the same term to disparage the folk choruses. Eachfaction of the movement feels it is important to distinguish itself from crasscommercialism, and to assert that what it presents is free of interferencefrom the world of business. In doing so, these performers hope to accruecultural capital by presenting a ‘true,’ untainted Russia.

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Yet almost every group does perform on stage and consequently has beenforced to revise folk traditions so that they can be shown to an audiencesitting on one side of a rectangular elevated platform. If nothing else, thegroups have had to position singers and to rework dances so that theperformers face the audience most of the time. Some of the purist ensemblesmake only minor concessions to the stage: they do not connect with theaudience and with each other through facial expression and gesture, andmaintain a low energy level while performing. Furthermore, they disregardan audience’s need for variety or accessibility by including in their repertoiremany songs that sound similar to an unaccustomed ear, or that belong togenres not typically performed on stage, such as wedding songs, funerallaments, or cow-calls; and by linking songs through academic lectures. Indoing so they demonstrate their view that educating an audience is moreimportant than entertaining; indeed, many of the leaders and members ofsuch groups are professors, students or professionals in highly specializedfields.

One such group is the St. Petersburg Center of Folklore andEthnography, directed by Mekhnetsov. These students study folk culturefrom the point of view of both theory and practice in order to becomeresearchers or teachers and leaders of folk ensembles or centers, and theirprogram is reputedly the most demanding in its field in Russia. Mekhnetsov,a man of strong principles who is also known as a Russian nationalist and aproponent of Orthodox Christian values, requires students to adopt lifestylehabits that mirror those values: for instance, women are forbidden to wearjeans or pants to classes at the Center, because dresses and skirts are tradi-tional women’s garb. Shchurov and many others in the movement think thatMekhnetsov’s stance on this and other issues is too strict. Mekhnetsovargues that his students must adhere to some of the lifestyle principles ofRussian village tradition because to some extent, the members of his folkensemble constitute transmitters of these dying traditions (in this case, fromwest and north Russia). While Mekhnetsov may be the strongest opponentof stage aesthetics in the folk revival movement, he is not the only one. Intheir idealization of the village roots of folk art, almost all revivalists makemuch of the supposed purity of Russian folk culture.

A Fountain of Youth: The Mythical Village

In fact, this desire to appear to have escaped the influence of the modernindustrialized, market-driven world is one of the driving forces underlyingthe project of revival. For many serious revivalists, the village is a sacredspace, contact with which grants them unique status in what is commonlyseen as an unstable, corrupt society. The Pokrovsky Ensemble had gone onexpeditions and performed vocal ‘experiments’ in villages; in the late 1980sand 1990s, liberal revivalist groups embellished the Pokrovsky model by

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living in villages, inviting village folk artists to be regular members of theirgroup, or adopting a particular village as a second ‘home.’

Liberal revivalists often justify their stsenicheskii stage comportment bythis regular contact with villages. They argue that self-expression is relatedto a mythic village aesthetic that recalls the concept of sobornost’: accordingto this myth, city culture teaches one to show off at the expense of others;but village culture gives everyone a chance to do what they do well. Forinstance, in order to increase their assimilation of the tradition they repre-sent on stage, Krasnopevtseva’s group Little Spindle regularly travels to theirsource villages, where they have friends and mentors among the villageelders who still actively carry the dance and song traditions. The partici-pants stay in the homes of their village teachers. The group also worksregularly with a middle-aged couple, originally from one of these villages,who moved permanently to Moscow during adulthood.

Many folk revivalists told me that such regular exposure to village cultureis essential for folklore performing groups. Zhanna Kabanova said that thevillage not only taught her how to sing and dance, but also gave the folksong meaning for her. She compared her experience of folk singing invillages with what she was taught at the Gnesin Institute:

130 Revival and Identity after Socialism

Fig 4.5: Ëlka children’s Christmas concert

[At the Gnesin Institute] they educate the sound in you, but it’s not yoursound, it’s the sound of the director, the correct sound of the director.And you’ll get the meaning [of the song] on the expedition. But they goon expeditions only for material. And that’s not exactly correct. To gofor material – that’s OK, but most importantly, one should go forenergy…to this day I am still receiving sustenance from the material,and bring [to others] material which I absorbed from the voice of avillage folk singer…. The song clearly reminds you of the high that yougot when you were with the village folk singers – because there one canbe in ecstasy, when you’re all sitting around the table…there is such anecstasy, such an unusual feeling of happiness…because for them thesong was the meaning of life. And not that [matter-of-fact attitudetypical of the Gnesin approach] – ‘when I went out on the stage, I wentout and sang it.’ Some things are only understood with one’s soul.

The folk material as such is of little significance to Kabanova; what mattersis a personal transmission from village performer to urban performer. Thisspontaneous, authentic energy can then be conveyed by the urban revivalistto the members of his or her ensemble, and eventually to the audience. Onereason why revivalists believe villagers embody such intuition and genuine-ness is that they adhere to the myth that all rural people are deeplyconnected with nature. Comparing rural and urban dwellers, AnzhelikaGlumova, director of the Saratov ensemble, Fun (Zabava) said:

[A villager has] a more natural way of life. The sun comes up, he toogets up with it. The sun sets, he too lies down with it. That is, he wantsto drink, he dips in the well and drinks. He wants bread, he plows thefield, harvests it, bakes it and eats it…. And that’s where the sound andthe breath [in folk music] come from. There is no perversity, there is nodyed hair or some kind of hairdos.

According to this widespread myth, rural residents are more natural thancity dwellers, and city dwellers could return to a more organic state – a statethey once inhabited – if they could assimilate some of the lifestyle andhabits of villagers. Since the village is a glimpse into the past of our species,contact with it can literally restore lost function to the body: ‘The functionof the human organism is such that if something isn’t used, it starts toatrophy. It happens naturally…. We don’t need a loud voice, you can takethe telephone and say in a whisper, ‘Vanya, come over here today,’ and notyell across the river. So from generation to generation the open voice willsimply disappear, disappear, disappear….’49

As I argued in Chapter 3, early twentieth-century artists and intellectualsoften sought a mythic wholeness, including connection with their ownbodies and sensations, through contact with ‘uncivilized’ people. This mythicsearch was nearly ubiquitous among revivalists who told me that through

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village music and dance, people could become more whole, supple, alive, andhealthy. Of course, this idea hearkens back to romantic conceptions of thepeasants as an undifferentiated mass living in harmony with nature. Theidea’s attractiveness may be compared with the notion of a fountain ofyouth; in this case, the fountain may presumably be reached by taking acommuter train a few miles outside of any Russian city. It is false: as onerural doctor told me, most of the illnesses she sees are due to the repetitive,back-breaking labor that her clients engage in throughout their lives. Manyother illnesses are due to poor-quality water sources and inadequate sewagedisposal in rural locations.

It was not only wholeness that was sought and offered by the revivalistsof the youth folklore movement. It was innocence. The village was a mythicspace associated with moral purity and closeness to a childlike nature.Kabanova told me: ‘Through folk art we become closer tochildren…[Nowadays] people suffer from the loss of some kind ofnaivete…and spontaneity.’ Further, such naivete was needed even moretoday, during the post-Soviet era, characterized by conspicuous consump-tion and the outright flaunting of lack of morals associated with the ‘newRussians.’ Kabanova told me her ensemble’s moral superiority to thisnouveau riche class was recognized at a recent political rally at which theyperformed: one of the rich Cossacks told them, ‘I could buy you, but you’respecial [osobye] people…. We don’t have that purity…. When you sing, youpreserve the purity of perception…. People who are involved with moneydon’t have that.’

Such an association of village culture with childlike innocence draws onthe stereotype of the pastoral, in which the city is a place of adversity,deception, and disorder, while the countryside represents integrity, purity,and natural order. According to the post-Soviet version of this myth, in thecity money rules, but those who have cultivated associations with village folkculture are immune to the demands and seductiveness of money. Of course,it is not true that as people involved with folklore Kabanova and herhusband are not affected by or concerned with money. In fact they are self-employed businesspeople who sell their services as folklore teachers andresearchers to several organizations in order to make ends meet in a difficultand chaotic economy.50

While all revivalists accrued cultural capital from their intimate knowl-edge of the mythic Russian village, they differed in the ways theyapproached the village. One approach, which Kabanova called ‘immersionin a style,’ attempts directly to imitate villagers’ singing and dancing.Moscow groups such as Folk Holiday (Narodnyi prazdnik), the Studiosconnected with the Alliance of Folk Ensembles, and the ensemble of the StPetersburg Conservatory use multi-track recordings of village singing regu-larly in their rehearsals. For Folk Holiday’s rehearsals, each singer isassigned (or chooses) a track, which she learns by listening on cassette tapeat home. During rehearsal, the group attempts to combine these learned

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roles in order to produce a faithful imitation of the performance recorded inthe village. The leader asks singers such questions as ‘Whose track are yousinging?’ or even ‘Who are you?’, as if the members of the urban grouptemporarily take on the identities of the villagers. Mekhnetsov defended thetechnique of immersing oneself in a style by imitating tape recordings,saying that singing an ancient song amounts to returning to an earlier timein history. ‘Of course [the songs] live and change, but…every time we sing asong from a certain oblast or village…we stand in the place of those whosang us that experience.51

By contrast, in the Kabanovs’ conception (as well as that of the others inthe liberal category), contact with the village is used as a means of gaininginspiration and familiarity with the village’s singing and dancing style. TheKabanovs critiqued the ‘immersion’ approach because it produced a staticimitation of a single performance by elder villagers. ‘The basic thesis of the[folk revival] movement was: sing like in the village. But now [that idea] isslowing things down. Because in reality you have to sing with your ownvoice.’52 The groups that imitated recordings of villagers had not made thesong theirs, but were reproducing someone else’s interpretation. Often, theKabanovs said, urban people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s were imitating thevoices of villagers in their 60s and 70s. Too close an imitation of an oldperson’s voice can yield a dark tone rather than a bright one. Kabanovaadvised me not to approach folk music this way in my own singing: ‘Laura,don’t drink in these sounds [on field recordings], simply let your voice out,let it be simple, but youthful [po molodezhnomu]…. Sing your vocal cords,you understand, it should all sound, resonate. That’s why the sexuality ofPokrovsky[’s ensemble] appealed to me. Because they didn’t try to imitate thegrannies, they were very explosive.53

For liberal folk performers of this ilk, to be young, sexual, and expressiveof one’s own personality is the epitome of folk style.

Sexuality

The notion of sexuality is controversial in post-Soviet culture, and the viewsof folk revivalists reflect this. As one might imagine, liberal folk revivalistsbelieve that sexuality is an important part of life that is reflected in any folkculture, while purists deny that sex has a place in folk culture, and see itsevidence as results of urban culture’s effect upon the rural. For them,emphasis on sexuality contradicts the image of the ‘innocent’ village. Bycontrast, liberal revivalists argue city culture, with its simultaneous denialand commodification of sexuality, turns an innocent subject into somethingvulgar.54 Yet, regardless of these philosophical differences, I did not find anyurban ensembles that presented erotic folklore on stage – despite the factthat many Russian rituals contain eroticized texts or gestures. Most revival-ists persist in perpetuating the Soviet cultural mentality expressed by aremark made on television in the mid 1980s: ‘We have no sex.’55

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In contrast to the urban ensembles’ reluctance to sing erotic songs inpublic, my own experience in Russian villages suggests a rather wide accep-tance and use of witty erotic folklore such as jokes and songs in casualsettings with a celebratory atmosphere, or when tradition demands it. In allof these situations, it seemed that the singing of ribald songs drew the grouptogether both because the songs were funny and expressed a taboo subject.Indeed, the expression of the taboo is one of the most important functionsof folklore: the ritualistic nature of the folklore performance creates a‘space’ in which what is normally forbidden is allowed.56

At the festival a debate arose over the place of sexuality in children’sperformances. For Mekhnetsov the introduction of sexuality into folklore –as the Kabanovs did in their children’s chastushka performance – meanserasing its national characteristics; purist revivalists associate nationaldistinctiveness with a noble, dignified subject matter.57 Mekhnetsov’s pointis reminiscent of both eighteenth-century classicist prohibitions against low,vulgar subjects and of the Soviet-era view; his assessment did not reflecteither the Romantic position, which was more accepting of eroticism – orthe real presence of eroticism in post-Soviet popular culture, both urban andrural.58 In fact, the prudish approach of revivalists today may have beenintensified by the commercialization of sexuality since glasnost, whichcaused many conservative Russians to associate open sexuality with anarchyand a rejection of authority.59 Mekhnetsov’s approach is tantamount to the‘decarnivalization’ that Bausinger observed in Germany: a Mardi Grasholiday – formerly celebrated with elements of burlesque and eroticism –became a ‘clean carnival’ because of the overly scholarly approach of orga-nizers. Thinking that they were cultivating older forms, carnival clubsbanned revealing forms of dress and made the holiday serious and rigid.60

In contrast to Mekhnetsov’s forbidding approach, Kabanova emphasizedthat the children’s interest in the opposite sex was completely normal. Iheard similar debates with regard to children’s folklore groups throughoutRussia. While some argued that it would be inappropriate for children’sgroups to re-enact a wedding, for example, others said that even in the pre-industrial era in Russian villages, children would play at weddings in orderto learn the complex Russian traditional wedding ritual cycle. Similarly,some felt that children of 10 or 11 were too young to play traditionalRussian kissing games, while others believed that younger children werealways present when their teenage siblings played such games, and wouldnaturally play them among themselves. Kabanov was one of the few I spoketo who said he did not care what was done traditionally, and asserted that hewas finding his own approach to Russian folk tradition.61

To be sure, in Russia much progress has been made in the area of researchon sexuality in folk culture – several volumes were published in the late1990s, and liberal folklorists are actively pursuing the topic.62 Still, my ownexperience with Russian researchers suggests that many of them still avoiderotic topics. Most revivalists did not perform bawdy songs on stage; in fact,

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a song that has been called ‘the anthem of the youth folklore movement,’‘Porushka Parania,’ from the village of Podserednee in Belgorod oblast, wasedited to produce a ‘clean’ version for the Russian stage. Originally, thedance song contained a long description of the sexual act in which the maninvites the woman into his bed, and the sexual organs of the couple aredescribed using euphemisms: ‘his white pen,’ ‘her black inkpot.’ ViacheslavShchurov, who collected the song in the 1950s, and whose folk singing groupat the Gnesin Institute included the song on their 1968 recording, said hewas responsible for producing the censored version. He blamed the self-censorship on the ‘asceticism’ which had come from Stalin:

The Party control was very strict, [the attitude was] ‘you must not singsuch songs to our Soviet people, it’s anti-moral,’ etc. For that reason, forconcerts, we edited ourselves, you understand, [we figured], either they’llnot allow us or forbid us, so it’s better if we do it ourselves – take it outand calmly sing it. And now no one knows that there are such words [inthat song]…Now all the young choruses sing it with the missing middle.Because [our version] became a standard for everyone.

Shchurov recounted how not only his singing group’s version and his tran-scription, but the released source recording of the song was edited as well.

I recorded Sopelkin (the lead singer from Podserednee) at the radio, andI told him, too, ‘you’re not going to sing those words. You’ll sing to hereand then you’ll skip’ – and so it came out that way on the record too….So it turned out that if people want to listen to the original, they listento that distorted version. And later I came to visit Sopelkin, and he said,‘What have you done with that song, you have crippled it. What is this?’And I said, ‘You sang it that way, too.’ He said, ‘It can’t be!’ We took therecord [he had recorded at the radio] and he said, ‘It’s true.’ He hadforgotten completely (laughter). Such incidents happened.63

While Shchurov’s comments indicate that such editing would not havehappened without Party dictates about sexuality, the cultural prohibition onportrayals of sexuality in Russian culture has strong roots. Despite new free-doms, neither Shchurov nor other folklorists has restored the missing versesto ‘Porushka’ by publishing them or telling other revivalists about them.64

Clearly, such erotic texts represent a taboo part of Russian village tradi-tions, which many urbanites are not ready to confront or embrace. Ratherthan preserving folk culture, the revival movement has decarnivalized it bytailoring it for consumption in Soviet society, where eroticism belongedexclusively to the private sphere. This change in the tradition was certainlybrought about when folklore was brought to the stage. In village traditionserotic texts were sung as part of rituals that included all present, and thosepresent formed a community in which all the members knew each other. To

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bring erotic texts into a stage setting where strangers – paying customers –sit silently in the darkness observing the spectacle, changes the dynamics ofthe situation. The voyeuristic and commercial nature of the stage environ-ment means that performing erotic rituals on stage would imply the sexualseduction and ‘satisfaction’ of the audience – a dynamic that is completelyabsent in rural community rituals.

While many revivalists are averse to the collection or representation ofbawdy texts, some with a more liberal approach have cultivated a subtleform of sexuality in their performances – perhaps, as I suggested in Chapter3, seeking a mode of being that promises wholeness and connection with thecorporeal sphere. Kabanova, who said she was attracted to the sexual energyof the Pokrovsky Ensemble, told me that now, as a mature woman in her late30s, such sexual energy was not enough; it should exist in combination with‘culture…and wisdom….’ Kabanova found the wisdom and culture shesought in village performers, like the couple from Podserednee who workwith Krasnopevtseva’s children’s ensemble. The male member of the couplerepresented the highest example of what she and her husband called ‘radi-ance’:

If you see him, how he dances, he simply creates. It’s something incred-ible. If you get a chance to see him, remember what I told you. AlekseiVasil’evich Popov. This is a person who radiates through dance. This issex together with culture. With wisdom. Everything’s here. It has suchan incredibly strong effect, which you can only dream of. There are fewsuch performers. And you understand that only after you have gonealong a certain path, when you’ve been on expeditions here, there, andeverywhere.

Here Kabanova seemingly turns primitivism on its head: the village-bornbut urban-dwelling master of folk dance is attractive precisely because hecombines the wholesome sexuality and innate wisdom of the rural spherewith the ‘culture’ of the civilized world.65 Instead, perhaps her remarkuncovers the true nature of the primitive: it is always a reflection of what theWesterner desires or fears.66

Conclusion

The folklore movement in the post-Soviet period has been characterized byboth tenacious clinging to pre-Revolutionary ideals – including views offolklore and myths of the village – and innovative approaches, such as thecultivation of self-expression within stage performance. In response to theSoviet heritage, there has been both rejection and adherence: all folkloristsreject uniformity and virtuoso approaches (although some show more toler-ance for working alongside them); but they have also been reluctant toreverse the Soviet era’s prudish attitude to sexuality. Given that many of

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these approaches to folklore were inherited from pre-Revolutionary orSoviet sources, can one say that this movement has made an actual culturalcontribution to the understanding and presentation of folklore, and if so,what is it? What are the implications of the split between camps: will the move-ment eventually break apart and cease to be a coherent cultural movement?

Folk revival practice today has distinguished itself from pre-Revolutionaryfolklore performance practice, which placed heavy emphasis upon adaptingvillage traditions for middle- and upper-class audiences, and from Soviet re-applications of these styles. Groups that are part of the youth folkloremovement have moved away from adaptation of the music or instruments,and instead have invented and adapted various techniques (such as videoand multi-track audio recording, living in villages, learning from villagemasters) to enable outsiders (city dwellers) to learn musical and movementtechniques from villagers themselves. It is a populist movement in that thevillagers themselves are the master artists, teachers and sources – even iftheir students often take the lead in their interpretations and presentationsof folklore. The importance of the village has become even greater in thepost-Soviet period, when many performing groups have not simply visitedvillages for single sessions, but have learned to work constantly or regularlywith their village teachers.

The movement has become more inclusive: whereas Pokrovsky main-tained his group in the exclusive sphere of high art, post-Soviet groups haveforged alliances with and managed to influence their former arch-enemies,the professional and amateur mainstream-style choruses and soloists. Thusfolk revival has entered popular culture, and as a result more people havehad access to what revivalists define as ‘authentic’ village folk music. Nownot only students in Moscow and St Petersburg, but children of agriculturaland blue-collar workers living in provincial cities, towns, and villages havejoined oppositional ensembles. One might question whether most of theseensembles truly are oppositional: although many of the leaders of the move-ment located in the capital and large cities see themselves as resisting themainstream approach, the less well-known ensembles and children’s ensem-bles do not generally take a confrontational position. In the folk revivalscene that existed at the end of the 1990s the dominant model was tendingtowards rapprochement rather than opposition: mainstream and opposi-tional groups were learning repertoire and approaches from each other.

Further, although I have categorized the youth folklore movement asbeing split between factions, in fact all of these groups consider themselvespart of a single movement, and generally see their own differences as smallerthan the difference between their approaches and the mainstream. In fact,while the leaders are split ideologically, many of the less well-known ensem-bles do not take strong stands on these issues. The movement’s greaterinclusiveness in the post-Soviet period may lead to its longevity, but asLivingston suggests, may ‘signal the end of the revival as an oppositional,anti-establishment “movement” and its transformation into an acceptedcurrent in the musical mainstream.’67

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The collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition to a new political andeconomic system have shaken the very core of national identity for allformer citizens of the Soviet Union, including Russians. The correspondingwidespread alienation and questioning have meant that many Russians arein search of touchstones that provide a sense of belonging and of historicalcontinuity. The search for such national symbolism has inevitably led to thepast. Yet for many Russians, the Russian past may be characterized as aminefield that must be negotiated with caution: both the tsarist and Sovieteras were associated with tyranny and oppression. Because of these darkassociations, the post-Soviet period has seen a wide variety of approaches tohistory, including attempts to atone for past sins, manipulation of history,and – what during the second half of the 1990s was probably the mostwidespread approach – attempts to cultivate a vague image of Russia’sheritage in evocative artistic works and performances, in everyday andpopular culture, and in rituals. This chapter addresses these arenas ofcultural revival, focusing upon images of folk culture and their interactionwith symbols of Cossack, Orthodox, and pre-Revolutionary culture.

Nationalism forms a largely unarticulated backdrop to such events andsymbols. I define nationalism as a discourse that occurs in the political arenaas well as in the sphere of daily life and cultural practice. Nationalism as apolitical ideal posits consonance between the nation and its government: therudimentary idea is, as Ernest Gellner put it, ‘one state, one culture.’1 In thepursuit of such a goal, political nationalists utilize the nation as a symboland compete with other groups over its meanings, attempting to ‘capture thesymbol’s definition and its legitimating effects.’ But nationalism may alsomean the feeling that ‘draws people into responding’ to the nation as asymbol, and the ‘daily interactions and practices’ that produce such a senti-ment. Theorists have called the latter aspect of nationalism ‘nationness’ or‘national sentiment.’ All nationalizing discourse helps to create subjectsthrough structures of power that are often invisible.2

The post-Soviet period may be described as one of nation-building ornationalizing: while the Russian nation exists both as a state in the geopolit-ical arena and as a territory, its cultural identity (or the identity of the

5 Power and Ritual: RussianNationalism and Representationsof the Folk, Orthodoxy, ImperialRussia, and the Cossackry

nation) remains to be defined. Russia is in a process of constant renegotia-tion and reimagination of its nationness. A few factors have made thetransition to the post-Socialist era a difficult one for Russia. One is a resultof the close association of Soviet and Russian identities, particularly in thepost-World War II era. Because Stalin deliberately promoted symbols ofRussian nationality, making Russians ‘more equal’ than other nationalities,there is now an identity paradox: ‘Russians may view themselves as thevictims of the Soviet system, but it was in so many ways theirsystem…Russians find themselves implicitly at war with themselves andtheir past in their current search for a national identity.’ Furthermore, thecollapse of the Soviet Union has shaken the foundations of national pridebased on military victories, cultural achievements, attainments in scienceand athletics, and a perceived leading role in international politics. In thelatter half of the 1990s, many Russians grew weary of glasnost’s self-depre-cation and began to search for their new identity in the post-Soviet world.3

As a result, in the arena of politics ‘the centrality of nationalist themesand symbols is now almost unquestioned.’ The term ‘Russia’ – with variouscompeting meanings – is used prominently in the name or slogan of almostevery political party, bloc, and association.4 Various groups define thenation in different ways, but given the particular history of the Russiannotion of nationality, narodnost’ (which refers to a conglomeration ofconcepts of ethnicity, nationality, and the common people) and Soviet poli-cies that institutionalized ethnic nationality, the post-Soviet definition ofnationality is overwhelmingly an ethnocultural one.5 In post-Soviet Russianationalists of all sorts seek both to define the limits of the nation, empha-sizing the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and to articulate anddemonstrate the coherence of the political community, often by claiming adistinctive ethnic past. In order to evoke such a shared past, politicians,cultural organizers, religious officials and others are turning to images asso-ciated with folk culture, the Cossackry, Orthodoxy, and pre-Revolutionaryculture.

The renewed interest in things Russian has become an accepted part ofRussian popular culture. Russian folk culture, literary classics, and historicalsettings feature prominently in printed advertisements, restaurant menus,films, television commercials, concerts, and plays. The televised Moscow‘Folklore Spring’ Festival examined in Chapter 4 showed the commodifica-tion of nationalist images: its patriotic hymns and exalted speeches recalleda mythic Slavic past associated with glory, patriotism, and tradition – allassociated with the festival’s sponsor, Gazprom. That such images ofRussianness were meant to stand for Russia’s national revival in the post-Socialist era was underlined by the MCs who proclaimed that this festivalwas a sign of the ‘revival of the nation, the revival of its economy, therevival of the national consciousness.’

In the contemporary Russian context, such national symbols fall intofour distinct categories, each with its own associations: the folk, the pre-

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Revolutionary Russian past (including symbols linked with medieval andImperial Russia), Orthodoxy, and the Cossackry. The village, peasant, andfolklore stand for a kind of Russian pre-history, a mythical time beforeindustrialization and Westernization, when Russians were truly Russians –honest, healthy, connected to nature and to a community, possessing agricul-tural bounty and a dual pagan and Orthodox spirituality. Folk symbols arewidely used because they are among the most generalized and malleable ofthe images associated with Russia, and can evoke the past without touchingupon the politically volatile specifics of Russian history. Yet the choice ofparticular references within folk culture is often loaded with significance: forexample, through one’s choice of folk-music styles one may cultivate associ-ations with Western or Soviet pop or classical culture, with mythic ancestralRussian village traditions, or with ethnographic regional history.

References to pre-Revolutionary high culture recall a great culture at itspeak. Here again, the choice of authors or works is crucial: classical Russianliterature and music, in the canonical list inherited from the Soviet period,are most favored because they offer a depoliticized version of the Goldenera of tsarist culture, while Russian avant-garde culture of a past era (such

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Fig 5.1: Singing Rus Festival

as the music of Stravinsky) shows allegiance with the oppositional glasnost-era impulse to recover the repressed creations of Russian modernism.

Images associated with Orthodox Christianity also symbolize Russianness,since for many centuries Orthodox religion defined Russian nationality:‘Russian’ and ‘Orthodox’ were often used as synonyms. A myth of ‘HolyRussia’ – the notion that Russians are God’s elect – was popular among themasses since the seventeenth century and was renewed in the writings of theSlavophiles in the mid-nineteenth century.6 For tsarist elites, Orthodoxy, asRussia’s state religion, was an ‘effective condenser for unity and socialharmony in late imperial Russia.’7 During the post-Soviet period Orthodoxy’sstatus as a state religion was basically reintroduced when in 1997 legislationwas passed giving full rights only to religions registered with the governmentas of 1982.8 Orthodoxy has received wide acceptance as a marker ofRussianness in the post-Soviet period: in fact, one could say that it replacedthe Party as a ubiquitous signifier of legitimacy in nationalizing discourse.

Finally, the Cossackry – in the form of images of Cossacks and of theiractual presence at events and locations – serves as a reference to a particularnotion of Russianness. I discuss the Cossackry’s history and associationswith Russian patriotism in Chapter 6, but here it will suffice to state that theCossack revival movement that began in the 1990s has reestablished theidentification of Cossacks with national allegiance and heroic defense of themotherland. In the post-Soviet political free-for-all, politicians of all sortshave been courting the favor of Cossacks because of the perceived associa-tion of the Cossackry with military power and Russian patriotism. In thepost-Soviet period, Cossacks symbolize strength, military glory, and revivalof national spirit.

Below I examine cases of nationalizing discourse involving images of thefolk in combination with symbols of pre-Revolutionary culture, Orthodoxy,and the Cossackry. I begin with overtly political cases and move to those inthe sphere of culture and ritual. In post-Soviet nationalizing discourse, oftenelements from these four categories are combined in a way that might seemexcessive or ideologically problematic; but the nature of symbols is such thatthey permit multiple meanings to be present simultaneously. Seemingcontradictions and ambiguities are resolved in a subconscious synthesis inthe mind of the perceiving individual. In fact, the very power of symbolsresides both in their condensation of diverse meanings, and the consequentpossibility of various interpretations of a single sign.9

Of course, in combining symbols in this way, politicians and culturalproducers are engaging in a well-known technique for organizing socialgroups and propagating political myths. The Soviets practiced this them-selves upon the establishment of the new state. The current approach issimilar, only the content is, in many cases, different. Since both revivalismand many brands of nationalism have emerged as a reaction against Sovietpolicies, the fact that nationalists and revivalists are repeating Soviet strate-gies is somewhat ironic, if not surprising.

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Yet there is another difference: if under the Soviets nationalism was aninstitutionalized discourse, in the post-Soviet context many individual politi-cians and cultural producers are using public fora to create their ownperformances of nationness. Although these presentations of multiplenational symbols may convey a specific meaning, they do not represent aparticular political platform. The overall picture is not one of distinct voicesengaging in debate upon vital issues, but neither is it of voices joiningtogether in unison. Rather, these diverse performed creations reflect avariety of interpretations of the four symbolic categories of Russian nation-ness outlined above, different artistic styles of their presentation, and variedultimate goals. While the versions of the past they evoke are different, eachis engaged in denoting a mythic past, and helping to establish identity. Inthis sense, all the parties in Russia’s current process of nationalizing exhibitwhat Eliot Borenstein has called a ‘rather unexpected form of unity’ sincethey all ultimately speak the same language of nostalgia for ‘a long-lost,mythical past.’10

Folk Revival and Post-Soviet Politics

In post-Soviet political battles nationalism is no longer restricted to the farright; political platforms in the center and the left appeal to nationalist senti-ments. It is by no means a united political front: even extreme nationalistsdisagree over key issues. Nationalist arguments are integral to the platformsof some groups, while others appeal to patriotic and nationalist sentiment inorder to maximize public support.11 This is not the place for considerationof these complex issues, but it will be helpful to distinguish between twomain strands of nationalism in Russian politics today, using AnthonySmith’s distinction between polycentric and ethnocentric nationalism. Whileethnocentric nationalism emphasizes Russian ethnocultural identity as thebasis for the formation of a new state and presupposes a privileged positionfor Russians within a reconstituted empire, polycentric nationalism recog-nizes that Russia’s search for autonomy and individuality occurs in a worldcontext in which there are many other nations.12 Within ethnocentric nation-alism, there are radical movements such as Eurasianism, Pamiat’ and theNational Salvation Front, and followers of Vladimir Zhirinovsky – all ofwhom adhere to a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory; there are also moremoderate nationalists, such as Slavophiles, among whom are AlexanderSolzhenitsyn and Alexander Lebed, who advocate seeking traditionallyRussian forms of government and empowerment of the regions rather thanthe center. At the other end of the spectrum, polycentric nationalismincludes civic nationalists – democrats who support a combination ofWestern principles of government and law with indigenous Russian tradi-tions.13

As Katherine Smith has shown, after the fall of the Soviet Union the firstof the major groups to align themselves with nationalism were the

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Communists. Their views resemble ethnocentric nationalism but within aplatform that advocates a return to the multi-ethnic USSR. By contrast,such nationalism was impossible for Yeltsin and other democrats toembrace. In fact, the past has been a difficult area for democrats, since bothpre-Revolutionary and Soviet markers carried ideological ‘baggage’ thatthese leaders were trying to avoid. It was not until Yeltsin’s 1996 re-electioncampaign that his supporters realized their denial of the past had left peoplewithout something positive to believe in – but their attempts to address thisissue by calling for a ‘new idea for Russia’ and by instituting holidays suchas Independence Day were largely unsuccessful. Yeltsin left office withouthaving established long-lasting symbols or commemorative traditions thatwould provide an identity for the new state.14 Yet we can see Yeltsin’s searchfor such a language as proof that even Westernizers have realized theprofound importance of the past in creating a new nation.

Moscow Mayor Iurii Luzhkov was one of the first democratic politiciansto realize that patriotism was important in fulfilling the population’s needfor historical continuity in the face of bewildering social changes. InMoscow he built a monument to Peter the Great, took over the completionof the replica of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (destroyed under Stalin),and had architectural details representing traditional Russian styles insertedinto plans for commercial structures as well as the city’s underground shop-ping mall at Manezh Square. At the square, Luzhkov commissioned statuesof Russian fairy-tale characters and St George slaying the dragon. As Smithpoints out, Luzhkov was not truly interested in history (in fact, whendecaying buildings were in the way of new architectural projects, he did nothesitate to disregard landmark preservation laws); rather, he ‘would haveRussians embrace a vague folkloric concept of their roots.’ For Luzhkov, aswell as for many politicians and cultural producers in today’s Russia, ‘theappearance of history in tidy and imposing forms was sufficient to representRussia’s past.’15

Luzhkov, who made a bid for the presidency in 1999–2000, further associ-ated himself with Russia’s past through the elaborate year-long celebrationhe produced in 1998 in honor of Moscow’s 850th birthday. The celebrationsincluded large-scale pageantry combining diverse elements of Russianculture: folk and classical music, theater, and dance, all containing multiplereferences to Russian history. Yet in both his architectural and culturalprojects, Luzhkov conveniently glossed over dark and controversial aspectsof Russian history and ended up modeling that past as a sort of historicaltheme park rather than a museum. Furthermore, through his imperiousmanagement style, Luzhkov clearly sought to promote his own politicalcareer more than to aid others in preserving Moscow history. Liberal criticsfaulted him for cultivating a patriotism that exalted military success andtsarist administration style.

The filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, who also ran for the presidential office,had long been associating himself with images of Russian patriotism

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through his films depicting a romanticized vision of Russian prosperity,stability, and fertility. Politically, he was well known as a monarchist andRussian nationalist. In 1997–8, through the charitable foundation he heads,the Russian Culture Fund, he sponsored such cultural events as music festi-vals in the Kremlin featuring concerts of Russian classical, religious, andfolk music of the purist revivalist variety.16 Mikhalkov himself appeared ontelevision in 1998 with Cossack Circle, a Moscow folklore ensemble, andduring the all-male group’s dance songs Mikhalkov, in Cossack militaryattire, joined in the dancing. In fact, in 1998–99 the association ofMikhalkov with this particular Cossack ensemble was so well-establishedthat folk revivalists repeatedly referred to the famous director, actor, andpolitician as the group’s ‘sponsor.’ The group itself was regarded very highlyamong revivalists and Cossacks in Russia for its ‘authentic’ performances(i.e. musically, they approached the level of singing of village masters) – somuch so that many revivalist folk ensembles, including those composed ofCossacks, used the recorded songs of this group as models for their ownsinging. Several of the group’s members – most of whom were Moscowintellectuals – were involved in the Cossack revival movement and had evengone so far as to become Old Believers, because of the long association ofthat religious sect with the Cossackry.

In promoting such groups, Mikhalkov, like Luzhkov, identified himselfwith a vision of Russia’s great culture. Yet the version of Russia’s pastMikhalkov chose to support was not the vague ‘theme park’ history thatLuzhkov favored. Instead, the famous actor and politician provided consis-tent backing for artists in the sphere of elite art, and the folklore ensembleshe sponsored were carefully selected preservationists whose main goals areto educate the public about ancient Russian village singing traditions, inaccordance with the ‘genetic memory’ theory to which they subscribe. Thechoice of sponsored ensembles and the degree of consistent sponsorshiphelp to suggest Mikhalkov’s association with ethnocentric nationalism. IfLuzhkov wished to conjure up a vague feeling of Russianness, Mikhalkovenacted a more focused promotion of national sentiment – combined, ofcourse, with a distinct flair for self-promotion.

‘Oh, You, Mother Russia’: Nationalism in Song

Another case of a politician’s choice to associate himself with Cossack folkmusic represents some of the tensions inherent in multi-ethnic Russia’s turnto nationalism. Liberal oppositional revivalists Andrei and ZhannaKabanov were asked to sing Russian and Cossack folk music at the openingcongress of Kemerovo Governor Aman Tuleev’s new movement,Renaissance and Unity, just outside Moscow in early June 1999. Politically,Tuleev is a populist and a leftist, a charismatic leader who is known foracting independently of Moscow’s directives and seeking to empower theregions rather than maintaining a strong federal government.17 Obviously,

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with the name of his new movement he was trying to suggest Russia’s revivaland oneness; with the request for Russian and Cossack music, he seemed tobe cultivating a specifically Russian heritage.

Yet Tuleev’s embracing of Russian nationalism is problematic. Ethnically,Tuleev is of Kazakh and Tatar heritage, but has said he was raised entirelyas a Russian, and considers himself a Russian. Some members of theMuslim community in Russia consider Tuleev a traitor (Kazakhs and Tatarswere traditionally Muslim): in July 1999, shortly after the circulation ofrumors that Tuleev had converted to Christianity, a death sentence waspronounced on the governor by an extraordinary meeting of a conservativeMuslim group in Grozny.18 Tuleev clearly exhibits an identity that politicalscientists call ‘former Sovietness’ – a modern ‘imagined community’ in whichethnic heritage is not as important as the overarching cultural heritage,formed by ‘educational, economic, and political unification.’19 That aperson of mixed parentage would seek Russian identity in the context of theSoviet Union is not surprising, given the relatively greater privilegesaccorded to Russians. Yet in the post-Soviet context of nationalization, sucha mixed ethno-cultural identity brings to the fore the many problems associ-ated with defining Russia and Russian nationalism.

Although the Kabanovs were hesitant to talk to me about their foray intopolitics, saying they were told to keep the event secret, they disclosed thatthey were specifically asked by Tuleev’s staff to sing the slow, powerful DonCossack song ‘Oh, You, Russia, Mother Russia, You, Our Russian Land,’which tells the story of a brave Cossack hero, Krasnoshchekov, who wentincognito as a guest to the house of the enemy, the Prussian King FrederickII, in the late eighteenth century. The king’s daughter recognizedKrasnoshchekov, but he escaped.20 The song had become a staple of therepertoire of the folk music revival movement during the 1980s.21

With its introductory lines underlining Mother Russia’s military andeconomic sufferings and her corresponding glory, the song makes poignantreference to an important myth of Russian patriotism. The song and themyth state that Russia is both victim and victor: ‘Oh, you [Russia] have seendire need, / Oh, you have spilled much blood, / Oh, you have amassed muchglory!’ 22 This twofold myth of national identity would presumably gain newresonance – and a different twist – now in the post-Soviet era, whenRussians occupy both the position of victim of the Soviet oppression butalso enactor of that oppression.23 But the song has another dimension.Although it has become popular throughout Russia in the post-Sovietperiod because of its patriotic first lines, it does in fact express the point ofview of a Cossack, and reiterates two of the essential myths of theCossackry. The song tells how Krasnoshchekov was sent to the Prussianking by Mother Russia herself – thus recalling the Cossack myth of Russia’sdependence upon Cossack military prowess. It ends with lines emphasizinganother aspect of Cossack mythology, their independence: ‘Now I,Krasnoshchekov, / Am a free Cossack.’ Of course, no contemporary group

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would sing the song to its end (thirty couplets) – in fact, most only sing theinitial patriotic lines (five couplets).

That Tuleev chose this song might suggest that, like many Soviet politi-cians, he wished to associate himself with the Cossack revival movement.Yet Kabanov’s ensemble is not a Cossack one; if Tuleev had wished, hecould have hired a Cossack revivalist or entertainment-oriented ensemble. ACossack folk song, in this case and in many others in post-Soviet Russia,then becomes a generalized signifier chosen for its associations with Russiannational sentiment rather than for its specific meanings or origins.

Yet Tuleev might have been interested in certain resonances associatedwith the myth of the Cossackry. As a regionalist known for challenging thecenter, the rogue politician may have identified with the image of Cossacksas independent people. By hiring Kabanov’s non-Cossack ensemble, Tuleevcould identify himself simultaneously with Russianness and with theCossacks’ self-reliant, yet patriotic stance toward Russia, without makingreference to the sometimes virulent anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic ethnocentricnationalism with which the current Cossack revival movement is associ-ated.24 Such subtleties went unstated and probably unnoticed at the rally, atwhich the folklore ensemble sang several songs and led a folkloric toast tothe governor. Clearly, in today’s Russia precise and coherent definitions ofnationness are unnecessary. Politicians rely on Russian and Cossack folksong, dance, and costume to evoke national sentiment in their constituents,but do not generally use them to advocate a particular nationalist politicalposition.

Stories of political and/or business sponsorship of performances andensembles were told to me by other folk performance groups (both revivalistand entertainment-oriented) in Volgograd, Saratov, Riazan, Astrakhan, andVoronezh oblasts. Gazprom is one of the largest sponsors of folklore, andhas collectives in several of its locations (11 of them came to Moscow forthe 1999 ‘Folklore Spring’ Festival). In some cases ensembles receive supportfrom local businesses that are involved in dealings on the borders of legality.Even if they do not agree with the source’s ideological views or ethics, theyaccept such associations because they need financial support.25 Onerevivalist pointed out that the alliance may work both ways: the groupprofits from the aid of the sponsor, but the patron may be ‘educated’through his or her participation in folklore activities.26 Since the mission ofmany of the revivalist ensembles is precisely to educate the public aboutancient Russian traditions and mores, they assume that such associationscan do more good than harm. Sometimes, however, as in the case consideredbelow, the alliances between folk revivalists and politicians are not simplythose of financial sponsorship, but rather of full ideological identification.

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Nationalism and Regionalism

Vasilii Kozlov, the head of the Culture Department of Vorob’evka, a largevillage in Voronezh province, has put on five national folk festivals since theearly 1990s. The festival, called ‘Singing Rus, Artisanal Rus’, has become abi-annual affair. Official sponsors of the event in 1998 included the RussianMinistry of Culture and the Russian Zemstvo Movement, headed by ElenaPanina, deputy of the State Duma. Panina’s movement, formed in 1993,puts into practice some of the views of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a well-known proponent of Slavophile ideas. Its name and part of its mission comefrom the zemstvo organizations established by Alexander II and his advisorsin 1864. The reforms called for self-governance through assemblies andboards designed to address the needs of the rural population. Today, thepolitical platform of the Russian Zemstvo Movement includes promotion ofancient Russian and Slavic forms of self-governance and self-organization,lessening of the power of the president and central government, andstrengthening of the powers of local elected officials.27 The movement isnationalist in character, with some traits of civic nationalism; however, to agreater extent than the Westernizing civic nationalists, Panina’s organizationis interested in native methods of grassroots governance.28

Panina’s speech at the Vorob’evka festival (delivered in her absence byone of her representatives) reveals some of her reasons for sponsoring thefestival and helps delineate elements of the brand of nationalism her group– and the festival itself – represent.

The festival carries on the noble, responsible mission to revive andpreserve the traditional, distinctive [samobytnyi] culture of Russia andthe ancient Voronezh region, which combines all the greatest aspects ofthe cultures of Russians, Ukrainians, and valiant Cossacks. It is wellknown that a common culture is the basis of any nation, and the preser-vation and transmission of culture determines the face of the nation,and reflects the unique features of the national character and the condi-tion of the national spirit. The festival in Vorob’evka, which came to usfrom centuries past and was reborn, can, as never before, help theRussian people and the Slavic world – especially today, when our home-land finds itself in trouble, when national traditions are beingundermined, and the mass media, especially the central ones, propagan-dize mediocre, pro-Western mass culture, which is foreign to the exaltedOrthodox spirit of the Russian people.

These are Slavophile views that picture Russia as a multi-cultural state inwhich Slavs and Slavic traditions predominate and take precedence, underlineRussia’s inherent difference from the West, and attribute that difference to itsOrthodox religious heritage. Like many ethnocentric nationalists, Paninaimplies that Russia’s current crisis is due in large part to the influence ofWestern culture and the implementation of Western economic and ideological

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solutions to Russia’s problems. Further, by mentioning ‘the culture of Russiaand the ancient Voronezh area,’ Panina underlines the dual national andregional character of the festival. After all, this is an ‘All-Russian’ festival thattakes place in a village. During the Soviet period, most large festivals were ‘All-Union’ and did not emphasize a particular ethnic heritage; the post-Sovietperiod has seen the creation of All-Russian festivals and exhibitions held inlarge cities, such as Moscow and St Petersburg. Villages traditionally hostedonly local events that drew participants from the surrounding area. Panina’sdisparaging comment about the central mass media in Russia augments thispoint: she imples the geographical location of the festival far from the centeradds to its true, distinctive Russian character, while the culture of the urbancenter weakens Russia by encouraging emulation of the West.

The festival itself embodies many of these views. In 1998 it featured about20 revivalist folklore performing groups from urban areas (many from provin-cial capitals), five ‘ethnographic’ performing groups of middle-aged and oldervillagers, and an exhibition and demonstration of folk crafts by folk artmasters. All participants presented Russian, Ukrainian, or Cossack traditions;they came from various areas of Russia, including Siberia. Participantsenjoyed three days of formal and informal performances, workshops, games,parties, and outings. Although the festival’s main point – as it seemed to me atthe time, and probably to many of the participants – was to bring togethervarious folk performers and craftspeople so that they could appreciate eachother’s work and share techniques or materials, in fact the festival presentedimportant nationalizing symbols during its rituals of opening and closing.These rituals were carefully crafted by the festival’s organizer, Kozlov, whoearned a diploma in theater directing from Kiev State University and haddirected ensembles in Kiev and Voronezh.

One of the ceremonies underlined an important ideological undercurrentof the festival: its celebration of regionalism. The opening ceremony beganwith a parade led by the local priest, several of the visiting officials, andCossacks in uniform followed by the various performing groups and crafts-people, each bearing a standard with the name of their home oblast. On astage erected in the village square, over a soundtrack of the same Cossackfolk song that Tuleev chose for his political event – ‘Oh, You, Russia,Mother Russia, You, Our Russian Land’ – each performing group’s oblastwas announced over a loudspeaker and a small cannon was set off, while achild dressed in a stylized, uniform version of generic folk dress carried eachstandard down the stairs of a platform.29 (Figure 5.1)

The pomp and circumstance connected with the announcing of eachoblast suggested such regional diversity was a source of pride for thefestival’s organizers, and implied these groups’ primary identification wastheir home oblast.30 Indeed, this kind of identification was present ininformal speech: as soon as we arrived participants began asking the localadministrators who would be coming – ‘Is Tambov coming? Is Lipetskcoming?’ This special attention to the home region of each ensemble also

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exemplified a new trend towards regionalism in the folk revival movement.Unlike the model set by the Pokrovsky Ensemble, most of these groups werelocated in a regional capital and specialized in the diverse traditions of theirhome oblast and, in some cases, of neighboring oblasts.

Panina’s movement must have found that the festival represented thepower of the provinces and privileged the periphery over the center. Still, theceremony with the cannons suggested unity within diversity: the childrenbearing the standards with each oblast’s name were wearing uniform, styl-ized Russian folk costume, as if to imply that these groups were, after all,children of Mother Russia.31 The background soundtrack, with its repeatedmention of Mother Russia, also made this point clear. This co-existence ofregionalism and nationalism is one of the paradoxes of Panina’s brand ofnationalism and indeed of the folk music and dance revival movement itself.While Russianness is an important concept in these movements, the regionaland local is viewed as a primary source of that Russianness.

Other scholars of the post-Soviet period have discovered a similar trendin current Russian attitudes toward the past. Nurit Schleifman writes: ‘Thebreakdown of the authoritative centralist government has enabled broadexpression to be given to the need for regional identity. In large measure,that need is related to the rejection of the Soviet past.’32 The Soviet regimefostered a strong central government, tried to contain the population withinlarge administrative units (such as large cities and collective farms), andencouraged individuals to establish their main relationship with the staterather than with family members. A reaction against these governmentalmethods has meant a renewal of interest in local identity, exemplified by theVorob’evka festival and the revival of the tradition of the parish holiday(examined below).

Schleifman identified the need for regional identity in struggles overeconomic resources and cultural monuments in a small Russian town. Whilesome locals did favor an ‘isolationist’ policy that attempted to present theregional area as a self-sufficient unit, Schleifman concluded that mostgroups favored ‘a distinctive local Russianness, bearing its own historicaland cultural validity, which claims recognition, respect, and status from thecentre.’ Thus, in this new conception of Russianness the center is not domi-nant, but neither is it unnecessary: ‘despite the local aspiration for greatercultural and economic self-expression, the struggle effectively reinforcesdependence on the centre.’ 33

There is something of the same dependence in the Vorob’evka festival.While the celebration’s local flavor was apparent and its promotion ofregionalism palpable, Moscow’s presence seemed to loom in the back-ground. Although Kozlov was extremely adept at finding local fundingsources, and even engaged in quasi-legal business deals to finance thefestival, he did receive a significant amount of funding and support from theRussian Ministry of Culture.34 Representatives from the central Ministry ofCulture and the Russian Association of Artistic Crafts gave speeches at the

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opening and closing and were present throughout the festival as honoredguests. In order to secure funds and backing for the festival, Kozlov makesseveral trips from Vorob’evka to Moscow every year, and in order to drawup the roster of invited performing groups he consults with a Moscow musi-cologist. Without Moscow, the festival would likely not happen. Thisexpectation of affirmation and support from the center hearkens back toSoviet organizational methods; indeed, many of the channels of interactionbetween local and central organizations have remained intact since Sovietyears and are staffed by the same people as during Soviet years. The differenceis that the current system allows Kozlov quite a bit of freedom in designingthe festival (the Ministry of Culture does make recommendations andrequirements, however), and he is able to partially fund it through local,private and sometimes unorthodox means.

Moscow’s presence was not the only unifying factor at the festival. Thecelebration’s rituals offered images of a mythical, integrative Russianness,which prominently featured Orthodoxy. To be sure, the festival itself did nothave a religious character – no Orthodox music was sung, and religious riteswere confined to the beginning of the festival, in which a prayer was held ata local church and the festival was blessed by Father Vladimir. Still,Orthodoxy emerged as an important underlying conviction, or at least anessential mythos – especially at the festival’s closing ceremony. Here, many ofthe groups participated in a staged theatrical finale depicting a traditionalRussian wedding, complete with matchmaking, engagement, bride’s lament,wedding ceremony, and, finally, the birth of a baby. The piece was framed onboth ends by taped patriotic speeches delivered by an actor dressed in thegarb of the ‘enlightened,’ archetypal Russian peasant, who occasionallypretended to strum a gusli, the instrument associated with ancient Russianbylina singers. In the final minutes a fountain made out of strings of lightsappeared; fireworks were set off, and a painted, lit-up image of an Orthodoxchurch, framed in sparklers rose slowly from behind the fountain while the

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Fig 5.2: Fireworks formed in the shape of an Orthodox church

recorded soundtrack played the final chorus from Glinka’s opera A Life forthe Tsar, a work that has been called ‘a brilliantly constructed monument tothe sanctity of autocratic absolutism.’35 In response to this spectacle, thecrowd whistled, beat upon tambourines, laughed, whooped, and hollered.(Figure 5.2)

Like the opening concert of the Moscow Folklore Festival described inthe previous chapter, this finale depicted a grand, mythic Slavic antiquity. Itwas designed to make maximum symbolic reference with every availableaural and visual means; in fact, the degree of excess suggests kitsch,although slightly different from the Soviet variety. If Soviet folk kitschdepicted a robust, optimistic peasantry enjoying its celebrations and labor,the new post-Soviet nationalist kitsch focuses on the past and combinesmultiple national symbols in the four basic categories mentioned above: thepagan folk, the medieval and Imperial Russian past, the Cossacks, andOrthodoxy. The overall message of such pageantry is, of course, predictive:the peasant marriage and birth of the child suggest that Russia will bereborn, and the rising of the church from the fountain signifies that thecause or culmination of Russia’s rebirth will be the resurrection of its faith.The interweaving of medieval, Cossack, and folk traditions throughoutimplies that the projected rebirth will be based upon the foundations ofRussia’s mythical and antique heritage.

In its use of costumed processions, opera choruses, fireworks, and aRussian wedding play, Kozlov’s elaborate staged rite recalls the spectaclescreated for the coronation of Tsar Alexander III. Alexander had wished toevoke Muscovite culture in order to demonstrate the bond between tsar andpeople.36 Yet here there was no tsar, no coronation, nor even a presidentialcampaign – and the event was the culmination of a homespun villagefestival. But like the coronation rituals, the closing of the Vorob’evka festivalwas an attempt to impress with every possible means. If it did not crown atsar, still it demonstrated the creative prowess of its singlehanded creator,Kozlov. Further, the pomp and circumstance linked the village to the center,as if to proclaim that this tiny place is not a backwater. This harnessing offolklore performance recalls Luzhkov’s ‘historical theme park’ version ofrevival in Moscow.

What kind of nationalism is suggested here? Panina’s speech makes clearthe ethnocentric, Slavophilic orientation of the political sponsors. Yetclearly, the main issue for revivalists like Kozlov is to promote native Slavictraditions, not to mobilize a population politically. Still, folk revival is polit-ical, and, like Kozlov’s festival, many revivalist activities attempt to engagethe nationalist feelings of the audience and participants. All revivalist theoryand practice frowns upon social, cultural, and economic ‘modernization’while promoting its own constructed conception of tradition; the verynotion of revival implies the existence of a definable tradition that needs tobe preserved. As part of their work revivalists try to identify ‘roots’ – thespecific national, regional, or ethnic group to which the folklore belongs.

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And finally, revival seeks to reverse cultural trends (often associated withWesternization and modernization) that hamper the preservation of thosetraditions. In educating a population about folk traditions, many revivalistsattempt to reacquaint the audience with its heritage. Kozlov’s festival iscompatible both with revivalist practice and with the kind of nationalismthat pervades Russian culture today. It provides us with an especially vividexample of how revivalist activities can be political, but I believe that all ofthem are to some extent.

Many contemporary revivalists disclaim any nationalist views, asPokrovsky did in Theodore Levin’s 1994 interview, believing there is some-thing shameful in nationalism. Pokrovsky associated it with a conservativepolicy of the state, Nicholas I’s ‘Official Nationality’ or narodnost’. Yetunder this doctrine from the 1830s, the ruler embodied the nation andbrought the diverse population together under the unifying concept of naro-dnost’. As Nathaniel Knight states, ‘Official Nationality was the negation ofethnicity,’ since it subsumed the myth of the people into the myth of theruler.37 By contrast, the kind of narodnost’ espoused by most revivalists (andthe kind that seems to appeal to many Russians today) is similar to one thatdeveloped as a reaction by radical intellectuals to Official Nationality, andled to populism in the later part of the nineteenth century. These theoristssaw the narod not as a branch of autocracy, but as its direct opposite, andargued that while the autocracy had gone so far in adopting Western waysthat it lacked any national characteristics, the common people, the truenarod, were the repository of narodnost’.38 In reenacting the traditions ofrural peasants, contemporary folk revivalists similarly rely on the mythicnarod to define Russianness: in nationalizing acts, they symbolically performwhat it means (to them) to be Russian.

Russian nationalism has similarly been treated as something shameful ordangerous by Western commentators on post-Soviet affairs, while nation-alism in other former republics was viewed as more benign – largely becausenational ‘movements for social control coincided with the West’s desire tobreak up the Soviet Union.’ As a result, Western analysts have focused theircritique on the ultra-nationalist Russian movements and have not paidattention to the ‘need for national renewal and a strengthened Russiannational identity’ that characterizes much Russian nationalist sentiment.39

As Verdery and others have suggested, we should avoid the temptation toview nationalism as its proponents view it: ‘to treat nations as actuallydefined, for example, by culture, or descent, or history.’ Nationalism is not asocial actor, not a thing in itself. Whether it is ‘good or bad, liberal orradical, or conducive to democratic politics’ is not of as much importance asto understand how the nation is constituted as a symbol, and how ‘differentgroups compete to control this symbol and its meanings.’40

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Imagining the Past in Religious Ritual

If in Kozlov’s festival Orthodoxy served a legitimating function for national-izing discourse, and the dominant form of presentation was kitsch, thefollowing case is, in a sense, its opposite. Here Orthodoxy serves as the over-arching context within which nationalizing performance may be understood,and in fact this religious context serves to make both nationality and folkculture sacred rather than primarily secular. While Kozlov’s festival adver-tised its political loyalties and its relation to the center, this example tookplace far from the center and there were few traces of official political ties.Unlike the Kozlov festival kitsch mode, which offered a superficial treatmentof nationalist symbols, this example links Cossack, Orthodox, and militarysymbols in the context of a rite that creates a richly ambiguous and multi-faceted connection between local and national, present and past.

Finally, unlike Kozlov’s scripted theatrical finale, this festival was ritual.41

The participants were not just reading parts, but were deeply involved. Assuch, this example shows how ritual – as standardized, repetitive, symbolicactivity – helps to define social groups, generate political myths, channelemotion, and structure reality. Its power lies partially in its dramatic repre-sentation of symbols’ meanings. Since the participant in ritual is emotionallyinvolved, the multiple meanings of the symbols lie in the subconscious. Partof ritual’s power resides in this ambiguity and condensation of diversesymbolic significances.42

The 1999 celebration of a parish holiday in a small town, Bolotnoe, about100 km from Novosibirsk, is an example of a fairly common post-Sovietphenomenon: the revival of the pre-Revolutionary tradition of the parishholiday in small towns and large villages throughout Russia. In accordancewith the idea of revival, the Bolotnoe parish chose to celebrate its holiday onthe saint’s day (May 22) of the town’s St Nicholas church which wasdestroyed during the Soviet years. On the large wooden cross marking thechurch’s former location, a plaque written in an imitation of Old ChurchSlavonic relates the history of the monument and of the church it stands for:the church had been founded in 1912 but was ‘profaned and, by God’s will,destroyed in the years of militant godlessness,’ and the cross was erected onSt Nicholas’ day in May, 1998.

The town’s celebration of the parish holiday in 1999 began with a krestnyikhod, a procession with the icon of the patron saint through the streets ofthe town, from the existing church to the cross marking the destroyedchurch and back to the modern church. At the head of the procession, fiveCossacks in olive green uniforms carried a lantern, an icon, a cross, andscarlet standards with images of the saint and of Christ; two men in streetclothes carried the main icon of St Nicholas, draped in an embroideredcloth. Next came the priest in gold robes, who chanted and sprinkled holywater on the processants and on locals who watched from houses and streetcorners; his subordinate, also in gold robes, swung a censer. A church choir

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of some eight women and one man, joined by others, sang Orthodox hymns.The local participants, about a hundred people, were mostly middle-agedand young women in kerchiefs and children in folk costume and streetclothes; a few middle-aged and younger men were also present. Alsoobserving and participating were guests, with whom I came by bus: the 52-year old director of the Novosibirsk Oblast Center for Folklore andEthnography, and about 15 young adults, local participants in theNovosibirsk Center’s folklore ensembles and two folk ensembles fromKrasnoiarsk.

At the cross the priest, who had organized the day’s events, read from thegospels in Church Slavonic and made a speech in modern Russian, and thepublic lined up to kiss the icon and to be sprinkled with holy water. Afterthe procession, the participants ate a common meal in the church, preparedand served by the church congregation; some of the guests scrutinized andkissed two local wonder-working icons, one of which gave off a specialfragrance [blagoveshchaet] and the other of which was said to be crying,

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Fig 5.3: Local men and visitors from Krasnoiarsk

because drops had appeared upon the face. At the request of the guests, alocal old man sang folk religious verses in the church courtyard.

Afterward, on a green in the town center, many of the young people fromthe procession engaged in folkloric games, dances, music, and ritual fightingtogether with other local young men and children. A group of 10 girls, ages8–13, dressed in sarafany, participated in dance-games – which included taggames accompanied by folk songs and accordion music – with the guestsand adults. Two young men, both in folk-style shirts – one wearing Cossackpants, the other in army camouflage pants – sparred on the lawn while boysbetween ages 3 and 10, dressed in folk costume, imitated them. The priest,now in light blue robes, organized and coached both guests and local menwhile they played a sparring game in which two players, squatting on theirhaunches, try in turn to unseat their opponent through a well-aimed punch.Towards the end of the day several of the adult and teenage men, includingthe Cossacks, engaged in a group brawl and afterwards sang a Cossack songin a circle with their arms around each other’s shoulders. These local youngpeople had learned the dances, games, songs, and fighting techniques at anafter-school program organized by the priest, and sponsored jointly by thelocal culture center (Dom narodnogo tvorchestva) and the church.43 Thepriest’s wife heads the folklore instruction, which includes weaving andbeading for the girls, as well as songs and games for both boys and girls,while the priest organizes the classes in traditional fistfighting for the boys,and himself conducts classes in church doctrine.

Although this was a ritual in which everyone who was present partici-pated, and not a staged performance designed by a director like theVorob’evka festival, a director – the priest – obviously had a hand in care-fully crafting the event to contain many symbols that have becomeimportant in the context of post-Soviet Russia’s self-redefinition. Theseinclude Orthodox religious symbols such as the cross and the icons; thetoken of local identity and history in the inscription on the cross and in thechoice to celebrate a local pre-revolutionary parish holiday; emblems ofRussian traditional village culture – the traditional dress, singing, dancing,games, and fistfighting; and elements of Cossack culture. All of these signsspeak of Russian national identity, and their combination in this one day’sevent suggests that there had been an attempt at maximizing the symbolicpotency of the ritual. The priest’s speech at the cross, just before the kissingof the icon, made clear the context into which all these symbols should beput:

Russia is a House of God. Russia and the Russian people are a peoplechosen by God. And if the Russian people turns away from God, it willcease to exist…. To our great regret Russia has now become like thiscross. There used to be a church [khram] here…here people prayed, herethere were prayers about all mankind. There came a time when peoplemoved away from God, forsook Christ…The church was destroyed….

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The sacred object was taken away from us because of our lawlessness.Now there is no church, but in its place, as a reminder of our fallinginto sin, stands this cross…the cross which is a weapon of torture and aweapon of salvation.

Clearly expressed here is the overarching meaning of the entire festival andits nationalizing discourse – that Russianness itself is sacred because theRussian people are ‘chosen.’ This sacralizing takes place on several levels inthe speech, through spatial and temporal linking. The village and its churchare seen to stand for all of Russia, which is pictured as sacred space (a‘house of God’). Present and past are associated in a way that seems toabrogate history and time, emphasizing continuity and underlyingpatterns.44 For example, by depicting the village’s monument to the fallenchurch (the wooden cross) as a ‘weapon of torture and of salvation,’ thepriest underlines its timeless nature, and stresses that the historical eventsthat caused the destruction of the church (and, by extension, of Russia’sspirituality) may be viewed in a religious context as a repetition of man’soriginal sin.

Where secular, historical time is mentioned in the inscription on the cross(it calls attention both to the pre-Revolutionary era when the church wasbuilt, and to the intervening years when the church was destroyed), the samede-historicizing process is at work. However, here as in other examples ofpost-Soviet nationalizing discourse, the Soviet era is treated differently fromthe pre-Revolutionary and post-Soviet eras. While the inscription preciselyindicates the year of the church’s founding and the date of the dedication ofthe monument, it makes no mention of the year when the church wasdestroyed. With this conscious, but non-specific reference to the Soviet era –the time of lawlessness and godlessness – we can see that the intent of theritual is to sacralize that very profane time by mentioning it in the context ofan Orthodox ritual. This moment in history is brought into the ahistoricalmoment of religious time: it becomes a period of falling away from God,into sin.

Meanwhile, because they are given numeric dates, the pre-Revolutionaryand post-Soviet eras are treated as history proper, as dates to be commemo-rated. These are not just indications of chronological time. Rather, the twoevents are symbolically linked: the dates are imbued with meaning in boththe religious and historical contexts. This use of ‘the synchronic mode ofsymbolic elevation’ recalls the historicism used in rituals of the court of thelate Imperial era, when the monarchs linked their rule with the Muscoviteperiod in order to reject the Westernized Russia of the recent past.45 In thecontext of similar political, religious, and Cossack revival in the post-Sovietperiod, historicism expresses continuity between the pre-Revolutionary eraand the present, post-Soviet day, while consigning the Soviet era to a blank,featureless time of ‘falling into sin.’

If the ritual consecrated the profane Soviet period by placing it in an

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Orthodox ritual, it simultaneously embraced what was formerly viewed asprofane – the pagan folk culture. The celebration of this parish holidaycombines symbols that traditionally do not belong together in this degree ofintimate proximity. Secular village singing, dancing, and games were offi-cially frowned upon by the Orthodox Church before the Revolution. Ritualfistfighting was part of the pagan folk tradition in Russia and was discour-aged by the Church because of its association with drunkenness andrevelry.46 Yet in this post-Soviet celebration, the priest’s wife organized folkmusic and dancing activities, while the priest himself served as a kind ofreferee and coach during the fistfighting games and the group brawl; and itwas he who gathered the men together at the end of the fighting, had themstand in a circle with their arms around each other, and sing a historicalCossack song, ‘Through the Carpathian Mountains’ (‘Po goramKarpatskim’). (Figure 5.3)

While it was traditional (until the mid-twentieth century) to conduct fist-fights on Sundays, church or agricultural holidays, and parish holidays fromthe beginning of winter until early summer, a special leader, called anataman or diad’ka, served as teacher and organizer of ritual fights – not apriest. There is some evidence that medieval monks knew how to fight andwould use their skills for the defense of their monastery. However, both thechurch and the government took an official stance against traditional gamesand fights, and actively prohibited the fighting as a ‘fairly vulgar element offolk holidays.’47 Presumably, priests would not have encouraged or orga-nized them. Nevertheless, in this ritual, as well as in the programs of theassociation Russian Shield (with chapters in 20 Russian cities), fistfighting isexplicitly associated with Orthodox Christianity. That the Bolotnoe priestserved as referee and organizer suggests that the church encourages therevival of a practice which it once actively discouraged. On the non-ecclesi-astical side, the voice-over on a training video put out by Russian Shieldstates that it teaches and propagandizes ‘Orthodox military culture.’ ‘Peopleask where the Russians hit from: the hips or the shoulders? Our grandfathersanswer: Russians hit from the soul.’ The organization proclaims ‘belief inGod’ one of the sources of strength of the Russian fistfighter. Indeed,Russian fighters used to say prayers (or incantations invoking God’s name)for strength prior to engaging in brawls.48

To be sure, the combination of militarism and Christianity is inherent inOrthodox mythology (as it is in medieval Christian mythology in general).The representation of St George killing the dragon, which serves as RussianShield’s coat of arms, reflects the notion that saints and martyrs diedefending the faith and Orthodox Russia. The text of the song which themen sang together at the Bolotnoe holiday, ‘Through the CarpathianMountains,’ reflects this duality as well, as it recounts the Cossack participa-tion in World War I: ‘The damned German is attacking us / Attacking ourState [derzhava], our golden cross. // But my dear dark, dark, dark-browedone / Is fighting the Germans for his faith.’ But although the mythology of

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Orthodox Christianity itself promotes the notion of fighting for one’s faith,Orthodox doctrine does not promote the practice of ritual fistfighting.

If we view this ritual in the context of modern Russian Orthodoxy, theefforts of the priest and his wife to revive Russian native traditions becomemore logical. As researchers have pointed out, while the Orthodox Churchhas practically achieved the status of a state religion in the post-Soviet era,worshippers have not flocked to it. Rather, greater numbers of Russians arefinding spirituality in cults and non-Orthodox Christian sects from abroad;many of those who have come to Orthodoxy are woefully ignorant aboutdoctrine and practice. The church must also deal with the legacy of theSoviet years, when it was forced to make concessions to the central govern-ment and KGB in order to guarantee its continued existence. As a result,today the church is seeking to redefine itself. Universalists in the church havesuggested that it become open to all and more tolerant of both religious andethnic diversity, while conservatives ‘insist on the national character of thehistorical church’ and ultra-conservatives preach anti-Semitism.49

The Bolotnoe priest and his wife exhibited several characteristics of theconservative manifestation of Orthodoxy: they are clearly part of the move-ment to make the Russian Orthodox Church more overtly national incharacter. However, although one might assume they were ethnocentricnationalists, they pursue a particular understanding of ethnicity in thatcontext. For instance, they stated proudly that several of their parishionerswere former Muslims who had converted to Orthodoxy; they pressed me toexplain why I had not chosen to become Orthodox, and refused to acceptthe nationality-based logic of my explanation that I was not Orthodoxbecause I was not Russian. To them, Orthodoxy was the truest form ofChristianity, and thus everyone, regardless of nationality, should wish tojoin it; they did not see a contradiction between this view and the nationalistthrust of their constructed ritual. Indeed, this has become a widespread viewamong some nationalists: in 1993 the All-World Russian Assembly, a right-wing organization which advocates the reinstatement of the Russian Empireand which has strong ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, stated thatanyone who converts to Orthodoxy automatically becomes ‘Russian.’50 Suchseemingly contradictory views are common in the post-Soviet renegotiationof national identity.

Besides this tension between ethnic and cultural nationalism, the StNicholas Day holiday allows us to perceive some of the other tensions andidiosyncrasies of contemporary Orthodoxy. In the Soviet period manyRussians – particularly men and young people – stayed away fromOrthodoxy in order to secure a viable future for themselves in society;church-going was associated with older women and particularly with olderfemale villagers. In the Bolotnoe holiday, despite new freedoms and restoredstatus for the Orthodox Church, participants were still mostly women,though many were young and had brought their children. Most of the localyoung men who participated in the fighting arrived at the festivities after the

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church ritual. Yet despite my expectations that villagers would be morepious than urbanites, in this case the urban young people – participants infolk ensembles in Novosibirsk and Krasnoiarsk – were extremely engagednot only in official expressions of Orthodoxy but in its mystical, magicalside. It was they who drew my attention to the wonder-working icons andasserted that they truly believed in the powers of the icons to heal. In aremarkable fusion of Western technology and Orthodox magic, one man inhis early 30s, an avid folk revivalist from Novosibirsk, even insisted that thehealing properties of a photocopy of the icon would be just as potent asthose of the original.

Such deep emotional appreciation of the event surprised me. In mytravels with urban young people (Muscovites) in Russian villages, I had beenused to a rather dry, scientific attitude toward the folkloric culture as arepository of valuable information. But in Novosibirsk, many of thoseinvolved in folklore were Orthodox believers; they saw their belief and folk-lore as part of a whole. Indeed, the attitudes of the priest himselfsymbolized this fusion of folk and religious spirituality.

Probably because of the obvious multi-level involvement of the partici-pants, this ritual had a very different character from the superficial ‘themepark’ and kitsch styles of other nationalist discourses. Although there wascertainly tension between the ethnic and cultural definitions of nationalism,and between the pre-Revolutionary doctrines and contemporary interpreta-tions of the Orthodox Church, the ritual seemed to resolve those tensions.Indeed, one of the strengths of ritual lies in its ability to combine whatseemingly does not belong together. With the emotional power of ritual, onedoes not question, for example, why fighting should represent Orthodoxfaith: the fighting itself, just like the folk singing and liturgical singing, thedancing and game playing, serve as a stimulus and channel for emotions.

Clearly, we are witnessing a new era, when there is a sense that thepowerful symbols of pre-Revolutionary Russia are up for grabs and may becombined in any fashion. Yet as I have shown, choices of particular symbolsare not arbitrary and the designers of such events do intend to conveymeaning through these events. In every case the ultimate goal is a politicalone: to redefine Russianness; to give a sense of identity to participants andaudience members; to attract adherents by presenting something new andemotionally powerful; and to present new allegiances that will help definewhere the culture moves during this transitional time.

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The Cossack revival movement that began in earnest after 1991 has beencalled one of the most remarkable features of Russia’s transition to post-Socialism;1 in large part it grew out of the Russian folk music and dancerevival movement. In fact, one may say that Cossack identity survivedbecause folk music revival created the forum for that identity’s performance.Moreover, much of the Russian folk revival movement’s distinctiveness arosefrom its intersection with the Cossack revival movement.

In the 1990s, interest in Cossack culture, including its folk music anddance, combat methods, and equestrianship grew tremendously not onlyamong descendants of Cossacks, but among non-Cossack Russians. Urbanand village children and young people joined after-school activities orattended summer camps to learn Cossack skills, including folkways.Meanwhile, politicians in both the regions and the center curried favor withCossacks. In post-Soviet Russia, Cossack culture continues to be associatedwith masculinity, strength, patriotism, pride, and independence, as well aswith a visible, tangible heritage – qualities which are often seen to be lackingin Russian culture.

The interaction of the Cossack and Russian folk revival movements in the1980s and 90s has raised questions about both Russian and Cossack identity.For Russians, including many associated with patriotic and nationalisticorganizations, elements of Cossack culture have come to form an integralpart of Russian patriotism. Although Cossack mythology asserts Cossackloyalty to the Russian state, and most Cossacks are ethnically Russian, thevarious organizations in the Cossack movement have declared that Cossacksare a distinct ‘ethnos’ within Russian territory. In claiming a discrete identity,they have ‘exposed cleavages in the reified terms “Russia” and “Russians”.’2

The question of Russian identity is beyond the scope of this book, but mydiscussion aims to suggest some reasons why Russian and Cossack identitiesseem to be so uniquely and inextricably intertwined, and to shed light on thecomplex interactions of Cossack and Russian folk revival in the twentiethcentury. I begin with a historical overview.

6 Performing Masculinity:Cossack Myth and Reality inPost-Soviet Revival Movements

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Cossacks under Soviet Power

The Cossacks were originally runaway serfs and outlaws who lived on theoutskirts of the Russian Empire, starting in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies. They formed democratically run, military nomadic male commu-nities in which unusually close attachments arose among the men, who weredependent upon each other for survival. Before the end of the seventeenthcentury, few Cossacks married; later, around the same time that theCossacks shifted to a sedentary way of life, they began to live with womencaptured from the groups they fought and pillaged, and afterward they tookRussian wives.3 In the eighteenth century they became subject to Russianrule, and composed a legal estate under the imperial government. They wereoffered certain freedoms and rights in exchange for their military service tothe Tsar. After the 1917 revolution the structures underpinning the Cossacks’existence as a corporate entity collapsed, leaving them without a definedidentity. Due to demands of the new regime and the international commu-nity, Cossacks began to propagate a definition of themselves as ‘a peoplewith a shared history and culture’ that included democratic representation;they wanted to be defined as ‘a people bordering on a distinct nationality.’4

During the Civil War, the Bolsheviks decided to take action to eliminate theCossacks as a distinct group. The policy of decossackization took placeduring two months in 1919, during which the Cossack elite was destroyed, allother Cossacks were threatened into conformity, and traces of Cossackculture were obliterated. It is estimated that ten to twelve thousand were killedduring those two months. Subsequently the decossackization policy wasrepealed because of opposition from within the party and evidence ofCossack counteraction. To be sure, individual Cossacks were persecuted foropposing the regime or for having previously evinced counterrevolutionarybehavior; later, during Stalin’s purges, many were singled out simply for theirassociation with those suspected of counterrevolutionary intent. But after1919, the Cossacks were not systematically persecuted for being Cossacks perse. Instead, the way Cossacks were identified was changed.5

Whereas under the tsars the definition of Cossack identity had been astrictly legal matter – the results of a deal between tsar and Cossack – in the1920s and later, Cossack identity acquired an ethno-cultural interpretation.Soviet policy treated Cossacks as a distinct group – similar to the status givento other Soviet ethnicities – with the exception that it was treated as a sub-ethnic category: Cossacks were considered ethnically Russian but culturallyCossack.6

In this climate, expressions of Cossack cultural identity were officiallyencouraged along with that of other ethnicities in the USSR. In 1936, anarticle on the front page of Pravda asserted that ‘the Cossackry has becomeSoviet,’ and Stalin met with a delegation of Don Cossacks in the BolshoiTheater for a performance of Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s opera Quiet Flows the Don.A mass celebration of the Cossackry held in Rostov culminated in the estab-

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lishment of Cossack cavalry divisions within the Red Army.7 The same year,both the Don and Kuban Cossack Choirs were formed. Significantly, theKuban choir’s director was G. Kontsevich, who had formerly directed theKuban voisko (host) choir (Voiskovyi pevcheskii khor), an official Cossackchoir that had represented the Kuban voisko at holidays and church services,singing a combination of church, folk, and classical music. That choir hadbeen founded in 1811 and discontinued in 1921. The hiring of the choir’sformer director in 1936 suggested a certain degree of acceptance of Cossackcultural expression.8

These professional Cossack choirs and dance troupes were created informer Cossack areas as part of the state cultural policy under which eachseparate people in the USSR had its own folk ensemble(s). As was the casewith the army divisions, the members of the ensembles did not have to beCossack descendants; they were professional musicians and dancers, gradu-ates of Soviet music and dance schools. In addition, many of the Russianstate-sponsored folk choruses included Cossack folk music and dancenumbers as an integral part of their repertoire, alongside the obligatoryUkrainian and Belarusian sets. In the minds of the citizens of the USSR,then, Cossacks became associated with swashbuckling sword twirlers andlithe, masculine dancers who could leap extremely high or perform innumer-able prisiadki (low-squatting dances) in perfect synchronization.

In dance, this situation did not reflect actual Cossack traditions so muchas it borrowed from the traditions of Russian ballet that dated to the latenineteenth century. To be sure, Cossack traditional dancing did involvemen’s showing off, but it was an improvisatory art in which each performer,receiving inspiration from the crowd and from the music, combined a vocab-ulary of movements in unpredictable ways. Rather than pointed-toe,graceful airborne leaps and splits, Don Cossack men’s dancing involvedheavy, rhythmical striking or scraping of the floor with the boot’s sole orside; some said it had a kind of clumsy quality.9 In music, the Cossackprofessional choirs reflected the repertoire and style of performance of theprofessional Russian folk choruses: they sang arranged songs and were wellknown for their musical exactitude – while Cossack village traditions werewell known for their highly developed improvisational polyphony.

In the countryside, a different style of Cossack folklore performancecontinued to live an active life. Amateur Cossack folk choirs were formed inlarge and small villages. When I visited such villages in Volgograd oblast in1998, locals still talked approvingly of the large, active village folk choirsthat had existed in the 1960s and 1970s. Some were officially constitutedunder the state’s policy of do-it-yourself artistic activity, while others werenon-official, spontaneously formed village groups. Despite the official policyof support for Cossack culture, accounts hint at a picture of incompletestate acceptance and maintenance of Cossack folk-performance activities.When the movement for Cossack revival came into full swing in 1991, thelevel of support for Cossack revivalist activities grew tremendously, but thesources were private organizations.

Cossack Revival and Russian Folk Revival

The beginning of Cossack revival has been traced to the 1970s with thepopularity of Cossack folk music in the repertoires of Russian revivalistensembles.10 While it is likely that even without this start Cossacks wouldhave engaged in a political movement for independence during glasnost, theperformance of Cossack folk traditions by folk revival groups provided asource of important symbols of Cossack culture. The Pokrovsky Ensemble’sheavy reliance on Cossack music in its repertoire – and its use of Cossackcostumes and swords in concerts – was extremely significant. Pokrovskydenied, however, that his work was meant to advance the cause of Cossackrevival or of other nationalistic movements: ‘In dressing up like Cossacksand singing their songs, we’re not trying to suggest that we’re part of theirindependence movement.’11

Despite Pokrovsky’s denial, the revival movement’s embracing of Cossackfolklore – particularly the music of the Don Cossacks – has contributed toCossack culture’s visibility and accessibility throughout Russia. When in1998 I visited Russian cities that were not traditionally inhabited by DonCossacks, I found ubiquitous interest in and use of Don Cossack repertoire.I was told by the leaders of several children’s ensembles that Cossack songsand fistfighting activities helped attract boys to folklore activities. Themajority of adult and young adult groups, too, included some Cossackmaterial in their repertoires. When I asked participants and leaders aboutthe role of Cossack folklore in their communities and their ensembles, somesaid their personal interest in the Cossacks was due to Cossack ancestry –just as did Dmitri Pokrovsky himself.12 While it is common for members ofthe folklore movement to be interested in their ancestral roots, those whoclaimed Cossack ancestry seemed to take special pride in this fact. It was asif Cossack ancestry conferred special status on a Russian.

Furthermore, Cossack music is loved and performed by many who do nothave Cossack ancestors. The leaders of Stanitsa, a professional Cossackensemble in Volgograd, are not themselves Cossacks, but are well accepted aspurveyors of this culture. In order to sing Cossack music, perform Cossackdances or learn Cossack fistfighting skills one does not have to possess orclaim Cossack roots. Many Russians consider Cossack culture part ofRussian culture. Cossacks themselves do not insist on proving ancestry,although Cossack organizations have argued for an ethno-cultural definitionof Cossacks. The declarations of many of the Cossack organizations foundedin the early 1990s contain the following definition of membership:

Members of the Cossackry may be Soviet and foreign citizens, descen-dants of Cossacks, natives of traditional Cossack oblasts and emigrésfrom those areas, as well as persons who are connected with theCossackry because of their interests or practical activities, who wish torevive the original Cossack ethnic formations, its history and culture,

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who actively support these goals, recognize the responsibilities of thesebylaws, and pay dues.13

Although I have no Cossack background, after I told Cossacks in Voronezhoblast in 1998 that I was researching Russian folklore revival, I was given adocument (consisting of a photocopied sheet of paper with my name writtenin) stating that I was an honorary Cossack.

Post-Soviet Revival and Myths of the Cossackry

The attraction of the Cossackry for today’s Russians – those with andwithout Cossack roots – has to do with the myths surrounding Cossacks,which have become doubly attractive in the context of the upheaval of post-Socialist Russia. Cossacks were known as brave and skillful warriors whoevolved their own culture and economy and never participated in serfdom.Many folksongs glorify Cossack independence through the concept of volia(freedom from restraint): common phrases include ‘liudi vol’nye, Donskiekazaki,’ (unrestrained people, Don Cossacks) and ‘vol’nye oni da svobodnye’(they are unrestrained and free).14 According to the myth, Cossacks wereimpervious to subjugation by foreign powers, tsars – and Soviet power.

During the Soviet Civil War, many Cossack communities were known tohave been pro-Tsar and anti-Soviet, and later on, it was a recognized fact thatCossacks were persecuted by the Soviet government. The popular version oftheir history stated that Cossacks presented important resistance to the Soviets,but were overcome, victimized and nearly destroyed. For this reason, Cossackculture may have been attractive for some Russian Soviet citizens with anti-Soviet leanings. Today, Cossacks represent a persecuted ‘ethnos’ that is bothRussian (because most Cossacks are ethnically Russian) and not-Russian.Cossacks are not ‘Other’ in the way that other persecuted ethnicities are; theyare an integral part of Russian culture, and yet they cannot be identified withthose who engaged in persecution during the Terrors of the Soviet era.

Furthermore, Cossack mythology identifies Cossacks with Russian patri-otism. Cossacks were known as Russia’s protectors, keeping her borderlandssafe from marauding heathen enemies.15 The important official myth ofCossacks’ loyalty and ‘self-sacrificing valor’ and the tsars’ correspondinggenerosity with ‘land and privilege’ figured symbolically in songs, statues,regalia, banners, written documents, and rituals of both Cossack andImperial origin. For example, Tsar Nicholas I in 1837 established a tradition(continued by all subsequent tsars) whereby the tsar gave his heir thehonorary title of Most August Ataman of All Cossack Voiskos. For theirpart, the Cossacks treasured written charters from the various tsars grantingland or privileges.16 Their songs depicted the Russian tsar calling for theCossacks in a time of need, and rewarding them for saving Russia.17 Ofcourse, in reality the Cossacks’ loyalty was countered by the equally impor-tant myth of their independence, and both the Cossacks and the tsar showedloyalty when it served their own aims.

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In the 1990s Cossack revival has reawakened the identification ofCossacks with patriotism and heroic defense of the motherland. Just as inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the post-Soviet period Cossackshave become an important political force nationally, alternately using strate-gies of independence and loyalty to obtain their demands from the state.The Cossacks wanted a codified independent status from Yeltsin’s govern-ment, and manipulated his desire to retain power. They formed variousCossack organizations, each claiming to represent all Cossacks; these orga-nizations asked the Russian government for administrative autonomy,military formations in the armed forces, and recognition of the repression ofCossacks under the Soviets. Autonomy has not been forthcoming, partlybecause of the lack of agreement among Cossack organizations, butCossacks did receive from Yeltsin’s government the provision of militaryunits, and government decrees recognizing Cossack repression in the pastand their identity as a ‘specific segment of the Russian people.’18 As Yeltsinmoved from democracy to authoritarianism, he increasingly turned to theCossacks for support, and other government factions also courted them.After 1993, ‘it became evident that there was an ethnonational Cossacklobby at the highest levels of the Russian state’ – ethnically Cossack politi-cians who favored state sponsorship of the Cossacks.19

The reality of Cossacks today differs considerably from myth. In today’sRussia, the many splintered Cossack groups are feuding among themselvesand fighting for power and land. Instead of Cossack heritage, their attentionis focused upon their legal status within the state, shifting political alliances,and the possibility of obtaining land and autonomy. This is a far cry from the1990 goals of ‘restoring the destroyed Cossack way of life through equestriancompetition and folklore ensembles and choruses.’20 Furthermore, amongliberal intellectuals, Cossacks have gained the reputation of antisemiticmarauders who are taking advantage of the state to further their own aims.Early in the 1990s, Cossacks began to form themselves into paramilitary andvigilante units, helping to ‘ensure law and order.’ To ordinary citizens,Cossacks became known as ‘another obstacle of already difficult daily life’:they form a ubiquitous professional security presence in markets, stores, andtransportation centers. Some Cossack units were ‘essentially business co-operatives or criminal gangs.’ 21 Others have been involved in initiatingconflicts with minorities living in the border areas of Russia’s territory.22

Still, a significant sub-faction within the Cossack revival movement isfocused not only upon material and legal gains, but upon cultural heritage.It is the activities and productions of these Cossacks that I describe andanalyze below. In talking to such Cossack revivalists I became convincedthat for them, as well as for the many non-Cossack Russians fascinated withCossack culture, the appeal of the Cossackry is linked not only to the Cossacks’complex reputation for independence and loyalty but to their association withan image of quintessential masculinity that has particularly potent reso-nances in the post-Soviet period.

Masculinity

At a festive dinner in the Moscow apartment of Andrei Kabanov, thespecialist on Cossack folk singing, Ol’ga Nikitenko, leader of Stanitsa, theprofessional Cossack ensemble from Volgograd, told the following joke. ACossack is lying in his yard while his wife is bustling about, mending thefence and seeing to the animals and the garden. He just lies there and liesthere while she toils and labors. His neighbor peeks his head over and sees theCossack lying in his yard and says, ‘Grisha!’ – ‘What!’ – ‘What are you doinglying in your yard while your wife is working?’ – ‘Well, what if war suddenlycomes, and I’m tired!’23

An important component of Cossack myth and a reason for Cossackculture’s attractiveness in glasnost-era and post-Soviet Russia has been itsassociation with masculinity. The values and occupations of Cossack culturerevolved around military service; Cossacks were not serfs. As the joke illus-trates, in the mythic form that has come down to us Cossack women kept theeconomy going by engaging in agriculture, but Cossack men preserved theirenergies for fighting; they were ‘above’ agriculture, ranking above peasants insocial stature. Thus today, even if they live in rural areas with agriculture-based economies, Cossacks take offense if one uses the Russian word for‘peasant man’ (muzhik) to refer to them; they are not muzhiki but kazaki. Theimage of the Cossack is of a male Cossack; as Judith Kornblatt has put it,‘women do not make Cossacks. Cossacks are male.’ Indeed, in nineteenthand twentieth century literary depictions Cossacks often declared they weremarried to their sword, horse, or the steppe.24

Certain elements of traditional cultures represent the male orientation ofCossack culture and the female orientation of peasant culture. For example,male Cossacks wear the uniform identifying them as Cossacks, and theuniform’s styling shows which host they are from; since the late nineteenthcentury, however, for women dress has not played a role as a marker ofCossack identity.25 Conversely, the symbol of the Russian peasant has cometo be female, and the styling of the female dress most clearly identifies thewearer’s regional origins. Traditional village singing also reflects this genderdifference: in south Russian polyphonic singing, women lead the song andsing it in a range comfortable for them, while Don Cossack polyphonicsinging is more suited to all-male groups, or a male group with only onewoman, who sings the high dishkant.26

The popularity of Cossack culture among liberal ensembles in the Russiaof the 1980s and 1990s is partly explained by this association of Cossackculture with masculinity. Because the Russian village is associated with oldwomen, folk ensemble leaders find it hard to attract boys and young men tofolklore activities. But if the group teaches and performs Cossack material,then boys willingly get involved. Cossack culture inculcates masculinity – justas Asian military arts are said to be beneficial to boys in American society.Both are seen as places where boys can ‘be boys’ while also learning discipline,pride, and leadership.

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In this sense Cossack culture may function as a kind of antidote to theperceived emasculation of Russian culture under the Soviet system.Sociologists and cultural critics have shown that the centralized, hierarchicalnature of Soviet society, where control was given to the top layers of societyand taken away from individuals, led to the phenomenon of men feelingdisempowered.27 In reality, both men and women were disempowered, butthe effect was presumably greater on men, whose sphere of power was tradi-tionally the public arena. Women’s traditional sphere, the family and thehome, was still available to them as a place of self-fulfillment.

In fact, in this context Cossack culture offers more than an ‘association’with masculinity. Judith Butler has argued that gender is not a ‘stable iden-tity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is anidentity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space througha stylized repetition of acts.’ (emphasis original.) She contends that byperforming gender through gesture, speech, and dress, we actively create andreinforce it, at the same time constructing the cultural fiction that what weare performing is ‘natural.’28 Because Cossack folk performance is charac-terized by scenes of masculine ‘excess,’ it constitutes an emblematic enactingof gendered qualities in the context of ritualized performance. I am referringin particular to the often-depicted demonstrations of military prowess and

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Fig 6.1: Vadim Koval’skii twirls swords

fighting in Cossack stage performances – both by Cossacks and non-Cossacks.

For example, a mixed-age ensemble (ages 10–35), based at the SaratovProvince House of Culture and Science, features Cossack elements in all ofits performances, although none of its members are Cossacks and Saratovwas not a Cossack territory (although it was geographically adjacent to theDon Cossack host). In its concerts the group regularly performs severalCossack dance tunes with accordion accompaniment. During one such tune,two of the group’s teenage boys pretended to ‘challenge’ each other whiledancing: without raising their arms, they danced towards one another andcollided with a (mild) full-body blow in the center of the stage, thenretreated. In essence, their performance demonstrated that boys’ dancing isnot just for entertainment; it is an emulation of the quintessential masculineoccupation, warfare – and, in the social context depicted onstage, competi-tion over girls. In another number, one of the group’s co-leaders, VadimKoval’skii, a trained actor, stepped out and began to twirl a large sword.Koval’skii increased the speed of the rotations, changed the angle, andswitched direction to show his skill; the rural audience hollered andapplauded. With a titillating degree of excess, the performance highlightedthe phallic implications of the sword and the performer’s prowess in control-ling it. Clearly, the decision of this group – and many others like it – tofeature such performances tells us much about the implications ofmasculinity for contemporary post-Soviet society. Male Russians, lackingmodels of what it would mean to perform Russian masculinity, borrowsymbolic masculine behavior from Cossack culture. (Figure 6.1)

To be sure, Cossacks themselves cultivate the masculine symbolism oftheir cultural products. In all these cases symbolic performative masculinityrepresents not simply gender but cultural capital: to perform masculinity isto assert one’s ascendancy within the context of the otherwise devaluedgenre of folk music.

Cossack Myth in Action

Thus in post-Soviet Russia, the mythology of the Cossackry plays an impor-tant role in helping to dictate both how Cossacks see themselves and howothers see them. Folk music and dance perpetuate these myths because theyprovide a ritual experience for participants. Cossack revivalist groups use thesymbolic imagery of song and the collective experience of singing andmoving together to create an encounter that intensely involves the wholeperson. Religious rituals similarly surround participants with sensory stimu-lation. David Kertzer writes, ‘In the intensity of ritual, people focus theirattention on a limited range of symbols. The greater their emotional involve-ment the more the rest of the universe is obliterated, and the more thesymbols embodied in the rites become authoritative.’29

Such a use of ritual experiences is evident in the summer camps created in

168 Performing Masculinity

the 1990s for boys and young men to cultivate traditional Cossack skills.They teach not only military skills but involve their attendees in perfor-mances of Cossack folk music ensembles, meetings with older localCossacks, religious services, and visits to history museums. A 1997 videodocumentary about one of these camps, held in Volgograd oblast forMoscow boys who wish to become Cossacks (or, as the documentary put it,to become ‘men’30) showed the degree to which the camp organizers – aswell as the documentarists – attempted to stimulate the emotions of bothparticipants and viewers in order to inculcate a version of Cossackmythology.31

While the documentary took pains to assert that it does not contain ‘asingle episode that was planned beforehand or specially prepared,’ it clearlyaimed both to propagandize the Cossack youth movement (to encourageother adolescents and young men to join Cossacks ranks) and to mytholo-gize the current Cossack revival. In the process it revealed a duality in theCossack position vis-à-vis Russia in the post-Soviet period. While assertingthe Cossacks’ historically important role as a reliable, patriotic defender ofRussia (including during World War II), the video also bemoaned thehorrific treatment of the Cossacks during the Soviet period. Thus, it seemedto say, while the Cossacks’ entire identity revolved around the defense of themotherland, it was precisely that motherland which attempted to decimatethe Cossacks. But the video, like much post-Soviet Cossack rhetoric, took apatriotic stance that did not identify an enemy within the country it nowproposed to serve.32

As the video opened, one of the camp’s participants sang the nationallyknown folk song ‘Oh you, broad steppe’ over visuals of the prairie landscapenear the village, Golubinskaia stanitsa, where the camp was held (stanitsaidentifies a large Cossack settlement). The video then alternated footage ofthe campers’ cultural activities with images of the boys learning swordfighting (and twirling), horsemanship, fencing, hand-to-hand combat,defense and attack techniques, use of ‘traditional’ weapons such as rifles andpistols, orienteering, and river crossing. In one segment, the young menvisited the local Museum of the Glory of Combat, which featured artifactsfrom the battle of Stalingrad; in an emotional moment, the film showed oneof the Cossacks finding his family name in the list of the soldiers killed inthis battle.

The video depicted the visit of the campers to the ruins of a local church(St Nicholas’s) on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the battle ofStalingrad (1942–3), for a requiem ‘for the Russian troops who were killedfor their faith and their fatherland.’ There was a dual occasion: the RussianOrthodox Church had declared that same day to mark the memory of the‘new martyrs’ [novomuchenniki] Tsar Nicholas II and his family. The videocut to footage of the schoolboy Tsarevich Alexei, who held the symbolic titleof the Ataman of All Cossack Troops, in Cossack dress; the voice-overstated: ‘The same executioners who killed the family also executed the decree

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on decossackization. How much pain and suffering this caused only the oldfolks know; but everyone should know.’ As illustration of this assertion thecamera panned the group of 30 adolescents standing, candles in hand, inCossack uniform in the ruined church, as if to suggest that these boys, atleast, would know; and that their inculcation into the Cossack ranks mightmake up for the loss of the boyish Ataman Alexei.

This brief sequence illustrates the paradox of the post-Soviet Cossackposition. The holiday provided occasion for a dual remembrance: both thekilling of the Tsar and Cossacks by the Bolsheviks and the battle ofStalingrad, where so many Cossacks died (Stalingrad, under its presentname Volgograd, is in the Don Cossack voisko). The video gave direct, butnon-specific mention of Soviet persecution: the faceless voice told us ‘onlythe old folks know,’ and did not give facts about who executed the decreeand how many suffered or were killed. The statistics, as published in theRussian press in the 1990s, suggested that more than 2 million Cossackswere repressed, over 1.5 million were killed, and more than 220,000 squaremiles (580,000 square kilometers) of their land was taken (Western accountshave challenged these interpretations).33 Yet the poetic phrasing of thevideo’s voice-over (‘only the old folks know’), together with its visuals of aceremony in a somber ruined church lit by candles, and underscored by asoundtrack of Russian Orthodox choral music, provided viewers with anemotional climax that would not be forthcoming from stark statistics alone.

The ‘knowledge’ that the video offered was like a call to action for theteenage Cossacks-in-training pictured there, and for those to whom thevideo was directed. Although the documentary did not call overtly forrevenge or retribution, it did indirectly incite one to join the Cossacks asthey ‘revive the Cossack spirit.’ The ritual and the video define the role ofthe new Cossacks in the new society as both victims and protectors, both thesufferers of Russia’s former tyranny and the resurrectors of the ailingnation. 34 To reconcile explicitly these two seemingly opposed notions is notnecessary in Cossack mythology. As this video demonstrates, the status ofvictim itself seems to provide the necessary push to activate the Cossacks intheir new/old role of protector and reviver.

In this video and others, folk music similarly linked a past gloriousheritage with a new generation’s drive to address past wrongs. One sequencein a similar video about a Cossack summer camp35 offered a particularlypotent symbolic portrayal of the victim/protector/resurrector dynamic. Atthe camp’s closing ceremony, three male Cossacks in their 30s and 40s –teachers at the camp – sang the patriotic Cossack song about World War II,‘Through the Carpathian Mountains,’ while the camera panned the group ofboys and adolescents in uniform watching this spectacle with rapt attention.

The filmmaker created an emotional climax during the men’s subsequentperformance of ‘Sing in the Garden, Nightingale,’ in which the male nightin-gale laments he cannot sing: he has lost his voice singing in unfamiliargardens and eating bitter berries. Although it is a nationally-known folk

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song, when Cossacks sing the song in the 1990s it may have multiplesymbolic meanings: the Cossack has been traveling far from home andenduring the hardships of war – or the Cossack has been exiled and enduresthe hardships of disfavor and loss of identity. At one point the video’sdirector froze the frame, capturing the trio in the midst of a refrain, a wistfulexpression on the face of the lead singer. The still image, held for severalseconds under the continuing soundtrack of the men’s music, resembled anold photograph, and the minor chords of the song gave it a nostalgicquality; it faded out to a shot of the listening boys. (Figure 6.2) The situa-tion was poignant in part because the solemn young faces of the audienceseemed to promise future resurrection of a once-active tradition: if themission of the camps was successful, the nightingale would once again sing.

Folklore Revival in Don Cossack Territory

In the 1990s it was not only the summer camps for young men that wereworking for the restoration of Cossack traditions. When I visited Volgogradoblast in 1998 the signs of folklore’s active presence were clearly visible. Innearly every village I found at least one folklore collective composed ofretired people – often including at least some men – who sang local folkloricsongs; some villages had mixed-age adult groups, including teenagers; inmany villages children’s folk dance and singing groups were active at Housesof Culture or at schools. It was possible to find Cossack men of all ages inthe various amateur and professional ensembles in the cities. Indicationspointed to a conscious process of folk revival: for example, a wedding in oneCossack village featured folk as well as modern elements; another largevillage was home to a Center of Cossack Culture that housed a museum anda folklore performing group; and urban Cossack folk performing groupsfeatured young or old village members as ‘masters.’ Many villages heldyearly celebrations of traditional parish holidays featuring folk perfor-mances and rituals. Although the economic situation in the late 1990s mayhave limited the available funds for cultural activities, Cossack areas werestill experiencing more activity in the area of folklore than were otherregions of Russia.

There are many possible reasons for this situation. The Cossack revivalmovement that began in the early 1990s helped to create a climate in whichany cultural activities that could be identified as ‘Cossack’ were backed bythe new Cossack philanthropic organizations that sprang up. Such organiza-tions were often funded by Cossack businesspeople – or non-Cossackpoliticians and businesspeople who wished to gain Cossack support.

For example, in Novoannenskii (in Volgograd oblast) I met a Cossackbusinessman who maintained a Cossack equestrian center – which, I wastold by others, fulfilled a money-laundering function for his quasi-legalactivities. In Alekseevskaia stanitsa, a large village that is a regional center inVolgograd oblast, the Center of Cossack Culture organized many Cossack

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revivalist activities – including holiday celebrations with folklore perfor-mances and demonstrations of fistfighting and horsemanship – as well asrestoring traditional holiday celebrations, and fund-raising activities(including a ‘telemarathon to collect funds for the revival of the Cossackry’).The Center housed a museum of Cossack life and a Cossack folkloreensemble, and had produced several educational videos on Cossack culture.Sponsors of such events included private enterprises, a radio station, and theMinistry of Defense of the Russian Federation.36

Further, it is clear that folklore activities had already been very popularamong Cossack descendants for several decades. Although it was forbiddento form Cossack organizations or to agitate for attention to Cossack affairsduring the Soviet period, some elements of Cossack culture – such asCossack song and dance ensembles – were supported, even though, as thefollowing account suggests, such support was incomplete.

The story of one amateur ensemble from a small town in Volgogradoblast is illustrative of official attitudes toward Cossack culture and thesomewhat defiant attitudes of Cossacks themselves in the 1960s and 1970s.Yet the story, told to me in 1998, was certainly subject to retrospective rein-terpretation that reflects not only Soviet-era attitudes but the kind of dualstance I have identified as characteristic of the post-Soviet period forCossacks. My informant emphasizes the Cossacks’ victim status during theSoviet period, and also hints at a version of the protector/resurrector stance:in his recounting, while the Cossacks faced persecution from the Sovietbureaucracy, they paradoxically remained loyal supporters of the country andits leader, even during the Soviet period, and were rewarded with warmappreciation in return.

In 1964 Vitalii Bortsov founded a choir and dance ensemble under theofficial auspices of the House of Culture in the town of Uriupinsk. Bortsovwas born in 1936 in a Cossack khutor (small village) near Uriupinsk, butduring World War II he and his family were exiled with other Cossack fami-lies to Perm oblast in the Urals. After Bortsov received his degree in folkdancing at the Perm Choreographic School, he asked to be assigned a job inhis home oblast. Although Cossack families in exile maintained a tight senseof community and a consciousness of themselves as Cossacks, and althoughhis own family regularly joined in Cossack traditional folk songs and dancesat celebrations, Bortsov recalls that at the time it never occurred to him toform a Cossack ensemble. To do so was not accepted practice; his traininghad prepared him to perform and teach dances of all the republics of theUSSR, not just Cossack ones.37 Furthermore, during the 1960sKhrushchev’s anti-religious policies had effectively shut down the activitiesof some of the professional Cossack choirs that had flourished earlier.38

Despite a political and cultural climate that was not propitious forstarting a Cossack performing troupe, an older choreographer in a nearbytown gave Bortsov the idea, and it appealed to him. Today, he is proud ofthe bold initiative he showed despite pressures to the contrary: ‘I started the

Cossack ensemble at a terrible time, when Cossacks here were not recog-nized, and were oppressed and battered. Even the word “Cossack” was acrime. But even so, I had the audacity to start a Cossack ensemble.’ 39

Bortsov worked on two fronts: he cultivated an ensemble of amateur youngdancers in the city, and also went back to his birthplace to recruit middle-aged and older men and women, workers in a kolkhoz, for the chorus.Bortsov and the dancers would travel regularly to the village for rehearsals,and the performing group became popular both in Volgograd oblast and inMoscow, and later abroad.

According to Bortsov, ‘although they stifled the Cossacks a bit,’ localParty officials generally approved of his ensemble and gave their support.However, Moscow officials were not so clear about the degree to which itwas appropriate to display symbols of the Cossackry. He recounted a storyof their invitation to Moscow to perform in the Kremlin Palace as part of acelebration of the adoption of the new Brezhnev Constitution in 1977. For adress rehearsal at the Palace, the group donned their usual costumes, whichincluded the traditional parochka (late-nineteenth-century-style blouse andskirt set) for the women and the official pre-Revolutionary Cossackuniform, including a tailored military jacket, blue pants with red stripes(lampasy) down the sides, and a cap (furazhka). An official from theDepartment of Propaganda of the Central Committee approached Bortsov

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Fig 6.2: Cossacks perform at Summer camp

and said, “OK, your piece is fine, but take off the lampasy. Rip them off”.The furazhki were also banned by the official. According to Bortsov, thelampasy are such an important symbol of Cossack culture that to have themripped off is “to kill a Cossack”.40 His group were ready to head home, butinstead they decided to turn their pants inside out, so that the stripes werenot visible.

A second official, the head of the Department of Propaganda, saw theCossacks without lampasy and furazhki and inquired as to the reason andthe origin of the command to take them off. As Bortsov remembers it, thehigher official reprimanded his underling: ‘What did you do? They’re goingto go home to the Don and say they were forced to rip off their lampasy! [Toa Cossack] there’s nothing more sacred than that! Sew them back on!’ Thevictorious ending of Bortsov’s story emphasizes the national leader’s ulti-mate support of the Cossacks:

I came back to my fsolks and said, ‘Turn the pants right side out!’ They said,‘Hooray! [O-pa!]’ And [the official] had already ordered two or three seam-stresses to sew the lampasy back on. And then we perform in front of them,and he says, ‘Oh, they sewed them back on already?’ ‘We didn’t rip them off.’‘Well, that’s Cossacks for you.’…And my folks danced with such pathos infront of Brezhnev, people yelled ‘Hurrah!’ Brezhnev, Lionia himselfapplauded, and even gave a standing ovation for our Cossacks!41

Clearly, Bortsov’s story reflects a guiding myth of the current Cossackrevival movement: the Cossacks were repeatedly oppressed throughout theSoviet period. The myth of Cossack sacrifice is an important one for currentCossack identity construction because it serves as justification for theCossacks’ attempts to receive apologies, reparations, and special status fromthe State. In the 1990s, official recognition was needed in order for theCossacks to exist on more than a cultural plane: they desired military status,land, and autonomy.42

Yet Bortsov’s story, with the official’s worry that the Cossacks would ‘goback to the Don’ and tell others how they were treated in Moscow, and itsvictorious ending emphasizing Brezhnev’s endorsement of their perfor-mance, demonstrates his belief that throughout these difficult years theleaders themselves feared and appreciated the Cossacks, even if others – thelower bureaucrats – did not. This points toward another important mythdating back to the pre-Revolutionary era: that the Cossacks are loyal to thetsar or supreme ruler, and that the leader always repays the Cossacks withloyalty. Thus, Bortsov’s story represents the degree to which contemporaryCossacks are constantly drawing upon elements of their mythic pre-Revolutionary history in order to forge their identity in the post-Sovietworld. And Bortsov’s narrative also ‘performs masculinity’: in underliningthe authorities’ fear of the Cossacks’ wrath, he boasts that the Cossackswere really the bosses in this exchange. The discourse of masculinity is ulti-

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mately about authority: the Cossacks refused to be castrated by the removalof the lampasy, and retained their formidable masculine disposition throughout.

In Bortsov’s further comments he stressed that although the Cossacks were‘oppressed’ during the Soviet era, they were well supported financially. Duringglasnost and perestroika and the early 1990s, Bortsov’s group had madeseveral tours abroad thanks to the support of the Ministry of Culture; butstarting in the mid-1990s state money dried up. Apparently, whereas themodel of locking horns with Soviet authorities was a familiar Cossack stance,begging was not. Contrary to my own expectations, Bortsov said that Cossackorganizations did not pitch in to support the group. Instead, the ensemble wassurviving due to the assistance of local businesspeople – not themselvesCossacks – who saw the value in supporting Cossack cultural activities. TheCossacks themselves, Bortsov said, were ‘cheap’: ‘if some [resources] appear,they put it in their own pockets, but in general they have nothing.’ Bortsov waspessimistic about the future of Cossacks in Russia, echoing the victim stancetypical of the Cossacks in the post-Soviet era: ‘When you bury a dead person,he never returns from the cemetery. Well it’s the same here, they buried theCossackry and I think it will never return. The only thing that is left is theculture.’

Bortsov may be right that the Cossackry will not gain its independence as asovereign country, or a region within Russia, nor obtain a treaty giving it therights and responsibilities it had prior to the Revolution. Still, it seems clearthat the Cossackry will continue to exist as a rich reservoir of powerfulmythology for Cossacks and other Russians alike. In a period when manyRussians perceive either a chaotic maelstrom of various sources of value or acomplete absence of meaning, Cossack history and traditions – connotingpower, masculine authority, triumph over oppression, continuity with a lostpast, and independence – provide a welcome resource for the building of anew identity.

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I have argued that when folk revivalists present ancient Russian folk tradi-tions on stage, they represent a culture that is in some ways not their own.To whom, then, does this ancient agrarian tradition belong? Is what isshown on stage the culture of Russian villages? If so, how have villagedwellers reacted to revivalists’ attempts to preserve it? Has there been arevivalist movement in the villages themselves as well as in Russian cities inthe past few decades? If, in fact, village culture differs significantly fromwhat is shown on stage by folk revivalists, then are revivalists’ hopes for a‘regeneration’ of the village just a fantasy?

The ‘Real Village’

In order to answer these questions, it will help to establish the characteristicsof villages in Russia today, and to distinguish this ‘real village’ from themythic village of revivalists. The village dwellers who are targeted as‘pockets of pastness’ by revivalists tend to be middle-aged and older peoplewho live alone in village houses that were built to accommodate whole fami-lies.1 The majority are women; while most have been married, few haveliving male partners. Studies of out-migration have shown that northern andcentral Russia’s rural population between 1959 and 1979 decreased by about48 percent, leaving behind a populace that was largely middle-aged andolder. While the rate of out-migration slowed in the late 1970s, the trend hascontinued.2 To take one central oblast’s statistics: in 1989 people over 45made up 53 percent of the total rural population of Riazan oblast, and 64percent of these were women. At a higher age the percentage difference ingender is even more obvious: the 60-and-over population comprised 30percent of the total rural population of Riazan oblast, and of these, 73percent were women. Typically, these women are visited every summer bysons and daughters who have mastered a trade or profession and moved to acity, and who bring with them city mores, values, and ways of life, as well asby grandchildren and sons- and daughters-in-law, some of whom have hadlittle or no experience in the village. Many of these members of the youngergeneration stay the entire summer to help with the agriculture.

7 The Village Revives

The village homes often reflect the intersection of modern and traditionalways of life: the structures are made of rough-hewn logs decorated withtraditional nalichniki (carved window trimmings); each home has an iconcorner; and the floors may be carpeted with mats, hand woven from cast-offclothes. Yet the furniture is often the mass-produced kind found in anyformer Soviet town, and decorations include bright polyester throws, plasticknick-knacks, and store-bought lamps. The television often physically occu-pies a central place, sometimes right under the icons. It also occupies acentral place in the lives of these retired women: many ritualistically watchUS-made and Latin American soap operas, such as Santa Barbara, whichdepict the mythic lifestyles of the Western, urban well-to-do. The programstake the place of former communal activities: people gather in front of thetelevision set at a certain time weekly or daily to watch their favorite show.They talk of the characters as if they were real (although they know they arenot). Often, when I introduced myself as an American, they wanted to knowwhether I knew the characters, actors, and programs.

Then and Now

While they enjoy the entertainment provided by a global economy, retiredvillagers generally complain about other aspects of modernization. Threedecades ago or so in villages, one never saw women without ‘proper’ villageattire – skirts below the knee and covered hair. Viacheslav Shchurov remem-bered that during an expedition to a village in the 1950s, the villagerschastised a female Moscow student who wore pants and wore her hair loose:‘Are you a man or a woman?’ ‘Aren’t you ashamed to go about bare-headed?’3 But now, it is no longer rare to see young women wearing jeans,short skirts or long, unbound hair in villages. Young people congregate atthe local klub every night of the week, dancing in a darkened room to rockand pop music, and drinking alcohol openly. People born in the late 1920sand 1930s said that they never behaved in such ways: there was little alcoholabuse and very little premarital sex among their cohort; if people did engagein either of these transgressions, they were ashamed and tried to hide thesigns of their behavior. Today both are ubiquitous, and older people feelpowerless to change the situation. One woman sighed, ‘Oh Lord, in the pastwe dressed modestly and life was better.’4

However, a ‘better life’ included many hardships. In a village in Kalugaoblast several informants told my Russian research partner and me thatprior to World War II their families were forced to move from their tinyvillages of 7–8 houses into larger ones near the sovkhoz (large state farm) orkolkhoz. Officials came and cut down the chimneys of the houses to compelpeople to move; no one was given any money to replace the old houses. Wesaw several of these ‘ghost villages,’ some of which were simply fields ofgrass. In others decrepit houses were still standing; old farm and householdimplements stood among the debris from the crumbling roofs and walls. As

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Varvara Balabanova (b. 1929) told us, she liked living in the small villagebetter not only because everyone knew each other but because ‘it was easierto steal from the sovkhoz.’ Stealing was very heavily punished; Balabanovaknew a sovkhoz brigadier who received seven years in prison for stealingpeas. Yet stealing was on everyone’s minds since they were not givenadequate room to plant their own vegetables; and their work for the sovkhozwas paid only in grain – which they then had to mill in order to make flour.5

Yet Balabanova said that nonetheless, life was ‘the gayest’ (veseleishee).She and others described singing as a ubiquitous part of daily life, muchmore than it is now. A man born in 1924 said: ‘How we sang! You’d go towork with a song, you’d come home with a song; despite the fact that therewas nothing to eat, we’d sing anyway.’ He reported that the songs they sangwere not ‘ancient songs’ but ‘Soviet ones’: ‘the pre-Revolutionary ones hadalready gone away.’ 6 Balabanova and others told us that they did sing‘ancient songs,’ but apparently Soviet songs were becoming equally popularin the years immediately before and after the war.

Two women, Anna Evseenkova (b. 1923) and Aleksandra Riabykh (b.1931), compared the attitude toward singing when they were young andnowadays. In the fragment of our conversation below, they indicate that theattitude toward singing changed with a radical shift in values: people nolonger work as hard, and they find different, more passive forms of enter-tainment. (EM is Elena Minenok, the Moscow folklorist whom Iaccompanied):

EM: Did you used to sing more songs in the past?AR + AE: Yes.EM: When did you sing them?AR: In the summer.AE: When going to the cut the hay. At that time people didn’t say,

‘Five o’clock, the working day is over,’ instead they worked tilldark.

AR: Yes, yes, yes. Today they don’t work like we used to.AE: At night we took in the flax.AR: It was ‘na ranke.’ The brigadier would say, Come, it’s time to

harrow. So you go to harrow. On horses. You hitch them up ‘naranke.’

EM: ‘Na ranke’ means ‘early’ [rano]?AR: Yes, about 5 o’clock [a.m.].LO: Did you sing all the time? How did you sing? Under what–AR: While going to the cut the hay. When you were on a truck trans-

porting grain there were songs – all the time, we sang…AE: Or while walking home, with a rake on your shoulder, you’d sing.LO: What songs did you sing?AE: All kinds.

178 The Village Revives

AR: We sang a lot of songs. But now – now, if you sing songs, they say‘She’s either drunk or a dummy.’

LO: They say that?AR: Yes. Now, I don’t know how many years it’s been since I’ve heard

singing.AE: Now people don’t sing.EM: But you sang when you were young. Why did your children stop

singing?AR: Life.AE: Life.AR: Life. Nowadays, child, they just party more than anything. They

run around…AE: smoke…AR: smoke, drink. Yes.EM: And for that reason they stopped singing songs?AR: They’re not interested in songs. They’re interested in a different

life.

In this conversation the older women convey more than just a difference thatwould be true of any two generations. They try to show that they feel theyare not highly regarded, that the values and rules by which they lived nolonger apply, and that the values of the younger generation are now the rule.It is likely that the denigration of their values was a theme that villagewomen heard throughout their lives. I repeatedly heard from older ruralwomen comments similar to Aleksandra Riabykh’s remark that they weretreated as ‘drunk or a dummy’ if they sang; Russian musicologists reportedsimilar remarks. Older female villagers recounted that (in the past and evenin recent memory) when they sang, people said ‘why are you yelling’ –reflecting the difference between the loud, open voice used in many Russianindigenous local singing styles and the more refined, sweet, rounded soundcultivated by the Soviet folk chorus. Musicologists noted that when they firstcame to a village to ask for local-style singing, they had to overcome enor-mous resistance on the part of the older people. The villagers had been toldso many times that their singing was ugly and that they were stupid andbackward, that they had learned to stop singing – that is, in effect, to rejecttheir own culture – or to conceal it. Such criticism came not only from offi-cial sources, like culture workers, but from local young people, sometimeseven their own children.

Village Singing and Gender

Condemnations of indigenous singing may have been directed towardpeople of both genders who sang, but in practice the antipathy towardvillage culture has largely been a gendered one. In pre-Revolutionary tradi-tion, depending on the situation and on local practice, women and men sang

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either together or separately: for example, in many locales the bulk of theritual music for the Russian wedding was sung by women, while in a fewareas men sang wedding songs together with women.7 But in most Russianregions singing was musically structured to accommodate (and many thinkto sound best with) mixed groups. However, as I pointed out in Chapter 2,wars contributed to a gender separation in singing. A further significantfactor for older women was that Russian men’s life expectancy has beensignificantly lower than that of women, even when wars were not a factor.The lack of men forced women to sing in all-female groups or individually.There evolved the stereotype of old rural women singing incomprehensibleand not very ‘beautiful’ songs – a cliché that, as some women told me, existseven now, although apparently it was more prevalent prior to the glasnostera.

In asking rural women about their singing I was repeatedly told that theywould have preferred to sing with men, but none were available. Thus, forexample, a singing group of six women (born between 1925 and 1941) in avillage in Riazan’ oblast told me that they had always sung with men in theiryouth and that they would much rather sing with men for aesthetic andpractical reasons: mixed singing sounded better and was easier because themen would sing ‘bass.’ (Figure 7.1) In their tradition, everyone sings bassexcept for a single higher voice that sings ‘podgolosok’; when men do singwith them, they more or less double what the lowest female voices aresinging – but for the men these notes would presumably be easier to singthan for the women (because they would be within their natural singing andspeaking range), and they would be sung with a different timbre, whichwould add a richer coloring to the group’s sound. But there were no inter-

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Fig 7.1: Women in a local ensemble sing around dinner table

ested men. Many of the women recounted that they had lost their fathers inWorld War II, and/or were widowed. In my travels in Russian villages I onlysaw a few older women living with husbands – and most of those were alco-holics.

As a result of the declining older male population in villages, the infor-mants used by folklorists and musicologists since at least World War II havelargely been female. Based upon my experience of such all-female choirs, Iconcluded that such singing groups were an important social institution, asource of solidarity for the middle-aged and elderly women who function asthe economic and social backbone of Russian village communities. YetRussian musicologists repeatedly led me away from such an interpretation.They told me – like the women in the village ensemble – that Russian singingwas incomplete without men and that the fact that only women were singingwas a sign of the degeneration of the tradition. They pointed to the revivingCossack singing practice as an example of how vibrant a tradition could bewhen men and boys were active in it.

Yet both the comments of musicologists and of village women on thenecessity of singing with men may reflect the devaluation of women andtheir cultural products. If in the twentieth century Russian folk music’s asso-ciation with women has contributed to its denigration, then it isunderstandable that people would imagine that men’s participation in folksinging could help restore a higher social status. In this context, whilerevivalists of Cossack music and dance may be raising the cultural capital oftheir productions by ‘performing masculinity,’ Russian rural women do notstand to gain cultural value through enacting femininity. In the context ofvillage folk singing, feminine gender is ‘invisible’ because it is the norm thatis already expected.

While women-only singing groups may have come about for reasons thatwere detrimental to women, it was clear to me that such informal groups didperform more than a musical function for their participants. The women insuch ensembles had been together for so many years that they often seemedto treat each other like siblings or relatives. For example, when talking to mein small groups, the women in the Riazan’ village often filled in or correcteddetails in each others’ stories about events that occurred in the past: it wasnot so much that they had heard the stories before, but that they lived themtogether. On one occasion, the group made fun of the desire of one of theirmembers to tell me a sad story about her experiences during World War II:‘She took a drink and now she wants to tell!’ The woman’s response was tocompletely ignore such comments and other interruptions to her story –obviously, she was used to such teasing.

All of these groups had strong internal dynamics, and this one was noexception: it was clear who usually won arguments and who backed downeasily. And obviously these women shared a complex world-view in whichsinging played a particular, important role. Despite social pressures to thecontrary, the group had maintained a repertoire containing many local, pre-

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Revolutionary songs that the women had learned from their mothers. Theyalso retained the local singing style, rich in improvisational folk polyphony.When I inquired as to why they had kept singing the old songs and stylewhile other groups switched to a Soviet-era repertoire, they speculated that itwas because the local workers in charge of culture did not force them tochange. In fact, they remembered that the woman who was director of theklub before the war fully supported their singing of old songs. The values ofthe group may have been shared by many in the village at that time andlater: the women reported that several of their children and grandchildren(all of whom live in other Russian towns and cities, but spend summers inthe village) still participate in singing local-style songs in informal familygatherings. The younger generation mostly ‘sings along,’ and most oftenparticipate in singing the ‘cruel romances,’ but also know some ancient ritualmaterial, the women said. However, despite an appreciation for old folksongs that came into vogue again during the glasnost period (discussedbelow), today the village has no klub and officially supported activities ofany kind are scarce.

The following story about the Riazan’ village singing group demonstrateshow important singing was and is to these women: remarkably, the right toexpress one’s musical creativity signified elevated status in the community.The narrator, Valentina Kuznetsova, tells how the women jockeyed formusical ‘power’ and recognition within the ensemble.8 But her anecdote isremarkable for another reason: it is an example of the most productivenarrative folkloric genre in Russian villages, the bylichka – a tale aboutcontemporary life that incorporates traditional supernatural elements suchas ghosts, witches, and other unclean spirits. (CD track 14)

Kuznetsova, the oldest member of the group (who always sang the specialpodgolosok part, which allows the singer to improvise in a very noticeableway) told us that a few years ago, just before Moscow ethnomusicologistswere to make a recording of their singing, she had gone hoarse. She was toldby a local healer to whom she happened to go with a sick cow that herillness was caused by a hex. Apparently, a witch (volkha) – the mother of theensemble’s youngest member – had cast the spell so that her daughter couldsing podgolosok on the recording. Kuznetsova visited a babushka in a nearbyvillage who successfully reversed the spell with a prayer: her throat clearedup, while the witch became ill. Since Kuznetsova was the village nurse (fel’d-sher), she was duty-bound to visit the sick woman – but as soon as she calledupon her, the witch touched Kuznetsova and she again became ill. AfterKuznetsova’s second visit to the babushka, the witch worsened and died.According to Kuznetsova, the daughter insists that she burned her mother’snotebooks – that is, she did not inherit the ability to cast spells – butKuznetsova believed the daughter did indeed receive transmission of hermother’s knowledge.9

This story might shock a Westerner with its blending of rational and irra-tional elements – a nurse who has studied medicine and who understands

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and accepts the use of contemporary technology to make an audiorecording attributes a simple case of laryngitis to the work of supernaturalforces. Yet rather than simply concluding that ‘Russian villagers are back-ward and superstitious’ as did the Bolsheviks in an earlier time, we mightlook at a similar genre in Western culture. For example, Westerners whootherwise consider themselves rational people of materialist views oftenhold supernatural beliefs, such as urban legends and astrology (the notionthat the alignment of planets affects one’s personality).10 ‘Superstition’ is acommon feature of contemporary Western urban cultures, much as it is invillages.11

Yet the story clearly has roots in Russian rural folkloric tradition, inwhich identifiable spirits, with various habits and powers, are said to live inthe village and its surroundings. As James Scott has put it, ‘the religion andculture of peasants contain, almost inevitably, the seeds of an alternativesymbolic universe’ which can be seen in folklore and rituals.12 Indeed, bothKuznetsova’s story about singing and the women’s singing itself imply theexistence of a symbolic world, a culture distinct from the mainstream. It isobvious that for them singing is not simply a hobby; it forms part of thefigurative realm that structures their lives.

At a more basic level, the story, with its attribution of a cold to magic,demonstrates the great value these women place upon singing and beingrecorded. The story would not have contained as much drama if it had notrevolved around such an important event – the recording of the singinggroup by scholars from the capital. While most of the village women I metsing just for themselves when working around the house or in the garden,and in family situations during informal get-togethers, they all seem to craveinvitations to perform at holiday celebrations in the regional capital. That is,for them the cultural value of singing is consecrated by Moscow and theprovincial capital or regional center: if administrators and musicologistsdemand a certain style or a performance, the women are eager to fulfill it.Moscow’s interest in their music represents a sanctification of their symbolicuniverse. When mentioning the positive reception they currently receive,village women often also noted – in nearly the same breath – that ‘it was notalways so’: in the past, public singing brought ridicule. Thus, if they valuepublic performance so highly, it may be because there are few other venuesin which respect for rural women and their culture is conveyed publicly.

The cultural hierarchy is a gendered hierarchy. As we will see in the nextsection, such a hierarchy consistently informs what people sing, how thatsinging is perceived by academics, and how the academic sphere has driventhe valuation of various art forms.

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Fol’klor vs. Narodnyi in the Repertoires of Village Ensembles

Moscow musicologist Ekaterina Dorokhova recounted the followingexample of the chasm between how villagers and revivalists understand theidea of folklore:

I once heard even such a story. It happened in a regional center on somefolk holiday. And one of those ethnographic groups from Moscow [i.e. apurist group from the youth folklore movement] came and sang veryancient songs from those very villages [where the holiday took place].And there, no one sings them anymore. They were the most exotic, themost complex [songs from that area]. And there stood twowomen…middle aged ones. Participants in some local [folk music]collective. And one of them said, ‘Those people are singing ‘folklore’[fol’klor], but we sing folk songs [narodnye pesni].’ That is, [the villagers]even try to separate [folklore] from themselves. They don’t see thoseancient songs as their own, not to mention that they called it ‘fol’klor,’ aforeign word, as if to say, ‘We sing folk [narodnye] songs – ours – butthat is ‘fol’klor’.

Indeed, most villagers are not in the everyday habit of singing ancient tradi-tional songs associated with the agricultural calendar or other ritualtraditions – the kind that the group from the Riazan’ village sings, thaturban folk ensembles collect and perform, and that are most often referredto by the word fol’klor. Thus, there exists the ironic situation in which theancient ritual traditions that originated exclusively in rural locales are nolonger seen by local inhabitants as belonging to them. Instead, the inhabi-tants of tiny villages view nationally popular ‘folk songs’ as their own songs.Much of this repertoire of ‘folk songs’ was created and promoted by theSoviet system. Villagers identify with what they heard on the mass media –what was popular nationally when they were young.

Meanwhile, intellectuals who were alienated by the industrialization andnational uniformity wrought by the Soviets are turning to ancient pockets oflocal-ness for a sense of authenticity. The fact that many villagers themselvesdo not support and continue their ancient local traditions does not makesuch traditions any less attractive for these urban intellectuals. In fact, someurban revivalists try to enlist the help of the older villagers who rememberboth strands of folklore, the ‘ancient’ and the ‘Soviet.’ Thus, if from the1930s to the 1980s Soviet culture workers and people of the younger genera-tion did violence to village culture by publicly disdaining it, then in the pastthree decades zealous folklorists have had an insidious effect on villageculture by worshipping it.

Often, where village ensembles actively sing ancient traditional songs andcelebrate ritual holidays in the old manner, a revivalist group or musicologisthas influenced them – in effect, has educated them about what fol’klor is and

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why it is valuable. These revivalists are reconstructing a memory. (I recountin detail a story of such influence in the next chapter.) This phenomenonseemed clear to me in numerous situations in Russia and Bulgaria: whenurban intellectuals visit with the purpose of collecting, recording, andpreserving ancient traditions, villagers sing ancient songs because they knowthat is what interests the revivalists. But when no one guides the selection ofwhat to sing, retired villagers often sing songs of a different era.

When I stayed at the homes of – and participated in impromptu celebra-tions with – middle-aged and older villagers, or simply asked them ‘What doyou like to sing?,’ they often sang the songs they consider ‘folk’ [narodnye],that is, songs that were popular in their youth or that they heard repeatedlyon the radio or television. These songs included many that were composedby nineteenth century or Soviet composers; some were featured in films.They are known nationally, and did not originate in their local song tradi-tions, although they may be performed in a local style. Like the earlier ‘cruelromances,’ the texts of many of these songs reflect the point of view of awoman, and they express heartache and sadness at her failures in love. Forexample, when I visited villages in 1998–9, middle-aged and older femalevillagers liked to sing ‘You’re the Same as You Were’ (‘Kakim ty byl’), fromthe 1949 film Kuban Cossacks, about a girl who is in love with a trouble-some, wandering man; ‘So Many Golden Lights’ (‘Ognei tak mnogozolotykh’), from the 1957 film It Happened in Penkovo, about a girl in lovewith a married man; and ‘I Drank Myself Drunk’ (‘Napilas’ ia p’ianoi’),which expresses the point of view of a young wife whose husband ischeating on her.13

Even if these songs are more recent in origin, they continue a traditionestablished by the nineteenth and early twentieth-century genre of ‘cruelromances,’ which are also popular among this population. The older cruelromances include songs like ‘A Young Cossack Strolls by the Don River’(‘Po Donu guliaet kazak molodoi’) based upon an 1835 poem by DmitriOznobishin, about a girl who falls from a bridge on her way to be married toa Cossack. Both earlier romances and the Soviet-era songs produced outsidethe mechanisms of Soviet control speak about taboo subjects such as adul-tery, forbidden passion, and illicit sex – in fact, the same themes featured inthe soap operas they watch on television weekly.

Clearly, the demand for such texts does not arise from television itself, butrather both the songs and television shows fulfill an important need. Asresearch has shown, women form a large part of the audience for melo-drama. Tania Modleski argues that ‘women have been attached to[melodrama] because it provides an outlet for the repressed femininevoice.’14 Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger help to demonstrate whythat was true in the Soviet context: ‘as an alternative to the old intelli-gentsia’s valorization of reason, propriety, and public and politicalcommitment, melodrama offered its audiences a world of feeling, sensation,and private moral dilemmas,’ but also ‘explored the social issues that preoc-

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cupied its audiences and offered models of behavior for changing times.’15

While this is not the place for an extended analysis of the popular cultureconsumed by Russian village women, it seems clear that villagers choosesongs partly for the same qualities that they find in soap operas – access to aworld of feeling and the raising of important social issues that concernwomen, such as their treatment by men.

In an attempt to understand what makes villagers choose such songs, Iasked them why they liked them. The answer of Ekaterina Nikanorova (b.1931) and one of her singing partners, Aleksandra Kuliakova (b. 1940), inLiubovnikovo, Riazan’ oblast, was typical:

LO: Which songs [Soviet or ancient] are more valuable for you andwhy?

EN: For me they’re the same; whatever song is heartfelt is better forme.

LO: Why is a song valuable?EN: How to tell you?AK: Whichever one is about life [is valuable].EN: About life.AK: All of life is contained in songs.EN: They’re in our memory, that’s the kind of life [they express].

Nikanorova’s answer reflected the context of the situation: two female visi-tors in their late 30s, one from Moscow and one from America, were sittingin her living room on a Sunday afternoon in October, asking her about oldsongs. She had brought out a notebook filled with song texts that sheconsidered worth remembering, written neatly in her own handwriting.Nikanorova was well educated according to the standards for rural-dwellingwomen of her generation: she had completed 7 grades of elementary schooland two grades of pedagogical high school. As a young bride she hadworked in a starch factory in a nearby city for a few years, then moved backto the village and worked for 30 years in the supply department of thevillage’s kolkhoz before retirement. She was proud that she had never takenvacations. A physically large woman who was a natural leader and spoke hermind freely, Nikanorova would spontaneously start singing songs from hernotebook during the afternoon we spent with her. The other women presentwould join in. (Figure 7.3; CD track 15).

It seemed that Nikanorova’s song book reflected her love of songs andher desire to preserve them. Like the musicologists who had visited her tolearn her songs since the late 1970s, Nikanorova saw these songs as worthremembering, and she was choosy about which songs she liked and wouldsing. But unlike the musicologists, she did not use the criterion of ‘ancient’or ‘Soviet’ to decide which songs were worth preserving. Instead, her bookof songs aided her in remembering the ones she liked best, songs thatreminded her of various times in her life – perhaps the time she first learned

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the song, or some of the times she sang it together with people she knew andloved. As she sang songs and I asked her questions about them, she wouldtell stories about times that she had sung them – who she was with, what theoccasion was. These were the aspects of the songs that seemed important toher, and were part of what she meant when she called them ‘heartfelt.’Nikanorova’s comments about songs she did not like revealed that aesthetic(musical) criteria were also at work in her choice of songs. She liked songsthat ‘came out well’ and refused to sings ones that she felt did not. If I askedfor such a song, her fellow singers would try to convince her to sing it,saying ‘They need it in America’ – but Nikanorova was not always swayedby such pleas.

While not every group I visited was as choosy with their repertoire as wasNikanorova’s, I sensed that among the village ensembles of middle-aged andolder women with which I was acquainted, nearly all chose their songs basedupon a combination of ‘heartfelt’ and ‘memory’ qualities, along withaesthetic criteria – which ones ‘came out well.’16 Since I visited only ensem-bles that had had prior contact with folklorists and ethnomusicologists fromMoscow, these groups all had some consciousness of what was deemed valu-able by revivalists – that is, old local songs. They all knew and performedsuch songs, and could talk about their memories of old ritual celebrations(such as Whitsunday, which some still practiced, and the local version of thetraditional wedding, which most had not seen conducted since their youth).Nevertheless, many of the ensembles became more animated when they sangSoviet-era songs.

Changing Policies Towards Folklore

In talking to groups of retired female farm workers in villages it becameclear to me that national political changes had played an important role intheir formation and the selection of their repertoire. The case of anensemble from a different village in the same region as Liubovnikovo wasillustrative.

The group from Ermolovo was somewhat different from theLiubovnikovo ensemble in that it did not appear to be as swayed by the songchoices of one leader, and it seemed more active: they had just returnedfrom a concert in the region’s small main city, where they were warmlyreceived, and they were energized by this performance. The character oftheir group was expressed by one word that came up repeatedly as I askedthem about the songs that constituted their repertoire: ‘cheerful.’ Theirchoice of cheerful songs was clearly motivated not only by their own person-alities – as a group, they loved to joke and laugh, and some of theirmembers were locally famed for their witty chastushki – but also by thedemands of their audiences and of the regional culture administrators whoinvited them to sing. (Figure 7.2; CD track 16)

They explained that they were gathered together as an ensemble in the

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mid-1980s by the head of the local Village Council (sel’sovet, now calledadministratsiia). He worked with the group for five years, helping them torecruit members, to acquire a steady repertoire of ‘ancient’ (pre-Soviet)songs, and to prepare programs for specific occasions. They gave concerts inthe village school for children and at the klub for holiday occasions; theywere invited regularly to perform at celebrations at the regional center,Kasimov, and the provincial capital, Riazan’. The administrators wouldarrange for a bus to be sent to the village for them, and the members wouldreceive komandirovochnye – pocket money for the trip. Praskov’iaSmetannikova (b. 1920) and her relative Polina Smetannikova (b. 1924)described the group’s current status and repertoire in the following way:

PrS: And we’re ‘written in’ now. You can’t get away [from us], we’re aninstitution. We went to the Day of the City, in Kasimov, on the26th [September, 1998]. They gave us six numbers [to sing]. We didfour at the Soviet, where the fountains spray, and at Lenin Squareand at the Square of the Hero in Kasimov. Lots of people came.And we sang songs and danced.

LO: Did they tell you what to sing?PrS: We sing what we’ve learned, or the most cheerful ones that they

tell us. The most cheerful.PoS: The most cheerful ancient songs…LO: And you danced?PrS: (whispers) We only dance a little bit because our legs don’t stamp

anymore.

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Fig 7.2: Members of a local ensemble from Ermolovo

Praskov’ia’s and Polina’s comments indicate their pride in being invited toofficial holidays. Although they were indeed guided by the culture adminis-trators as to their choice of repertoire, they felt that the ‘cheerful’ characterof their ensemble had not been forced upon them, but arose naturally, andwas an asset to the group, since it won them a loyal audience and repeatoffers from administrators.

But Tatiana Miakisheva of Ermolovo (b. 1925) told me that peoplehadn’t always been so appreciative; it used to be that when they would singold songs, people even commented ‘What are you yelling for!’ The ancientfolk songs the old people knew weren’t included in official celebrations.Miakisheva and her fellow singers described this transition:

TM: Before [the founding of the ensemble], there was nothing.Everything was quiet before the dawn.

AM: Yes, and nobody did anything anywhere.PrS: And now without us they can’t do a single holiday in Kasimov.PoS: They count on us, they wait for us, Ermolovo.LO: And when Ermolovo is there, then it’s…PoS: more cheerful than anybody, they wait for us.

The women’s comments point out local manifestations of a change in Sovietpolicy toward folklore that occurred in the mid-1980s with the advent ofglasnost. They felt this change in their village through the beginning ofinterest in folklore on the part of village cultural administrators. The politicsof the Gorbachev era meant that the government began to place increasedattention on the folklore heritage that urban intellectuals had long deemedthe most valuable. During the glasnost era, although the state continued tosupport its network of professional and amateur song and dance ensembles,it also began to support the preservation of ancient local traditions.

Villages in other provinces told me similar stories of changes in theirensembles in the mid-1980s. Two women (b. ca. 1930) in the village ofTroitskoe in Kaluga province, who were involved in a vocal ensemble basedat the klub in their village, reported that the songs they sang on stage inproductions for local holidays after World War II were ‘modern, Sovietones.’ But in 1986 or 1987, with the coming of glasnost and an increase inattention being paid to the authentic village folklore, ancient songs began tobe in demand. Unlike the group in Ermolovo, these women did not say thatthings were ‘quiet before the dawn’ before glasnost. They had been partici-pating in local song culture both in an official capacity – they sang in a local‘folk’ chorus – and also unofficially. Their account of how Soviet holidayswere conducted in their village helped to explain how villagers still hadancient ritual songs in their repertoire when the glasnost-era interest in themaffected official policy. According to their description, ancient ritualscontinued to be practiced separately from the official Soviet onesthroughout the Soviet era.

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As an example, Zinaida Efremenkova described the Soviet replacement ofWhitsunday holiday, when the village traditionally makes a processionthrough the streets to throw birch wreaths and a huge birch ‘doll’ into theriver. This was traditionally called ‘Spirits’ Day’ because the spirits of deadpeople were said to walk about on that day. The new Soviet-style holiday,which was introduced in the late 1950s, was called the ‘Russian birchholiday’ [Prazdnik russkoi berezy]. In the conception Efremenkova describesbelow, the holiday no longer had the character of a pagan ritual that cele-brated spring greenery, insured the abundance of future crops, and appeasedtroubled spirits. Instead, in the Soviet version it had become a way to moti-vate agricultural workers. Nevertheless, villagers continued to celebrate theirtraditional pagan holiday throughout the Soviet years. They celebrated itafter the official part of the holiday was completed.

ZE: …and [there was also] ‘Russian birch holiday.’ How many peoplewere there!

LO: On what day was it celebrated?ZE: On Sunday [Spirits’ Day]. The sovkhoz organized it…. There was

a procession. And that was after the spring sowing was done –they would try to finish precisely before Spirits’ Day. They gaveprizes to the best workers [peredoviki].

LO: Did they make wreaths?ZE: They did. But afterwards. First was the celebration, then they went

to weave wreaths. After the holiday.LO: That part was not official.ZE: They had a parade of the best workers, and the director of the

sovkhoz gave a speech, and the party organization, and the secre-tary of the party organization. The most prominent people. Theynamed them by first and last name and gave prizes, and gave someof them valuable presents, good ones. My son got a set of china, itcost 47 rubles, that was expensive in those days.

LO: What for?ZE: He operated a combine. For the harvesting…LO: That was the official part. And then you went on stage?ZE: No, we didn’t perform on stage. Others performed, but during that

holiday we didn’t.LO: Was it simply a party?ZE: Yes, it was a party. There were sports games and football, and

various gorodki (traditional Russian game).…LO: So after the holiday you went to make wreaths.ZE: Yes, afterwards we went to make wreaths and sang and walked

and danced. We wove them and undid them.17

Efremenkova’s comments indicate that she did not view the Soviet celebra-tion as detracting from the village’s traditional celebration of Spirits’ Day.

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Although with my questions and comments I tried to make a separationbetween what I saw as the ‘official’ holiday and the ‘unofficial,’ traditionalholiday, Efremenkova resisted that categorization. To her, the Soviet part ofthe holiday was a positive addition to the traditional one: her son received aprize, people’s hard work was recognized, they all played games and hadfun. Afterwards, some of the villagers continued to celebrate the ancientholiday. There was room for both. I saw and heard of this phenomenon else-where in Russia: after glasnost and the fall of the Soviet Union, when itbecame possible to celebrate traditional holidays officially, it turned out thatpeople had been celebrating them all along. These holidays had not beenofficially sponsored, but no one had stopped them from celebrating them.The official Soviet strategy for addressing ‘superstitious’ and ‘religious’beliefs and rituals involved substituting other celebrations for them and, insome cases, shaming those who took part in them. But it is likely that insome villages such shaming did not take place or occurred only among partyworkers. Workers who were not party members, older people, and womenand children would likely not have been shamed for carrying on such pre-Revolutionary rituals.

Thus, when ancient songs came into demand in the mid-1980s, thevillage’s older women still knew these songs. They had been practicing themyearly since they were small. In some locales such songs had not beenincluded in official celebrations previously, but during the late 1980s thewomen were asked to make programs containing ancient songs for schoolsand holiday celebrations in the village and the regional center. Suddenly, thefact that they remembered these ancient aspects of their local traditions gavethem a certain cachet, especially to the urbanites who came to the villages asa ‘source’ for traditional folklore.

According to Efremenkova, the large, official celebrations that had beensponsored by the sovkhoz in the 1980s ended with the ‘change in power’ in1991. There was no longer money in the sovkhoz budget to put on suchevents. Instead, during the 1990s, the older women continued to celebratethe Spirits’ Day holiday in the traditional way, with wreaths and a doll madeout of birch branches, a procession, dancing, and songs. The holiday’scontinuance was spurred by the presence of a Moscow couple composed ofa folklorist and a filmmaker, Elena and Sergei Minenok, who were making afilm about the holiday. In 1999, the year I accompanied the Minenoks asthey finished up their filming, the holiday celebration seemed in danger ofdying out since many of the older women felt they could no longer walk inthe procession due to failing health. The holiday had been sustained by theMinenoks’ interest, but it could not continue unless younger people beganlearning the songs. Although younger people and children participated inthe holiday when I attended it in 1999, they did not appear to be singing.Still, it is possible that the tradition would continue even without the olderwomen’s songs. The leader of the village’s klub, a middle-aged woman,clearly enjoyed organizing the holiday, and other middle-aged and younger

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men and women and children took pleasure in the holiday’s lively, carnival-istic character, which was exemplified by the communal creation of alarger-than-life size doll made out of birch branches, who was made‘anatomically correct’ with a stuffed bra and a dish scrubber to represent hergenitalia.

The four villages I refer to above have different levels of participation infolklore, but all three are basically alike in several aspects: 1) they were origi-nally tapped as sources of folklore by Moscow folklorists or musicologists inthe 1970s or 1980s; 2) local culture workers made an effort to support folk-lore activities and, in some cases, helped to form a folklore performinggroup; 3) the folklore group is composed of middle-aged and older women(most are of retirement age); 4) these performing groups only meet to singwhen there is an occasion – such as when they are invited by local cultureworkers to perform in the village or city – and very little other organizedfolklore activities exist in their villages; 5) their performances were more indemand in the late 1980s and early 1990s; later, with the dismantling of theSoviet Union and a radical change in the economic system, funds to sponsorfolklore performances dried up and are only gradually being restored now insome locales.

I believe that this picture holds generally true for many villages. There arethree major exceptions to this picture, however, involving either less or moreorganized folklore performance. These are: 1) villages that have never beentapped as sources of folklore by scholars and where folklore has never beenencouraged by local culture workers. In such villages, folklore performancemay be sporadic or occur exclusively in family settings; 2) villages inCossack and other territories where folklore has become part of the move-ment for the revival of the group’s religious, ethnic, or social identity, and istherefore not only encouraged by local culture workers but also financed bylocal business leaders (as discussed in Chapter 6); and 3) villages where alocal individual or group has taken on the task of promoting folklore, andorganizes many folklore-related events on a regular basis.

Since I did not personally visit any villages of the first type, I cannotcomment in detail on them. However, if Riazan’ oblast is representative,then such villages are in the majority. In Riazan’ oblast, as of 1 January 11998, there was a total of 2,300 amateur artistic clubs in cities and villagesinvolving an average of 12.6 persons per group (this figure counts only clubsbased at Houses of Culture and does not include similar clubs at schools).Of these, approximately 900 groups were choruses and vocal ensembles,many of which had a repertoire that was at least partially composed of folk-loric or narodnyi (nationally popular) material. Another 90 groups calledthemselves ‘folklore ensembles,’ meaning they specialized in folklore or naro-dnyi repertoire. Many of the latter category were largely composed ofpensioners.18 If one compares this statistic with the population of the oblast,which in 1989 was more than 1.3 million, then it is clear that the majority ofthe population does not participate in such groups (the rate is 1 person in

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47). Although these statistics are incomplete (because they do not containschool groups and do not separate folk performing groups from othergroups), still they draw a general picture of the low rate of participation inall cultural activities, including folklore, in the provinces.

On the other side of the spectrum are regions or single villages wherefolklore activities were or are popular and well-supported. Some, like thevillage of Kochemary in Riazan’ oblast, have retained a repertoire of olderlocal songs partly due to the perseverance of former local organizers, someof whom even in the 1930s and 1940s did not insist that villagers sing thenew Soviet songs.

A different case is presented by the village of Vorob’evka in Voronezhoblast, where since the glasnost period the performance of folklore hasbecome an emblem of the village’s dedication to Russian tradition. Thevillage differs from the ones discussed above in that it is very large, with apopulation of 5,000, and is also the equivalent of the county seat, theraionnyi tsentr. Thus, it receives money from the government to hire cultureworkers and teachers. However, what this village does with its culture allot-ment – and the ways that it manages to increase its portion – is striking. Thefolklore-related activities of this village exceed those of much larger provin-cial cities.

Creative Support of Folklore Revival in South Russia: A CaseStudy

Vasilii Kozlov, the head of the Culture Department of Vorob’evka, has beenactively supporting folklore-related activities in the region since the mid-1980s. The glasnost and post-Soviet eras set up the necessary conditions forKozlov’s enterprise, since new economic freedoms allowed him to engage increative financing for the staffing and education of folk performing groups,and for the building of structures to house the workshops of professionalcraftspeople. In addition, Kozlov has put on four national folk festivals sincethe early 1990s, which have become a bi-annual affair. I have alreadydescribed and analyzed the festival itself in Chapter 5 as an example of themarriage of politics and folklore in today’s Russian culture. This section willexamine how Kozlov used the knowledge of Moscow musicologists and theresources of national and local government and the private sector to create akind of folklore-saturated village whose influence has spread to surroundingvillages and towns, and beyond.

The story of Kozlov’s enterprise allows us to see how contemporaryvillagers and rural life differ from the mythic conception. Rather than naiverural people remote from the concerns of the market-economy world whofaithfully preserve their ancient folk traditions, this story concerns politicallyand economically aware people who consciously use folk traditions ascultural capital. Their actions may be likened to contemporary strategies bywhich traditionally objectified populations have made themselves active re-

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appropriators of their cultural artifacts: for example, in the United Statesand Canada, indigenous communities now obtain grants to establish theirown museums, hire anthropologists, urge the repatriation of material collec-tions, and recycle written artifacts as local history and tribal lore.19 As wewill see, however, in the case of Vorob’evka what is re-appropriated oftendoes not belong to the particular local culture of the Voronezh village. Asdistinct from indigenous North Americans with a particular ethno-culturalidentity to reconstruct, these Russian villagers are primarily constructing anational identity. They adopt the principles of the urban revivalists theyemulate by learning to perform music and dance and do crafts from variousRussian and Cossack traditions.

When I met him in 1998 I was struck by Kozlov’s extremely dynamicpersonality. At that time 40 years old, Kozlov was tall, with dark blue eyesand a boyish face, rumpled black wavy hair, dressed in dark pants and a bluepolyester collared shirt. He had an unusual take-charge manner and acertain personal magnetism which he appeared to use to his advantage.Indeed, I was uncomfortable during the first few minutes after we metbecause his demeanor lacked the cool reserve characteristic of Russian busi-ness situations. Instead of introducing himself as ‘Kozlov, VasiliiViktorovich,’ as is the custom in formal settings, Kozlov stared directly intomy eyes for several seconds and introduced himself by his nickname, ‘Vasia.’I was so taken aback that, to my embarrassment, I had to ask him to repeatit. I continued to be embarrassed and uncomfortable around him until I gotused to his jocular, unprepossessing, and charismatic manner. Certainly, thiswas a man who mastered situations. He was not a small-town administratortrying to appear more important than he really was; rather, he appeared asan important man who tried to cultivate a down-to-earth image. That hedrove (and was sometimes chauffeured) around the village in a late-modelFord served to underline his combination of secure material, social, andpolitical status, hip Western image, and quirky style.

As Kozlov tells it, he was exposed to village folklore as a child because hismother, a milkmaid in a very small village (khutor’ Vysokii) in Voronezhoblast, sang local songs to him. She herself had learned the songs fromother young women from a neighboring village, Nikol’skoe, when sheworked with these women cutting peat near St Petersburg. In explaining howhe grew to devote his career to the preservation of ‘true’ folklore, Kozlovgave his mother’s love of folklore and of Pushkin (she owned two volumesof his works in a village that was too small to have a library) as two of themost important influences on him. As he characterized himself, he was acountry bumpkin who did not take his first trip by train (to a small townthat is one hour away by car) until he was in tenth grade, and in college stilldid not know that Stalin had died in 1953 (he thought he had been oustedfrom power). Yet, he said, he knew the difference between what he called the‘monumental Soviet choral art’ of the folk choruses and the ‘true roots’ ofRussian culture, i.e. village folklore.

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After serving in the army Kozlov received degrees in acting and theaterdirecting in Kiev, and moved to the big village, Vorob’evka, in 1982 to workas director of an amateur theater group. He was promoted to director of thevillage’s Department of Culture in 1985 and still holds that post at the timeof writing. Starting with his promotion in 1985 Kozlov began to devotehimself to creating an environment favorable for folklore in the village. Hecollected about ten specialists from surrounding areas and paid for theirresettlement in Vorob’evka. He had homes built for them or bought themexisting homes or apartments, and gave or procured them jobs as leaders oflocal amateur cultural groups or school clubs, and/or as teachers in schools.Kozlov acquired the funds for this endeavor by convincing government andParty officials that it was necessary. He said persuading them was not diffi-cult, first of all because Kozlov himself ‘possessed the language of ideology’which was necessary to talk to these officials; secondly, ‘every director whomI had to convince of the necessity of spending money on this had peasantroots – many of them. If you can make him look inside himself, [explainthings in terms of] his heritage, his roots, then you could find a commonlanguage.’

One of the specialists that Kozlov ‘procured’ in this way was the currentleader of one of the village’s folk performing groups, Volodia Talorin (b.1958). Talorin, a trumpet player who received a degree in choral and instru-mental directing at the Tambov filial of the Moscow Institute of Culture,came to Vorob’evka in 1989 from Podgornoe village in neighboringKalachevskii region. Before coming to Vorob’evka he had directed twoamateur choirs at the Kalachevskii sovkhoz: a young people’s folk (narodnyi)choir and an ‘ethnographic’ choir composed of older women. Revealing hisoppositional stance to the Soviet regime and its approach to folklore, he toldme, ‘They used to make the sovkhozes have a choir. They demanded it. Itwas usually about 30–40 people: the more the better. Quality was not impor-tant.’ The Voronezh oblast, which was composed of 32 regions, had 16 ofthese large, amateur folk choirs. Talorin said his work with this chorus wasgood experience for his future work in Vorob’evka – but he learned moreabout folklore from the ‘grannies’ in the ethnographic chorus.20

In order to teach Talorin more about the ‘true roots’ of folklore, Kozlovsent him and others from the village to Moscow to attend a seminar onauthentic folk music. Talorin came back full of enthusiasm about thespecialists he had met in Moscow, such as Volodia Ivanov and AndreiKabanov; but lamented that they would never come to such an out-of-the-way place as Vorob’evka (to get to Vorov’ebka from Moscow, one needs totake an overnight train to Voronezh and drive three more hours). Kozlovremembers his reaction: ‘Who says they’ll never come here?’ He traveled toMoscow, got Kabanov’s home phone number, and proceeded to convincehim to give a series of classes in folk performance and folklore collecting tothe local participants in the village’s existing folk ensemble, in exchange fortrain fare and a travel allowance. Kabanov’s classes took place once per

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month or so for several months, and both Kozlov and other members of thegroup remembered that at first most of them did not welcome whatKabanov taught them. ‘Two or three people accepted him, those who thinkmore deeply, while the rest slept during his classes, because it was hard tomove away from the mindset of the Soviet chorus with its emphasis onquick, spectacular results, to an approach that was oriented toward an innerunderstanding of folklore, not winning over an audience, not popularizingor showing off.’21 In inviting Kabanov, Kozlov situated himself as a forwardthinker, part of the urbanized village intelligentsia (‘those who think moredeeply’), someone who appreciated the priceless authentic folk culture thatwas hidden in the village.

Eventually the classes had an effect, and the members of the ensemble –who previously had never sung unarranged village folk songs on stage – notonly had their voices ‘opened’ by Kabanov and learned a significant amountof the Cossack repertoire that was popular with urban ensembles, but alsobegan to enjoy hunting for interesting local folklore material in neighboringvillages. They apprenticed themselves to the mother of one of the members,who lived in the nearby village, Nikol’skoe, which was very well known forits musical folklore. Kozlov’s wife Irina, a participant in the chorus, remem-bered a particular song they tried for half a year to learn from NinaPeregudova’s mother. They all loved the song, but it was very difficult tomake it sound the way Nina’s mother said it should.

We made scandals and fought among ourselves [over that song]. Wecouldn’t make it work. We didn’t know what do to with it. And Ninatortured herself too, she said, finally, ‘OK, we won’t sing such songs,we’ll sing easier ones, bold, dashing ones where you learn it, you sing it,and that’s it.’ But Andrei Sergeevich [Kabanov] helped us accept thissong too, and it went on and on like that, because the material is abottomless barrel.22

The Moscow musicologist brought these villagers new appreciation of theirown families. But he also gave them cultural cachet that allowed them toparticipate in the vogue for ‘authentic’ folklore. Besides performing often atholidays and special events in villages and towns in Voronezh oblast, thegroup traveled widely to festivals in the USSR and toured abroad to Egypt,Hungary, and Poland in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Meanwhile, Kozlovexpanded the opportunities for learning by inviting not only Kabanov but aseries of other Moscow specialists in various aspects of Russian folklore,including dance and musical instruments. Kozlov wanted his group to beable to do more than just sing: he embraced the syncretic view of villageculture that was common among revivalists and wished to have everyone ‘beorganic – he has to be able to control his body, he has to play an instrument,’and to acquire a variety of traditional skills. It was as if villagers werebecoming ‘true villagers’ again (according to the reigning myth of villagers’

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wholeness) – ironically, under the tutelage of Moscow intellectuals. (CDtrack 17)

In its performances, the group decided it would not simply stand andsing, like villagers in ‘ethnographic ensembles’ do – they also emulated someof the Pokrovsky Ensemble’s unorthodox stage style. Taking advantage ofKozlov’s expertise in theater directing, the group used the dramatic arts in itsproductions. Under the influence of these new activities several other folkgroups, including a Cossack group and several children’s groups, sprung upin Vorob’evka. And then in the early 1990s Kozlov’s folkloric enterpriseexpanded even more. With Kabanov’s help and expertise, Kozlov startedfolklore performing groups in two other towns and villages in Voronezhoblast; he constructed a building in Vorob’evka to house folk crafts; and hebegan to organize celebrations or, as they came to be called, ‘all-Russianfestivals,’ in Vorob’evka. All this new activity was financed through newlyavailable private sources as well as through Kozlov’s expert manipulation ofestablished government channels.

Kozlov’s aim in starting folklore groups in other towns and villages wastwofold. First, these groups would provide support and camaraderie foreach other. ‘It was nice that there were already three groups; we couldsocialize. And we did some seminars together, at our place, and people camefrom different areas.’ Second, he felt that the existence of such groups would

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Fig 7.3: Members of a local ensemble sing for visitors

help to further promote folklore in Voronezh oblast and in Russia ingeneral. Kozlov was on a mission: ‘Simply, our good, Russian song culturerestores our genes.’ For Kozlov, true folklore contained a high moral stance,a dignity that would help to revive Russian society. He realized thatauthentic folklore, like true art, would always be given inadequate attentionunless someone like himself sought resources to give it the publicity itdeserved.23

The need for resources lay behind another of Kozlov’s projects, the craftcenter. Not only would the center revive ancient arts and help to supportlocal craftspeople, but it would make a profit that could be used to financeother folklore-related projects. Currently, the center contains a wood dryingroom that produces oak for building and furnishing homes, a commoditythat is much in demand by the ‘new Russians,’ Russia’s nouveaux riches.‘They want everything to be made of oak, and to be beautiful, and theyaren’t stingy with their money,’ Kozlov remarked. Craftspeople at the centermake artistic objects out of the wood, and some of the wood is sold aslumber. The center’s most profitable venture is a blacksmithy that createswrought iron gates, fences, and decorations, currently also in high demandfor high-class buildings. Kozlov commented on his plans for the black-smithy: ‘There’s a two year waiting list for the blacksmiths to join it. I needto create another brigade of blacksmiths, five or six people, to give themanother building, and then it will be in excellent shape in terms ofmoney…There are a lot of orders, a huge amount of them.’24 In short, ‘folk-lore’ had truly become a commodity, but unlike his urban intellectualcounterparts, Kozlov was not afraid to exploit it – and shamelessly todiscuss the success of his enterprise with a foreign visitor.

The idea for the folk festival grew from the opening of the craft center in1992. In order to celebrate it, Kozlov wished to invite craftspeople fromother areas to see the new center and swap trade secrets with his staff. But herealized it would not be a celebration without a performance aspect. Heinvited folklore performing groups from Moscow and other areas, and cameto the conclusion that what he was planning was indeed a festival. Themodest first festival grew into a more involved one, for which Kozlov appliedfor and received the status of ‘all-Russian’ from the Ministry of Culture.Performing groups and craftspeople from all over Russia attend the festivaland all of the several hundred participants receive free accommodation andthree meals a day during its three days.

This ‘all-Russian’ status was important because it meant Kozlov wouldreceive earmarked funds from the Ministry of Culture’s budget, and wouldnot have to beg for funding for each biennial festival. The Ministry ofCulture would give 30 percent of the budget of the festival. The proceedsfrom the craft center and from other business ventures, as well as donationsin produce from local merchants such as a vodka factory, a meat producer,and 16 local communal farms, would form the other 70 percent.

To arrange the donations from local merchants was a large task in itself,

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but Kozlov’s biggest innovation was in how he obtained Ministry of Culturefunding. He explained that the economic system in Russia is currently cash-poor, and for that reason it is running on a kind of modification of thebarter system. Many factories and companies owe money to the oil and gascompany (Gazprom) for gas. Because they have no cash, they pay the gascompany in products, such as sugar, liquor, cars, and metal pipes.Meanwhile, the gas company owes large amounts of taxes to the govern-ment. These taxes are partly paid by passing on the products which the gascompany has received in exchange for its gas. The Ministry of Culture getsits share of the taxes in products, which it then must sell in order to financecultural events with cash.

Kozlov’s innovation involved approaching the Ministry of Culture andoffering to take his money for the festival in the form of products. In doingso, he said he was making things easier for the Ministry, who had less workto do to dispose of its income. When I spoke to him in May 1999, Kozlovhad received three wagonloads – and was expecting five more – of metalpipes, of the kind used to carry natural gas for heating. He said he likedreceiving pipes because he needed no special license to sell them; they couldbe sold freely on the open market, and natural gas was becoming an increas-ingly popular source of heat. Previously, he had received a shipment of 20minivans, but the license to sell them was too expensive for him to make aprofit from the sale. Apparently, Kozlov had received some help in arrangingthese deals, because he was giving half of the money from the sales to theVoronezh oblast government.25

While Kozlov’s high-level involvement in the business world might notseem surprising to a Westerner, it is exceedingly rare in Russia. Most low-level government bureaucrats like Kozlov – particularly those from smalltowns or villages and especially those in charge of culture – do not getinvolved in the financial dealings of the Moscow Ministry of Culture. Mostadhere to time-honored bureaucratic practices and apply for money fromState agencies but are often told that no money exists. Many folklore organi-zations, including ones in big cities like Moscow and Novosibirsk, areconstantly trimming budgets and cutting corners to stay afloat.26

According to Kozlov, when he first started as director of the village’sCulture Department he himself played by the rules, operating through tradi-tional bureaucratic channels. Eventually, however, he figured out how toplay the financial game in a way that got the Ministry of Culture’s attention:

I went for several years to the capital and didn’t understand thateveryone is joking and making fun of me, saying ‘You see, there’s thebudget, you have to watch the television, and when they say on televi-sion that the budget is [done], then you need to come and then maybewe can organize some money.’ And then I began to understand the gistof this situation. Now I gradually see that you don’t need to work withmoney.

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Certainly Kozlov is right when he says that anyone who wants to organizefolklore events in Russia today needs to know how to do more than just playthe balalaika. ‘You need to be a kind of matchmaker, who would mix thingsup and then rearrange them, and convince everyone, so that the event canhappen.’ Perhaps one needs to be, like Kozlov, not just a matchmaker but anOstap Bender-type character, a wheeler-dealer who is not afraid to bendrules and work on many fronts in order to achieve his goal. Unlike OstapBender, the fictional hero of Il’f and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs (1928), Kozlovwas not a conman, but he did make especially creative use of generallyaccepted second-economy practices such as blat, which Sheila Fitzpatrickdefines as ‘the informal system of reciprocal favors through which citizensobtained scarce goods and services.’ Perhaps the most interesting similaritybetween Kozlov and Bender is their ‘great talent’ to ‘ “speak Bolshevik” withtotal assurance and fluency’ and ‘to use this linguistic fluency’ whereverneeded to achieve their ends.27 If Bender used his linguistic prowess toimpersonate officials, Kozlov used it to convince both officials and busi-nessmen of the ideological urgency of his folkloric enterprise.

Whereas urban revivalists adhere to and promote the myth of the ruralsetting and of folk culture as a sacred sphere both untouched by and unin-terested in business, it turns out that to achieve a revival of folk traditionsone must learn how to manipulate the world of commerce. AlthoughKozlov’s particular manner of effecting financial transactions may be repre-sentative of the post-Soviet economy, the basic principle is one that has longruled the very notion of folk revival. Bausinger writes, ‘Folklorism is themeans used to protect the allegedly essential folk culture from actual devel-opment, and it is done with the help of all the technology of the cultureindustry.’28

In order to observe the fruits of Kozlov’s organizational efforts, I visitedperformances and rehearsals of some of Vorob’evka’s folklore groups(including two children’s groups) and traveled to Novokhopersk, a smalltown that hosts one of the folklore groups Kozlov helped to start. In almostall cases I saw active, enthusiastic groups whose participants are veryconscious of their role as preservers of a national treasure. However, theirperformances were of fairly poor artistic quality. I played my recordings ofthese local groups for Andrei Kabanov in Moscow. Since he had originallybrought this music to this area, I was curious to see how he would evaluatethe results of his work. He pointed out many musical flaws in their perfor-mances: for example, one director had all or most of the children singing theupper part on one Cossack song, while most should have been singing thelower part, and the wrong accordion was used so that the song was pitcheduncomfortably low; in another children’s group, a song from the NekrasovCossacks was again pitched too low and an upper part had been added thatsounded strange. But despite the poor musical quality, Kabanov said theoverall result was positive.

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What is folklore? It is goodness, it protects us from evil. There’s no evilin it…. There’s a group, they meet regularly, it’s a part of their life. Fromour point of view it’s ugly, but this will gradually become a local style.Like a crooked birch in the forest, this is part of nature, and I’m inter-ested in it…. If they sang just like I taught them, it’d be just ‘by thebook,’ which is a dead end…. Folklore was always able to avoid thatdead end. With folklore, you should never copy anything.

Kabanov said he realized that in evaluating his former pupils he was in abind common to all teachers: to assert his own notion of what is ‘right’ in afolklore performance would be dogmatic and would end in failure. That is, ifhis students simply reproduced what they were taught, the result would belifeless and lack creativity. For Kabanov, the drive to ‘preserve’ folkloreimplies precisely such a philosophical problem. One cannot preserve folkloreas a living phenomenon without also creating anew:

There are two positions within folklore that are always at odds witheach other: preservation and composition. They are like speech and thenorms of the language. We always want these to be the same, but they’renot. I can’t [speak strictly according to norms], I speak my own way….If they were the same, it’d be flat, boring.29

Kabanov’s equation of poor-quality folklore performance with a ‘crookedbirch’ is an unusually liberal view among musicologists – especially thosetrained at elite institutions like the Moscow Conservatory, where Kabanovreceived his degree. Most would deplore the degradation of the purity of the‘original’ folklore. Nonetheless, his comments point to an important conclu-sion for this study: he argues that the fruits of folklorism should be regardedas a kind of authentic folklore itself. Even if the participants in Vorob’evka’sfolklore ensembles learn and perform music and dance from other regionaltraditions (Don Cossack music was popular in Vorob’evka, although therewere few existing Cossack populations in the oblast), this material may beseen as an essential part of the local popular culture and hence, a part of theevolving local folkloric style.

However, Kabanov’s comments do not address some of the essentialproblems connected with the expansion of the folklore movement from thecity to the village. The methods of the folklore movement require transmis-sion based upon contact with educated specialists and the use of audiorecordings. While city ensembles – including those in provincial capitals –can draw upon the resources of universities or houses of culture, villageslack such means. Kozlov avoided this problem initially by inviting specialistsfrom the capital, but eventually, such contact with Moscow became lessfrequent. Beyond the workshops included in the biannual festival, Kozlovdoes not bring in specialists to educate the leaders of the Vorob’evka folk-lore ensembles. Without the benefit of continual advice and correction from

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educated specialists, local collectives must rely on local resources. It is truethat villagers do have proximity to folklore informants (in their own orneighboring villages), but often lack transportation to visit them. Further, inthe case of some of the Vorob’evka and Novokhopersk collectives, the mate-rial they perform is not of local origin, so local informants are of no help.These directors of the groups have very little professional experience withfolklore, or music generally; although they love folklore and appreciate theinitial assistance and repertoire material they received from Kabanov, theycannot create groups with a high level of artistic quality without continuededucation. But to further their education would require time and money thatare often not available.

With their relatively low salaries and minimal associated benefits, groupdirectors can rarely afford to put continuous time and energy into theirensembles. For example, the director of one children’s folklore ensemble is afull-time teacher with no experience in folklore beyond the tuition shereceived from Kabanov. She conducts the twice-weekly folklore group as anextra load, for which she receives four hours of pay per week. The extraamount is very little: about $5 per month. Her husband, who does have amusical education (a degree in accordion from a specialized music highschool), does not teach folklore for a living because, she said, if he did ‘we’dhave nothing to live on.’ His only source of income from folklore involvesperforming Cossack folk music abroad, mostly in Germany. This attitudetoward folk music as a non-lucrative hobby is shared by the children in herfolklore group, she said. She knows of none from her group who have goneon to study folklore performance professionally: ‘It’s not prestigious now.The salaries are too low.’ Instead, children are interested in foreignlanguages and subjects related to technology.30

Despite folklore’s reputation as a field that does not generate income,Vorob’evka’s success with popularizing folklore has had concrete resultseven outside of its surrounding territory. My stay in Vorob’evka in Spring1999 coincided with the visit of a group of performers from Semiluki, afairly large city some 10 km from the oblast capital, Voronezh. They haddriven three hours by bus to participate in a cultural exchange withVorob’evka. Performances of the Semiluki groups, including a folkloreensemble, were held in Vorob’evka’s main square, and later Vorob’evka’sperformers would travel to Semiluki. The exchange had been ongoing fortwo years, and a Vorob’evka official told me Semiluki had initiated thecontact because of Vorob’evka’s active cultural scene.

The director of the Department of Culture from Semiluki told me thatthe city had become interested in folklore activities thanks to Vorob’evka’sinspiration. When the exchanges with Vorob’evka started two years ago thecity put an advertisement in the newspaper looking for a folklore specialist.They hired a young woman (age 18), Elena Tychinina, who had just gradu-ated from the Voronezh music high school with a major in directing folkloreensembles. She directs an amateur adult ensemble, composed of local geog-

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raphers and other professionals, that rehearses twice weekly at the city’sPalace of Culture. They sing village music from Voronezh and neighboringoblasts. Although her education acquainted her mostly with arranged folk-lore, Tychinina said she prefers unarranged, authentic village music. When Ispoke with her, she was planning to introduce a children’s group in the nearfuture; the city did not currently have one. In order to learn from the experi-ence of other such groups, the city was planning to host a festival ofchildren’s folklore collectives from Voronezh and surrounding oblasts.31

For me, Semiluki’s newfound interest in village folklore offered furtherproof of Vorob’evka’s broad influence and suggested that the chain of folk-lore revival had come full circle. With the visits of Kabanov and otherspecialists from Moscow to Vorob’evka, the urban folk revival movementhad changed the culture of a village. Now, with Semiluki’s appeal toVorob’evka for help and inspiration, the village folk revival movement washelping to change the culture of a city. Yet clearly, what would be trans-mitted to Semiluki would include folk music and dance from other Russianregions that had been filtered through the perspective of villagers with littleacademic background in folklore.

Was this an isolated incidence or was it happening elsewhere in thecountry? My sense was that this chain of influence – in which the urbanrevival movement inspired both village and also provincial city movements –was not common, but that it did occur in several instances, increasingly inthe 1990s. Even without being asked by the villages themselves, manyrevivalists were taking it upon themselves to found folklore schools andamateur young people’s ensembles in villages and small towns. Often thesevillages and towns were chosen by the revivalists because they were alreadyhubs of folklore activity (that is, the village had long possessed a strong folk-lore group composed of older residents) or were located close to cities withstrong urban folklore centers or schools. For example, a recent graduate ofthe Folklore Department of the Voronezh Conservatory told me that he hadfounded an amateur adult folk chorus in one of the villages surroundingVoronezh, and traveled there weekly to conduct rehearsals. Both Dorokhovaand Shchurov, Moscow musicologists, told me of separate villages inBelgorod region that had started children’s folklore schools with the supportof revivalist Moscow scholars.

In all of these instances where folklore is reimplanted in the village, itseems that the results will always be a ‘crooked birch.’ The concept of purityin folklore is an invention of scholars that has little relation to real life.Moreover, what is judged by them as ‘impure’ may be viewed from anotherperspective as productive and interesting. I return to these issues in thefollowing chapter to look more closely at the interactions of villagers withurban revivalists as the latter try to return village rituals to their ‘original’state. It turns out that in some cases villagers, confronted with the plea toreturn to earlier forms, do not comply but enact a kind of tacit resistance.

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Although performance of music and folk traditions was a central focus ofthe Russian folk revival movement’s origins, in fact it formed only a smallpart of the ultimate goals of its leaders. Many revivalists were interested notjust in music, but in returning that music and its context to everyday life;they paid particular attention to ritual since it was one of the main contextsin which folklore was included in daily life.1 In the early 1980s AndreiKabanov founded an experimental, ‘non-stage-oriented’ folklore ensembleand together with other groups in the urban folklore movement tried toidentify situations in everyday city life in which folklore could play a naturalrole. They discovered moments – weddings, parties and celebrations forvarious occasions (such as birthdays and national holidays), family celebra-tions (such as anniversaries), and picnics, barbeques, and other outings –when traditional village songs and dances could play an organic role andgradually become habitual. Some organized rituals became established asyearly, public events: for example, the Moscow women’s group Folk Holidayarranged a holiday celebration on Willow Sunday, the Russian Orthodoxequivalent of Palm Sunday, in a Moscow park and invited other folk ensem-bles and school groups – and anyone who happened to be passing by – tojoin them.2

Other groups focused their attention upon the ‘preservation’ of ritual bymaking video documentaries of traditional village holiday celebrations.Often they tried to film the ritual in the village where it originated, even ifthe locals, who had never before been filmed, needed to be coached aboutwhat to say and do. And some urban ensembles learned songs, texts, andgestures from published sources in order to reconstruct village rituals them-selves. They would often take performances of such rituals on stage toschools, museums, concert halls, and other venues.

In their writings on the importance of preserving ritual, revivalists theo-rized that the extensive and complex belief system associated withtraditional holiday contexts might provide a solution to ‘problemsconnected with the industrial character of contemporary civilization, suchas the problem of the so-called “deficit of human contact,” personal self-expression, passivity with regard to cultural creation, and consumerism in

8 Making Memory: How UrbanIntellectuals Reinvent RussianVillage Traditions

the area of culture, and others.’3 They hoped that folklore, properlyimplanted into Russian culture, could help to counter such trends. MarinaNovitskaia, an author of textbooks for use in elementary Schools of FolkArts wrote in 1990: ‘The vital necessity of returning the enduring achieve-ments of folk art to our everyday life, to holidays, to the everyday culture ofsocial interaction, to our spiritual world, to the sphere of ethical andaesthetic values is becoming more and more consciously felt, and that returnto specific national features is becoming more and more urgent.’4

In arguing for the importance of the return of folklore to everyday lifeand in linking the presence of folklore in daily life with national characteris-tics, revivalists draw upon a central notion in Slavophile thought.Slavophiles idealized the Russian’s love of ritual, claiming that adherence totradition was one of the essential characteristics of Russians, that it reflectedtheir collectivity and contributed to their strength as a people.5 While therhetoric of the late-twentieth-century revivalists does not generally engage inthe idealization typical of the Slavophiles, the productions of the revivalists– performances, holiday celebrations, videos, textbooks, and the like – oftenidealize the way of life that they wish to implant in modern Russian society.Ultimately, such idealization can lead to generalization – a notion of ageneral Russianness expressed in folklore, ignoring regional differences –and sometimes falsification reminiscent of the fakelore of the Stalin era.

Part of the revivalist strategy to re-implant folklore into the daily life ofmodern culture has involved working with villages in order to invite theactive remembrance of ancient songs, and the celebration of traditional pre-revolutionary holidays and parish saint’s days [prestol’nye prazdniki]. Whilemany of these projects have been successful in encouraging the active perfor-mance of traditions, they often involve problematic interactions betweenvillage and city cultures, between agricultural workers and urban intellec-tuals. Because of the cultural gulf separating the village and city spheres,urban revivalists sometimes continue to play out the Soviet-era dynamic ofpatronage (shefstvo), in which intellectuals from the city were expected to bein charge of the cultural ‘development’ of the village. Under that program(which lasted from the 1920s to the 1980s), city intellectuals were supposedto ‘bring villagers into the twentieth century’ culturally by exposing them toaccepted world classics and modern methods and materials in the arts. Inthis new version of that practice, the urban revivalists endeavored toencourage and enable villagers to return to their ‘roots,’ to re-enact the prac-tices that had been shunned since the Revolution. From a Soviet standpoint,these revivalists were asking people to dust off their forgotten ‘museumexhibits’ and bring them back to life. In the remainder of this chapter, Iexamine this patronage dynamic by looking closely at a few examples ofrevivalist strategies.

Making Memory 205

Returning Memory to the Village

Many revivalist musicologists attempt to return songs to their ‘sources’ – thememories of villagers – with the goals of ‘preserving’ what they call ‘ancient’culture by keeping it active in people’s minds, and also of enabling villagersto demonstrate their ancient traditions in the dual contexts of local celebra-tions and wider exposure such as nationally broadcast televisiondocumentaries. Since scholars want villagers to set an example and providean education in old traditions, they exhort them to preserve certain parts oftheir traditions, while ignoring other parts.

Natalia Giliarova, professor of musicology at the Moscow Conservatory,has been working on the folklore of Riazan’ oblast since 1970, and hasbecome a nationally recognized expert on the folk singing of this region. Shesings in and directs a chorus, the Moscow Conservatory Folk Ensemble, thatspecializes in the music of this area. In late July 1996, as part of a seminarshe and I organized together, she took a group of ten Americans toLiubovnikovo in Riazan oblast to visit a village singing collective she hadbeen researching for several years.6 Excited by the presence of the Americanguests, the seven women in the village group, almost all retired collectivefarm workers, sang a number of songs from contemporary genres, such asSoviet-era songs and late-nineteenth-century romances. After listening forsome time, the musicologist herself launched into a song, ‘Seiu veiu’ (‘I sow,I winnow’), a dance song whose text reflects the agricultural way of life ofthe village prior to industrialization. Giliarova had learned the song fromthis same village eight years previously, and had not only published it butincluded it in the repertoire of her ensemble. By contrast, only two of thevillage women knew the song; the younger ones did not.

The village women followed along haphazardly but enthusiastically,joining in toward the second half of each verse, when the words wererepeated, and sometimes whooping and clapping. Sixty-five-year-oldEkaterina Nikanorova, the unofficial leader of the local ensemble, tried tostart a verse herself, but Giliarova re-started the same verse. Nikanorova hadsung it differently, more plainly, without a swoop on the syllable ‘Okh’ priorto the first words. On a subsequent verse, Nikanorova sang along withGiliarova on the solo introductory phrase. When the song was over, one ofthe women declared, ‘We have to learn that song right.’ Giliarova responded:‘Yes, you should learn it!’ A second woman exclaimed, to general laughter:‘Natalia Nikolaevna, come and teach it to us!’ As the laughter subsided,Giliarova told them: ‘I will come! I’ll shoot a television program here.’ Later,the musicologist reiterated her plans, saying ‘I’m not going to leave you inpeace.’ As if suggesting they should do the same, she gave them the exampleof another village in which, as in theirs, only a few older folks couldremember old songs. In that village, the older group took in three younger,middle-aged women – ‘Just your age,’ she pointed to the middle-aged womanwho had not known how to sing ‘Seiu veiu.’

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Making Memory 207

At first, nothing came of it. They got mixed up, they were afraid, theydidn’t know, they were all over the place. That was it! The older womenmade everyone write the words down. Then Mar’ia would start thesong, and they’d look at the notebook the whole time. They’d look whilesinging, and then slowly, they wouldn’t have to look anymore. But theyadded three voices, younger ones.7

This scene provides us with an example of the interaction between academicand rural culture in Russia, and a glimpse into the working methods andgoals of many Soviet-trained musicologists. It also provides us with insightinto the constructed quality of memory and tradition in post-Soviet Russia.

Several assumptions are at work in this situation. Both the villagers andthe musicologist assume 1) that there exists a ‘correct’ way of singing thesong, and 2) that only the musicologist knows this ‘correct’ version. As Iaccompanied Russian folklorists and musicologists on field expeditions inthe late 1990s, the combination of these two principles was a repeatedtheme. It suggested a profound respect for academic learning, a reflection ofthe longstanding cultural tradition in Tsarist and Soviet Russia that HelenaGoscilo calls ‘Russia’s peculiar penchant for ideological legitimationthrough “high” art.’8 In this case, the musicologist clearly functions as arepresentative of ‘high’ culture as opposed to the villagers’ ‘low’ culture. Thisrelationship of upper to lower strata, elite to folk, is bound up with the nine-teenth-century definition of ‘the folk’ as European peasant, and their ‘lore’as the proper object of study of urban scholars.9 Such a definition was obvi-ously accepted unquestioningly by the participants in this scene.

I followed up on this interesting phenomenon a few years after the inci-dent described above; I was with musicologist Elena Bogina (Giliarova’sstudent) in the village of Kochemary, also in Riazan’ oblast. After Boginacorrected the informants, I asked them whether they liked being coached inthis manner. They answered with a clear ‘yes.’ They said they thought hercomments helped them sound better, and that she knew how their musicshould sound. They respected her opinion and trusted that she was bringingthem closer to the ‘original’ style of their village. That this was a goal theythemselves strove for could clearly be seen in their actions while we werestaying in the village: these women corrected a song text themselves by goingto an older woman who was reputed to know many songs and checking theirtext with her. It turned out they had combined three separate song texts,spiritual verses (dukhovnye stikhi) that were sung to similar melodies. Theylater insisted on singing the songs ‘properly’ for our recording.10

A third aspect of our two scenes is the depiction of urban intellectualsteaching villagers traditional songs. In the first case, the songs to be ‘re-implanted’ are ones that the folklorist originally learned from the samecommunity. The folklorist now ‘returns’ these songs to their ‘home’ byencouraging the group to learn them, re-learn them, or to ‘remember’ wordsor stylistic details. The scholar functions as a bridge between the old,

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organic life of the song (the time when the song lived ‘naturally’ in people’smemories) and the new, ‘revived’ life of the song. He or she ideally functionslike a computer storage disk, ‘uploading’ information after the computer’shard disk has ‘crashed’ and lost its memory. However, as could be seen in theabove scenes, whereas the computer restores everything that was on the disk,the folklorist must choose, based upon her own memory, tastes, training andother factors, what to restore. This method involving intervention of a folk-lorist may be contrasted with older, more spontaneous traditional methodsof transmission of folklore in Russia, in which people learned frommembers of their own communities, and made their own decisions aboutwhat was worth maintaining as part of an active repertoire and what todiscard because it was no longer relevant or appreciated.11

In fact, Giliarova is engaged in even more active work than simplyrecording and ‘uploading’ information. She is engaged in activism in thecommunity and nationally. In the above scene, she suggests a practical wayto keep the singing group from falling apart due to lack of enthusiasm,personnel, or opportunities to perform. She outlines how the youngermembers of the group may learn the songs by having written texts in frontof them and following the older ones when they sing. Further, she tries toget the women to work toward the goal of presenting their local songs andholidays on a television documentary. Giliarova pointed out that the act ofmaking the documentary will help them to focus on learning certain oldsongs; subsequently, it may be easier to keep those songs in their activememories. Primarily, however, a documentary will serve to educate a newgeneration, which may one day ‘wake up’ and begin to value its heritageafter these informants are gone. For Giliarova and for many other revival-ists, video documentary functions as another kind of storage device thatboth motivates village performers to ‘preserve’ certain elements of culture,and disseminates this constructed ‘information’ to the public.

Giliarova’s activism is further shown by her use of her own ensemble as ameans of preserving and even restoring songs. Following in the steps ofAnna Rudneva, her mentor at the Moscow State Conservatory, Giliarovahas learned to restore songs that have been mostly forgotten by villagers.12

With a text and one or two vocal parts, Giliarova and her chorus can, givenher knowledge of the local style, bring a ‘dead’ song back to life in folk poly-phonic performance. ‘One must preserve a good, artistic, good-qualityperformance. For now, only we [the urban ensemble] can do this.’ Giliarovadescribed to me how when she first started to visit some villages, they sang‘badly.’ But she was able to encourage them to restore their repertoires to amore acceptable level, that is, to include polyphonic performances of songsthat date back to before the Soviet period. However, village ensembles them-selves are often not able to restore songs that are left in the memory of justone member, either because the other villagers are not sufficiently familiarwith the style of the song to be able to improvise with it; or because they donot see a reason for learning it. In this context, the folklorist and her

performing ensemble function not so much as a computer storage disk,restoring erased memory, as painters trying to restore frescoes in a church byextrapolating from existing designs. Such artists have not only to replicatewhat existed but to imagine in what ways the designs were used to decoratethe church space, what colors may have been used and how those colorsoriginally looked (e.g. bright or muted). In Russian folk music, the artist’stoolbox is her performing ensemble: a folklorist alone cannot reproducepolyphony.

The method by which Giliarova reproduces polyphony seems simple to acasual observer. She has her group listen to a recording of the song as sungby villagers, and after they have understood the text, she asks them to singit. She then corrects them on vocal timbre, styling, tempo, melodic contourand polyphonic structure by demonstrating with her own voice or with thevoices of more experienced members.13 The method relies on the scholar’sinterpretation of what would constitute the most ‘authentic’ version of thesong. Based upon her fieldwork in the region, Giliarova must guess whattextual variants, vocal timbres and tempos are the most representative of‘ancient’ (at least pre-Revolutionary, and often older) music-making.Furthermore, since the only informants are generally retired women,Giliarova must imagine what the women sounded like when they wereyounger and had greater energy; and she has to estimate what men wouldhave sung. The reconstruction process also hinges on her ensemble havingan excellent knowledge of the traditions with which they work. For thisreason, Giliarova limits the group’s repertoire to music from a few selectedregional traditions: Riazan’ and Penza oblasts, and the Volgograd Cossacks.The members of the groups regularly go on academic expeditions withGiliarova to acquaint themselves with these traditions. (CD tracks 18–19)

Thus Giliarova’s work occurs on parallel fronts: ‘educating’ villagers inorder to keep traditions ‘alive’ (at least long enough to record on video); andeducating urban young people in the art of singing in the local styles ofcertain villages. The goal in both cases, she said, is to show folklore to ‘anaudience made up of children.’ By exposing children to ancient Russiantraditions, Giliarova hopes ‘to preserve’ Russian folk culture – and mostimportantly, ‘to preserve people’s unconscious perception of the folksong.’14 Her comment returns to the notion of ‘genetic memory’. While herapproach has strong foundations in established scholarship and has beensuccessful in providing contemporary approximations of older folk art, it isclear that it perpetuates the shefstvo dynamic and the notion that only‘ancient’ elements of village culture are valuable.

Other Approaches

Some revivalists have cultivated other strategies for relating to their infor-mants, in which the informant/scholar dichotomy is minimized, andinteractions are modeled upon traditional group structures of the family

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and its larger community. Performing groups that include young ‘native’carriers of a given tradition (such as the Stanitsa ensemble of Volgograd),that cultivate mentoring relationships with older ‘masters’ of traditional arts(such as Little Spindle, the Moscow children’s ensemble), or that performwith their older masters (such as Gornitsa, the group from Alekseevskaiastanitsa in Volgograd oblast) often relate to their informants as members ofthe group’s ‘family.’

Such groups may avoid the shefstvo positioning of the intellectual whoapproaches native informants for the raw material that s/he will then turninto ‘art,’ because they respect the attitudes of these masters toward theirarts. For instance, the director of Gornitsa, Valentina Kubrakova, recalledthat due to the authentic color their ‘master,’ Ivan Bespalov, lent to anysong, the ensemble would often have him lead their songs by starting thesolo first line of every verse. To give Bespalov the solo line accorded himquite a bit of power: despite the demands of the stage which dictate cuttinglong songs down to a usual two or three minutes, Bespalov never stopped asong before he had sung all the verses. Sometimes it was ‘13 verses of a slowsong.’ For Bespalov, the audience’s limited attention span was of no conse-quence: what mattered was to tell the song’s story in full.15 Compare thisaccount with a practice observed at the 1998 Moscow Folklore SpringFestival, when the group from Sudzha, in Kursk oblast, who performedtogether with four old women from the village, did not give their elders theopening solo lines in several of their songs. Some revivalist leaders criticizedthe practice, saying it showed disrespect to the older women.

Similarly, in fieldwork situations or teaching situations with village infor-mants, some revivalists allowed their informants to lead as teachers ratherthan simply to provide raw material that then would be transformed by ascholar. For example, Elena Krasnopevtseva prepares the children in herensemble Little Spindle for a long time before they are ready to travel to avillage to learn from masters. Each child studies a vocal part or instrumentby learning from cassette tapes (they often learn a single voice from a multi-track recording) and from their Moscow teachers. When they go to thesource village, each child stays in the home of the village ‘grandmother’ or‘grandfather’ whose instrument or vocal part s/he has been learning, becauseKrasnopevtseva believes that ‘in order to play an instrument, one mustunderstand the inner life of the bearer [of the tradition].’ When the childrensing along with the grandmothers, Krasnopevtseva tells them to blend withtheir teachers ‘in such a way that I can’t hear you.’ She reports that theyquickly learn to listen to their teachers rather than trying to show off whatthey know. Krasnopevtseva pays close attention to the aesthetic system ofthe grandmothers themselves: she recently discovered, for example, that theylisten for overtones, and reject a particular performance as ‘bad’ (gadko) ifthey do not hear them.16 She herself has established very close relationshipswith some village grandmothers; one in particular has served as a mentor,teacher, and confidant and has been very influential in Krasnopevtseva’sown personal development.17

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Thus, Krasnopevtseva feels she has succeeded in avoiding the shefstvoposition in regard to her informants. Indeed, learning about the musicaltastes, daily life, and views of a villager makes for a stance that differs fromthe typical approach of folk enthusiasts to folkloric sources, which demandsthat the exotic native Others ‘be premodern, untainted, and thus musicallythe same as they ever were.’18 Yet of course, there is always the danger thatthe revivalist’s own expectations color the encounter. As we saw above,villagers were glad to supply the kind of folk music they thought the scholarwanted, since they had been acculturated to value the scholar’s taste morethan their own. Presumably, all encounters between scholars and villagershave the potential to be tainted by a shefstvo dynamic that is deeplyingrained in the culture.

Returning Ritual to the Village

Yet if shefstvo underlay the attitudes of many folklorists to villagers, theopposite was not always true, despite the villagers’ deference describedabove. In some cases where revivalists have attempted to return ancientculture to villages, they have not met with unequivocal success. Such is thestory of the visit of Zabava (‘Fun’), a Saratov-based ensemble, to a village inits oblast for a holiday celebration. While many of the villagers on this occa-sion adopted a revivalist attitude and wished to show how well their culturehad preserved ancient folk forms of the holiday, some seemed tacitly tothumb their noses at the idea that their own traditions were inadequate.

The story of this urban-rural encounter also illustrates the dangers ofusing the medium of television to ‘record’ rituals. Both Saratov Televisionand Saratov Radio were invited to the village to make programs about thishappening. Documentary films are not representations of reality in itsentirety; they literally and figuratively frame events in accordance with thegoals of the filmmakers and the (real or imagined) demands of an audience.Since I witnessed both the real life and the documentary version of theevent, I could compare the two: I saw that documentaries about folkcustoms often do all they can to present the village as an idyllic place wherethe source of true Russianness – folklore – by some miracle still lives today.

If Giliarova’s urban group was conservative in its approach – taking onlya few geographical regions and trying to master their musical styles – theSaratov ensemble followed the Pokrovsky model in performing Russiantraditions that would be most interesting to audiences. Since this ensemble’sleaders vigorously stressed to me their disdain for the Soviet approach tofolklore, I assumed they would have tried to avoid the shefstvo attitude. Yetwhen we traveled to the village, Zabava’s leaders, like Giliarova, criticized theactual customs practiced in the village and lamented the fact that moreancient traditions had not been ‘preserved.’ As it turned out, Zabava’s urbanensemble participated, through the television documentary, in the creationof a false impression about the true state of Russian traditions.

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The setting was Christmas, the official celebration of which Russianswere ‘deprived’ of for 70 years. Since 1991 they have reclaimed it; but itsreinstitution has not involved a simple return to the pre-Revolutionary styleof celebration. Instead, when I spent the 1999 Christmas season in Russia, Isaw an array of different winter holiday traditions, ranging from Westerncommercialism to Russian High Orthodoxy, from Soviet glorification oflabor to ancient pagan agrarian rites. There was no single source of ritesassociated with Christmas. The coexistence of these different traditionssuggests, rather, that Christmas does not have a single identity in Russia;rather, for the Russians who celebrate it, the holiday functions as a locus forfinding and affirming national and cultural identity.

In the official culture of post-Soviet Russia, Christmas is associated withRussianness because of its dual associations with the Orthodox Church andwith folk culture. Christmas has been reinstated with pomp and pageantry:it is now a formal state holiday, and in 1998 the patriarch of the RussianOrthodox Church, Alexei II, led a midnight mass that was broadcast live onpublic television for four and a half hours. The video footage showed severalpoliticians in attendance, such as then-Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov,and also folk performers in a festival outside the church.19 This proximity offolk and church celebrations points to the essence of the Christmas holidayfor Russia. Church and folk cannot be separated here: for every churchtradition at Christmas, there is an equally interesting folk one. Often, theyare combined in a single ritual or single text, as in a folk Christmas carolthat mentions both Christ and Koliada, a pagan god.20

In 1999, at the same time as the official, nationally televised Christmascelebration took place in Moscow, Zabava made their own version of a tele-vised Christmas celebration. They had had copious experience in front ofthe camera: the group had produced videos of a traditional wedding, ofMaslenitsa (a Shrove Tuesday celebration), and a folk Christmas. The latter,completed just the year before (1998), showed all basic elements of theholiday: caroling, mummery, evening parties, and fortune-telling. The scriptfor the holiday reconstruction was not based upon the traditions of a singlevillage but incorporated village Christmas traditions from several regions ofsouthern Russia and Ukraine. Although each area (in fact, each village) haddifferent texts and songs, Zabava’s leader, Anzhelika Glumova, put togetherthe most interesting examples of representative traditions, gleaned fromfolklore collections. The script was published in 1998 by the Department ofLeisure Activities of the Saratov Province House of Culture and Science.

The video showed caroling, in which a group of young people goesaround the village, singing under the windows or at the porch. At eachhouse, they sing a specific carol to each member of the household. Thesongs bless the household by describing the members as attractive and rich,and their animals as beautiful and sleek – as if, by saying they are alreadyrich, the carolers bring abundance to the house. The songs and the sayingsthat come after them also prod the hosts, telling them that if they give abun-

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dantly, they will be rich and beautiful, while if they are stingy, they and theirchildren will be homely and poor.

The carolers collect specially prepared biscuits, candies, or other food orcoins from the host or hostess, in return for blessing the household withtheir singing. The point of this ritual was a kind of incantation. As Zabava’sleader told me, ‘this is an ancient, magical ritual, the invocation of a goodharvest. If you ask who needs whom more – the carolers the hosts or thehosts the carolers – then it used to be that it was the hosts who needed thecarolers more. If [the carolers] didn’t glorify them, something bad wouldbefall them. [The hosts] even invited, enticed them in.’21

This caroling would start on Christmas day, and would last up to a weekthereafter. On Christmas day itself, the youngest carolers, called khris-toslavtsy, would sing canonical Church texts and other songs about Christ’sbirth. During the week following Christmas, young people would dress upfor the tradition of mummery [riazhenie] in costumes of the opposite sex,animals, and social types such as soldiers, gentry, cripples, robbers, gypsies,and so on. 22 For this part of their celebration, Zabava used animal masksmade of skins and other natural objects. (Figure 8.1). As they showed it,traditionally the mummers would appear at evening gatherings of youngpeople, and would often behave there in an unusually familiar, aggressive,and loose manner – scaring, chasing, and tackling those who were not incostume, talking and laughing boisterously. Their lively and sexually chargedbehavior fit the general theme of the winter holiday, which was the celebra-tion of the coming fertility of the earth and the overcoming of winter’s deadspirit.23 At some point, probably in the nineteenth century, mummerybecame mixed with caroling, so that mummers too would go door to doorwith songs.24

During Christmas 1999, Zabava’s three adult leaders and about twelveyoung people aged 10–18 set out with their Christmas-caroling script to visitthe village of Vladykino, population 560, located some 190 miles (300 kilo-meters) from the provincial capital, Saratov. They had heard about thevillage from Olga Makarova, a culture specialist in the Saratov CultureDepartment, whose home village it was; her uncle is the self-appointed localhistorian and founder of the local museum. Zabava chose to arrange aconcert and a television documentary in Vladykino because Makarova hadtold Zabava’s leaders that the young people still go caroling there. Theleaders of Zabava were excited to go to a village where ancient traditions arestill practiced despite 70 years of Soviet prohibition; they assumed theywould be able to learn local songs or sayings there in order to enrich theirrepertoire. Further, they felt that going to Vladykino would be a chance fortheir own teenagers to experience a real village setting: they expected to beswept away by the energy of the local carolers.25 Thus, they set out withthree goals: to demonstrate to the villagers their semi-professional perfor-mance of ancient folklore (the traditional shefstvo stance); to collectmaterial (again implying their superiority as repositories of culture who

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know how to use the material properly); and the presumably more egalitarianstance of allowing the city children to experience an authentic village setting.

However, from the ensemble leaders’ point of view, the two latter aimswere foiled. First of all, the folkloric material available was not ancient, local,or appropriate to the holiday. As we soon discovered, no local carols actuallyremain in Vladykino. Village inhabitants born in the 1920s said they neverwitnessed any actual carol singing in the village.26 Children, young people,and even some middle-aged people do get dressed up in mummer’s costumeson Christmas eve and go door-to-door, wishing ‘Merry Christmas’ to thehosts and holding out an open sack. The hosts give specially-preparedbiscuits, store-bought food, candy and alcoholic drinks to the mummer-carolers.

Second, Vladykino’s Christmas celebration differed significantly from thetradition the Saratov ensemble had studied. Not only children and youngpeople but adults went from house to house; and the teens and adults drankalcoholic beverages. The carolers used no sung or spoken texts appropriateto Christmas. In fact, at one house when prompted by a radio reporter andtelevision director to ‘sing something,’ a rather drunk ‘caroler’ in his 30ssang a song from prison folklore instead of a carol. The costumes weresimplified: many mummer-carolers wore just rouged or charcoaled cheeks,while some wore no costume at all. (See Figure 8.2) And instead of thehouseholds seeking and receiving the benefit of a blessing from the carolers,only the caroler-mummers sought and received benefit from the hosts, in the

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Fig 8.1: Two members of Saratov Ensemble ‘Zabava’

form of something to eat and drink. Zabava’s leader, 32-year old AnzhelikaGlumova, lamented this fact: ‘The essence of the holiday is obviouslyalready lost, and it has become ordinary begging.’27

Whether or not the caroling constituted begging, it was clear that theholiday had changed with time. From the point of view of many contempo-rary American folklorists, change is inevitable and not necessarily bad.Although participants may lament the loss of some perceived spirituality,new holiday celebrations may better suit the relationships, conditions, ortenor of different times. But Zabava’s leaders did not see change neutrally.

Meanwhile, the Vladykino residents who went caroling or receivedcarolers were unaware that their holiday did not meet the standards of theurban revivalists. They were conscious of, and proud of, their holiday.According to the local historian, 43-year old Alexei Karas’ev, this practiceexisted throughout the Soviet years, despite the fact that the holiday wasofficially discontinued after 1918, and New Year was substituted as an offi-cial holiday. The fact that Christmas was a religious holiday, Karas’ev said,was ‘no problem.’ ‘Many had icons in the corner – whether they believed ornot, no one talked about that, but…everyone had icons [displayed in thehome].…Everyone prepared for the holiday.’28 The children would go fromhouse to house early in the morning, and, Karas’ev remembers, they wouldrecite texts like: ‘Open your suitcase, take out a nickel.’ (‘Otkryvai sundu-chok, vynimai piatachok’).29

To continue the celebration of Christmas during Soviet years was some-

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Fig 8.2: Local young man in ‘Mummer’s’ costume

what rare. According to descriptions of ethnographers, New Year’s Evebecame an important holiday for Soviet citizens after it was officiallyinstated in 1918, and subsequently both the Christian and pre-Christianwinter holiday celebrations started to die out. In some villages a few of theChristmas traditions, such as masquerades, became transferred onto theNew Year holiday.30 Since there was no official support for any sort of cele-bration on Christmas itself, however, in most places public celebration ofthis holiday died out. Yet there were villages like Vladykino in whichcaroling was carried on privately at Christmas. For Karas’ev, this fact –coupled with the increasing popularity of the holiday – was a source ofpride. ‘This is Russian, this is our culture; what kind of Russians are wewithout culture? Without traditions, without rituals, without songs? – This isour wealth.’ By contrast, some of those who did not participate in thecaroling – such as two older women I sought out for information about pastpractices – seemed rather indifferent about it. To these women, the holidaywas not celebrated properly; they commented that there was in fact ‘nocaroling’ in the village now, and there had not been any for a long time.Their comments seemed to indicate that for them, caroling was somethingentirely different from that which takes place today.

Zabava’s leaders were disappointed in more than the transformation ofthe purpose of caroling; they were also critical of the behavior of the youngvillagers. Glumova felt the local teenagers in costume lacked the proper wild,free spirit, and were acting up in a very modern way. They used a lot ofcurse words and seemed bold when they were on the street, but as soon asthey entered the house where they should have recited verses, sang songs, oracted humorously in front of the television camera, they could not actuallysay or do anything. The cameras could not have made them forget what tosay, Glumova said. She compared these teenagers with people who actuallyknow and participate in their folk traditions: ‘Someone who has an innerfreedom, someone who is competent in some sphere of activity, for whomthis is really organic and from his heart, it’s all the same to him, a camera, amicrophone, or whatever; in principle, he relaxes and gets wild [chumit’sia],he’s happy at what’s going on, he might even get more wound up from thepresence of the camera, might play, might [even] play up too much[pereigryvat’]…But here, they…don’t know the songs or the sayings[zaklichki], but they come in dressed up – yeah, great, ‘Merry Christmas’ [sRozhdestvom Khristovym] – and that’s it. What next? And the camera’s on.They aren’t able to do anything else.’31

Glumova’s remarks suggest that true folk participants should be fluentspeakers of a language of folk culture. They would possess a vocabulary ofpossible texts to be said and sung, gestures and actions to be used. Theirknowledge would include a prescription of what must happen at such events.By contrast, these youths lacked knowledge of such a language. Instead,their behavior revealed only fragmentary acquaintance with the holiday –they knew snippets of text, they practiced the easiest and most obvious

216 Making Memory

forms of masquerading. As a result, for Glumova, they did not participatein the holiday in a meaningful way. The lack of vocabulary in the heads ofthe young participants meant that the holiday was empty, devoid of theproper moral and spiritual expressions.

Glumova compared her group favorably to the village youngsters. Shesaid that the city youths did possess the proper playful spirit, and attemptedto mix with the locals, but that the locals were too concerned with appearing‘cool’ to participate. Vadim Kovalskii, one of the co-leaders of Zabava,recounted the resistance put up by the local youths when the city groupengaged in a folkloric dance with accordion accompaniment outside one ofthe homes. One local girl protested when he tried to bring her into theongoing group dance; she said that she did not want to mess up her hair.Meanwhile, he said, the local boys stood to the side in their leather jackets,while he, Kovalskii, wore a sheepskin coat. He thought their choice of outerclothing was inappropriate for an extremely cold night, and attributed it totheir attempt to seem ‘citified.’

The locals’ resistance to participating in a folklore dance with unfamiliarcity people and their desire to appear as if they themselves were from a cityare understandable, however, if one recalls common attitudes toward folk-lore, village dress, and villagers in Soviet Russia. For example, as I noted inChapter 7, Soviet village women were often mocked by younger villagers forsinging village songs. Rural folk culture was associated with old women. Andeven if the village youths did appreciate rural folk culture, it may have beenuncomfortable for them to witness urbanites making a great show of anunfamiliar ‘folklore’ while their village was supposedly renowned for its folktraditions. Finally, the youths’ use of curse words and urban folklore such asgestures, posturing, ‘attitude,’ and attire likely reflect the authentic folklore oftheir culture. If they were trying to seem ‘citified,’ that stance may have muchto do with a common aspiration toward urban culture among both villageand city-dwelling young people in Russia since at least the 1960s.32

By contrast, Zabava was almost entirely made up of city teenagers whowere enamored with rural culture, yet had never experienced a spontaneousform of the ancient rituals they had studied. Instead, they had memorizedan enormous quantity of Christmas songs and the sayings that come afterthem. They had been taught the traditional meaning of the holiday and hadbeen encouraged by their leaders to evince the proper spirit while acting itout. They had learned what amounts to a script of the holiday. The fact thatit was learned did not mean that it constituted a dry, empty memorization:these teenagers’ motivation was to resurrect the ancient bases of Russianculture in order to bring traditional values to a contemporary society thatseemed devoid of them. Accordingly, the teenagers themselves had activelyinitiated caroling in the city of Saratov (described in the Introduction), andwere trying to revive the holiday in a small way by caroling door to door,and in so doing hoping to educate people about the holiday.33

The teenagers’ consciousness of the value of tradition, which I have iden-

Making Memory 217

tified as a hallmark of folklorism (following Bausinger), could be seen in theattitudes of the group’s leaders as well. Glumova authored the script for thegroup’s Christmas celebration because she felt her job was to return topeople something they were unconsciously seeking due to their ‘geneticmemory.’34 As she put it, 70 years of Soviet rule ‘took the informationaway…erased it from [people’s] memory.’35 Yet it was precisely this view thatSoviet society had robbed the citizenry of an authentic culture that madeZabava’s leaders unable to accept what they found in the real village. Ifvillages did not produce the folklore that these revivalists had read about insources written prior to the Revolution or by scholars with a well-knownanti-Soviet bent, then it was not a proper source of ‘Russian’ folklore. Thestrong revivalist tenets of this group could not help but color all their interac-tions with the villagers.

But Zabava’s leaders were not the only ones who adhered to the notion thatfolklore had to be ancient and ‘Russian’: the locals, too, were concerned toshow ‘authentic’ folklore. To be sure, their standards were different from thoseof Zabava (Glumova holds a college degree in Slavic literature and her workshows the tastes and resources of an educated person), but the basic principlewas the same. This was evident when I reviewed the 20-minute televisionprogram made by Saratov Television about the holiday in Vladykino.36 To mysurprise, the program showed local people caroling with songs and traditionaltexts. I was shocked, since I had been under the impression that the locals didnot know traditional songs or texts. I was not present for all of the televisionshootings, but I was present at unplanned encounters where locals did notknow any traditional Christmas songs.

I telephoned Glumova, and she explained to me that I had not beenmistaken about Vladykino’s level of knowledge of Christmas traditions.Rather, someone had prepared a kind of script for this part of the programas well. In one scene three local middle-aged women performed songs andsayings appropriate for Christmas. One of these women is a culture workerin the village; it is her job to promote culture, including traditional culture.The texts they sang in this scene were not of local origin, but were probablyobtained from published booklets like Glumova’s, and either learned espe-cially for the filming, or learned earlier for another occasion. One sung textabout Christ’s birth was a canonical church hymn, and could have beenlearned in church.37 In another caroling scene, children recited texts obvi-ously learned not long ago, probably in school. It is quite possible that theylearned these texts specially for a new holiday practice which the villagerecently instituted, in which children are encouraged to learn a poem orsaying to recite in church at a ceremony on Christmas morning. Each childwho recites is given a gift.38

On second and third viewings of this program, I began to see that noscript learned for the occasion could hide the fact that the local youths –especially the males – felt very uncomfortable participating in the holiday.Their behavior inside the house was very reserved. Glumova was right: they

218 Making Memory

lacked a kind of inner guidance, something to tell them what to do.However, I believe the youths’ behavior may indeed have been affected bythe situation. They were wild in other circumstances on the street and withinhouses, but in the filmed scene, where they were standing physically behindwomen of their mothers’ age singing and chanting folk and Church texts,they probably felt that they might say or do the ‘wrong thing.’ Zabava’steenagers, by contrast, not only possessed that inner guidance, but cameacross as being almost too forward: in one scene they almost overwhelmedthe host and hostess, who were speechless and did not make a move to offerfood and drink until several rousing songs and texts had been performed.Clearly, the members of the Saratov ensemble were the more experiencedactors as both the locals and the visitors performed their Christmas scripts.

Perhaps what interested me the most about this televised performancewas Glumova’s attitude toward it. When I called her to ask whether I hadmisunderstood the events I had seen, she was at first perplexed: what differ-ence did I see between the reality and the TV version? She told me ‘so what?’if the locals learned a few texts especially to show on TV; ‘so what?’ if theTV producers purposely showed Christmas carols that few in the villageknew, and that did not originate in their village? From her point of view,none of that mattered, just as it did not matter that she pieced together herscript from various regional traditions. Of course, she said, she would haveliked to see the holiday better preserved, with original texts and songs. Butwhat mattered most in the television version was that people saw whatChristmas traditions could look like, they heard Russian songs. Such aperformance might be enough to activate their ‘genetic memory.’

Thus, through the work of ensembles like Zabava – as well as through thework of individuals like Kozlov (Chapter 7), the concept of Russian localtraditional culture is changing: it is becoming more pan-Russian. In theSaratov Christmas event as well as in Giliarova’s work, television plays alarge part, since it offers the possibility of awakening ‘genetic memory’ byexposing ordinary Russians to their roots. For revivalists like Giliarova,villagers must be ‘taught’ to sing and say the proper things with the properstyle in order to ensure an ‘authentic’ reenactment of tradition. By contrast,for Glumova and Kozlov – and for many other revivalists, televisionproducers, village culture workers, and historians like them – it is not impor-tant exactly what is sung or said in traditional ritual. Instead, they arelooking for a sense of Russianness, something to give people a sense ofnational identity. The particular texts they sing and speak function only assymbolic signs of tradition and Russianness.

In a certain sense, video documentaries such as the ones produced byZabava and Giliarova perform a function similar to that designed for folk-lore during the Stalin era. At that time, folklore was harnessed aspropaganda for the Soviet state and its ideological goals. Ironically, in the1990s revivalists with anti-Soviet leanings were also utilizing folklore aspropaganda. While they did not promote a state ideology, they advocated a

Making Memory 219

particular view of Russian culture and a particular interpretation of the folkheritage.39 In this context the reticent behavior of the youths may be viewed asa kind of resistance: recognizing that anything they said or did could be criti-cized by the urban folklorists as ‘incorrect,’ they simply refused to join thegames and were silent in front of the camera.

Meanwhile, village culture continued to exhibit signs that it possessed itsown authentic folklore, qualitatively different from the carefully preparedproductions scripted by the revivalists – including the local ones. For example,throughout the village we saw barns and homes with crosses marked in chalkon the doors. An older woman told me that people mark buildings to signifythat they have been sprinkled with holy water on the Orthodox religiousholiday of Epiphany, 19 January, when a priest from the neighboring churchblesses the water in a local well. This was clearly an active tradition that wasnot carried on for the purpose of revival. Although it was an Orthodoxholiday, the chalk crosses indicated that locals had established ways ofconducting it that were not prescribed or regulated by the Church.

There was a similar spontaneous quality to the prison song sung by oneof the carolers at 2 a.m. when the village host, the television and radio direc-tors, and I were sitting around a table drinking and eating. Clearly, thesong’s use in a Christmas caroling setting was an anomaly in folkloric prac-tice, which the man recognized. Before he sang it, he asked if it would be allright: ‘There’s another one, but I don’t know whether it fits here or not.’Everyone told him: ‘it fits, it fits.’ The Christmas ritual had merged with theritual of zastol’e, the celebratory Russian practice of sitting around a table,sharing toasts, poems, jokes, and songs. In the context of zastol’e, nearly anyheartfelt performance was permissible.

The song must have been a well-known text among this man’s peers, whomay have included former prisoners or simply those enamored with thecriminal world. In it, a young prisoner tells of his wish to be like a dove,flying free above the prison. In a self-reflexive twist at the end of the text, helaments that this very song will not be heard:

A young man lying on his plank bedQuietly sings a song.He sings how hard it is to live without one’s freedomWithout friends, without tender girlfriends.And they will never again hear this songBecause tomorrow this young man is to be shot.

The song pointed out the ephemeral, ever-changing nature of folklore: songschange with the people who sing them. There is no fixed tradition that mustbe guarded, preserved, or re-invented, because folklore can be trusted toevolve in unexpected and constantly interesting ways. Furthermore, the songasserted, folklore is precious to the people who produce it because it reflectstheir individuality. A song can symbolize more than an ancient culture: itcan signal an identity, which in the end is as priceless as life itself.

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Our country is the only one in the world that has its own national culture.America is a great state, but it has no national culture.

Nadezhda Babkina1

Throughout this narrative I have stressed the ways that various groups haveconstructed images of the folk as a means of representing their own identi-ties. Thus, whereas nineteenth-century elites approached folkways as asource of ‘national character’ and to signify their oneness with the commonpeople, radicals saw allegiance with the narod as a means of differentiatingthemselves from the autocracy. Soviet post-War culture endorsed its senti-mentalized, homogenized kitsch version of the folk as a means of recoveringnational confidence and expurgating ‘foreign’ elements; a few decades later,oppositional-minded intellectuals revolutionized the study and performanceof folklore through attention to the regional and local nature of folk culture.In the post-Soviet period, the debate over the correct way to show Russiantradition constituted a struggle over the representation of Russianness. In allthese periods, both government officials and nonconformists utilizedconceptions of the folk for political ends; each group, in attempting to givevoice to its political position, emphasized different attributes of the imag-ined ‘other.’ Thus, rather than an object of scientific study or representation(as it is more usually thought of), folk culture functions as a locus in whichgroups negotiate their identities, a perfect example of Foucault’s notion ofdiscourse as ‘systematically form[ing] the objects of which it speaks.’2

Within this charting of the ways that groups have framed their notion of‘folk,’ we have also seen the less obvious ways that individuals and groupshave engaged in practices that did not fit within chosen or establishedframes. Rural dwellers, in particular, neither preserved nor transformed theirtraditions in the ways that scholars and officials expected. Boundariesbetween urban and rural culture were more fluid than those who studiedfolklore may have wished. Even when urban intellectuals carefully plannedto use their performances to show how folklore was performed in ‘ancientRussia,’ there was always the possibility that a subverting element wouldcreep into the picture: the frame of a festival that included folk-kitsch, for

9 Conclusion: Folklore andPopular Culture

example, or a child’s chastushka that spoke about the commercial nature ofthe performance situation.

One such subverting element for the post-Soviet folk revival movementhas been its relation to and dependence on the Western European and NorthAmerican ‘World Music’ movement. Motivated by a ‘loss of faith in institu-tions…spiritual confusion and social breakdown,’ both educated Russiansand Westerners have sought spiritual development and bygone forms ofcommunity in signs of the primitive.3 In the West, educated, affluent people(among whom I count myself and my cohort) are the primary purchasers ofthe World Music productions that have packaged folk, classical, and popgenres from other cultures as a kind of balm for the modern illness of alien-ation. For Americans, there is often the unconscious acceptance of thenotion expressed by Babkina in this chapter’s epigraph: we must seek ‘roots’in older, more primitive cultures. For Russian revivalists the ideologicalwrinkle in this situation is that World Music is essentially a commercialventure that draws heavily on the popularity of Western (particularlyAmerican) pop-music forms, while their ostensible aim as musicians andscholars is to head off the ‘Americanization of [Russian] music.’ 4

In fact this contradiction between altruistic goals and moneymakingstrategies exists within the World Music movement itself. As numerouscritics have pointed out, World Music was not a grassroots movement butthe conscious creation of record companies and concert promoters whodecided that record shops would be more likely to carry the newly popularmusic of third world countries if they had a category to describe it.5

Timothy Brennan argues that this music ‘characterizes a longing inmetropolitan centers of Europe and North America for what is not Europeor North America’; it ‘represents a flight from the Euro-self at the verymoment of that self ’s suffocating hegemony, as though people were drivenaway by the image stalking them in the mirror.’ That image is of the imperi-alist exportation of the products of European and North American culturefactories. In this context World Music offers the hope of subverting the‘ideological parochialism of Euro-American popular music’ and freeingmusic from imperialist domination – an illusory goal that appeals to thewell-educated, liberal, affluent consumers of this music.6

Ironically, it has been the existence of the World Music movement thathas allowed many Russian and East European folk revival groups – andtheir counterparts in the growing field of folk-pop fusion – to survive theravaged economies of their home countries. The rise of international musicfestivals and the proliferation of entrepreneurs willing to take on projects inEast European folk and folk-influenced music allowed such groups to formand to achieve international success. The interest of big names in ‘ethnic’music was crucial: artists such as David Byrne, Paul Simon, and PeterGabriel utilized various international folk idioms and performers in theircompositions, and Gabriel’s Real World Studios provided a place where‘musicians who had no commitment towards Western pop’ could record

222 Conclusion

albums so that any ‘talented musicians in the world, regardless of nation-ality or home, [could] reach an international public.’ As Gabriel put it, theidea behind his enterprise (which included the studio, a record label, andWorld of Music and Dance – WOMAD – a series of outdoor music celebra-tions modeled after rock festivals) was to expose people to ‘the cultures ofother countries’ in order to erase their ‘fear of foreigners’: ‘From this pointof view, Real World can undoubtedly be seen as a bulwark against racism….Though the songs may ultimately wind up sounding European, that’s okaywith me. At the heart, it is world music that I do. It’s all connections.Ultimately, we’re all connected.’ 7

Like Russian revivalists, these Western musical producers cultivated theillusion that these non-Western musicians were ‘pure’ because they weresupposedly not interested in making pop music, and would never ‘sell out’their own musics for money. Such privileging of the primitive asks the Otherto remain ‘the same’ while Western musical producers exploit their music.The notion of ‘connectedness’ is deceptive because in the final analysis, thesystem is set up so that savvy businesspeople and intellectuals possess themeans to market the music, transform it, and profit from it, while nativemusicians are reduced to the role of providing the unrefined material. Suchan approach mirrors the stance of Russian folk revivalists toward ruralcarriers of folk traditions: in both cases the cultural capital is held by thosewho possess the skill to identify and analyze folk art, not by the producersof the art.

Indeed, the category of World Music is not subversive of Western imperi-alism: on the contrary, it perpetuates it by misrepresenting the musics itpurports to stand for. The marketing of non-Western cultural artifacts maypromote an appearance of cultural and ethnic diversity and ‘authenticity,’but also cultivates and fetishizes the primitive quality of the musicians. Bylining up and implicitly equating disparate traditions that have very differentsocietal functions, the World Music category reduces all to the same clichés:Indian classical music, comprising a system similar in complexity to that ofEuropean classical music, is situated alongside Angelique Kidjo’s rock musicfrom Benin, an American-based music with the addition of African rhythmsand instruments; the discs of Tuvan throat-singers, whose vocal-instru-mental ensemble formations were influenced both by the Soviet passion forAndreev-style folk orchestras and by Western-style rock bands, sit onrecord-shop racks next to recordings of retired Russian villagers singingagricultural holiday songs a cappella. The packaging seems to assert that allsuch music belongs to a ‘transnational youth culture of entertainment,’when in fact of these four examples only Kidjo and the Tuvans haveexpressly directed their productions at such a market.8

Presumably, no one asked Russian Old Believers – who are known fortheir reserve and believe photographing the face and recording the voice tobe a sin – whether they would like their wedding laments and religious songsto be marketed to affluent European and American consumers.

Conclusion 223

Nevertheless, their village’s opus can be purchased, with detailed notes, onPan Records Ethnic Series from the Netherlands – one of a handful ofEuropean companies that produced several discs of ‘authentic’ Russianvillage music in the late 1990s.9 Does the production of ethnographic fieldrecordings for public sale constitute exploitation, or is it simply a way ofdistributing this precious material more widely? Debate on this questioncontinues to rage, although currently the tide has turned in favor of compen-sating native performers and having them sign legal contracts beforerecording even takes place.10

While the market for ethnographic recordings of Russian folk musicoutside of Russia (as well as within Russia) has remained small, Russianshave begun to actively participate in the World Music movement in otherways, raising similar political and ethical issues. The movement has had itsmost productive florescence in the cultivation not so much of various worldmusical traditions, but of an indigenous music tradition incorporatingexperimental fusions of Russian folk music with jazz, alternative rock,classic rock, and pop. Following in the wake of the Pokrovsky Ensemble’scollaboration with the Paul Winter Consort in 1986–7, such creations ofRussian artists – with and without foreign collaborators – have attainedfairly wide popularity abroad as well as within Russia itself. While this musictakes much from the productions of World Music aimed at Westerners – andcan often similarly be characterized as a superficial search for the primitivein pleasantly entertaining form – its proponents and critics argue it isdifferent in that it showcases Russian and other Slavic folk musics.

Perhaps the most successful of such artists within Russia has been thegroup Ivan Kupala, composed of three men who worked for a St Petersburgradio station in the mid-1990s. These technophiles without musical educa-tion (although they had dabbled in St Petersburg rock bands) put togethertheir compositions by electronically sampling and combining ethnographicfield recordings from Russian villages (mostly groups of older female vocal-ists and some wind instruments) with various musical phrases from otherethnic vocal and instrumental musics (such as Bulgarian flutes and women’schorus, a Romanian instrumental ensemble), environmental sounds (birds,water), simple synthesized chordal arrangement, a very danceable beat(mostly house, some trance and reggae) and synthesized bass. Their 1999album Kostroma was so popular that a year later one critic wrote that only ahermit had not heard their music; anyone who listened to the radio hadmemorized the ritual dialogue in the title song ten times over already.11

That dialogue was a Spring and Summer ritual play from Dorozhevo,Briansk oblast, about which folklorists and musicologists have written muchsince the 1940s; the Pokrovsky Ensemble performed their rendition of itwidely in the 1980s.12 The version from Dorozhevo is a carnivalistic play inwhich a woman describes and acts out the entire process of spinning threadand weaving cloth; she then eats dinner and gets sick (the latter is accompa-nied by exaggerated erotic gestures); lying on her deathbed, she (farcically)

224 Conclusion

confesses her sins to the priest, then gets up and dances.13 The play containsapproximately forty separate spoken episodes, separated by a chorus; in therecording by Ivan Kupala, only five are represented. Not surprisingly, thepop version of the play does not render its carnivalistic, ribald origins, but itdoes hint at them with the insertion of various exuberant vocalized yells andwhoops sampled into the instrumental finale. Instead of carnival, the song’scharm lies in its humorous and poignant juxtaposition of the voices of theelderly female performers speaking and singing in their local dialect with themodern dance club arrangement.14 The old women’s vocal track, with itsrough, hoarse texture, gives the piece an exotic, nostalgic quality – as thefirst track on the album (immediately prior to the title track, ‘Kostroma’)underscores with the phrase, spoken by an older male villager: ‘It happenedlong ago. It’s the absolute truth.’ Of course, ‘it’ did not happen long ago: themusic grows directly out of the work of 1990s West European urban housedance (and trance) music such as that of Deep Forest and Enigma.

When asked if they were interested in folklore, two members of the groupsaid ‘we are not fanatics of folklore, we are fanatics of beautiful music. Welove good folk music; we don’t like stylizations of folk music.’15 But even ifthe musicians do not see themselves as revivalists who purposely exposelisteners to ancient Russian roots, reviewers have lauded the compositionsfor bringing something ‘Russian’ to the Russian music scene: ‘Interestingly,it never gets boring. It’s ours, after all. Your own wealth doesn’t feel heavy inyour pockets.’16 Clearly, the musicians are capitalizing upon the currentpopularity of ‘a fashion for everything Russian, that is, Russian folkmusic.’17

Unlike other folk-pop fusions that sample eclectically from multiplesources, do not reveal their sources, and ‘hide’ their samples by choppingthem into unrecognizable bits, the music of Ivan Kupala gives the illusion offull citation – of putting the music of Russian grandmothers in the spot-light. Most of the tracks on the group’s first album contain fairly fullversions of Russian folk tunes (although sometimes two tunes are combinedtogether), and the names of the villages from which samples were obtainedare listed on the album cover (although there is no indication which sourcebelongs to which track). However, ultimately this is not a form of quotationbut of mutation. As one member of the band described, each second ofsound takes approximately two to two-and-a-half hours to produce. Thevocals and instrumentals of the Russian villagers are transformed, reshapedto fit the strictly consistent rhythms and pitches of the electronic accompa-niment, and to fit a musical structure intended for dancing to (for example,repetitions of sung phrases are inserted to fill up rhythmic breaks in thevocal tracks). When the group made the transition to live performance, itconsidered hiring village informants but found that real-life ethnographicperformers could not be made to sing on cue; instead, it employed fourGnesin-educated young women, two of whom were formerly members ofthe Pokrovsky Ensemble.18

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If Ivan Kupala’s music was carefully wrought in the studio, the music ofanother author of musical projects in Russian folk fusion was inspired bythe live, improvisational mood of jazz and folk idioms. Conservatory-educated revivalist musician Sergei Starostin, the director of the WorldVillage television documentary series discussed in Chapter 4, has beeninvolved in some of the most interesting contemporary experimentalprojects using folk music. Although his music (and that of the groups withwhom he collaborates) has not been as broadly popular in Russia as that ofIvan Kupala, it has accrued a significant following at home and has madenotable inroads into Western European and American markets. In fact, itcould never be as popular as Ivan Kupala’s music, because this is not dance-able pop aimed at a club audience, but sophisticated music with manyinfluences: jazz, rock, folk, and world. Perhaps best known in America andWestern Europe is the pair of CDs that Starostin – respectively alone and aspart of the Moscow Art Trio with Mikhail Alperin and Arkady Shilkloper –has created together with Bulgarian and Tuvan ensembles.19 On severaltracks Starostin’s solo vocals weave unusual Russian village melodies arounda texture created by the Bulgarian choir singing arranged art versions ofBulgarian folk tunes or the Tuvan throat-singers with their instrumentalensemble. Here Russian vocal folk music provides one of the sharper flavorsin an eclectic musical stew.

Most interesting, however, is Starostin’s work with Inna Zhelannaia andthe band known alternately as Alliance and as The Farlanders. Starting in1989 with the band’s first album, these musicians have been creating original‘alternative’ folk-rock, using Russian folk tunes as the base of about one-third of their compositions, and Russian folk instruments (as well asinstruments of other ethnic traditions) in almost all the pieces.20 The songsvary widely in sound and influences: sometimes one can hear the inventiverock of Pink Floyd, at other times the funky jazz of Herbie Hancock;klezmer notes from two clarinets mix with Balkan rhythms and instruments(flute, bagpipe) and a reedy-sounding Russian zhaleika and overtone flutes;a fretless bass, acoustic and electric guitar, drumset and other percussioninstruments form the music’s core, while Zhelannaia’s voice is oftencompared to the voices of the Indigo Girls and the Cranberries. This is theeclectic, inspired music of seasoned musicians who love to experiment withtheir instruments and voices.

For example, the song ‘Through the Garden’ is a jazz-rock arrangementof the traditional wedding dance song recorded in 1964 by ViacheslavShchurov in the village of Afanas’evka, in Belgorod oblast (‘Through theGarden, through the Cherry Orchard’ / ‘Cherez sadik, cherez vishen’e’).21 Asthe song opens, bass drums, snare drums, and cymbals play a quirky beat; asix-string fretless bass and electric guitar enter with a repeated jazz-funk-inspired motif, and then Starostin, playing a double-reed zhaleika, a villageinstrument traditional in the region from which the song comes (where it iscalled rozhok), assumes the role of a jazz saxophone by ‘commenting’ on the

226 Conclusion

guitar riff with playfully mocking short, sharp, staccato phrases. WhenStarostin’s and Zhelannaia’s vocals enter with funk bass and drum accompa-niment, they sing the notes and the words of the traditional dance song, butthey omit ornaments that help to give a characteristic accent to the villageversion, and at one point Zhelannaia doubles the melody a third higher,taking her out of the range of the village style. During subsequent instru-mental breaks an overtone flute playing long held notes offers a dialogiccounterpoint to Starostin’s spiky zhaleika.22

This music at first listen seems farther from the traditional than that ofIvan Kupala because it does not directly quote any traditional recordings,and transforms the village sound in obvious ways in accordance with its newjazz environment. Yet there is something more authentic about Zhelannaia’sand Starostin’s production: it never promises nostalgia and fascination withthe exotic folk as does the Kupala musical packaging, but instead incorpo-rates traditional instruments and elements in the creation of a newcomposition in the jazz-fusion genre. To be sure, one of Starostin’s goals as aperformer is the quintessential one of the revivalist, to make sure that peoplehear folk sounds: ‘I think subconsciously, my goal is to broaden the influ-ence of folklore intonations, folklore music, in various genres. That’s mymissionary goal…I try to introduce folklore into the most varied [musicalcontexts], where it’s hard to imagine how folklore could blend in.’23 Yetjudging by his music, one would have to conclude that Starostin views facili-tating the exposure of folk music as a musical challenge rather than as apropaganda job.

Or, to put it a different way: rather than fitting folklore to a modern style(as does Kupala), Starostin approaches folklore as a set of tools that can bere-fitted in order to be used creatively in a new environment – a potentiallymore productive approach. Indeed, while Starostin has brought folk musicto a wide variety of musical genres (combinations of the music of variousethnic groups, folk-rock and folk-jazz fusions, a jazz opera), Kupala hasissued two subsequent discs that are remixes and remakes of the tracks ontheir first album.24 These remixes add very little to the original pieces, andare clearly a device that allows the group to remarket old material.

While Russian listeners may appreciate both groups for bucking the trendof what Zhelannaia calls the ‘Americanization of music’ by incorporatingRussian sounds into their compositions, that does not mean that listenersunderstand or fully recognize their Russian musical roots. In fact, afterreading some of the criticism of this music, it seems clear that many Russianlisteners are ill-equipped to correctly identify Russian musical elements whenthey hear them.25 Thus, whether audiences can be considered ‘exposed’ tothe roots of Russian music when they listen to dance versions of ethno-graphic recordings or jazz played with Russian folk instruments is debatable.And even if Russian radio listeners memorize the dialogue in Kostroma, thatdoes not mean that they understand the nature of the source ritual.

Thus, the folk revival and World Music movements not only intersect in

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such productions, but share many of the same goals, methods – and, ulti-mately, contradictions. It is impossible to reconstruct or create a music thatwill transform society by countering the process of Americanization or reed-ucating a listener. Still, each of these movements plays an important role insociety, a role that exemplifies what I have identified as the true functions offolklore.

Instead of seeking roots and authenticity in a particular kind of music,one may seek it in practices. The debate over authenticity may be turned onits head: to some audiences, including this listener, the most authentic musicmay not be that which is most ‘traditional,’ but that in which the performerscreatively express their (self-defined) identity, and audiences find a reflectionof theirs. If the modern music of Russian musicians who are equally enam-ored of Russian folk and Western pop, rock, and jazz styles is appreciated byaudiences, then it is a viable, living music – perhaps even the start of a tradi-tion. In short, it is popular culture, which has an appreciable effect onpeople’s lives.

Richard Stites wrote that while high culture may seem to reflect eternaltruths and deep values, ‘popular culture rarely concerns itself with the greatenigmas of human experience’; yet popular culture provides an essentialmeans of social bonding and shares many of the other important functionsof folk culture as I have defined it, such as allowing the expression of taboosubjects and providing a means of establishing or envisioning identitieswithin communities, whether immediate (family, neighborhood) or imagined(nation, state, or interest-based). In fact folk culture and popular culture arevery much intertwined: the main difference is that while folk culture is some-thing one actively does or creates, popular culture is typically seen assomething one consumes: ‘urban songs and dances, light reading, the enter-tainment stage, and cinema.’ Yet popular culture entails both consumingand creating, since ‘audience reception’ comprises the ways that peopleincorporate elements of popular culture into their daily lives. Thus, folkloricpractices such as ‘songs they sing together for certain functions, clothes theywear, styles of behavior, gestures, emulative postures (e.g. of cinema stars),dances…speech patterns, jokes, and narrative styles’ are all ways that peoplemake popular culture part of their lives.26

Recognizing this point of intersection between popular and folk culture iscrucial to understanding the ways that folklore functions in the modernworld. If we disregard it, as do many Russian folklorists and musicologists,we will always see folklore as a remnant, a pale shadow of its former self. Inorder to perceive a healthy, truly living folklore, we must open our eyes tothe grassroots creative practices of all kinds of social groups, includingthose who produce or consume folk-pop or folk-jazz fusions, and those Ihave identified as producers of an artificial ‘folklorism’ – the Soviet-stylefolk choirs and the urban revivalists, the provincial amateur choirs and therural revivalists.

That popular culture and folklore are intertwined was made abundantly

228 Conclusion

clear to me when two fourth-year students in the Musical-Ethnographicprogram of St Petersburg State Conservatory, whose classes I was visiting,invited me to attend a rock concert which they said was related to folkmusic.27 That these students liked rock was a surprise, since the school wasconservative and most of the students seemed serious and reticent. In theSoviet-era wooden auditorium of the St Petersburg youth club we sat in thefirst row of seats. The audience, including my companions, grew increasinglyexcited as the concert progressed, and shouted out names of favorite songsduring the breaks between numbers. When the band played a particularlywell-loved tune, the spectators erupted into applause, whistles, and criesafter the first few chords; occasionally they sang along and some stood,holding hands or lighters aloft.

As an ‘outsider’ to this music, I did not fully understand the crowd’senthusiasm, nor did I understand what it had to do with folk music. Mycompanion Liuda Makhova filled me in the next evening, over a meal at herdormitory. The band, Kalinov Most, began in the mid-1980s in Novosibirsk,where Makhova was from, and had grown popular nationally in the early1990s. By playing various tracks from the band’s discs and explaining theirlyrics to me, Makhova demonstrated how the singer, Dmitri Reviakin, usedelements of Siberian village vocal style in his singing and showed that hislyrics were sprinkled with folkloric images and neologisms based upon Slavicroots (the latter, she said, were reminiscent of Velemir Khlebnikov’smodernist poetry).28 To make her points, she taught me two Siberian villagesongs that she had learned in folk ensembles in her home town. Clearly,Makhova was proud that all of this music – the rock and the traditionalvillage songs – expressed what she considered to be the rich culture of theirSiberian ancestors: ‘There’s everything in Siberia!’

But what seemed more important here was the way in which Reviakin’smusic created a space in which the concert attendees were able to expressand enact aspects of their identities. To perform the role of a fan of thisband was not simply to say that one enjoyed this form of entertainment; itwas to make a statement about one’s politics, cultural appreciation, andethnic or regional identification. The same was true of Makhova’s folkrevivalist activities and her self-identification as a folk revivalist.

Indeed, as has become clear to me through this study, all groups incorpo-rate specific rituals, music, slang, expressions, jokes, references, and materialgoods into their daily lives. In many cases, the material that folk revivalistsconsciously attempt to preserve by performing on stage also exists offstagein a spontaneous form that has personal meaning for them and their audi-ences. Through such a process it is no longer folklorism, but folklore itself.Thus, radio listeners’ memorization of the dialogue from Kostroma may notmean that they understand the pagan significance of a ribald summer ritual,but when they get together at parties their common knowledge and appreci-ation of that music may allow them to enact social groupings and identities

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that have more than fleeting significance. In fact, they may create their ownribald rituals.

Three further episodes from my fieldwork experiences, described below,show how the practices of folk revivalists have also create a space in whichparticipants enact identities by expressing values and social and regionalaffiliations. Such examples offer a glimpse into the ‘underside’ of the move-ment – that which happens when microphones are turned off, when agendasfor maximizing the presentation of Russian culture to Westernized audi-ences are forgotten or fade into the background, when ritual situations allowpeople to make music and to experience the emotional and social transfor-mations which that activity entails.

September 1998

On the last evening of the folk festival in Vorob’evka, after a large banquetfor all participants in a school gymnasium, members of various groupsbegan to sing, play, and dance beloved folk songs. When I wanderedoutdoors at 2 a.m., a group of about twenty young adult members of severalensembles were loosely grouped in a circle around an accordionist. Theywere engaged in what was obviously a favorite pastime: singing bawdy chas-tushki. As I listened, I began to understand that this style of music-makingwas like a game with particular rules. For example, a participant said ‘mine!’or simply moved into the center of the circle during the instrumental inter-lude to signal that he or she wanted to sing the next chastushka. Once I hadlistened for a while and understood some of the rules, I jumped in with achastushka I had learned in Riazan’ oblast; the accordionist sensed my diffi-culty with the speed of the accompaniment and slowed down toaccommodate me. After my performance, a few others sang chastushkirelated to my theme (mine was about perestroika – which, someonecommented, was a bit outdated) before moving on to other, more productivethemes, like mothers-in-law. At times, a competition between men andwomen was initiated by comments or by the chastushki themselves. Forinstance, after several men in a row sang chastushki, one of the men eggedon the women, saying ‘Girls, sing! The boys are talking, but you’re…’ towhich one of the women responded by singing:

My dear sweetie pieIs like a scarlet posyHe’s big, he has big mustachesJust his thing is tiny!29

In response, all of the women whooped and hollered to praise the particu-larly witty chastushka, while the man who had suggested it in the first placesaid ‘We’ll get you back,’ and a second man countered with another chas-tushka jokingly defending a small manhood:

230 Conclusion

On the window grows a posySky blue and scarlet.Better small and standing upThan big and wilted!30

These chastushki were particularly funny because they used the technique ofsurprise. The first two lines seemed to be perfectly innocent, but the secondtwo revealed their hidden metaphorical meaning. In general, the singersavoided using curse words; instead they utilized symbolic substitution or awhistle in place of the offensive word. In one case, just before a man wasabout to sing a chastushka in which he pronounced such language, hecrossed himself and said ‘Forgive me God!’ Obviously, the participants wereconscious that this was taboo material, and the situation – the fact that itwas late at night, we were outdoors, people were intoxicated, and the nextday everyone would part to go home – made this a special time in whichtransgressions were permitted. After several facetious exchanges, some ofthe participants began to leave, remarking that they were getting sober – itwas time to drink more; fresh arrivals from the banqueting hall replacedthem, and the songs continued.

April 1999

One evening after the events of the Moscow Folkloric Spring festival werefinished, I and about 12 members of ensembles from Moscow, Volgograd,and Astrakhan’ gathered in a room in the Hotel Sevastopol’ on the outskirtsof the city, where the out-of-town guests were staying. We prepared and atesalted fish from Astrakhan’, drank vodka and homemade liqueur fromVolgograd, made toasts, talked about the politics of funding a folkensemble, and sang along with each other’s songs. At one point theVolgograd women sang a melodramatic nineteenth-century Cossackromance, ‘The White Birch’ (‘Belaia bereza’), in which a gypsy tells a womanher lover is cheating on her. With each verse, more and more of thosepresent joined in on the repeated lines; Andrei Kabanov sang along,changing the words to ‘and the Metro is closing!’ to signify it was time to gohome. After the song one of the young Volgograd women, Vika, started along, heartfelt toast to her mentors, the leaders of ensemble Stanitsa, OlgaNikitenko and her husband Aleksandr (Sasha) Kiiazhka, but Nikitenkointerrupted it by kissing Kiiazhka passionately while everyone shouted‘bitter!’ (a kind of toast usually performed at weddings); he explained thattomorrow would be their twenty-second anniversary. Vika resumed herlengthy toast, at the culmination of which she called Nikitenko her motherand kissed her warmly. The leader of the Astrakhan’ group launched into ‘IWalked in the Garden and Picked Flowers’ (‘Vo sadu ia khodila, tsvetochkirvala’), a romance from their region with a melody and story similar to

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‘White Birch,’ in which a woman tells her friends not to fall in love, since herown lover has married another, at which point her ‘life ended.’

May 1999

I flew from Moscow to Perm, a large industrial city just west of the Urals, tovisit the folk ensemble called Songster Workshop, based at the universitythere. The group, composed of about 12 members ranging from their lateteens and 20s to their 30s and 40s, were mostly students and faculty at PermUniversity. Their enthusiasm and deep knowledge of local village traditionsreflected not only their scholarly approach, but also their own village back-grounds. At a casual dinner held to celebrate their recent participation in theMoscow Folklore Spring festival, they sang several songs from their reper-toire.

Wishing to participate in the singing instead of simply listening, I asked ifthey knew any Cossack songs – a regional style with which I was familiarbecause of my contacts with Moscow revivalist groups. They said they neverperformed Cossack music onstage, but occasionally sang it for themselves;they had learned some songs from their leader, who acquired them years agofrom an ensemble in Saratov oblast. I started ‘Zagorelas’ vo pole kalina,’from the Terek Cossacks – a song made popular among folk aficionados bythe Pokrovsky Ensemble. The Perm singers joined in, singing in full voiceand obviously greatly enjoying themselves. But for me, something waswrong: they had changed the musical structure of the song, and it soundedmore like the local Perm style than like a Cossack song.31 However, no oneseemed to notice, so I did my best to find my own voice in this new musicalfabric. When I commented on this ‘interesting’ interpretation to the director,he said matter-of-factly, ‘Yes, it’s interesting that the kids sing it with a Permaccent.’

Each of these examples demonstrates the extent to which the appropri-ated material of Russian (and Cossack) folk music becomes part of the dailylife of the participants of revivalist ensembles. Those who perform folkmusic on stage to entertain and educate audiences also use that very musicto engage creatively with others; to socialize and to solidify social relations;and to establish and enact a shared identity. Their performances in suchcontexts differ from the Western theater model in which, according topopular assumption, what is performed on stage is a simulacrum and ‘actingmeans make-believe.’32 Here, in each case the particular relation between theperformers and listeners was not the classic one of active/passive,real/unreal. The listeners felt free to join in at any time, to express theirheartfelt appreciation, to take the performance in a different direction, toinject their own (personal or regional) style into the music and the toasts.

Also contrary to the Western theater archetype, these contexts did notprivilege the aesthetic qualities of the performance. Rather, here the partici-pants emphasized the emotional, psychological, and social effects of their

232 Conclusion

acts.33 For example, I suggested the song to the Perm group because Iwanted to feel closer to them; the fact that they participated willingly andwith gusto allowed me to feel socially accepted. That they sang the songdifferently than the Moscow groups did not matter on the social level, whichwas prominent; even on the musical level, their singing simply provided aninteresting musical challenge for me and did not detract from the fulfillingexperience of immersing oneself into a group, musically creating with otherco-creators. In the Moscow hotel room, the Astrakhan and Volgogradgroups expressed appreciation for each other when they carried on a musicaldialogue by singing songs that were similar to one another – and partici-pating in each other’s songs. Further, perhaps since the Volgograd group hadbeen the center of attention for several minutes (first it sang a song, then itsmembers led two toasts), the second song constituted the Astrakhan group’ssocial bid for acceptance and attention.

Play, humor, and carnivalesque inversion also played a large part: thechastushki and hotel-room situations were like games in that there wereunwritten rules for participation and the participants behaved as thoughcreative, humorous manipulation of the sung and spoken material was oneof the goals. For example, Kabanov showed impish irreverence for the melo-dramatic folkloric text when he changed the words to reflect the (mundane)current situation: he created a ritual inversion by breaking the common‘rules’ of singing (by which one would take the text seriously and try to singthe ‘correct’ words). Nikitenko interrupted Vika’s perhaps too-heartfeltspeech with a playfully eroticized counter-toast, again breaking ‘rules’ oftoasting and showing irreverence to those who are overly earnest. The chas-tushki singing evolved into a mischievous battle of the sexes in which thetemporary winners were those who gave greatest insult to the rival gender; inthese carnivalesque songs the ‘lower strata’ of the body, the genitals, wereprivileged. Just as in the play-time or pretend-time of ritual, these situationsprovided a ‘space’ (or frame) within which irreverence, insults, eroticizedbehavior, cursing and other taboo language were accepted – indeed, werepart of the goal.34

In fact, each of these scenes offers an example of ritual: the first was theritual of a rock concert with the attendant outpouring of love from the fans;the second scene represented a variant of the Russian ritual of an outdoor,public musical gathering, ulichnoe gulianie; the third and fourth exemplifiedthe ritual of zastol’e, in which the participants, sitting at a table with food ordrink, express themselves creatively and emotionally. The last two areamong the most productive rituals incorporating music in Russia today:ulichnye gulianiia spring up in city parks and apartment building courtyardsall over Russia whenever there is an accordionist and a few people who loveto sing and dance (the name for such an agreed-upon place in a city park ispiatachok); zastol’ia are a ubiquitous feature of Russians’ celebrations ofholidays, birthdays, weddings, and the like. Toasts are an omnipresent,defining feature; and even in urban settings singing often takes place: some-

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times the host will make sure that someone brings a guitar in order to singbard’s songs, or the participants sing along with recorded music.

Victor Turner has argued that one of the defining features of ritual is itsliminality, the transitional state in which the normal rules of the society aretemporarily suspended. In the context of such a displacement of socialstructure, ritual makes room for what Turner calls ‘communitas’ or a feelingof community: ‘an essential and generic human bond.’35 Although thescenes I have described do not fit the traditional association of liminalitywith a rite of passage, a state ‘betwixt and between,’ I believe they are modi-fied versions of such states, where ritual marks out a space in which peoplefeel free to express themselves in ways they would not customarily, to ‘play’with structures, systems, rules, and expectations. For example, the toastallows Russians to avow deep emotions that might be hard to expresspublicly without the aid of the requisite verbal pattern. Group singing(including singing along) provides a structure in which people assert theirconnectedness. The zastol’e and the gulianie both provide structures thatallow participants to play creatively, to be imaginative, to express emotions,to reinforce groups. Chastushki allow for the acting out of transgression, the‘interrogation of boundaries.’36 Through these rituals, participants are trans-formed: after the ritual is over, they may feel that new bonds have beenestablished, identities have been forged, rules and hierarchies have been chal-lenged.

Thus, these folk-music aficionados are not simply using music to solidifypersonal relationships. We can understand these offstage performances inseveral ways. Perhaps, with their playful subversion of conventions, theperformers tacitly affirm a broader inversion: that what they do offstage isjust as important – or maybe more important – than what they do onstage.Performing onstage requires adherence to set rules, hierarchies, and conven-tions: the audience remains quiet while the performers sing, each song has abeginning and end, the choice of songs follows a set program, the content ofsongs and gestures must be ‘proper,’ and so on. In the offstage situations Ihave described, each of these requirements is reversed. The actions of theperformers suggest that the constraints of the stage are stifling, staid; theatmosphere is too ‘cultured.’ These revivalists require an outlet for inhibi-tions, a place in which to undo limitations.

In this sense the behind-the-scenes performances act as a crucial supple-ment or an equally valuable double that makes up for theinstitutionalization and aestheticization of staged folklore. Offstage, theycan both create and transgress. Furthermore, when they sing in the contextsof such rituals they assert their identity as part of an ‘imagined community’that links them through its shared culture. After they experience such back-stage rituals their stage acts may contain at least the memory of this play,heartfelt emotion, and sense of belonging – and be richer because of it.

The formation of an imagined community occurs not just within eachensemble, but on an international level: the groups are linked despite being

234 Conclusion

geographically widespread. Whether or not they have had prior face-to-facecontact, each group can participate in singing with other groups who arepart of the youth folklore movement because they share the ability and thedesire to sing along with folk music. Thus, the Perm group can and does singalong with the music of Terek Cossacks, led by an American. Bawdy chas-tushki bring together young adults from various regions (and countries) andnone are left out; all are accommodated.

What is significant about this imagined community is the way it isbrought about through a single, very traditional method of transmission.While Russian folk ensembles use both face-to-face and fixed media (writtentexts and notation, video and audio recordings) to learn the materials theyperform on stage, the rituals that occur when folklore ensembles get togetheroffer spontaneous situations for face-to-face transmission. As in the exampleof the encounter of the Astrakhan’ and Volgograd groups in the Moscowhotel room, these two ensembles sang along with each others’ songs eventhough they had no prior knowledge of this material. Although they prob-ably did not learn the songs from this one encounter, a few subsequentencounters would have been sufficient for the groups to adopt songs fromeach others’ repertoires, if they should have desired (and I saw ampleevidence of such repertoire-sharing among groups). Such was the primarymethod of folklore transmission prior to the widespread use of radio: withina community, people learned by singing along with elders, and similarly, visi-tors from other communities adopted new repertoire by singing along withhosts, and vice versa.

In this sense the culture of the folk revival movement comprises what Idefine as authentic folklore – grassroots and spontaneously produced, notorganized and consciously constructed. If on stage the performers areappropriators of a romanticized village culture which is not their own,during such moments of spontaneous incorporation of this music into theirlives, the position of appropriator weakens and fades away, and folklorismbecomes folklore. This folklore is not recognized by the participants as such– it is just what they do when they are not ‘performing.’ Thus, folklorismcomes full circle and becomes real folklore: each performer can be seen aspart of the culture he or she represents, if we define that culture as themilieu of the folk revival movement.

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List of Interviews

Aivazian, Svetlana. Director of Alliance of Folklore Ensembles. 16 September 1998,Moscow.

Batmanova, Olga. Director of Novgorod Center of Folk Art. 3 December 1999,Novgorod.

Borisenko, Boris Ivanovich. Head of Department of Folk Chorus and solo singingat the Institute of Arts. 22 September 1998, Volgograd.

Boronina, Elena Germanovna. Director of amateur folk ensemble and teacher offolk arts. (a) 11 November 1998; (b) 5 November 1998, Moscow.

Bortsov, Vitalii. Director of amateur folk ensemble. 10 May, 1999, Uriupinsk,Volgograd oblast.

Bur’iak, Marina. Director of the amateur folk ensemble Kudesy, teacher of folkmusic at School of Arts, Novgorod. 2 December 1998, Novgorod.

Demchenko, Natal’ia. Director of amateur folk ensemble. 11 May 1999, Vorob’evka,Voronezh oblast.

Dorokhova, Ekaterina. Musicologist at Russian Folklore Commission in Moscow,artistic director of the amateur folk ensemble Narodnyi Prazdnik, member of theensemble Russian Music. 13 January 1999, Moscow.

Galitskii, Vitalii. Maker of ancient folk instruments, member of professional folkensemble Rusichi. 14 January 1999, Moscow.

Galiuk, Vera. Director of amateur folk ensemble Radoves, in Voronezh. 13September 1998, Vorob’evka, Voronezh oblast.

Giliarova, Natal’ia. Musicologist, Professor, and Dean at Moscow Conservatory,director of amateur Moscow Conservatory Folk Ensemble. (a) 20 September1998; (b) 25 September 1998; (c) 31 October 1998, Moscow.

Glumova, Anzhelika. Director of amateur folk ensemble. (a) 12 September 1998; (b)9 January 1999; (c) 1 January 1999; (d) 9 January 1999, Saratov.

Grechkosei, Valentina. Director of amateur ensemble Vereiushka, in Zheleznogorsk,Kursk oblast. 13 September 1998. Vorob’evka, Voronezh oblast.

Gribova, Dusia. Member of village ensemble. 20 October 1998, Lubianiki, Riazanoblast.

Gubareva, Zinaida. Member of village ensemble. 10 October 1998, Kochemary,Riazan’ oblast.

Iarysh, Vladimir. Maker of gusli and teacher of folk music at School of Arts,Novgorod. 2 December 1998, Novgorod.

Appendix

Il’ina, Larisa. Craftsperson working in birch bark. Novgorod Center of Folk Art. 3December 1999, Novgorod.

Kabanov, Andrei. Freelance musicologist, adjunct faculty at Gnesin Academy, co-director of amateur folk ensemble Izmailovskaia Sloboda. (a) 10 November 1998;(b) 13 November 1998; (c) 18 November 1998; (d) 28 December 1998; (e) 9January 1999; (f) 16 January 1999; (g) 21 April 1999; (h) 14 May 1999; (i) 8 June1999, Moscow.

Kabanova, Zhanna. Adjunct faculty at Gnesin Academy, co-director of amateur folkensemble Izmailovskaia Sloboda. (a) 17 January 1999; (b) 26 May 1999, Moscow.

Kaidun, Vera. Director of children’s ensemble Gornitsa. 5 December 1998, St Peters-burg.

Karas’ev, Alexei. Founder of local historical museum. 6 January 1999, village ofVladykino, Saratov oblast.

Kliuchnikova, Olga. Staff member of Alliance of Folklore Ensembles, leader andmember of folk singing studio. 22 January 1999, Moscow.

Kob, Ivan Semenovich. Singer of religious verses. 23 May 1999, Bolotnoe, Novosi-birsk oblast.

Kol’tsova, Nadezhda. Director of professional folk ensemble Uzoroch’e. 21 October1998, Riazan’.

Kotov, Andrei. Director of professional ensemble specializing in religious vocalmusic. 26 January 1999, Moscow.

Koval’skii, Vadim. Actor, teacher of martial arts, co-director of amateur folkensemble. 1 January 1999, Saratov.

Kozlov, Aleksandr. Director of Riazan State Folk Choir. 22 October 1998, Riazan.Kozlov, Vasilii. Director of Department of Culture, Vorob’evka. (a) 9 May 1999; (b)

12 May 1999, Vorob’evka, Voronezh oblast.Kozlova, Irina. Doctor, member of amateur folk ensemble. 7 May 1999, Vorob’evka,

Voronezh oblast.Krasnopevtseva, Elena. Director of amateur folk ensemble. (a) 19 November 1998;

(b) 20 January 1999, Moscow.Kubrakova, Valentina. Director of Center of Cossack Culture, museum, and

amateur folk ensemble; producer of amateur videos on Cossack culture. Alsopresent: Natalia Giliarova, Valerii Dronov, Nadezhda Penkovtseva. 24 September1998, Alekseevskaia, Volgograd oblast.

Kukhanova, Irina. Student at St Petersburg Conservatory, Musical-EthnologicalDepartment. 5 December, 1998, St Petersburg.

Makhova, Liuda. Student at St Petersburg State Conservatory (musical-ethno-graphic department), 6 December 1998, St Petersburg.

Makheeva, Tat’iana. Composer of Requiem for Dmitri Pokrovsky. 29 November1998, Moscow.

Marshalkina, Ania. Member of amateur folk ensemble. 7 January 1999, village ofVladykino, Saratov oblast’.

Mekhnetsov, Anatolii. Professor, St Petersburg State Conservatory, Musical-Ethno-graphic department, Director of St Petersburg Folkloric-Ethnographic Center,Director of student Folklore Ensemble of the St Petersburg State Conservatory.(a) 4 December 1998; (b) 5 December 1998; (c) 7 December 1998, St Petersburg;(d) 22 April 1999, Moscow.

Minenok, Elena. Folklorist at the Institute of World Literature, Moscow. (a) 16November 1998, Moscow; (b) 30 May 1999, Troitskoe, Kaluga oblast; (c) 31 May

Interviewees 237

1999, Petrovskoe, Kaluga oblast; (d) 1 June 1999 Troitskoe, Kaluga oblast’; (e) 9June, 1999, Moscow.

Mironova, Marina. Director of Ensemble Khoper. 9 May 1999, Novokhopersk,Voronezh oblast.

Nefedova, Maria. Co-director of Pokrovsky Ensemble, 30 December 1998, Moscow.Nekrylova, Anna. Professor and researcher, Institute of Art History, Folklore Sector,

St Petersburg. 7 December 1998, St Petersburg.Novitskaia, Marina Iur’evna. Folklorist, author. 18 January 1999, Moscow.Osipova, Elena. Weaver. Novgorod Center of Folk Art. 3 December 1999,

Novgorod.Pereslegin, Alexander. Musicologist, member of amateur folk ensemble Cossack

Circle. 13 January 1999, Moscow.Popova, Natal’ia. Teacher of folklore at Center of Ancient Instruments, Novgorod. 4

December 1998, Novgorod.Povetkin, Vladimir. Maker of ancient instruments, teacher, Director of Center of

Ancient Instruments, Novgorod. 4 December 1998, Novgorod.Savel’eva, Ira. Folk singer and researcher, Moscow Conservatory. 17 November 1998,

Moscow.Shamina, Liudmila. Professor of folk singing, researcher, Gnesin Academy. 17

November 1998, Moscow.Shchurov, Viacheslav Mikhailovich. Musicologist, Moscow Conservatory, teacher of

folk singing, Ippolitovo-Ivanovo Institute. (a) 9 November 1998; (b) 11 November1998; (c) 9 December 1998, Moscow.

Shilin, Aleksei. Choreographer, teacher at Gnesin School and Academy. 26 January1999, Moscow.

Smyslova, Tamara. Former member of Pokrovsky Ensemble, Director of profes-sional folk ensemble. 11 November 1998, Moscow.

Starostin, Sergei. Researcher on folk music, author of documentary series, profes-sional folk musician. 22 December, 1998, Moscow.

Strel’tsov, Sergei, member of amateur folk ensemble. 20 September 1998, Veshen-skaia stanitsa, Rostov oblast.

Talorin, Volodia. Director of amateur folk ensemble. 7 May 1999, Vorob’evka,Voronezh oblast.

Trifilov, Nikolai. Member of amateur folk ensemble Cossack Circle. 11 September1998, Nikol’skoe, Voronezh oblast.

Tychinina, Elena. Director of Semiluki Department of Culture. 7 May 1999,Vorob’evka, Voronezh oblast.

Vagner, Pavel. Member of amateur folk ensemble. 20 September 1998, Veshenskaiastanitsa, Rostov oblast.

Vilochkova, Zinaida. Village resident. 7 January 1999, village of Vladykino, Saratovoblast’.

Zagradakaia, Svetlana. Director of amateur folk ensemble. (a) 9 December 1998; (b)18 December 1998, Moscow.

Zhuk, Valera. Director of amateur folk ensemble Pesel’naia artel’. (a) 15 May 1999;(b) 17 May 1999, Perm.

Zosimova, Evgeniia. Director of professional folk ensemble Karagod. 29 October1998, Moscow.

238 Interviewees

Group Interviews, listed by location

Berezovka, Volgograd oblast. Village ensemble. 21 September 1998. Mariia Popova(b. 1928), Aleksandra Krivenkova (b. 1928), Aleksandra Karpova (b. 1937), AnnaPonomareva (b. 1926). Also present: Nina Kentner, Natal’ia Giliarova.

Charuss, Riazan oblast. Village ensemble. (a) 25 July 1995; (b) 26 July 1995.Ermolovo, Riazan oblast. Village ensemble. (a) August 1, 1996; (b) 16 October 1998.

Evdokinia Blinnikova (b. 1915), Aleksandra Matasova (b. 1919), PraskoviaSmetannikova (b. 1920), Polina Smetannikova (b. 1924). Also present: ElenaBogina.

Kochemary, Riazan oblast. Village ensemble. (a) 22 July 1995; (b) 24 July 1995; (c) 19October 1998; (d) 20 October 1998. Valentina A. Aleshina (b. 1941), ValentinaChukhunova (b. 1940), Aleksandra Tarasova (b. 1936), Tat’iana Arkhipova (b.1928), Valentina I. Aleshina (b. 1930), Zinaida Gubareva (b. 1925).

Kozlinovskii, Volgograd oblast. Village ensemble. 21 September 1998. Tat’ianaChekunova (b. 1940), Raisa Khadiuk (b. 1933), Liubov’ Makeeva (b. 1958),Valentina Ovchinkova (b. 1964), Nadezhda Sukharukova (b. 1937), LenaVoronova (b. 1979), Iurii Serpin (b. 1939), Petr Sukharukov (b. 1935), AnnaDolgacheva (b. 1972), Valentina Khavrova (b. 1965), Ol’ga Gleikina (b. 1960),Nikolai Popov (b. 1939 – accordionist), Rima Serkina (b. 1938). Also present:Liuba Dolgachova, Nata’lia Giliarova.

Krasnokorotovka, Volgograd oblast. Village ensemble, 19 September 1998. Natal’iaLarina (b. 1924), Anna Skorobochatova (b. 1929), Tat’iana Sosina (b. 1932),Larisa Zavolochkina (b. 1984), Mariia Kozlovtseva (b. 1984), Tat’iana Ermilova(b. 1986), Liuda Serikova (b. 1985). Also present: Nata’lia Giliarova.

Lasino, Riazan oblast. Village ensemble. (a) and (b) 18 October 1998. EkaterinaRusina (b. 1924), Valentina Karpova (b. 1929), Polina Kislenko (b. 1921), Mar’iaD’iachkova (b. 1924). Also present: Elena Bogina.

Lubianiki, Riazan oblast. Village ensemble. (b) 20 October 1998. Lidiia Savina (b.1959), Alla Kirsanova (b. 1975), Ol’ga Staroverova (b. 1978), Tat’iana Khokhlova(b. 1957), Liubov’ Kirsanova (b. 1946), Anna Kondrakova (b. 1953), Tat’ianaStaroverova (b. 1959). Also present: Elena Bogina.

Liubovnikovo, Riazan oblast. Village ensemble. (a) 29 July 1996, (b) 17 December1998.

Varvara Beliakova (b. 1924), Antonina Poddubnaia (b. 1941), Anna Ivanushkina (b.1941), Aleksandra Kulikova (b. 1941), Ekaterina Nikanorova (b. 1921), AnnaNosova (b. 1941).

Polfiniaty, Kaluga oblast. Village ensemble. 31 May 1999. Anna Evsenkova (b. 1923),Aleksandra Riabykh (b. 1931).

Rog-Izmailovskii, Volgograd oblast. Village ensemble. 19 September 1998. TaiaGodovaniuk (b. 1941), Mariia Krasikova (b. 1942), Aleksandra Krasikova (b.1936), Aleksandr Lukashin (b. 1930), Raisa Lukashina (b. 1932), Mariia Ageeva(b. 1935), Ol’ga Afanas’eva (b. 1925), Vasilii Trasikov (b. 1935), Anna Babicheva(b. 1931), Nikolai Shein (b. 1931), Zoia Sheina (b. 1935).

Ust-Buzuluk, Volgograd oblast. Village ensemble. 24 September 1998. TamaraKozyreva (b. 1931), Anna Kramarova (b. 1933), Zinaida Kondrashova (b. 1942),Hadezhda Medveditskova (b. 1949), Valentina Kolesnikova (b. 1931), IuliaPopova (b. 1930), Vitalii Popov (b. 1930), Taisa Antamoshkina (b. 1936), ZoiaMinaeva (b. 1929), Aleksei Minaev (b.1929), Valentina Tereshenkova (b. 1931),Maria Matorkina (b. 1935), Vasilii Kozyrev (b. 1926).

Interviewees 239

Troitskoe, Kaluga oblast. Village ensemble. a) 1 June 1999. Zinaida V. Efremenkova(b. 1929), Varvara R. Balabanova (b. 1929). b) 30 May 1999. Antonina Bala-banova (b. 1930), Lidiia Sibirskaia (b. 1931), Aleksei Sibirskii (b. 1927).

Vorob’evka, Voronezh oblast. Amateur folk ensemble Vereia. (a) 7 May 1999; (b) 18May 1999. Olga Garlova (b. 1965), Nina Peregudova (b. 1955), Ludmilla Kosti-akova (b. 1964), Volodia Talorin (b. 1958), and Irina Kozlova.

240 Interviewees

Introduction1 Ania Marshalkina (b. 1982), interview with the author, village of Vladykino,

Saratov oblast’, 7 January 1999.2 Based upon statistics from the 1989 census indicating city and rural population

of the RSFSR. Itogi vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1989 g. vol II, ‘Vozrast isostoianie v brake naseleniia SSSR,’ part I (Minneapolis, MN: East View, 1992),24–6.

3 E. V. Kashcheeva, ‘Gorodskie formy dosuga: moskovskoe meshchanstvo,’ inTraditsionnye formy dosuga: istoriia i sovremennost’, Sokhranenie i vozrozhdeniefol’klornykh traditsii, vyp. 5, Gosudarstvennyi respublikanskii tsentr russkogofol’klora, Moscow, 1994, 162.

4 Kashcheeva, 160.5 Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 27–8, 30.6 James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld, ‘Introduction,’ in German Volkskunde: A

Decade of Theoretical Confrontation, Debate, and Reorientation (1967–7), ed.and trans. James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1986), 8.

7 Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore (Logan, UT: Utah State UniversityPress, 1996), 2.

8 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 12.

9 Alan Dundes, ‘What is Folklore?’ in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 2.; Toelken, 19.

10 Hermann Bausinger, ‘Towards a Critique of Folklorism Criticism,’ in Dow andLixfeld, op. cit., 115–16

11 I am referring to Clifford’s notion of the ‘art-culture system.’ See Clifford 1988,224.

12 Bausinger, 117–20.13 James Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths,’ in Writing Culture: the Poetics and

Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 1986), 15.

14 Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1996), 7.

15 Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English FolkRevival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), xiii.

16 Periodicals included Sovetskaia muzyka, Sovetskaia kul’tura, and Klub i khodozh-estvennaia samodeiatel’nost’.

Notes

17 See Barry P. Michrina and CherylAnne Richards, Person to Person: Fieldwork,Dialogue, and the Hermeneutic Method (Albany, NY: State University of NewYork Press, 1996).

18 Such techniques are used, for example, in Jane Sugarman, Engendering Song:Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings (Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press, 1997); Theodore Levin, The Hundred Thousand Fools of God:Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) (Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 1996); and Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honorand Poetry in a Bedouin Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

19 Sugarman speaks of similar renegotiations among diaspora families from PrespaAlbania, 26.

20 Helena Goscilo, ‘The Gendered Trinity of Russian Cultural Rhetoric Today – orthe Glyph of the H[i]eroine,’ in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in LateTwentieth-Century Russia, ed. Nancy Condee (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1995), 74–5; Gregory Feifer, ‘Utopian Nostalgia: Russia’s “NewIdea”,’ in World Policy Journal 16, no. 3 (Fall 1999), 111.

21 Such a view of performance has affinities with Judith Butler’s work on genderand identity. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (NewYork: Routledge, 1990) Butler argues that ‘there is no preexisting identity’ andthat identity is essentially created ‘through sustained social performances’ (141).Works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault also point towards such aconception of performance; for a summary and assessment see Sugarman, 27.

22 Siân Jones and Paul Graves-Brown, ‘Introduction: Archaeology and CulturalIdentity in Europe,’ in Cultural Identity and Archaeology: The Construction ofEuropean Communities, ed. Paul Graves-Brown, Siân Jones, Clive Gamble(London: Routledge, 1996), 4, 7.

23 Jones and Graves-Brown, 7.24 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon,

1972), 162–65; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Artand Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 34, 42–3; and LoisMcNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (New York: Continuum, 1994) 3, 11. Inthe past decade several studies have been written in Soviet history and culturethat employ this dual dynamic. See, for example, the work of Evgeny Dobrenko,Lynne Viola, and Stephen Kotkin.

25 Clifford 1988, 224–6.26 Clifford 1988, 229.27 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions,’ in The Invention of

Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983), 1.

1 The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music in Pre-Revolutionary Russia1 A. Pol’shina, ‘Zhanrovye osobennosti orkestra russkikh narodnykh instrumentov

i puti ego razvitiia,’ in Narodnoe tvorchestvo: Voprosy muzykal’noi samod-eiatel’nosti i fol’klora Ministerstvo kul’tury RSFSR, Nauchno-issledovatel’nyiinstitut kul’tury, Trudy 20 (Moscow, 1974), 122–3.

2 Evgenii Kuznetsov, Iz proshlogo russkoi estrady: Istoricheskie ocherki (Moscow,1958), 316.

3 F. Sokolov, V. V. Andreev i ego orkestr (Leningrad, 1962), 70–72.4 Sokolov, 74–5. Famitsyn’s monograph is Domra i srodnye ei muzykal’nye instru-

menty russkogo naroda (St Petersburg, 1891).

242 Notes

5 K. Vertkov, Russkie narodnye muzykal’nye instrumenty (Leningrad, 1975), 82–83,173, 175.

6 Iu. Boiko, ‘Russkie narodnye instrumenty i orkestry russkikh narodnykh instru-mentov,’ in Traditsionnyi fol’klor v sovremennoi khudozhestvennoi zhizni: Fol’klor ifol’klorizm, ed. I. Zemtsovskii, V. Lapin, and I. Matsievskii (Leningrad, 1984),88. Boiko notes that contemporary Kazakh musicians often used an imitation ofthis style of playing on their native instrument, the dombra, calling it ‘Russian’style playing. See note 19, p. 95.

7 Boiko, 88– 9.8 Kuznetsov 317–20.9 V. V. Andreev, ‘Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,’ in Novoe vremia 9422 (1902), supplement.

10 Iu. V., Keldysh, Istoriia russkoi muzyki, v. 1 Drevniaia rus’ XI–XVII veka(Moscow, 1983), 67, 194.

11 Boiko, 92.12 Boiko, 93.13 ‘Russkaia balalaika v Amerike (beseda s V. V. Andreevym),’ in Peterburgskii

listok 64 (March 7, 1911), reprinted in A. V. Tikhonov, Sozdatel’ velikorusskogoorkestra V. V. Andreev v zerkale russkoi pressy (1888–1917 gody) (St Petersburg,1998), 136–7.

14 Novoe vremia 11122 (27 February, 1907), reprinted in Tikhonov, 86.15 Novosti 14 March 1888, quoted in Pol’shina 124.16 Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1. 960), 161; Kuznetsov 68–9.17 Malcolm Hamrick Brown, ‘Native Song and National Consciousness in

Nineteenth-Century Russian Music,’ in Art and Culture in Nineteenth-CenturyRussia, ed. Theofanis George Stavrou (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UniversityPress, 1983), 60.

18 Kuznetsov 56–9.19 Elena Chinyaeva, ‘Hostages of Their Own Music,’ in Transitions 4, no. 4

(September 1997), reprinted in Patrin, www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/culture.htm(accessed 14 January 1999). The opposing view is taken by E. Druts and A.Gessler, who argue that the Russians and Russian music had a great influence onRomani music. See Narodnye pesni russkikh tsigan (Moscow, 1988), 4.

20 Kuznetsov 57–62.21 On the similarity of lifestyles of gentry and serf see Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on

the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (Yale University Press,1995), 3, 12.

22 Izalii Zemtsovskii, ‘Traditional music,’ in The New Grove Dictionary of MusicOnline ed. L. Macy (Accessed 26 June 2001), www.grovemusic.com.

23 Izalii Zemtsovskii, Russkaia narodnaia pesnia. Nauchno-populiarnyi ocherk(Moscow, 1964), 5–6. On the difficulty of generalizing about Russian folk musicsee Zemtsovskii, ‘Traditional music.’

24 Viacheslav Shchurov, Stilevye osnovy russkoi narodnoi muzyki (Moscow, 1998),70.

25 Zemtsovskii, ‘Traditional music.’26 T. Popova, Russkoe narodnoe muzykal’noe tvorchestvo vol. 2 (Moscow, 1964), 13.27 On the term ‘podgolosok’ see Lineva, Velikorusskiia pesni v narodnoi garmo-

nizatsii, v. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1904), iv. Russian folk polyphony differs fromWestern polyphony as well as from Western harmony; see Alfred J. Swan, ‘TheNature of the Russian Folk-Song,’ Musical Quarterly 29, no. 4 (October, 1943):512.

28 Elizabeth A. Warner and Evgenii S. Kustovskii, Russian Traditional Folk Song(Hull: Hull University Press, 1990), 10; see also Jowan Hove, ‘The Two Worlds of

Notes 243

the Russian Peasant and Urban Folk Song,’ Etnomusikologian vuosikirja(1990):186; Viacheslav Shchurov, interview with the author, Moscow, 9November 1998.

29 Zemtsovskii 1964, 44; Izalii Zemtsovskii, Russkie narodnye protiazhnye pesni,Moscow 1966, 16.

30 See Jowan Hove, ‘The Two Worlds of the Russian Peasant and Urban FolkSong,’ in Etnomusikologian vuosikirja (1990), 178; F. Rubtsov, ‘Russkie narodnyekhory i psevdonarodnye pesni,’ in Stat’i po muzykal’nomu fol’kloru (Moscow,1973), 192; E. Lineva, Velikorusskie pesni v narodnoi garmonizatsii 1 (St.Petersburg, 1904), xxvii.

31 Izalii Zemtsovskii, Russkie narodnye protiazhnye pesni, Mocow 1966, 12–13;Zemtsovskii 1980, 394.

32 ‘Russian Folk Music,’ s. v. ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,‘ in New GroveDictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan,1980), 388.

33 E. V. Gippius, ‘O russkoi narodnoi podgolosochnoi polifonii v kontseXVIII–nachale XIX veka,’ Sovetskaia etnografiia, no. 2 (1948), 96.

34 Margarita Mazo, ‘Introduction,’ in A Collection of Russian Folk Songs by NikolaiLvov and Ivan Prach, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Ann Arbor, MI: UMIResearch Press, 1987), 14–18 and 32; see also Rogger, 161–3.

35 Roosevelt 204, 236; Kuznetsov, 36–7; Mazo 6; Elizabeth A. Warner, The RussianFolk Theatre (The Hague: Mouton, 1977), xii; A. F. Nekrylova, Russkie narodnyegorodskie prazdnikiki, uveseleniia i zrelishcha. Konets XVIII–nachalo XX veka(Leningrad, 1988), 159.

36 Robert A. Rothstein, ‘Death of the Folk Song?’ in Cultures in Flux: Lower-ClassValues, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frankand Mark D. Steinberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994),115–17.

37 V. G. Smolitskii, N. V. Mikhailova, Russkii zhestokii romans (Moscow, 1994),3–6.

38 Shchurov, 1998, 71.39 Rothstein 1994, 115–17.40 Mazo, 14.41 William A. Wilson, ‘Herder, Folklore, and Romantic Nationalism,’ Folk Groups

and Folklore Genres: A Reader, ed. Elliott Oring (Logan, UT: Utah StateUniversity Press, 1989), 28–9.

42 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole(London: J. M. Dent, 1973), 118.

43 Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans.T. Churchill, 1800 (reprinted New York: Bergman, 1966), 194.

44 Wilson, 30.45 Rothstein 1994, 110.46 A. D. Soimonov, ‘ “Pesennaia proklamatsiia” P. V. Kireevskogo,’ in Sovetskaia

etnografiia 4 (1960), 148.47 Rothstein 1994, 120.48 And elsewhere: see Tamara E. Livingston, ‘Music Revivals: Towards a General

Theory,’ Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 74.49 Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Tradition, Genuine or Spurious,’ Folk

Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, ed. Elliott Oring (Logan, UT: Utah StateUniversity Press, 1989): 39.

50 Rothstein 1994, 118.

244 Notes

51 Robert C. Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry inNineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981),76.

52 Jennifer Fuller, ‘Epic Melodies: An Examination of Folk Motifs in the Text andMusic of Prince Igor,’ in Intersections and Transpositions: Russian Music,Literature, and Society, ed. Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press, 1998), 35.

53 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of theWorks through Mavra vol. 1(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 606.

54 Ridenour, 76–7.55 Cathy A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late 19th

Century Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7.56 Richard S. Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism, (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1967), 8, 14–18.57 Both the Wanderers movement in painting and the Mighty Handful started with

progressive goals to bring art to the people and to counter what they saw as theprofessionalization and institutionalization of art. Both movements are widelyviewed as having ended up more reactionary than progressive. See Taruskin 1996,45–54, 73.

58 Richard Taruskin, ‘ “The Present in the Past”: Russian Opera and RussianHistoriography, ca. 1870,’ Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz,ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 80;William Craft Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 11.

59 Alison Hilton, Russian Folk Art (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,1995), 216–17.

60 Hilton, 217.61 Taruskin 1996, 355.62 ‘Present in the Past,’ 110.63 ‘Present in the Past,’ 115, 125, 143.64 Richard Taruskin, ‘ “Little Star”: An Etude in the Folk Style,’ Musorgsky: In

Memoriam 1881–1981, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Ann Arbor, MI: UMIResearch Press, 1982), 64; Izalii Zemtsovskii, Iskateli pesen: Rasskazy o sobi-rateliakh narodnykh pesen v dorevoliutsionnoi i Sovetskoi Rossii (Leningrad,1967), 68.

65 Taruskin 1996, 724–5, note 136.66 Frierson, 10, 12.67 Warner and Kustovskii, 4; Dana Prescott Howell, The Development of Soviet

Folkloristics (New York: Garland, 1992), 21–2; M. K. Azadovskii, Istoriiarusskoi fol’kloristiki, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1963), 238–39.

68 Zemtsovskii 1964, 69; Taruskin 1996, 724. The musicologists who first wrotedown Russian folk polyphony in musical notation in the 1870s were V. Prokunin,Iu. Mel’gunov, and N. Pal’chikov. Mel’gunov was the first to describe severalimportant features of Russian folk polyphony. See Gippius, 1948, 101–2.

69 Taruskin 1996, 355.70 Hilton, 234–5.71 Hilton, 245–8.72 Taruskin 1996, 533–4.73 Taruskin 1996, 119.74 Robert Fink, ‘On Igor Stravinsky,’ Modernism/Modernity 4.3 (1997), 152.75 Taruskin 1996, 905, 914.76 Taruskin 1996, 949–50.77 Kuznetsov 185–5.

Notes 245

78 N. I. Zhulanova, ‘Molodezhnoe fol’klornoe dvizhenie,’ in Samodeiatel’noekhudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo v SSSR: Ocherki istorii. Konets 1950-x–nachalo1990-x godov., ed. L. P. Solntseva and M. V. Iunisov (St Petersburg: 1999), 129,note 3. See also F. Rubtsov, ‘Russkie narodnye khory i psevdonarodnye pesni,’in Stat’i po muzykal’nomu fol’kloru (Moscow, 1973), 205.

79 D. Lokshin, Zamechatel’nye russkie khory i ikh dirizhery (Moscow, 1963), 65,states that the pseudonym was adopted because Agrenev and his chorusperformed ‘mostly Slavic songs,’ but Agrenev’s involvement with the Slavicpolitical movement suggests the name symbolized more than the choice ofrepertoire.

80 Lokshin, 67.81 Lokshin, 68.82 Kuznetsov, 193–7; Lokshin, 72.83 Lokshin, 70–71.84 Kuznetsov, 197.85 P. I. Chaikovskii, Muzykal’no-kriticheskie stat’i (Moscow, 1953) 139, 287,

quoted in Kuznetsov, 194.86 Kuznetsov, 197. The words ‘vulgar’ and ‘dilettante’ are Kuznetsov’s and reflect

the Soviet view of the chorus.87 A. Khitrovo, Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Slavianskii i ego deiatel’nost’ (Tver’, 1887),

55–61.88 M. Gor’kii, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, v. 23 (Moscow, 1953), 156.89 Kuznetsov, 197–8.90 Kuznetsov, 199–200.91 Rubtsov 1973, 204.92 Rubtsov 1973, 206.93 Zhulanova, 129, note 3.94 Livingston, 74.95 Zemtsovskii 1964, 80.95 Zemtsovskii 1964, 80.99 Zemtsovskii 1964, 73; see also Eugenie Lineff, Russian Folk-Songs and Peasant

Wedding Ceremonies (Chicago: Summy, 1893), 60.100 Lineff 1893, 62.101 James Bailey and Mikhail Lobanov note that Lineva departed ‘from ethno-

graphic meticulousness’ in her choir’s concerts. ‘In actuality, only a few weddingsongs were sung by the choir and even those were taken mainly from the collec-tion of Rimsky-Korsakov.’ See Slavic and East European Folklore Association 4,no. 1 (Spring 1999), 26–7.

102 E. E. Lineva, Russkaia muzykal’naia gazeta 15 (Aug. 15, 1901): col. 420; I. I.Shevchenko, ‘Iz istorii Moskovskoi narodnoi konservatorii (1906–1918 gg.),’ inTraditsionnyi fol’klor i sovremennye narordye khory i ansambli. Fol’klor iFol’klorizm, vyp. 2, eds. V. Lapin, I. Zemtsovskii, and L. Ivleva (Leningrad,1989), 81.

102 Viktor Lapin, ‘Razvitie russkikh narodnykh khorov (istoriia i sovremennost’),’in Sokhranenie i razvitie russkikh narodno-pevcheskikh traditsii, ed. L. V.Shamina (Moscow, 1986), 18–19; see also E. Kann-Novikova, Sobiratel’nitsarusskikh narodnykh pesen Evgeniia Lineva (Moscow, 1952), 142–5.

102 Shevchenko, 83.103 For other points of view see Susannah Lockwood Smith, ‘Soviet Arts Policy,

Folk Music, and National Identity: The Piatnitskii State Russian Folk Choir,1927–45,’ Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1997, 18; Shevchenko, 81.

104 Smith, 13–21.105 Smith, 18.

246 Notes

106 Kuznetsov, 313.107 Kuznetsov, 313.108 V. Poponov, ‘Entuziast russkikh narodnykh orkestrov,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 9

(1949), 85.109 Livingston, 76–7.110 Richard Taruskin, ‘The Limits of Authenticity: A Discussion,’ Early Music 12,

no. 1 (1984): 9.111 Lapin 1986, 20.

2 A Unified National Style1 Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 43.2 Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress, 1977 [1960]), 177.3 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917–1932 (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1982), 7–8.4 Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State

Promoted Ethnic Particularism,’ Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 417,424.

5 Slezkine, 424–36.6 Slezkine, 424, 434.7 Iurii M. Sokolov, ‘Mesto narodnoi slovesnosti sredi kraevedcheskoi raboty,’ in

Voprosy kraevedeniia (Moscow, 1923), 109; Howell, 70.8 Howell, 74; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the

Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),227–30.

9 Howell, 61–62, 70–74.10 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20–21; Howell 74–5.11 Helmut Altrichter, ‘Insoluble Conflicts: Village Life Between Revolution and

Collectivization,’ in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society andCulture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 201; Oinas and StephenSoudakoff, eds. ‘Introduction,’ in The Study of Russian Folklore (The Hague:Mouton, 1975), 4.

12 Slezkine, 440–41.13 Fitzpatrick 1994, 41.14 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-

Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 23.15 Fitzpatrick 1994, 38–41.16 Fitzpatrick 1994, 48.17 I.V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1952), 306, 309; Slezkine, 442.18 N.L. Rogalina, Kollektivizatsiia: Uroki proidennogo puti (Moscow, 1989), 198;

Fitzpatrick 1994, 262–3.19 Greg Castillo, ‘Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National

Question,’ in Socialist Realism Without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and EvgenyDobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 100.

20 Slezkine, 442–3.21 Slezkine, 443; see also John B. Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian

Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 10–12.22 For examples of this view in relation to folk music see articles such as B. Asaf’ev,

‘O russkoi pesennosti,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 3 (1948), 22–30; and V. Surin,‘Vydaiushchiisia russkii Khor,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 5–6 (1946), 32–6.

Notes 247

23 Howell, 75, 312, 319.24 Susannah Lockwood Smith, ‘Soviet Arts Policy, Folk Music, and National

Identity: The Piatnitskii State Russian Folk Choir, 1927–45,’ Ph.D. diss.,University of Minnesota, 1997, 66.

25 Adam B. Ulam, A History of Soviet Russia (New York: Praeger, 1976), 99.26 Fitzpatrick 1994, 268.27 Smith 1997, 126.28 For a description of what both Moscow and St Petersburg folklorists valued in

folklore collecting prior to the revolution, see Howell, 18–20.29 Howell 318–26.30 Ursula Justus, ‘Vosvrashchenie v rai: sotsrealizm i fol’klor,’ in Sotsrealisticheskii

kanon, ed. Hans Gunter and Evgenii Dobrenko (St Petersburg, 2000), 70–72.31 Max Hayward, Writers in Russia: 1917–1978, ed. Patricia Blake (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 62; ‘Muzyka,’ in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklo-pediia, 40 (Moscow, 1926–47) 569.

32 See Chapter 3 for more on sociological school. Howell, 321–4, 333–5.33 Maxim Gorky, ‘Soviet Literature,’ in Soviet Writers Congress 1934: The Debate

on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union (London: Lawrence andWishart, 1977), 53–4; Justus 71.

34 Elena Minyonok, interview with the author, Moscow, 16 November 1998; seealso Felix J. Oinas, ‘The Political Uses and Themes of Folklore in the SovietUnion,’ in Journal of the Folklore Institute 12, no. 2/3 (1975), 159.

35 Feodosii Rubtsov also makes this point, criticizing the Soviet approach to folk-lore. See F. Rubtsov, ‘Russkie narodnye khory i psevdonarodnye pesni,’ in Stat’ipo muzykal’nomu fol’kloru (Moscow, 1973), 184.

36 Howell 12–14, quote from V. F. Miller to E. N. Eleonskaia, 22 February 1913 inE. V. Pomerantseva, ‘Komissiia po narodnoi slovesnosti Obshchestva liubiteleiestestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii (1911–1926),’ in Ocherki 2 (1963), 200.

37 Oinas 1975, 158–69; Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore andPseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 3–19.

38 Miller, 105–7.39 Viktorin Popov’s commentary in Iu. M. Sokolov, Russian Folklore, trans.

Catherine Ruth Smith (Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1966), 677.40 Miller, 107.41 See Eve Levin’s deconstruction (and recovery) of the term ‘double belief ’ in her

‘Dvoeverie and Popular Religion,’ in Seeking God: The Recovery of ReligiousIdentity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, ed. Stephen K. Batalden(DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 29–52.

42 Feliks Roziner, ‘Sotsrealizm v sovetskoi muzyke,’ in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon,166–7.

43 Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1981, enlargededition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983), 137–8.

44 Amy Nelson ‘The Struggle for Proletarian Music: RAPM and the CulturalRevolution’ in Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000), 126, 131; Lynn Sargeant,‘The Social Politics of Music: Revolutionary Legitimacy and Artistic Integrity inthe Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories, 1917–1932,’ paper given at the 1997national congress of the American Association for the Advancement of SlavicStudies.

45 A. Sokol’skaia, ‘Plastika i tanets v samodeiatel’nom tvorchestve,’ inSamodeiatel’noe khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo v SSSR 2000, 382.

46 Evgeny Dobrenko, ‘Muzyka vmesto sumbura: Narodnost’ kak problemamuzykal’noi kinokomedii stalinskoi epokhi,’ in Revue des etudes Slaves 67, no.2–3 (1995), 410; LaPasha, 160–61.

248 Notes

47 Dobrenko 1995, 414.48 Dobrenko 1995, 418.49 Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic

Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 138–9, 143, 161–2.

50 Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1976), 93.

51 Dobrenko 1995, 432.52 As Amy Nelson points out, this elitist view originated with the Russian

Association of Proletarian Musicians, RAPM. See Nelson 108; Birgit Mentsel’,‘Vse bel’kanto trudiashchimsia ili Opera stalinskoi epokhi,’ in Sotsrealisticheskiikanon, 990.

53 Dobrenko 1995, 432.54 Jennifer Fuller, ‘Epic Melodies: An Examination of Folk Motifs in the Text and

Music of Prince Igor,’ in Intersections and Transpositions: Russian Music,Literature, and Society, ed. Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press), 46.

55 N. Briusova, ‘Vtorichnaia zhizn’ russkoi narodnoi pesni v operakh sovetskikhkompozitorov,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 8–9 (1946), 57.

56 Quoted in ‘Letter to Stalin’ from Moscow composers and musicologists, 1948,Nicholas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900 (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 1375.

57 Steven Moller-Sally argues that the same Romantic model of imitation throughinspiration obtained in literature as well. See ‘ “Klassicheskoe nasledie” v epokhusotsrealizma, ili pokhozhdeniia Gogolia v strane bol’shevikov,’ inSotsrealisticheskii kanon, 509–22.

58 1997, 160.59 V. Kudriakov and A. Liuter, ‘K novomu rastsvetu,’ in Kul’turno-prostetitel’naia

rabota 3 (1965), 1.60 Genrikh Bruk, ‘Nastoiashchee i budushchee muzykal’noi samodeiatel’nosti,’ in

Sovetskaia muzyka 1 (1941), 71.61 L. Robin C. LaPasha, ‘From Chastushki to Tchaikovsky: Amateur Activity and

the Production of Popular Culture in the Soviet 1930s.’ Ph.D. Diss., DukeUniversity, 2001, 300.

62 ‘Samodeiatel’nost’ muzykal’naia,’ in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopedia, 50(Moscow, 1926–47),181.

63 S. Rumiantsev, ‘Muzykal’naia samodeiatel’nost’,’ in Samodeiatel’noe khudozh-estvennoe tvorchestvo v SSSR: Ocherki istorii 1917–1932 gg (St Petersburg, 2000),238.

64 B. Tevlin, ‘Neskol’ko replik,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 12 (1965), 123.65 A. Lenskii, ‘Pogovorim nachistotu,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 12 (1965), 120.66 ‘Samodeiatel’nost’ muzykal’naia,’ 181.67 Smith 1997, 152; LaPasha, 305.68 LaPasha, 316.69 By 1973 they numbered 175 in the Soviet Union. M. M. Iakovlev, ‘Doma naro-

dnogo tvorchestva,’ Muzykal’naia entsyklopediia, 2 (Moscow, 1974), col. 283.70 Smith 1997, 133.71 S. Bugoslavskii, Ivan Shishov, Russkaia narodnaia pesnia, ed. M. Grinberg

(Moscow: 1936), 5.72 Izalii Zemtsovskii, ‘Sel’skaia khorovaia samodeiatel’nost’ i fol’klor,’ in Problemy

muzykal’noi samodeiatel’nosti (Moscow, 1965), 82–3.73 ‘Eshche raz o narodnykh instrumentakh,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 10 (1965), 107–8.74 LaPasha, 314.

Notes 249

75 ‘Gosudarstvennyi komitet Rossiiskoi federatsii po statistike,’ in Rossiiskii statis-ticheskii ezhegodnik, 1998 (Moscow, 1998), 322.

76 Z. Golubchina, ‘Pervyi god,’ in Kul’turno-prostetitel’naia rabota 1 (1965), 13.77 I. Ranish , ‘Za obshchestvennyi domashnyi ochag,’ in Kul’turno-prostetitel’naia

rabota 3 (1965), 24.78 LaPasha 270–71. Rudneva’s important theoretical work influenced the contem-

porary folklore movement. See N. N. Giliarova and L. F. Kostiukovets, ‘Otredaktorov-sostavitelei,’ in A. Rudneva, Russkoe narodnoe muzykal’noe tvorch-estvo (Moscow: Kompozitor, 1994), 5–10.

79 LaPasha 293–4.80 LaPasha 326–7.81 LaPasha’s research bears out this supposition. See 158, 301, 318.82 Zemtsovskii 1965, 84, 87.83 Village of Lasino, Riazan’ oblast, group interview.84 LaPasha 262–3, 267.85 A. Koposov, ‘O russkikh narodnykh khorakh,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 4 (1962),

21; LaPasha, 317.86 Participants appeared in stylized costumes, sang in a mannered way, used

smaller versions of folk orchestras for accompaniment, and conveyed an opti-mistic, rousing feeling to their audiences.

87 Iurii Kruglov, Fol’klornaia praktika (Moscow, 1979), 20.88 Alfred G. Meyer, ‘The Impact of World War I on Russian Women’s Lives,’ in

Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. BarbaraEvans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, Christine D. Worobec, 208–24.

89 Exceptions abound. For instance, it is not unusual to find a rural woman whoplays balalaika. In some areas women traditionally played specific instruments,e.g. small button accordions or panpipes. However, in general female accor-dionists and rozhok players were and are rare. When groups of village womenlacked an accordionist, they sang a form of ‘mouth music’ (pod iazyk) asaccompaniment for chastushki.

90 Eliot Borenstein, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in RussianFiction, 1917–1929 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 17.

91 See Borenstein 273–4 and Elizabeth Waters, ‘The Female Form in SovietPolitical Iconography, 1917–29,’ in Russia’s Women: Accommodation,Resistance, Transformation, 240–41.

92 Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Leninand Stalin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 81.

93 Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture ofPeasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 183; LaPasha, 223.

94 Robin LaPasha, personal communication, August 2002. Cossack areas likelyconstitute an exception.

95 LaPasha, 267, 269.96 See Bonnell, 110–11.97 V. Vinogradov, ‘Istochnik tvorcheskogo vdokhnoveniia,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 2

(1948), 91.98 Miller, 19.99 ‘Samodeiatel’nost’ muzykal’naia,’ 181.

100 Smith 1997, 127–8.101 Smith 1997, 123.102 V. Poponov, Orkestr khora imeni Piatnitskogo (Moscow, 1979), 70.103 Surin, 34.104 Smith 1997, 120.105 Surin, 35.

250 Notes

106 A. Zhivtsov, ‘Gosudarstvennyi russkii narodnyi khor im. Piatnitskogo,’ inSovetskaia muzyka 2 (1948), 88.

107 Surin, 32.108 Howell, 390–91; Smith 1997, 134–5.109 Theodore Levin, ‘Dmitri Pokrovsky and the Russian Folk Music Revival

Movement’ in Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and EasternEurope, ed. Mark Slobin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 61–2;Carole Pegg, Mongolian Music, Dance, and Oral Narrative: Performing DiverseIdentities (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001), 256–7; TimothyRice, May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music, ed. Philip Bohlmanand Bruno Nettl (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 176–9. Thesame was true of dance. The Soviets invented ‘national’ dance styles based uponSoviet ballet for cultures whose own dance styles did not seem appropriatelyathletic or flashy. Tim Scholl, private communication, 23 Sept. 2002.

110 G. G. Soboleva, Sovremennyi russkii narodnyi khor (Moscow, 1978), 45.111 Often foreign (Western) elements from classical music and dance were intro-

duced. Many professional groups had numbers that were labeled as ‘national’ –such as ‘Ukranian dance’ – but these were cliches having little to do withauthentic traditional dance. V. Ural’skaia and T. Purtova, ‘Khoreograficheskaiasamodeiatel’nost’,’ in Samodeiatel’noe khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo v SSSR;Ocherki istorii. Konets 1950-x–nachalo 1990-x godov (St Petersburg, 1999),338–9.

112 LaPasha, 121–2, 147–9, 198.113 LaPasha, 105–6, 144.114 LaPasha, 154–5, 170–71, 194.115 Izalii Zemtsovskii, ‘Russian Folk Music,’ s. v. ‘Union of Soviet Socialist

Republics, ‘ in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 19, ed. StanleySadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), 396.

116 M. Cheremukhin, ‘Proshloe i nastoiashchee orkestrov russkikh narodnykhinstrumentov,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 5 (1949), 53

117 Poponov 1979, 69.118 On nostalgia see LaPasha, 200–01.119 Smith 1997, 101; see also Schwarz 109–10.120 Smith 1997, 101.121 Fitzpatrick, 149–82.122 LaPasha, 314–16.123 LaPasha 327.124 Schwarz 396. See also Mayo Bryce, Fine Arts Education in the Soviet Union

(Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1963), 28–31.125 M. Anastasiev, ‘Music Education in the U.S.S.R.,’ in Musical America

(February, 1959), 21; Norman Haltmeyer, ‘A Study of Soviet Music Education’(M.A. thesis, State College of Iowa, 1964), 44. The folk instruments taughtwere accordion, domra, and balalaika; at the high school level they includedmandolin as well, while at the conservatory level other instruments were taughtaccording to the local musical traditions in the republic where the conservatorywas located. See Daniel Robert Remeta, ‘Music Education in the USSR’ (Ph.D.diss., University of Southern California, 1974), 187, 237.

126 In Soviet music schools students were grouped in majors already at the elemen-tary school level, and each major had a different program of study. See Bryce28. The Soviet music curriculum remained much the same from 1934 until thelate 1980s, when Dmitri Kabalevskii’s new curriculum was introduced. SeeMary Elizabeth McCaskill, ‘A Comparative Study of General Music EducationCurricula in Elementary Schools of the United States of America and the

Notes 251

Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic’ (Ph.D. diss., Lexington, Universityof Kentucky, 1989), 307; and Remeta 39.

127 Bryce, 35.128 After the revolution the new ‘School of Russian Ballet’ was based more on

character than on classical ballet style. This was the basis for the teaching offolk dancing in Russian schools. See Sokol’skaia 385; and V. Ural’skaia and T.Purtova 345.

129 At the high school level singers took 40 hours in folk music during their four-year program. They had to give a final solo recital at which they performed twoopera arias (one by a Russian composer, the other by a foreign composer), tworomances, one folk song, and a composition by a Soviet composer. At theconservatory level, students could choose the specialty of Opera Singer,Chamber Artist, or Teacher. They did not have special classes in folk music, butdid spend 157 hours on the history of music in the USSR. The final recital forthose in the Chamber Artist specialty had to contain Russian folk songs,Russian and foreign classical songs and romances, and songs by Sovietcomposers. Remeta 192, 195, 240–41, 244.

130 Bryce, 72.131 Remeta 286–7. See also G. Karpov, ‘O kul’turno-prosvetitel’nykh shkolakh,’ in

Kul’turno-prosvetitel’naia rabota 9 (1948), 46–8.132 The program was initiated by Alexander Iurlov, conductor of the RSFSR

Academic Russian Chorus. See Viacheslav Shchurov, ‘Slovno chistoi vodyglotok,’ in Narodnoe tvorchestvo 5 (1997), 40; and V. Popov, ‘A. A. Iurlov i naro-dnaia pesnia,’ in Aleksandr Iurlov: Stat’i i vospominaniia. Materialy, ed. I.Marisova (Moscow, 1983), 43. The Gnesin Institute, currently the GnesinRussian Academy of Music, is still one of the premiere musical institutions inRussia. It was opened in 1944 on the basis of the Gnesin School (uchilishche)which dated back to 1895. The purpose of the Institute was to train teachers formusical schools and institutes all over Russia.

133 The programs include, for example, a major in folk-chorus directing at theMoscow Institute of Culture, the Gnesin Music School, and the MoscowCultural-Pedagogical School, all of which were initiated by the first graduatesfrom the Gnesin Institute folk chorus directing program. Besides these, a majorin folk music or folk chorus is currently offered in institutes in St Petersburg,Volgograd, Saratov, Ekaterinburg, Nizhni Novgorod, Petrozavodsk,Novosibirsk, Krasnoiasrk, Vologda, and Irkutsk, among other cities. There arespecial conservatory programs in folklore and folk music only in St Petersburgand Voronezh. See Shchurov 1997, 41; and Natalia Giliarova, interview with theauthor, Moscow, 25 September 1998.

134 Zemtsovskii 1965, 84, 86; E. Zazerskii, ‘Sel’skii klub,’ in Pravda (20 Sept. 1963).135 Zemtsovskii’s comment reflects the new climate of the 1960s, when oppositional

voices began to be heard and some of the professors at some institutions beganto teach the value of ancient traditional singing. However, it is likely that in the1960s many of the graduates of the cultural enlightenment schools, whosetraining was oriented towards party ideology, still would have promoted newlycomposed rather than traditional folk music.

136 See L. Kulakovskii, ‘O russkoi narodnoi pesennoi klassike,’ in Sovetskaiamuzyka 11 (1949), 42; M. Cheremukhin, 53; Asaf’ev 24.

137 Cheremukhin, 53.138 Charles Molesworth, Salmagundi 85/86 (special issue on kitsch, roundtable

discussion by several scholars), 279.139 ‘Neskol’ko myslei po povodu olimpiady muzyki i tantsa,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka

9 (1935), 62.

252 Notes

140 I. Chekhov, D. Eppel’, Selu – kul’turu gorodskuiu (Moscow, 1968), 94–8.141 I. Chekhov, D. Eppel’, 93.142 LaPasha, 301–3.143 G. Polianovskii, 70 let v mire muzyki (Moscow, 1977), 256.144 Group interview, village of Lubianiki, Riazan’ oblast, 20 October 1998.145 Saul Friedlander,Salmagundi 85/6, 203; Robert Nozick, Salmagundi 85/6, 221.146 Friedlander, 203.147 Hermann Broch, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,’ Kitsch, the World of Bad

Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Universe Books, 1969), 73.148 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated by Michael

Henry Heim. (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 252.149 Kundera, 248.150 Kundera, 251–2.151 Kundera, 255.152 Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977), 243–4.153 Molesworth, 279.154 Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments,

1945–1957, translated and edited Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,1998), 119.

155 ‘Ob opere ‘Velikaia druzhba’ V. Muradeli (Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) ot 10fevralia 1948 g.),’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 1 (1948), 3–8, translated as ‘Resolutionof the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of10 February 1948,’ in Slonimsky, 1359–60.

156 ‘Declaration of Tikhon Khrennikov’ in ‘Discussion at a General Assembly ofSoviet Composers, Moscow, 17–26 February 1948,’ translated in Slonimsky,1366.

157 For example, as a result of the resolution, during the late 1940s and early 1950sa major study of Russian folk polyphony was published, and another was re-published. These studies were partially oriented toward composers who wantedto compose in the folk-polyphony style – as had nineteenth century composerssuch as Balakirev and Musorgsky. E. V. Gippius, ‘O russkoi narodnoipodgolosochnoi polifonii v kontse XVIII–nachale XIX veka,’ in Sovetskaiaetnografiia 2 (1948), 103–4.

158 Gippius 1948, 104.159 For instance, in 1949 a commentator on the Russian folk orchestra appealed for

folk polyphony in future compositions. He faulted the nineteenth-centuryAndreev orchestra for the lack of such polyphony, saying that ‘the absence oftrue folk polyphony robbed it [the orchestra] of the possibility to completelyexpress the character of folk singing [pesennost].’ Yet how could folk orchestrasand choruses, the music of which had been based upon Western harmony sincetheir inception, play and sing folk polyphony? Cheremukhin, 53; see also V.Ikonnikova and A. Moreeva, ‘Za russkuiu khorovuiu sovetskuiu pesniu,’ inSovetskaia muzyka 7 (1949), 73, who state that newly composed songs followthe tradition of folk polyphony mentioned in the 1948 resolution.

160 ‘B’et kliuchom narodnoe tvorchestvo,’ Klub 4 (1951), 4–5.161 ‘B’et kliuchom narodnoe tvorchestvo,’; A. Kuznetsov, ‘V pomoshch’

rukovoditel’iu tantseval’nogo kollektiva,’ Klub 4 (1951), 26–7.162 A. Chizhova, Tantsuet ‘Berezka’ (Moscow, 1967), 5, 11–15.163 See descriptions in T. Ustinova, Berech’ krasotu russkogo tantsa (Moscow,

1959). For example: ‘The young men, sprucing themselves up a bit, proudlywalk in a circle, as if asking ‘Who will come and dance with us?’ Majestically

Notes 253

and regally the girls enter. They are obviously worried: after all, each of themwill have to invite her favorite boy to dance’ etc., 85.

164 Rubtsov 1973, 199.165 G. Bruk, ‘Chto pet’ samodeiatel’nosti,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 12 (1965), 121–2.166 V. Poponov, Orkestr Khora imeni Piatnitskogo (Moscow, 1979), 102.167 ‘Postanovlenie kollegii Ministerstva kul’tury SSSR’, June 20, 1961.168 For example D. Osipov, ‘V pomoshch’ rukovoditeliam khudozhestvennoi

samodeiatel’nosti: Sovety rukovoditeliam orkestrov russkikh narodnykh instru-mentov,’ Klub 2 (1951), 25–6.

169 ‘In Leningrad alone at the present time there are 68 Russian folk song collec-tives (in 1947 there were only six).’ N. Kotikova, ‘O russkikh narodnykhkhorakh,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 2 (1957), 153.

170 Shchurov argues that the organization of the major in folk-chorus directing atthe Gnesin Institute in 1966 gave a major impetus to the revival movement. See‘Slovno chistoi vody glotok’ (1997), 40. Natalia Giliarova says that this depart-ment taught in a serious way only for the first few years; later, it lost its focus onresearch, which she considers essential to a revivalist mission. Interview withthe author, Moscow, 31 October 1998.

171 Exceptions abound. Many times within one department there are teachers witha revivalist mentality and others with a folk-chorus mentality. Students maylearn improvisation from the revivalist teachers while learning to sing arrangedmusic in a stylized voice from some of the other teachers. In general, theacademic structure of most of the folk chorus departments resists a revivalistapproach, since revivalism is rooted in deep knowledge of folklore, while thesedepartments are preparing specialists for specific, narrowly-defined jobs asheads of performing groups. The academic departments that do offer arevivalist approach are much more rigorous; examples are the programs at theSt Petersburg Conservatory headed by Anatolii Mekhnetsov, and the one at theVoronezh Conservatory headed by T. Sysoeva. Students in these programs arebeing trained as folklorists (researchers) as well as ensemble leaders.

3 The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement1 Viacheslav Shchurov, interview with the author, Moscow, 9 November 1998.2 Tamara E. Livingston, ‘Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,’ in

Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 66.3 Kathleen F. Parthe, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1992), 3.4 Parthe, 21–2.5 Parthe, 52–61.6 Theodore Levin. ‘Dmitri Pokrovsky and the Russian Folk Music Revival

Movement,’ in Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe,ed. Mark Slobin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 26.

7 Natal’ia Giliarova, interview with the author, Moscow, 31 October 1998.8 Parthe points out that the village prose writers largely ‘hinted at rather than

discussed frankly’ the effects of collectivization on the village. See pp. 50–51.9 The Pokrovsky Ensemble appeared in Farewell (Elem Klimov, 1982), a dramati-

zation of Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora (1976).10 See, for example, Viktor Lapin, ‘Istreblenie fol’klora i ekologiia kul’tury,’ in

Iskusstvo Leningrada 7 (1991), 4–7.11 According to Parthe, only a few village prose writers were sympathetic to the

views of fascist organizations like Pamiat’. These included Rasputin, Astafiev,Belov, and others. See her page 96.

254 Notes

12 Gerald Stanton Smith, Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet‘Mass Song’ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 120.

13 B. M. Dobrovol’sky, ‘Sovremennye bytovye pesni gorodskoi molodezhi,’ inFol’klor i khudozhestvennaia samodeiatel’nost’ (Leningrad, 1968), 193, quoted inGerald Stanton Smith (1984), 48. See also Smith, 44.

14 Andrei Kabanov, one of the founders of the folk revival movement, told me thatmembers of groups called ‘Amateur Song Circles’ (Krug samodeiatel’noi pesni, orKSP), who sang their own poetry or the music of Okudzhava, Vysotskii andother bards, used to invite members of the folk revival movement to their under-ground gatherings [slety] in woods and fields outside Moscow in the 1980s. Hesaid that although both resisted the Soviet mentality and supported the develop-ment of ‘individual personality and freedom,’ the KSP participants [KSPeshniki]were more political than the folk revivalists, and composed lyrics that directlycritiqued the establishment. Interview with the author, 17 January 1999.

15 Andrei Kabanov reported that the gatherings of the KSP drew many moreparticipants than the gatherings of the folk revival groups, probably becausetheir songs used ‘the contemporary word’ rather than obscure, ancient folklanguage, and because it was easier to sing their simple melodies with guitaraccompaniment, than to learn to sing polyphonic folk a cappella songs.Interview with the author, 17 January 1999.

16 N. I. Zhulanova, ‘Molodezhnoe fol’klornoe dvizhenie,’ in Samodeiatel’noekhudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo v SSSR: Ocherki istorii. Konets 1950-x–nachalo1990-x godov., ed. L. P. Solntseva and M. V. Iunisov (St Petersburg: 1999), 109.

17 On the importance of discourse and ideology in revival movements, see TamaraE. Livingston, ‘Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,’ in Ethnomusicology43, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 69.

18 N. P. Leont’ev, ‘Volkhovanie i shamanstvo,’ Novyi mir 8 (1953), 243.19 Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the

Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 103–4.20 Miller, 101, citing, among others, L. I. Emel’ianov, ‘Makar’evskii raion,’ in

Russkii fol’klor 6 (1961), 137, and O. V. Alekseeva, ‘Pyshugskii raion,’ in Russkiifol’klor 6 (1961), 132.

21 To a large extent this story of folklore’s death has political implications.Folklorists have privately criticized the government’s policies towards the villageand indicated that these are responsible for folklore’s likely premature death incertain regions – see Chapter 6 on this topic. Of course, it is a matter of interpre-tation whether folklore is ‘dying out’ or is simply ‘changing.’ It is my view thatfolklore changes; certain traditions may die out or become unrecognizable, butfolklore as a whole does not generally die. The difference revolves around thedefinition of folklore: Soviet folklorists and musicologists do not tend to think ofcontemporary material as having any folkloric interest whatsoever. Giliarovainterview, 31 October 1998. See also Miller, 102.

22 A. Koposov, ‘O russkikh narodnykh khorakh,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka 4 (1962),22.

23 F. Rubtsov, ‘Sovremennoe narodnoe pesnetvorchestvo,’ in Voprosy teorii i estetikimuzyki 4 (Moscow, 1965), 126–8, citing L. I. Emel’ianov, ‘Poniatie “fol’klor” vsovetskoi fol’kloristike,’ and V. E. Gusev, ‘Ekspeditsiia v Kostromskuiu oblast’,’in Russkii fol’klor: Materialy i issledovaniia, 6 (Moscow, 1961), 25, 125, 129,150–51.

24 Levin 1996, 20.25 Rubtsov 1965, 128. I use Levin’s translation of samodeiatel’nost’: see ‘Dmitri

Pokrovsky,’ 35.26 Rubtsov 1965, 129–33.

Notes 255

27 V. Pomerantsev, ‘Ob iskrennosti v literature,’ in Novyi mir 12 (1953), 235–6, 242,245.

28 Livingston, 74. She cites an unpublished manuscript on nationalist revivals byThomas Turino (1997) as the origin of the term ‘time depth.’

29 Dana Prescott Howell, The Development of Soviet Folkloristics (New York:Garland, 1992), 152.

30 Howell, 116, 132–4; see also two articles by E. V. Gippius, ‘Krest’ianskaiamuzyka Zaonezh’ia,’ in Iskusstvo severa: Zaonezh’e (Leningrad, 1927), 147–64,and ‘Kul’tura protiazhnoi pesni na Pinege,’ in Iskusstvo severa II: Pinezhsko-Mezenskaia ekspeditsiia (Leningrad, 1928), 98–116

31 ‘Predislovie,’ in Iskusstvo severa: Zaonezh’e (Leningrad, 1927), 6.32 Gippius 1927, 149–50.33 Howell, 335–634 Gippius and V. I. Chicherov, ‘Sovetskaia fol’kloristika za 30 let,’ in Sovetskaia

muzyka 4 (1947): 35–6.35 Howell, 335–6.36 N. Briusova, ‘Oshibki i derzaniia fol’klorista,’ In Sovetskaia muzyka 5 (1949), 57.37 Gippius (1928) 116.38 Gippius and Chicherov, 37. The criticism of Gippius in 1948 was part of the

ideological campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism,’ in which several categories ofintellectuals, including Jews and formalist or comparativist academics, wereattacked.

39 Andrei Kabanov, interview with the author, Moscow, 13 November 1998.40 Dmitrii Pokrovsky, ‘Fol’klor i muzykal’noe vospriiatie,’ in Vospriiatie muzyki:

sbornik statei, ed. V. N. Maksimov (Moscow, 1980), 248, 250.41 New work on polyphony was published by E. V. Gippius, ‘O russkoi narodnoi

podgolosochnoi polifonii v kontse XVIII–nachale XIX veka,’ in Sovetskaia etno-grafiia 2 (1948), 101–2; Lev Kulakovskii, O russkom narodnom mnogogolosii(Moscow 1951); Lev Kulakovskii, Kak sobirat’ i zapisyvat’ narodnyi pesni(Moscow 1962); Anna Rudneva, ‘Kurskie tanki i karagody,’ in Voprosy muzykoz-naniia 11 (Moscow 1956), 147–90; Anna Rudneva, ‘Ritmika stikha i napeva vrusskoi narodoi pesni,’ in Izvestiia na instituta za muzika 13 (1969), 303–34; T.Bershadskaya, Osnovnye kompozitsionnye zakonomernosti mnogogolosiia russkoinarodnoi krest’ianskoi pesni (Leningrad 1961); Izalii Zemtsovskii, Russkaia naro-dnaia pesnia: Nauchno-populiarnyi ocherk (Moscow, 1964); and IzaliiZemtsovskii, Iskateli pesen: Rasskazy o sobirateliakh narodnykh pesen v dorevoli-utsionnoi i Sovetskoi Rossii (Leningrad, 1967), 67–8. See also Barbara Krader,‘Soviet Research on Russian Folk Music Since World War II’, inEthnomusicology 7 (1963): 252–61, and Izalii Zemtsovskii, ‘Russian Folk Music,’s. v. ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ‘ in New Grove Dictionary of Music andMusicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), 388–98.

42 Kabanov, 13 November 1998.43 Natalia Giliarova, interview with the author, 31 October 1998.44 Viacheslav Shchurov, interview with the author, 9 November 1998. The first

recording of the Folklore Ensemble of the Gnesin Institute was a 45 rpm discissued in 1968. The group also made recordings in 1977 and 1978. In 1984 itchanged its name to Solovka; in 1997 it released a CD, Solovka: The MoscowFolk Song Ensemble, with Pan Records (Leiden, Holland: PAN 7008 CD, 1997).

45 Shchurov, ‘Slovno chistoi vody glotok,’ in Narodnoe tvorchestvo, 5 (1997), 42.46 Tamara Smyslova, interview with author, Moscow, 11 November 1998.47 Kabanov, 13 November 1998.48 Kabanov, 13 November 1998.

256 Notes

49 See, for example, the response by N. Kotikova, ‘O russkikh narodnykh khorakh,’in Sovetskaia muzyka, 2 (1957), 152–5 to an article by E. Rodygin. ‘O russkikhnarodnykh khorakh,’ Sovetskaia muzyka, 9 (1956).

50 Viacheslav Shchurov, interview with the author, Moscow, 9 November 1998; seealso I. Zemtsovskii 1967, 47.

51 Tamara Smyslova, interview with the author, Moscow, 11 November 1998.52 A 1992 catalog of published recordings of authentic folk music (on LPs and 45s)

lists 92 entries under Russian and Cossack folklore. See I. Zemtsovskii,Muzykal’nyi fol’klor na gramplastinkakh: opyt diskografii (Moscow, 1992).

53 Viacheslav Shchurov, interview with the author, Moscow, 9 November 1998.54 In fact, I have not been able to ascertain what the quality of the Folklore

Commission’s sponsorship of the Pokrovsky Ensemble was. Apparently, even ifthe ensemble was registered as an official research group of the FolkloreCommission, this did not mean that they had permission to perform as aperforming group. The group was unofficial from its inception until 1978.Theodore Levin, ‘Dmitri Pokrovsky and the Russian Folk Music RevivalMovement’ in Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe,ed. Mark Slobin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 20.

55 Pokrovsky, 251–3.56 Natal’ia Giliarova, 31 October 1998.57 Pokrovsky is quoted in Levin 1996, 30.58 In September 1998 I witnessed Kabanov’s ‘laboratory’ at the biennial folk festival

in a large village, Vorob’evka, in Voronezh oblast. The experiment that Kabanovconstructed that day was quite challenging. Some music students from Voronezhwalked out of the room in protest (and perhaps, out of fear of embarrassment)after Kabanov asked them to learn a song by singing it together with villagers.

59 Pokrovsky, 246–50.60 Pokrovsky, 251.61 Smyslova, 11 November 1998.62 Pokrovsky, 253–4; and Kabanov, ‘K probleme sokhraneniia pesennoi fol’klornoi

traditsii v sovremennykh usloviiakh,’ in Khudozhestvennaia samodeiatel’nost’:Voprosy razvitiia i rukovodstva, Nauchnyi Issledovatel’skii Institut Kul’tury,Trudy 88 (Moscow, 1980): 99, 101–3.

63 This method of recording was first used at the Department of Folk Music atMoscow State Conservatory (in 1967 according to Shchurov). See A. Rudneva,V. Shchurov, and S. Pushkina, Russkie narodnye pesni v mnogomikrofonnoi zapisi(Moscow, 1979), 3. Earlier attempts by Svetlana Pushkina had used two cassetterecorders to record a group of several singers. Shchurov attributed his modifica-tion of this technique to two factors: 1) there were enough tape recorders at theMoscow Conservatory to record each singer; and 2) the village group had cometo Moscow to perform and to be recorded. Viacheslav Shchurov, interview withthe author, Moscow, 9 December, 1998.

64 Kabanov made the recording of 8–15 songs in 8 channels in 1974. Kabanov, 13November 1998.

65 Levin 1996, 24.66 Levin 1996, 20–22.67 Levin 1996, 21.68 Smyslova, 11 November 1998 and Levin 1996, 20–21.69 Levin 1996, 17, 24; and personal memories of Pokrovsky Ensemble concerts in

Boston in 1987 and 1991.70 I am indebted to Mark Leiderman for offering some of the ideas and termi-

nology in the previous paragraph.

Notes 257

71 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, transl.Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3.

72 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), quoted in Mark Andliff andPatricia Leighten, ‘Primitive,’ in Critical Terms for Art History, 182.

73 Shchurov, interview with the author, 9 November 1998.74 Shchurov, interview with the author, 9 November 1998.75 Nikita Tolstoi, ‘Problemy rekonstruktsii drevneslavianskoi dukhovnoi kul’tury,’

in Iazyk i narodnaia kul’tura (Moscow, 1995), 41–2, 50.76 Clearly, such movements may have been inspired by rock and roll dancing.77 Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1990), 228, 240.78 Torgovnick, 75, 78.79 Torgovnick, 82.80 The Pokrovsky Ensemble, Les Noces (‘The Wedding’) and Russian Village

Wedding Songs, Elektra Nonesuch 79335–2, 1994.81 A. Zhivtsov, ‘Gosudarstvennyi russkii narodnyi khor im. Piatnitskogo,’ in

Sovetskaia muzyka, 2 (1948), 85.82 Maria Nefedova, interview with the author, 30 December 1998.83 Nefedova, interview. The play, with musical setting by Pokrovsky and including

the ensemble as actors, was banned in 1982; subsequently Liubimov was forcedto emigrate to the West. When he returned to the Taganka in 1988, his produc-tion of Boris Godunov finally had its premiere. Seewww.taganka.org/html/stuecke/spektakli2.htm (accessed 10 September 2003).

84 Kabanov, interview with the author, Moscow, 18 November 1998, and Smyslova,interview with the author, 11 November 1998.

85 Kabanov, 18 November 1998.86 Levin 1996, 23.87 Kabanov, 18 November 1998.88 Smyslova, 11 November 1998.89 Smyslova, 11 November 1998.90 Kabanov, personal communication, Moscow, October 1998.91 Observed in Moscow during rehearsals for Stravinsky’s Svadebka, Spring 1990.92 Later they did employ a choreographer, Evgeniia Rudneva, a Bolshoi-trained

ballerina and the daughter of musicologist Anna Rudneva. I did not speak toRudneva, but those who spoke about her said that she made herself into aspecialist on authentic Russian folk dancing and, in keeping with the revivalistphilosophy, was interested in studying and notating the village dances rather thantransforming them into choreographed set pieces. Smyslova, 11 November 1998.

93 See discussion of the ways that this ensemble’s program reflects syncretism inElena A. Kransopevtseva and Olga V. Velichkina, ‘Proekt detskoi shkoly naro-dnogo tvorchestva,’ in Sokhranenie i vozrozhdenie fol’klornykh traditsii, ed. A. A.Banin (Moscow, 1990), 178. Information also based upon the author’s observa-tion of a rehearsal, 19 November, 1998, and conversation with Krasnopevtseva,same date.

94 Krasnopevtseva and Velichkina, 179.95 Krasnopevtseva and Velichkina, 179.96 Kabanov, interview with the author, 28 December 1998.97 Andrezej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia

in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, translated by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1989 [1975]), 199.

98 E. Lineva, Velikorusskie pesni v narodnoi garmonizatsii, 1 (St Petersburg, 1904),xxix. Lineva’s use of the term artel to mean ‘singing collective’ was often cited by

258 Notes

later musicologists. Artel refer to the Russian tradition in which artisans formedcooperative craft societies. Thus, Lineva tacitly situates singing as a kind of craft,and underlines the self-organizing feature of village craft societies. See AlisonHilton, Russian Folk Art (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995),42–9;

99 When I first started investigating the folk revival movement in 1998, I had tolearn new terminology. If I asked revivalists whether they had a chorus, they saidno; but if I asked whether they had a collective or ensemble, they said yes. Thiswas sometimes explained to me as a designation of quantity: choruses were large,and ensembles were small. However, it may have had something do to with theSoviet adoption of the term ‘chorus’ for its folk choruses, and revivalists’ desireto avoid such associations.

100 To be sure, the fact of a group’s having a leader did not mean that it was notcollective in character. In fact, the Slavophiles generally supported autocracy,since it was a Russian tradition and since, theoretically, within that structure thetradition of the commune could flourish. See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Russiaand the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology(Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965), 150–51.

101 Kabanov, 13 November 1998.102 Levin 1996, 24.103 Smyslova, 11 November 1998.104 Gilarova, 31 October 1998105 V. Kadiaev, ‘Festival’ v Saratove’, Politicheskaia agitatsiia 981, no. 11 (June 1988), 24.

4 Revival and Identity after Socialism1 Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, ‘Communism as Kitsch: Soviet Symbols in Post-Soviet

Society,’ in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev,ed. Adele Marie Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 367.

2 Sabonis-Chafee, 375.3 Ol’ga Shablinskaia, ‘Kadysheva – Zolushka nashikh dnei,’ in Argumenty i fakty

14 (April, 2000), 16.4 Concert, Moscow, Kremlin Palace of Soviets, 14 November 1998.5 Natal’ia Sapozhnikova, ‘Nadezhda Babkina – voitel’nitsa Russkoi pesni,’ in Self-

Made Man: Zhurnal o liudiakh i ikh uspekhakh 20 (November 2002); MikhailAntonov, ‘Randevu so zvezdoi,’ in Smena 29, no. 22819 (13 February 2001), bothreprinted in www.babkina.ru/press/star/index.html (Accessed 30 March 2003);‘Babkina Nadezhda Georgievna,’ www.biograph.comstar.ru/bank/babkina.htm(Accessed 20 February 2000).

6 www.biograph.comstar.ru/bank/zykina.htm (Accessed 20 February 2000).7 Roman Nikitin, ‘ “Zolotoe kol’tso” Zolushki,’ in Ekstra – M 10 (March 14,

1998).8 World Village was originally named Folklore: Unknown Cultures and started in

1991 as a monthly half-hour program on the new Russian television studio,RTR, at the initiative of Sergei Starostin. During the early years of its existence,RTR had to fill up free air time and was glad to have programs such as this,made by professional folklorists but not professional filmmakers. Through theseven-year run of the series 150 programs were made. The program was closedwhen a new manager, Eduard Segalaev, came to the studio during a pre-electionperiod and wanted to create a new folklore program with an optimistic, nationaltheme. He wanted it to be called Ei ukhnem! (the title of the song known inEnglish as the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’) and to run for 13 minutes every dayexcept Sunday. The idea of a cheerful, entertaining kitsch show did not fit the

Notes 259

conception of Starostin and his team, and they could hardly keep up with thedaily deadlines, but they continued to produce the own program under the newname for a time. Sergei Starostin, interview with the author, Moscow, 22December 1998.

9 See ‘Zavolokin, Gennady Dmitrievich,’ on Mezhdunarodnyi Ob’edienennyiBiograficheskii Tsentr, www.biograph.comstar.ru/bank/zavolokin.htm (accessed 30March 2003). Each week it visits a different location and features certain accor-dionists (and sometimes singers) in the area. Starostin said: ‘it was made so thatour provinces wouldn’t forget the accordion, and to cheer up the state of theRussian soul. It’s very far from folklore, in reality, because mostly city accordion-ists take part in the show…When village accordionists did appear before thecamera…they were given hardly any attention at all.’ Interview with the author,Moscow, 22 December 1998.

10 (Starostin, 22 December 1998).11 Hermann Bausinger, Folk Culture in a World of Technology, trans. Elke Dettmer

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 156.12 Agence France Presse, ‘Gazprom and Regions Cozy up,’ in Banks and Exchanges

Weekly, May 24 1999, 11.13 Compare remarks by T. Ustinova, choreographer of the Piatnitsky Chorus, in

her Berech’ krasotu russkogo tantsa (Moscow, 1959), 6.14 Compare a 1948 article on the Piatnitsky choir, quoting a late-nineteenth-century

critic: ‘Every male and female worker in Russia, just as 1000 years ago, accompa-nies his or her work by singing whole collections of songs.’ The article makes thepoint that ‘the song lives in all of us’ despite the unfavorable conditions of indus-trialization and capitalism, when no respect was given the folk song. A. Zhivtsov,‘Gosudarstvennyi russkii narodnyi khor im. Piatnitskogo,’ in Sovetskaia muzyka2 (1948), 85, quoting Vladimir Stasov.

15 ‘Gazprom and IMF: Mortal Friends,’ in Banks and Exchanges Weekly, May 51999, 13.

16 Bausinger 1990, 160.17 Dan Ben-Amos, ‘Foreword,’ in Bausinger 1990, x.18 See Zuzana Štefániková,’Folk Costume as a Form of Ethnic Identification in

Slovakia,’ in Folklore, Folklorism and National Identification: The Slovak CulturalContext, ed. Gabriela Kiliánová and Eva Krekovicová (Bratislava, 1992), 28, 31.

19 Maria Nefedova, interview with the author, Moscow, 30 December 1998.20 According to Aleksei Shilin, this gesture was composed and does not exist as an

element of Russian village traditional dance. Interview with the author, Moscow,26 January 1999.

21 Natal’ia Erokhina, comments after presentation of paper, ‘Molodezhnoefolk’lornoe dvizhenie v kontekste muzykal’noi kul’tury,’ at the State RepublicCenter of Russian Folklore, Moscow, 26 November 1998.

22 Natal’ia Giliarova said she had noticed the same thing: many of these groups‘talk very well.’ Conversation with the author, 20 September 1998.

23 In the Soviet and post-Soviet periods narodnyi also described any artist,performer, or professional who had achieved a certain professional status in hisor her field – thus, ‘narodnyi pevets RFSFR’ designated a professional singer inthe Russian republic.

24 Iu. Boiko, ‘Russkie narodnye instrumenty i orkestry russkikh narodnykh instru-mentov,’ in Traditsionnyi fol’klor v sovremennoi khudozhestvennoi zhizni: Fol’klor ifol’klorizm, ed. I. Zemtsovskii, V. Lapin, and I. Matsievskii (Leningrad, 1984),93.

25 Petrozavodsk is in the Republic of Karelia, on the Finnish border, whose popula-tion in 1989 was roughly 10 percent Karelians and 74 percent Russians. Many of

260 Notes

the Karelians living in Russia have become Russified. The costumes worn by thePetrozavodsk ensemble apparently represented Karelian folk costume (which hassimilarities with the Northern Russian costume), yet the songs were in Russianand represented the Soviet style of folk music and dance presentation. See‘Republic of Kareliya,’ in The Territories of the Russian Federation, 2001(London: Europa 2001), 80–82; E. I. Klement’ev, ‘Karely,’ in Narody RossiiEntsiklopediia (Moscow, 1994), 186–9; Pekka Nevalainen, ‘The Many Karelias,’Virtual Finland, http://um1.tmt.tele.fi/finfo/english/karjala.html (Accessed 6 June2002).

26 Natal’ia Giliarova, interview with author, April 1990 (notes not dated).27 Ekaterina Dorokhova, interview with author, Moscow, 13 January 1999.28 Svetlana Braz, comments at the Folk Ensemble division of the ‘Young Talents of

Moscow’ competition, held 3–4 November 1998, Moscow.29 Such as Tsar Maksimilian. They also performed in the Taganka theater’s produc-

tion of Boris Godunov.30 They were the actors and singers in The Song of Jeremiah, for which Anatolii

Vasiliev directed and designed sets, and Vladimir Martynov set a Biblical text toa ‘paraliturgical’ Orthodox musical score. First performed in Moscow at thePushkin Museum in 1993; I saw it in 1999 at the Moscow School of DramaticArt. See Plach Ieremii, (theater program, Moscow: Almanakh Menon, 1996).

31 V. Ural’skaia and T. Purtova, ‘Khoreograficheskaia samodeiatel’nost’,’ inSamodeiatel’noe khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo v SSSR, ed. Solntseva et al.(1999), 345.

32 Aleksei Shilin, interview with author, Moscow, 26 January 1999.33 Nefedova, interview.34 Dorokhova, interview.35 Natalia Giliarova, interview with the author, 31 October 1998.36 Bausinger 1990, 23, 76.37 Some scholars have embraced the broader definition of Western folklorists. See,

for example, A. K. Baiburin et al, Problemy sotsial’nogo i gumanitarnogo znaniia,1–2 (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2000), and the work of Sergei Nekliudovand other scholars at Russian State Humanities University (RGGU), representedat: www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/Mast4.html (accessed 28 March 2003).

38 Words by M. Isakovskii and music by M. Blanter. According to the Kabanovs,the comment was made by Aleksandr Shchadrin, who had worked at Pokrovsky’sstudio and was a jazz musician.

39 Zhanna Kabanova, interview with the author, Moscow, 26 May 1999.40 Anatolii Mekhnetsov, comments at round table, Gnesin Academy of Music,

Moscow, 23 April 1999.41 To be sure, mainstream audiences do accept ‘Katiusha’ and other Soviet-era

popular songs as ‘folklore.’ Kadysheva, Balagan Limited, and other populargroups sing such songs, and many amateur groups – especially those composedof pensioners – sing them as part of their repertoire.

42 Bausinger 1990, 76.43 Natal’ia Sapozhnikova, ‘Nadezhda Babkina – voitel’nitsa Russkoi pesni.’44 Krasnopevtseva, interview with the author, Moscow, 20 January 1999.45 Izaly Zemtsovsky and Alma Kunanbaeva, ‘Communism and Folklore,’ in

Folklore and Traditional Music in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe:Proceedings of a One-Day Conference, May 16, 1994, ed. James Porter (LosAngeles: Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA, 1997), 8.

46 Interestingly, most such groups work with south-Russian folk music, which isknown for its liveliness; according to this stereotype (which is not totally accu-rate) north-Russian music is generally more serious and directed inward, and

Notes 261

would be less suited to such vibrant self-expression. Ekaterina Dorokhova, inter-view with author, Moscow, 13 January 1999.

47 Zhanna Kabanova, master class, ‘Folklore Spring’ Festival, Moscow, 21 April1999.

48 Viacheslav Shchurov, interview with the author, Moscow, 9 November 1998.49 Anzhelika Glumova, interview with the author, Saratov, 9 January 1999.50 According to Andrei Kabanov, he and his wife received fairly regular income

from 6 different sources for teaching folklore and one for research in the springof 1999. Interview with the author, Moscow, 15 May 1999.

51 Anatolii Mekhnetsov, master class, Folklore Spring Festival, Moscow, 22 April1999.

52 Andrei Kabanov, interview with the author, Moscow, 18 November 1998.53 Zhanna Kabanova, interview with the author, Moscow, 17 January 1999.54 Zhanna Kabanova, interview with the author, Moscow, 26 May 1999.55 Phrase spoken by a Soviet woman on the USSR–US TV Bridge/Telemost

Leningrad-Boston, 17 June 1986, led by Soviet journalist Vladimir Pozner.56 Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,

1980), 36.57 Anatolii Mekhnetsov, interview with the author, Moscow, 22 April 1999.58 In pre-Revolutionary Russia there was a tradition of interest in bawdy subjects

by Pushkin and other Romantic-era intellectuals; see Paul W. Goldschmidt,‘Pornography in Russia,’ in Barker, 319–20.

59 Goldschmidt 324–5.60 Bausinger 1990, 155.61 Andrei Kabanov, interview with the author, Moscow, 21 April 1999.62 For example, A. A. Toporkov, ed., Seks i erotika v russkoi traditsionnoi kul’ture

(Moscow, 1996); A.L. Toporkov, Russkii eroticheskii fol’klor (Moscow, 1995); S.D. Pliusnin, Russkii eroticheskii fol’klor: skazki, skazy, pribautki, prigovorki,pogovorki, zagadki, oboznacheniia intimnogo, chastushki (Kirov, 1997).

63 Viacheslav Shchurov, interview with the author, Moscow, 9 December 1998.64 I discovered the text in a version published in the United States by Kevin Moss,

director of the Russian Choir at Middlebury College, who had acquired the fulltext from Dmitri Pokrovsky. Middlebury Russian Choir Songbook, Babel, 1988.The Pokrovsky ensemble did not perform the erotic verses either.

65 In Russian, ‘culture’ can mean ‘tasteful,’ in the sense that Kabanova thinksPopov’s dances are tasteful rather than crass presentations of sexuality. I ampurposely taking the word literally here.

66 Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1990), 246.

67 Tamara E. Livingston, ‘Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,’Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 77.

5 Power and Ritual1 Ernest Gellner, Nationalism, (New York: New York University Press, and

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997) 6, 54.2 Katherine Verdery, ‘Whither “Nation” and “Nationalism”?,’ in Daedalus 122, no.

3 (Summer 1993), 38–41. ‘Nationness’ is used by John Borneman in Belonging inthe Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992) (cited in Verdery 41) and Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed:Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996; ‘national sentiment’ is a phrase used byAnthony Smith, 168.

262 Notes

3 Gregory Guroff and Alexander Guroff, ‘The Paradox of Russian NationalIdentity,’ in National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States ofEurasia, ed. Roman Szporluk (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 86, 90.

4 Mark Sandle, ‘Searching for a National Identity: Intellectual Debates in Post-Soviet Russia,’ in Ethnicity and Nationalism in Russia, the CIS and the BalticStates, ed. Christopher Williams and Thanasis D. Sfikas (Aldershot: Ashgate,1999), 65, 82.

5 Nathaniel Knight, ‘Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses: Narodnost’ andModernity in Imperial Russia,’ in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge,Practices, ed. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York: St. Martin’s,2000), 57–9; Brubaker, 17, 112, 137. As Brubaker shows, there are complicatingfactors in defining nationality this way: Russia has always been a multi-ethnicstate, and new conceptions of the nation need to take this into account in somefashion, even while nationalization is taking place.

6 Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New York:Random House, 1969 [1961]), 116–17, 120, 146, 171; Judith D. Kornblatt,‘Christianity, Antisemitism, Nationalism’, in Consuming Russia, ed. Adele MarieBarker, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) 415, 417.

7 Robert L. Nichols, ‘The Icon and Machine in Russia’s Religious Renaissance,1900–1909,’ in Christianity and the Arts in Russia, ed. William C. Brumfield andMilos M. Velimirovic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131–44.

8 Kornblatt, 414.9 David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1988), 11.10 Eliot Borenstein, ‘Suspending Disbelief: “Cults” and Postmodernism in Post-

Soviet Russia,’ in Barker, 456.11 Oksana Oracheva, ‘The Ideology of Russian Nationalism,’ in Williams and

Sfikas, 50.12 Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983),

160. See also Sandle, 74–5. Others use different terms: R. Szporluk speaks of‘Empire-savers’ and ‘nation-builders’ in ‘Dilemmas of Russian nationalism,’ inProblems of Communism 38, no. 1 (1994), 36–9, cited in Sandle, 70. About thesmall but growing role of ultra-nationalist views in Russian politics, seeOracheva, 61–2.

13 Sandle, 71; Stephen K. Carter, ‘Russian Nationalism and Russian Politics in the1990s,’ in Williams and Sfikas, 92, 96, 100.

14 Katherine E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia , 159, 176–7, 180–81, Sandle,73–4.

15 Katherine Smith, 125–6.16 The concert series took place in 1997–8. Brochures printed for the concerts listed

sponsorship by Aeroflot and Ingosstrakh.17 Robert W. Orttung, Danielle N. Lussier and Anna Paretskaya, The Republics and

Regions of the Russian Federation: A Guide to Politics, Policies, and Leaders(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 213, 216.

18 ‘Tuleev, Aman Gumirovich,’ in European Internet Network, Russia Today;‘Tuleev Gets the Death Penalty,’ in World Reporter, July 14 1999, 16.

19 Galina Yemelianova, ‘Ethnic Nationalism, Islam and Russian Politics in theNorth Caucasus (with special reference to the autonomous Republic ofDagestan),’ in Williams and Sfikas, 128.

20 During the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63. A. Listopadov, Pesni DonskikhKazakov vol. I, part 2 (Moscow, 1949), 225–7. The song was sung in differentversions referring to different historical events. A version was sung in whichKrasnoshchekov’s name was replaced by that of Cossack General Matvei Platov

Notes 263

(referring to events in the late eighteenth century); and during the Soviet period,Lenin’s name was used. Kabanov, interview with the author, 8 June 1999.

21 Kabanov had recorded it, and the Pokrovsky Ensemble and later the CossackCircle had popularized it by singing it widely in concerts.

22 The song’s first five verses consist of the following lines: ‘Oh, you, Russia,Mother Russia / Oh, you, our Russian land / Oh, you have seen dire need, / Oh,you have spilled much blood, / Oh, you have amassed much glory! / Oh, ourMother Russia, / You have granted us much.’ Translated from Listopadov, 226.

23 Sandle, 68.24 Roman Laba, ‘The Cossack Movement and the Russian State, 1990–96,’ in Low

Intensity Conflict & Law Enforcement 5 (1996), 377, 399–401.25 Anzhelika Glumova, interview with the author, Saratov, 9 January 1999; Irina

Tarasova, interview with the author, Moscow, 24 April 1999; Zhanna Kabanova,interview with the author, Moscow, 26 May 1999.

26 Vasilii Kozlov, interview with the author, Voronezh, 12 May 1999.27 Elena Panina, ‘ “Segodnia oboshlos.” A zavtra?’ in Zemskii vestnik 6 (1998), 7;

‘Piat’ let sluzheniia Rossii,’ in Zemskii vestnik 6 (1998), 24; Vera Chizhova,‘Doroga nachinaetsia s tropinki,’ in Zemskii vestnik 6 (1998), 30–31; Igor’Sanachev, ‘Mestnoe samoupravlenie v Rossii: tak chto zhe proiskhodit?’ inZemskii vestnik 4 (1998), 44–6.

28 See definitions in Sandle, 71–7.29 The girls wore short red dresses and red sandals, while the boys wore yellow folk-

style tunics with red embroidery and Cossack- or Ukrainian-style wide pantswith red boots.

30 To be sure, this festival opening reflected many of the elements of Soviet festivalssince the 1930s, such as a parade of all the participants in costumes to reflecttheir geographical region. Lynn Mally, Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater andthe Soviet State, 1917–1938 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 171–2.

31 In fact the costumes were so general and had such mixed styles that they are notidentifiable as ethnically Russian. However, they do represent the ethnic diversitymentioned by Panina as belonging to the Voronezh area: Russian, Ukrainian,and Cossack. I would say that they stand for a generic Russian-empire folk style.

32 Nurit Schleifman, ‘The Uses of Memory: The Russian Province in Search of ItsPast,’ in Russia at a Crossroads: History, Memory and Political Practice, ed. NuritSchleifman (London: Cass, 1998), 29.

33 Schleifman, 29–30.34 Kozlov, interview with the author, 12 May 1999. The Ministry of Culture

provided 30 percent of the budget, but according to Kozlov the actual percentagewas more since there is some padding of official figures. One of Kozlov’s mainsources of income for the festival is purchasing and re-selling items. See Chapter7.

35 Thomas P. Hodge, ‘Susanin, Two Glinkas, and Ryleev: History-Making in A Lifefor the Tsar,’ in Intersections and Transpositions, ed. Andrew Baruch Wachtel(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 14.

36 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in RussianMonarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 226–8.

37 Knight, 56.38 Knight, 56–7.39 Guroff and Guroff, 79, 86, 93.40 Verdery, 39.41 Many of the examples examined so far exhibit features of ritual – for example, I

would classify the opening and closing of the Vorob’evka festival as ritual, or atleast as ritualized performance. Still, the fact that most of the festival’s rituals

264 Notes

took place on stage as authored and scripted theatrical events allows me toconsider them primarily as performance and only secondarily as ritual.

42 Kertzer, 11.43 The priest appeared to be in his 30s. He had been a medical student at the univer-

sity in Novosibirsk when he received his calling.44 Kertzer, 10.45 See Wortman (2000), 235–6.46 B. V. Gorbunov, Traditsionnye rukopashnye sostiazaniia v narodnoi kul’ture

vostochnykh slavian XIX–nachala XX vv. Istoriko-etnograficheskoe issledovanie(Moscow, 1997), 30–31, 44, 64–5; A. Gruntovskii, Russkii kulachnyi boi: Istoriia,Etnografiia, Tekhnika (St Petersburg, 1998), 50–51.

47 Gorbunov, 47, 49, 51.48 Gorbunov, 60–61.49 Kornblatt 1999, 414–16.50 John B. Dunlop, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church as an “Empire-Saving”

Institution,’ in The Politics of Religion in Russia and the New States of Eurasia,ed. Michael Bourdeaux (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 15–16.

6 Performing Masculinity1 Peter Holquist, ‘From Estate to Ethnos: The Changing Nature of Cossack

Identity in the Twentieth Century,’ in Russia at a Crossroads: History, Memoryand Political Practice, ed. Nurit Schleifman (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 111.

2 Roman Laba, ‘The Cossack Movement and the Russian State, 1990–96’ In LowIntensity Conflict & Law Enforcement 5 (1996), 379.

3 Shane O’Rourke, Warriors and Peasants: The Don Cossacks in Late ImperialRussia (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 135–7.

4 Holquist, 92–3, 98.5 Holquist, 98, 101.6 Holquist, 101–3.7 Holquist, 103–4. As Holquist points out, the establishment of Cossack cavalry

divisions did not mean the resurrection of the Cossacks as a military communitywithin the USSR. The divisions were composed simply of male residents offormerly Cossack regions, not necessarily descendants of Cossacks themselves.

8 V. Kommissinskii, ‘Gosudarstvennyi akademicheskii Kubanskii kazachii khor,’Krasnodar: Server administratsii i gorodskoi dumy goroda Krasnodara.http://med.krd.ru/www/home.nsf/webdocs/4AB9F27C367A4013C3256A62002D0951.html (accessed 11 April 2002).

9 Aleksei Shilin, Tvorcheskaia masterskaia russkogo khoreograficheskogo fol’kloraA. I. Shilina nos. 2, 3 (video, 1995); comments of members of ensemble from 1stBuzuluk, Volgograd oblast, at Laboratory led by Andrei Kabanov, Vorob’evka,12 September 1998.

10 Lester W. Grau, Rebirth of the Cossack Brotherhood: A Political/Military Force ina Disintegrating Russia (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Foreign Military Studies Office,July 1992), 7.

11 Levin 1996, 29.12 Tamara Smyslova, interview with the author, 11 November 1998, Moscow.13 The declaration was adopted by both the national Union of Cossacks and many

of the local chapters. ‘Ustav Soiuza kazakov, Moskva, 30 iuniia 1990 g,’reprinted in Mukhin, A. A. and Vladimir Pribylovskii Kazach’e dvizhenie v Rossiii stranakh blizhnego zarubezh’ia, 1988–1994 gody vol. 2, Prilozheniia, (Moscow,1994), 265.

Notes 265

14 Listopadov, ‘Oi, ty, kormilets, Don Ivanovich,’ in Pesni Donskikh Kazakov vol. I,part 2 (Moscow, 1949), 399–402; ‘Po goram-to, goram,’ 423–5.

15 Holquist, 92.16 Robert H. McNeal, Tsar and Cossack, 1855–1914 (New York: St Martin’s Press,

1987), 1–2.17 Listopadov, ‘Ai, ne dve-to tuchushki groznye,’ 383–5.18 ‘Basic principles for the concept of a state policy toward the Cossackry,’ 22 April

1994, quoted in Holquist, 112–13.19 Laba, 397.20 ‘Don Cossack Association Created,’ in Izvestiia, 9 March 1990, 3, cited in Laba,

384.21 Laba, 391–2.22 Laba, 398, 401.23 25 December 1998.24 Judith Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural

Mythology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 61.25 After Cossacks were issued uniforms, starting at the end of the eighteenth

century, they were supposed to wear a uniform at all times (although differentuniforms were designed for parade dress and for everyday use). See OlegAgafonov, Kazach’i voiska Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Epokha, 1995), 490–91.In the early years of Cossack history Cossack women wore Turkic-style costumesthat identified them as Cossack women. Later, costumes closer to the style of theneighboring Russians and Ukrainians were adopted. Starting in the late nine-teenth century Cossack women, like many women in villages all over Russia,began to wear the parochka, a blouse and skirt sewn of the same material orcolor. This is the costume used today by Cossack performing groups, whilegroups representing Russian village traditions usually take forms of costume thatrepresent an older local style. See N. Sosnina and I. Shangina, Russkii tradit-sionnyi kostium: Iliustrirovannaia entsiklopediia (St Petersburg, 1998), 204;‘Zhenskii kostium,’ www.cossackweb.com/kazaki/r_zhkost00a.htm (accessed 29Sept. 2002).

26 On the Don, songs are led by the bass, but among Kuban and Tereg Cossacksthe upper voice leads. Interview with Andrei Kabanov, 10 December 1998. To besure, there are some Cossack women’s songs – mostly wedding songs.

27 Sex and Russian Society, ed. Igor Kon and James Riordan (Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 1993), 69.

28 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (NewYork: Routledge, 1990), 140. See also Martha Nussbaum, ‘The Professor ofParody,’ in The New Republic (22 February, 1999),www.tnr.com/archive/0299/022299/nussbaum022299.html

29 David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1988), 99.

30 The video asserted that the camp did more than simply prepare the boys forentry into military academies: ‘the study of traditional Cossack military artsgives a good opportunity to develop physical qualities necessary not only for afuture fighter but for every youth who will become a man and a head anddefender of his family.’

31 L. Muratov, I. Stul’nev, Shatry nad Donom, Telekompaniia SKIT, Moscow 1997.These videos are part of a series, Kazaki, produced by the Russian FolkloreAlliance (Rossiiskii Fol’klornyi Soiuz) and sold at its Moscow office and throughother private distributors of items related to the Cossackry, Russian patriotism,and folklore. Thus, the audience for the films presumably would include manyfolk- and Cossack-related clubs that are members of the Alliance. For a descrip-

266 Notes

tion of the Moscow Cossack division featured in the film, seehttp://platovetz.narod.ru/ (Accessed 23 March 2003).

32 The duality of the Cossack position seems to be clearly encapsulated in theCossack experience during World War II. The Cossacks were split: manydefended the Soviet Union, but approximately 266,000 Cossacks fought againstthe USSR, hoping to defeat Stalin and regain their independence. When thesewere forcibly repatriated after the war, they were executed or imprisoned in laborcamps. The video does not explore this history and is uncritical of Soviet policy.See Peter J. Huxley-Blythe, The East Came West (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1964),and ‘Cossacks in WWII,’ www.cossackweb.com/cossacks/kazww2.htm (accessed29 September, 2002).

33 See, for example, V. Medvedev, ‘Terpi, kazak…‘ in Komsomol’skaia pravda, 2April 1992; and V. Perushkin, ‘Kazachyi krug,’ in Argumenty i fakty, 15 April1992, 4; for a challenge of these figures see Holquist.

34 For discussion of the myth see T. V. Tabolina, Vozrozhdenie Kazachestva1989–1994. Istoki, Khronika. Perspektivy, vol. 1, ‘Tsentr’ (Moscow, RANInstitute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Center for the Study of InterethnicRelations, 1994), 47.

35 Regional’nyi tsentr kazach’ei kul’tury, Letnie Kazach’i lageria (1995), part of theKazaki series.

36 Valentina Kubrakova, interview with the author, Alekseevskaia, Volgogradoblast, 24 September 1998.

37 Vitalii Bortsov, interview with the author, Uriupinsk, Volgograd oblast, 10 May1999.

38 Kommissinskii.39 Vitalii Bortsov, interview with the author.40 The lampasy served as a sign that the wearer belonged to the Cossacks.

According to one quasi-academic version of Cossack mythology, lampasy werefound on costumes dating back to the ancient warrior tribes, the Polovtsy andScythians; ‘It is no wonder that Cossacks were and are so proud of them.’ See B.Almazov, V. Novikov, A. Mazhola, Kazaki (St Petersburg: Diamant, 1999), 50.However, there is no evidence that Scythians were ancestors of the Cossacks.

41 Vitalii Bortsov, interview with the author.42 Holquist, 112.

7 The Village Revives1 Of course it is difficult to generalize about the ‘real’ Russian village, because

many differences exist in standard of living and livelihood. Since my own experi-ence and that of many of my musicologist and folklorist contacts has beenprimarily in central, western and southern Russia, most of my examples aredrawn from these regions.

2 Sue Bridger, ‘Rural Youth,’ in Soviet Youth Culture ed. Jim Riordan(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 83–4.

3 Shchurov, interview with the author, 9 December 1998.4 ‘Okh, gospodi, togda my prosten’ko khodili i luchshe bylo’.Varvara Balabanova,

interview with the author and Elena Minenok, Troitskoe, Kaluga oblast, 1 June1999.

5 Varvara Balabanova, interview with the author, 30 May 1999. As Elena Zubkovapoints out, stealing from the sovkhoz was often the ‘fault of the state’ since it didnot pay people enough. See Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, andDisapointments, 1945–57, trans. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,1998), 131.

Notes 267

6 Nikolai Nikitych Senatov, interview with the author and Elena Minenok,Petrovskoe, Kaluga oblast, 31 May 1999. Balabanova said much the same.

7 Natal’ia Giliarova, lecture at Moscow Conservatory, 26 July 1996. The exception– where men do sing wedding songs – is in Sekirino, Riazan. But despite men’smusical participation, the wedding ritual in Sekirino is matriarchal in the sensethat the girl’s parents go to the house of the boy to propose their daughter, ratherthan the opposite.

8 Due to the potentially sensitive nature of this informant’s statements, I havechanged her name.Varvara Balabanova of Troitsa told a similar story about a sorceress [koldunia].Balabanova’s mother suddenly took ill, and because of various signs she knewthat a spell had been put upon her. She died after three days, at the age of 43.Interview with the author, 30 May 1999.

9 For a list of such legends see www.tafkac.org/faq2k/medicine_index.html (accessed18 July, 2002).

10 See further examples in Hermann Bausinger, Folk Culture in a World ofTechnology, trans. Elke Dettmer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,1990), 28–30.

11 James Scott, ‘Hegemony and the Peasantry,’ in Politics and Society 7, no. 3(1977), 284, cited in Lynne Viola, ‘The Peasant Nightmare: Visions ofApocalypse in the Soviet Countryside,’ in Journal of Modern History 62, no. 4(December 1990), 758.

12 ‘Kakim ty byl’ from Kubanskie Kazaki (Ivan Pyr’ev, 1949), with music by IsaakDunaevskii and lyrics by M. Isakovskii and M. Vol´pin. ‘Ognei tak mnogo zolo-tykh’ from Delo bylo v Pen’kove (Stanislav Rostotskii, 1957) with music byKirill.Molchanov and lyrics by N. Dorizo. ‘Napilas’ ia p’ianoi’ was popularizedin the 1990s by Nadezhda Kadysheva and her group Golden Ring, but its originsare earlier. I was not able to find its composer. Due to its implied message (thespeaker gets drunk because of an unfaithful husband) it was not publishedduring the Soviet period., but has been widely published in songbooks sincethen. Other songs named as popular by my village informants include ‘Moskvazlatoglavaia,’ a city-style romance about Moscow in winter, and ‘Chernyi voron,’with words by N. Verevkin, about a soldier who dies in battle.

13 Tania Modleski, ‘Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film,’ in Cinema Journal 23,no. 3 (Spring 1984), 21.

14 Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, eds. ‘Introduction,’ in Imitations ofLife: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, ed. Louise McReynolds and JoanNeuberger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 3.

15 Rudneva, too, speaks of peasants rejecting certain performances of songsbecause of aesthetic criteria, using expressions such as ‘the song doesn’t fly’ or‘the song can’t be sung.’ See A. Rudneva, Russkoe narodnoe muzykal’noe tvorch-estvo (Moscow: Kompozitor, 1994), 200, 203.

16 Zinaida V. Efremenkova, interview with the author, Troitskoe, Kaluge oblast, 1June 1999.

17 Amateur clubs include theater, dance, and instrumental (orchestral) groups aswell as choruses, and about half are children’s groups while half are adults’.Statistics and interpretations of them given by Viacheslav Korostylev of theTsentr Narodnogo Tvorchestva (TsNT) in Riazan, from internal records of theTsNT and from a yearly report sent to all the TsNTs, Formirovanie samod-eiatel’nogo narodnogo tvorchestva. Korostylev could not estimate how many ofthe groups were based in villages as opposed to cities.

18 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 248.

268 Notes

19 Volodia Talorin, interview with the author, Vorob’evka, 7 May 1999.20 Vasilii Kozlov, interview with the author, Vorob’evka, 12 May 1999.21 Irina Kozlova, interview with the author, Vorob’evka, 7 May 1999.22 Vasilii Kozlov, interview with the author, Vorob’evka, 9 May 1999.23 Vasilii Kozlov, interview with the author, Vorob’evka, 12 May 1999.24 Vasilii Kozlov, interview with the author, Vorob’evka, 12 May 1999.25 For instance, I attended a small folk festival in Novosibirsk where (unlike at the

Vorob’evka festival) participants had to pay for their own accommodation. Thedirector told me the center had recently been threatened with closure. In order toprevent its demise, he had asked colleagues in Moscow and elsewhere to writeletters supporting the center’s continued existence. The center was allowed tocontinue, but with an extremely limited budget.

26 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘The World of Ostap Bender: Soviet Confidence Men in theStalin Period,’ in Slavic Review 61, no. 3 (Fall 2002), 537, 547.

27 Bausinger 1990, 160.28 Andrei Kabanov, interview with the author, Moscow, 14 May 1999.29 Natal’ia Demchenko, interview with author, Vorob’evka, 11 May 1999.30 Elena Tychinina and Director of Semiluki Department of Culture, interviews

with the author, Vorob’evka, 7 May 1999.

8 Making Memory1 See, for example, Andrei Kabanov, Perspektivy fol’klornogo dvizheniia v sovre-

mennom narodnom tvorchestve, Nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut kul’tury,Programma razvitiia narodnogo tvorchestva (Moscow, 1989), 24; and MarinaNovitskaia, ‘Detskaia shkola narodnykh iskusstv,’ in Sokhranenie i vozrozhdeniefol’klornykh traditsii, ed. A. A. Banin (Moscow, 1990), 155.

2 I attended this celebration in 1990. See also N. I. Zhulanova, ‘Molodezhnoefol’klornoe dvizhenie,’ in Samodeiatel’noe khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo v SSSR:Ocherki istorii. Konets 1950-x–nachalo 1990-x godov., ed. L. P. Solntseva, M. V.Iunisov (St Petersburg, 1999), 119.

3 I. P. Pankrat’ev, ‘Sovremennyi liubitel’skii fol’klornyi kollektiv: nekotoryeosobennosti deiatel’nosti,’ in Khudozhestvennaia samodeiatel’nost’: Traditsii,masterstvo, vospitanie, Nauchno-issledovate’lskii institut kul’tury, Sbornik nauch-nykh trudov No. 144 (Moscow, 1985), 32.

4 Novitskaia, 155.5 Andrezej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia

in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (NotreDame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1989 [1975]), 198; N. Zernov, ThreeRussian Prophets: Khomyakov, Dostoevsky, Solov’ev (London, 1944), 37–8; ElenaHellberg-Hirn, Soil and Soul: The Symbolic World of Russianness (Aldershot:Ashgate, 1998), 94.

6 This group is discussed in Chapter 7.7 Village of Liubovnikovo, Riazan’ oblast, 29 July 1996.8 Helena Goscilo, ‘The Gendered Trinity of Russian Cultural Rhetoric Today – or

the Glyph of the H[i]eroine,’ in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in LateTwentieth-Century Russia, ed. Nancy Condee (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1995), 81.

9 Alan Dundes, ‘What is Folklore?’ in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 4.

10 Village of Kochemary, Riazan’ oblast, 19 and 20 October, 1998.11 Much has been written about transmission in folkloric traditions. As I noted in

Chapter 3, Kabanov and Pokrovsky found that transmission of Russian poly-

Notes 269

270 Notes

phonic music was relatively casual: there was no apprenticeship process, andoften people ‘just started singing.’ The structure of the music permitted relativelyinexperienced singers to participate in singing the simpler, lower parts, while theprecentor and the diskant or highest podgolosok were commonly sung by themore accomplished singers. By contrast, in traditions such as that of theUkrainian minstrels, transmission was accomplished by apprenticeship to anestablished master. After the last of the minstrels were wiped out in 1939 underStalin, no such transmission was possible and the next generation of these tradi-tional musicians had to learn from published texts. See Natalie Kononenko,Ukrainian Minstrels: And the Blind Shall Sing (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,1998), 116–17. As a further contrast, in the sphere of classical music, transmis-sion is by formal education. It was this system of transmission that was appliedto all the arts, including folklore, by the Soviets, so disrupting the traditionaltransmission patterns; Alekseev points out that due to ‘the total liquidation ofilliteracy’ – and, I would add, due to the professionalization of folklore perfor-mance – ‘whole generations have been totally left out’ of the process of folkloricoral transmission. Today, he noted in 1988, oral transmission commonly skips ageneration: older people deliver their knowledge of folk traditions to their grand-children, bypassing the generation of the fathers. See Eduard Alekseev, Fol’klor vkontekste sovremennoi kultury: rassuzhdeniia o sudbakh narodnoi pesni (Moscow:Sovetskii kompozitor, 1988), 68.

12 Giliarova, 31 October 1998. Rudneva died in 1983.13 For example, at a rehearsal on 30 April 1999, the group was learning a wedding

song from Riazan’ oblast, ‘Nauchi-ka molodets.’ Giliarova corrected the leadsinger several times on timbre, pacing, and manner of pronouncing the words.The girl singing upper voice was told to imitate one of the other members, whosang the top notes ‘in the head.’ (For Giliarova this head-voice timbre likelysuggested a hint of a ‘church’ vocal quality and represented a remnant of a pre-Revolutionary aspect of the tradition). Lower voices were told to sing morecleanly, in unison. The group was asked to sing in smaller units and Giliarovamade comments such as ‘You’re both yelling,’ and ‘Now I understand, there’s notenough of that timbre in the middle.’

14 Giliarova, 31 October 1998.15 Kubrakova, interview with the author, 24 September 1998.16 Of course, this may also be a classic case of the ethnomusicologist imputing

his/her own observations to his/her informants. Krasnopevtseva said that thegrandmothers do not actually articulate that they are listening for overtones;rather, she simply noticed that when she could hear overtones they liked theperformance, and vice versa.

17 Krasnopevtseva, interview with the author, 20 January 1999.18 Timothy Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York:

Routledge, 1997), 21.19 BBC Monitoring International Reports, ‘Russian Public TV broadcasts

Orthodox Christmas service in Moscow,’ Worldwide BBC Monitoring Service,January 6 1999; Reynolds.

20 O. V. Makarova and A. V. Glumova, Vot prishlo, prikatilo, RozhdestvoKhristovo… (Saratov: Saratovskii oblastnoi Dom kul’tury i nauki, 1998), 14.

21 Anzhelika Glumova, interview with the author, Saratov, 9 January 1999.22 T. S. Makashina, ‘Sviatki’ (foreword), in Sviatki: Sbornik, ed. G. E. Levkodimov

and L. M. Firsova (Moscow: ZAO RIFME, ‘Molodezhnaia Estrada’ series,1997), 5–7.

23 Makashina, 8.24 Makarova and Glumova, 14.25 Glumova, 9 January 1999.

26 Zinaida Vilochkova (b. 1929), interview with the author, village of Vladykino,Saratov oblast’, 7 January 1999. Casual conversation with elderly womanpasserby on street yielded same memory about caroling: ‘no one caroled.’

27 Glumova, 9 January 1999.28 Alexei Karas’ev (b. 1955), interview with author, village of Vladykino, Saratov

oblast’, 6 January 1999.29 Karas’ev. Original text: ‘Ia malen’kii mal’chik sel na stakanchik stakanchik

khrup davai mne rub. Otkryvai sunduchok vynimai piatachok.’30 V. A. Lipinskaia, ‘Narodnye traditsii v sovremennykh kalendarnykh obriadakh i

prasznikakh russkogo naseleniia Altaiskogo kraia,’ in Russkie: semeinyi i obshch-estvenyi byt, Institut etnografii im. N. N. Mikluxo-Maklaia, (Moscow: Nauka,1989), 118.

31 Glumova, 9 January 1999.32 Sue Bridger, ‘Rural Youth,’ Soviet Youth Culture ed. Jim Riordan (Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 89.33 Ania Marshalkina (b. 1982), interview with the author, village of Vladykino,

Saratov oblast’, 7 January 1999.34 Makarova and Glumova.35 Glumova, 9 January 1999.36 ‘Rozhdestvo vo Vladykino,’ Saratov Television, 1999.37 I base this supposition on information given me by Glumova in a phone conver-

sation in late January 1999, and on the information given me by two elderlyinformants mentioned in an earlier footnote.

38 Makarova and Glumova, 1; Karas’ev, 6 January 1999.39 I do not mean to suggest that any revivalists’ goals, actions, or productions are

harmful in the way that Stalinist policies toward folklore were. Furthermore, Irecognize that my own work, including this book, ‘advocates a particular inter-pretation of folk heritage’. There is no ‘way out’ of ideology.

9 Conclusion1 Natal’ia Sapozhnikova, ‘Nadezhda Babkina – voitel’nitsa Russkoi pesni,’ in Self-

Made Man: Zhurnal o liudiakh i ikh uspekhakh 20, November 2002.2 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 42.3 David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 227.4 Viktoriia Loginova, ‘Inna Zhelannaia: Ia vybiraiu svobodu,’ in Moskovskaia

Pravda (5 April 1995), 8, available online at http://messia.narod.ru/zhelannaja.htm(Accessed 18 October, 2002).

5 Timothy Brennan, ‘World Music Does Not Exist,’ in Discourse 23, no. 1 (Winter2000), 45.

6 Brennan, 46.7 ‘Biography’ on the Peter Gabriel Official Web Site, www.petergabriel.com/biog/

(accessed 18 October, 2002). See also Simon Frith, ‘The Discourse of WorldMusic,’ in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, andAppropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley,CA: University of California Press, 2000), 306–7.

8 Brennan, 47.9 Jovan Howe, Irina Raspopova, Sinjie Lipjagi: Village of Blue Linden Trees

(Leiden, Netherlands: Pan Records Ethnic Series, 1996), PAN 2039CD. Otherdiscs include: Sygrai, Vanya / Play, Vanya: Folk Instrumental Music and its VocalCounterpart in the Southern, Western, and Central Regions of Russia (Leiden,Netherlands: Pan Records Ethnic Series, 1991), PAN 2002CD; Vyacheslav

Notes 271

Shchurov, Tam Letal Pavlin / A Peacock once Went Flying: Songs from the Areaof Belgorod Town and the Oskol River (Leiden, Netherlands: Pan Records EthnicSeries, 1991), PAN 2001CD; Ekaterina Dorokhova, Chants des Peuples deRussie: Regions of Briansk, Tula, Arkhangelsk, Sverdlovsk … (Paris: Le Chant duMonde, 1994), CMT 274978.

10 But this is very difficult, since often the copyright for field recordings belongs tothe person who made the recording, not the artists. On the political and ethicalissues connected with these practices, see David Hesmondhalgh, ‘InternationalTimes: Fusions, Exoticism, and Antiracism in Electronic Dance Music,’ in Bornand Hesmondhalgh, 286–93.

11 Iurii Saprykin, ‘Zdorovo, Kostroma,’ on Afisha, www.afisha.ru/cd-review?id=136722 (accessed 13 May 2002).

12 Lev Kulakovskii, ‘Kostroma,’ in Sovetskaia etnografiia 1 (1946), 163–86, andIskusstvo sela Dorozhevo (Moscow, 1957, 1965); V. K. Sokolova, Vesenne-letniekalendarnye obriady russkikh, ukraintsev i belorusov (Moscow, 1979).

13 Kulakovskii 1946, 185.14 Some listeners found this music not only humorous but a hilarious parody of the

Soviet folk music tradition that took itself too seriously.15 Viacheslav Rusin, ‘Ivan Kupala: My ne fanaty fol’klora, my fanaty krasivoi

muzyki,’ in Zelenograd on-line, http://zol.gorcom.ru/music/music6-ivankupala.htm(accessed 13 May 2002).

16 ‘Ivan Kupala: Kostroma,’ on Notonosets, http://noto.ruz.net/al/ikk.htm (accessed13 May 2002)

17 Dmitrii Serostanoff, Gazeta ‘EN’ (20 April, 2000),http://muzyka.kulichki.net/ivan_kupala/ (accessed 13 May, 2002).

18 Oleg Klimov, ‘Ivan Kupala – konstruktor vysokoi stepeni slozhnosti,’Muzykal’naia gazeta 47 (1999), www.nestor.minsk.by/mg/mg99/47/mg94705.html(accessed 13 May 2002).

19 Bulgarian Voices [Angelite] and Huun-Huur-Tu featuring Sergei Starostin andMikhail Alperin, Fly, Fly, My Sadness, JARO 1996 (4197–2) and Shanachie(SHA-64071); Bulgarian Voices [Angelite] and Moscow Art Trio with Huun-Huur-Tu, Mountain Tale, JARO 1998, Zebra Acoustic Series 1999 (ZA 44405–2).

20 Alians, Sdelano v belom / Made in White (BSA Records, 1989); Mari Boine andAlians, Motel Moskva (Norway, 1993); Inna Zhelannaia, Vodorosl’ (GeneralRecords, 1995, GR 95056); Inna Zhelannaia and Farlanders, Inozemets(GreenWave, 1998, GRCD-98–1, and Jaro-4222); Inna & The Farlanders, TheDream of Endless Nights (Shanachie, 1999); Farlanders, Moments: Live inGermany (Jaro 4230–2, Green Wave, 2000).

21 Inna Zhelannaia and Farlanders, ‘Inozemets’; transcription of village recordingpublished in Viacheslav Shchurov, Belgorodskoe Prioskol’e (Moscow, 1995),286–7. After Shchurov recorded the song with his student ensemble Solovka in1968, the song became quite popular among groups in the youth folklore move-ment; Starostin called it a ‘shlager’ (a hit).

22 I base these observations partly on the transcription made by Shchurov and the1968 recording by Solovka. The vocals also lack the traditional solo lead-in; andthey break after each pair of verses for an instrumental interlude, which is nottraditional for a Russian dance-song.

23 Starostin, interview with the author, 22 December 1998.24 Ivan Kupala, Zdorovo Kostroma: Kollektsia remiksov i rimeikov, with groups

Griv, Deadushki, Leprikonsi, Diskoteka Avariia, Zdob si Zdub, and S.P.O.R.T.(Soiuz, 2000); and Ivan Kupala, Zvezdnaia Seriia (Star Records, 2002).

25 For example, a critic of the Kupala album stated that the group ‘traveled tovillages’ with a tape recorder when in fact they used recordings donated to them

272 Notes

by ethnomusicologists (see Dmitrii Serostanoff, Gazeta ‘EN’). Another critic saidthe group mixed ‘two seconds of Arkhangel’sk grannies with 3 seconds ofBashkir grannies, and a Breton instrumental,’ when in fact each of the songs iscomposed mainly of one or two recordings of Russian villagers (see TimofeiOvsenin, ‘CD Ivan Kupala “Kostroma”,’ in Afisha, www.afisha.ru/cd-review?id=6439 (accessed 13 May, 2002). With Starostin’s music, some criticsmisidentified some of the folk instruments used, and one critic told Zhelannaiashe had trouble distinguishing her own authored songs from the folk songs onthe album (see Viktoriia Loginova, ‘Inna Zhelannaia: Ia vybiraiu svobodu’).

26 Richard Stites, ‘The Domestic Muse: Music at Home in the Twilight ofSerfdom,’ in Intersections and Transpositions: Russian Music, Literature, andSociety, ed. Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1998), 2–3.

27 December 5 1998.28 See, for example, Siberian-style vocals in ‘Sberegla’ (Poias Ul’chi, CD 1994 SNC

Records, MC 1996 SNC Records, MC 1997 Moroz Records) and ‘Provezen’ ’(Uzaren’, LP 1992 SNC Records, CD 1993 SNC Records, MC 1996 SNCRecords, MC 1997 Moroz Records).

29 Moj milyonok dorogoikak tsvetochek alen’kiiStan bol’shoi, usy bolshoi,Tol’ko khren-to malen’kii

30 Na okne rastet tsvetochekGoluboi da i alen’kiiLushche malen’kii stoiachiiChem bol’shoi da vialen’kii

31 Although the group knew all the words and sang without hesitation, there wasno dishkant, they pronounced the words without reducing their vowels, and theyintroduced pitches that were not in the original scale of the song. This transfor-mation was explained when the leader, Valera Zhuk, told me that although themembers of the group back in the 1980s had learned the songs from the cassettehe brought from Saratov, the current members had never heard the cassette, andhad learned the songs from other members. Interview with the author, 15 May1999.

32 Richard Schechner, ‘Collective Reflexivity: Restoration of Behavior,’ in TheCrack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, ed. J. Ruby(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 63; Edward L.Schieffelin, ‘Problematizing Performance,’ in Ritual, Performance, Media, ed.Felicia Hughes-Freeland (London: Routledge, 1998), 200.

33 Schieffelin, 205.34 Tom F. Driver, Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transforming Power of Ritual

(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 156.35 Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1969), 94–7; Driver,

160.36 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression,

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 200.

Notes 273

a capella singing 20, 57Abu-Lughod, Lila 243n18accordion 18, 22, 62, 155; Play,

Accordion! 108-9acting out of folk songs/rituals 93-4,

100, 118Agafonov, Oleg 267n25agrarian calendar/rites 20, 184, 212Agrenev-Slavianskii chorus 28-31Agrenev-Slavianskii, Dmitri 28alcohol abuse 177, 181Alekseev, Eduard 271n11Alekseeva, O. V. 256n20Alexander III, Tsar 151alienation (ostranenie) 91All-World Russian Assembly 158Alliance of Folk Ensembles 132Almazov, B. 268n40Alperin, Mikhail 227Altrichter, Helmut 248n11amateur artistic activity 46-7, 50, 52-3,

74; and patronage (shefstvo) 61; seealso professionalism

amateur music 100; amateur clubs 48,192; bard movement 71-2; folk choirs8, 46-50, 51-2, 74, 162; folkorchestras 55-6; see also funding

American folk music 7-9, 223; revivalmovement 70, 72

’Americanization of music’ 223, 228Anastasiev, M. 252n125Andreev, Vasilii 16-19, 23, 33, 244n9anonymity 73Antonov, Mikhail 260n5Army Ensemble 47

artel 102Asaf’ev, B. 249n22audio cassette recordings 87, 132-3, 137;

learning from 210authenticity 28, 39, 74-8, 121-3, 229,

236; in contemporary folk culture184, 195-6, 201-3, 209, 218-20; andhistoricism 25-6; of instruments 16-17; and mainstream performance109; peasant culture as source of 23,70

author’s background/perceptions 7-11Azadovskii, M. K. 246n67

Babkina, Nadezhda 106, 107, 117Baiburin, A. K. 262n37Bailey, James 247n100Balabanova, Vavara 178, 268n4, 269n5-

6, 269n8Balakirev, Mily 24, 25, 26balalaikas 16-17, 18, 22; derogatory

slang use of term 117ballet 27, 44bard movement 71-2Barker 263n58Bausinger, Hermann 6-7, 109, 122, 134,

242n12, 261n11, 261n16, 262n36,262n42, 263n60, 269n10, 270n27

Ben-Amos, Dan 261n17Bershadskaya, T. 257n41Bespalov, Ivan 210bias 7, 9-10; see also methods of studyBlanter, M. 262n38blat (reciprocal favors) 200

Index

Transliterations of Russian terms appear in italic font. Endnotes are indicated by "n" and theendnote number. Endnotes are listed on the pages where their full text occurs, e.g., 231n5indicates endnote number 5, whose full text occurs on page 231.

Bogina, Elena 207Boiko, Iurii 17, 18, 244n6-7, 244n11-12,

261n24Boine, Mari 273n20Bolsheviks 35, 161, 183Bonnell, Victoria E. 251n92, 251n96Borenstein, Eliot 142, 251n90, 264n10Boris Godunov 96Born, Georgina 273n10Borneman, John 263n2Borodin, Aleksander 24, 44Bortsov, Vitalii 172-5, 268n37, 268n41Bourdieu, Pierre 90, 243n21, 243n24,

259n71boycotts (of new music material) 50Boyes, Georgina 9, 242n15Braz, Svetlana 262n28Brennan, Timothy 272n5-6, 272n8Brezhnev 88, 173-4Bridger, Sue 268n2, 272n32Briusova, N. 250n55Broch, Hermann 254n147Brooks, David 272n3Brown, Malcolm Hamrick 244n17Brubaker, Rogers 263n2, 264n5Bruk, Genrikh 250n60, 255n165Brumfield, William Craft 246n58Bryce, Mayo 252n124, 252n126,

253n127, 253n130Bryne, David 223Bugoslavskii, S. 250n71Bulgarian ensembles 225, 227Butler, Judith 167, 243n21, 267n28byliny (epic songs) 20, 29, 69

Calinescu, Matei 254n152’cantilena’ (lyrical) style 64Cantwell, Robert 242n14carnival quality (of folk performances)

91, 92, 134, 225-6caroling 1-2, 9-10, 20, 212-16Carter, Stephen K. 264n13cassette recordings see audio cassette

recordingsCastillo, Greg 248n18Catherine the Great 19CD of text examples 15censorship 135chastushki (sung limericks) 22, 29, 40,

41, 231-2, 235; performance bychildren 125-7, 134

Chekhov, I. 254n140-1

Cheremukhin, M. 252n116, 253n137,254n159

Chermnykh, Mikhail 52Cherniavsky, Michael 264n6Chernobyl’ accident 104Chicago World’s Fair 31Chicherov, V. I. 257n38children’s folk ensembles 2-3, 48, 50,

118; Izmailovskaia Sloboda 125, 129;’Little Spindle’ 101, 124, 128, 130,210-11

Chinyaeva, Elena 244n19Chizhova, A. 254n162, 265n27choirs see folk choruseschoreography see dancechoruses see folk chorusesChristmas celebration 212-20; caroling

1-2, 9-10, 20, 212-16Chulkov, Mikhail 22classical music 17, 24, 44-5, 55-7; in

post-Soviet nationalism 139, 140Clifford, James 13, 242n8, 242n13,

243n25-6, 270n18club, village 48-9, 50, 177, 182, 189collection: of folk songs 23, 26, 31; of

folklore 36-7, 73, 84collective (kollektiv) 47collectives, village singing 80collectivism (sobornost’) 100-3, 130collectivization 35, 38-9, 71commercialism of folklore 107, 110-11,

223-5Communists 64, 143competitions 47, 53Composers’ Unions 44Conquest, Robert 248n14Cossack Circle ensemble 105, 144Cossackry 141, 144-6, 160-75;

amateur/professional folk choirs 52,106-7, 162, 163, 172-3; ataman(leader) 157, 164, 169-70; Bolotnoeparish celebration 153-9; Cossackrevival movement 141, 146, 160, 163-4, 168-75; Cossack roots 104-5;costumes/dress 155, 163, 173-4;decossackization 161, 170;fistfighting games 157-9, 172; historyof 161-3, 164; masculinity and 160,162, 165-8, 174, 181; myths of 164-5,168-71, 175; and national music 144-6; Old Believers and 144;propagandization of 169, 173-4

costumes 30, 32, 48, 54, 71; Boyar 29;

Index 275

Cossack 155, 163, 173-4; in post-Soviet folk festivals 148-9; in post-Soviet mainstream performances 107,115-16, 120

counter-melodies (podgoloski) 21, 26,180

crafts and folklore funding 198-9Crimean War 24cruel romances 40, 122, 182, 185Cui, César 24cultural-enlightenment schools 48, 74cultural identity see identity

dance 59, 64, 83, 119; ballet 27, 44;Cossack dance ensembles 144, 162,172-3; dance-games 155; dance songs(pliasovye) 20, 100; Soviet ’nationaldances’ 66

defamiliarization (ostranenie) 91, 96Degtirev, Alexsandr 79Demchenko, Natal’ia 270n29Department of Propaganda of the

Central Committee 173-4Diaghilev, Serge 27dialects 20, 48, 100dissemination (of folk music) 97-100divertissements (intermission acts) 3, 19,

22, 28Dobrenko, Evgeny 45, 243n24, 250n46-

9, 250n51, 250n53Dobrovol’sky, B. M. 256n13documentaries 108-9, 169, 204, 208, 211-

20Don Cossack Choir 52Dorokhova, Ekaterina 118, 119, 184,

262n27, 262n34, 263n46, 272n9Dow, James 242n6Driver, Tom F. 274n34Druts, E. 244n19Dundes, Alan 242n9, 263n56, 271n9Dunham, Vera 250n50Dunlop, John B. 248n21, 266n50Dzerzhinsky, Ivan 161

Early Music movement 33Edison cylinder machine 31education 45, 58-62, 118-20; of choir

directors 48, 59-60, 67, 118; learningin groups (ansamblevoe obuchenie)101

Efremenkova, Zinaida V. 190, 269n16Emel’ianov, L. I. 256n20, 256n23Ensemble Volia (Freedom) 112-13

epic songs: byliny 20, 29, 69; of Stalinera 41-2, 73

Erokhina, Natal’ia 116, 261n21estrada (stage) 3, 19, 30-1, 33; in

mainstream performances 107, 117;see also stage aesthetics

ethnography 26, 31-2, 40, 77, 184; fieldrecordings 225-6; and PokrovskyEnsemble 92, 94-5, 103-5; see alsoWorld Music Movement

Eurasianism 142Evseenkova, Anna 178

’fakelore’ 9, 42, 74, 122Famitsyn, A. S. 17Farewell to Matyora (film) 71fascism 38Fatiushina, Iuliia 115-16 (incl. Fig. 4.2),

117Feifer, Gregory 243n20femininity see genderfestivals see folk festivalsFink, Robert 246n75fistfighting games 157-9, 172Fitzpatrick, Sheila 37, 200, 248n3,

248n8, 248n10, 248n13, 248n15-16,249n26, 252n121, 270n26

The Five see The Mighty Handfulflutes 17, 101the folk 5-6, 62-3, 222; nineteenth-

century views of 23-4; as post-Sovietnational symbol 138-42, 143;redefined in Stalin period 38-43;Soviet views of 35-8; terminologychanges 39, 117, 152; see also narod(the people); peasants

folk choruses 17, 27-33, 38, 52, 102; all-female 180-2; amateur 8, 46-50, 51-2,74, 162; children’s ensembles 2-3, 48,50, 118; gender separation 51-2, 54-5,101, 179-83; kolkhoz folk choirs 48,49-50; professional 47-8, 50, 52-5, 64,162; of serfs 19; Soviet 17, 80, 93,102, 229; see also mainstream folkperformance

folk choruses/ensembles, specific:Agrenev-Slavianskii chorus 28-31;Army Ensemble 47; Cossack Circle105, 144; Don/Kuban Cossack Choir52, 162; Ensemble Volia (Freedom)112-13; Ermolovo ensemble 187-9;Folk Chorus of the Gnesin College114; Folk Holiday (Narodnyi

276 Index

prazdnik) 132; Gnesin Academy FolkChoir 112; Gornitsa 210; IvanKupala 225-8; Izmailovskaia Sloboda125, 128; ’Little Spindle’ 101, 124,128, 130, 210-11; MoscowConservatory Folk Ensemble 206;Northern Russian Folk Choir 49;Omsk Folk Chorus 81; PetrozavodskMusic School ensemble 114, 117-19;Piatnitskii Choir 47, 53; PokrovskyEnsemble 78-88; Red Army Choir 52;Red Army Song and DanceEnsemble of the USSR 53; RussianMusic 128; Russian Song - Russkaiapesnia 106; Sirin Choir 118-19;Songster Workshop (Pesel’naia artel’)123, 233; Stanitsa 113-14, 128, 163,210; State Academic Kuban CossackChoir 106-7; State AcademicPiatnitsky Russian Folk Choir 107;Ural Russian Folk Chorus 61;Zabava (’Fun’) 131, 211-20

folk dance see dancefolk festivals 147-8, 193, 196, 223;

Moscow ’Folklore Spring’ festival110-16, 118, 120, 139; Vorob’evkafestival 147-52, 198-9

Folk Holiday (Narodnyi prazdnik)ensemble 132

folk instruments see instrumentsfolk music 2-4, 16-34, 74-6;

contemporary/popular 223-8;dissemination of 97-100, 196; andeducation system 58-62; exploitationpotential 224-5; gap between ruraland urban music 18, 86, 205, 222;narodnaia muzyka/narodnye pesni39, 117, 184; post-1934encouragement of 38, 180, 182, 189;see also American folk music;authenticity; revival

folk orchestras 16-18, 27, 33, 55-7;gender separation in 51-2; post-1934encouragement of 38

folk polyphony 33, 64-5, 67, 182, 208-9folk-pop 110, 223-7, 229folk-rock 95, 227folk songs 20-2, 28-33, 74-8, 184-9;

acting out of 30, 93-4; ’death of thefolk song’ 9, 24, 111, 122; in opera25-6, 57; Song Commission 31; andSoviet nationalism 40-2; ’The Song’

(symphonic arrangement/highculture) 45

folk theater 118-19, 128, 197folklore 4-7, 13, 38-43, 117, 184-7; 1999

Moscow ’Folklore Spring’ Festival110-16, 118; commercialism of 107,110-12; dying out perceived 43, 73,256n21; as hobby 46-9; liberals vs.purists 120-3; narodnoe tvorchestvo(’people’s creation’) 41, 43, 73; pan-Russian (obshcherusskii) principle53-4, 119-20; and popular culture222-36; preservation of 187-93, 204-21; as propaganda 41-2, 54-5, 73, 77,220; ’pseudofolklore’ 30-1, 42, 73;and Soviet national style 35-43;terminology changes 117, 184; seealso collection; funding; memory;revival

Folklore Commission (of the RSFSR)78

folklorism 6-7, 13, 43, 229, 236; in latenineteenth century 24-33; andmainstream performance 109

Foucault, Michel 13, 222, 243n21,243n24, 272n2

Friedlander, Saul 254n145-6Frierson, Cathy 25, 246n55, 246n66Frith, Simon 272n7Fuller, Jennifer 246n52, 250n54funding 106-8, 192; by Gazprom 110-12,

115-16, 139, 146; for Vorob’evkafolklore 149-50, 193-200; see alsoprofessionalism

Gabriel, Peter 223-4, 272n7Gazprom: funding of folklore

performance 110-12, 115-16, 139,146; tax receipt in local products 199

Gellner, Ernest 138, 263n1gender 51-2, 176, 179-83; and Cossack

identity/performance 160, 162, 166-8,181; female view of folk song texts185-7; separation in singing 51-2, 54-5, 101, 179-83; valuation of women181, 183; see also masculinity

’genetic memory’ 105, 144, 218-19Geographical Society (Russian) 26, 31Gessler, A. 244n19Giliarova, Natalia 81, 85, 118, 251n78,

253n133, 255n7, 255n170, 256n21,257n43, 258n56, 261n22, 262n26,262n35, 269n7, 271n12-14; and

Index 277

contemporary village singing 206,208-9; on preservation of songs 121-2

Gippius, Evgenii 77-81, 245n33, 246n69,254n157-8, 257n32, 257n34, 257n37-8, 257n41

glasnost 106, 112, 121, 134; andencouragement of folklore traditions180, 182, 189

Glinka, Mikhail 17, 24, 46, 151Glumova, Anzhelika 92-3, 131, 263n49,

265n25, 271n20-1, 272n24-5, 272n27,272n31, 272n34-5, 272n37-8; andvideo documentary of Zabava 212,215, 216-19

Gnesin Academy 107, 110, 112, 118Gnesin Institute 60, 74, 80, 130-1Golden Ring - Zolotoe kol’tso 107Goldschmidt, Paul 263n58-9Golubchina, Z. 251n76Goncharova, Natal’ia 27Gorbachev 71Gorbunov, B. V. 266n46-8Gorky, Maxim 29, 247n89, 249n33; 1934

speech redefining folklore 39-41, 48Gornitsa 210Goscilo, Helena 207, 243n20, 270n8Grau, Lester W. 266n10Graves-Brown, Paul 243n22-3Great Russian Orchestra 17Grotovskii, Jerzy 118Gruntovskii, A. 266n46guitar poetry movement 71-2Guroff, Gregory and Alexander 264n3,

265n39Gusev, V. E. 256n23’Gypsy’ dances 66’Gypsy’ singers 19

Haltmeyer, Norman 252n125Handler, Richard 23-4, 245n49Hayward, Max 249n31Hellberg-Hirn, Elena 270n5Herder, Johann Gottfried 23, 245n43Hesmondhalgh, David 273n10heterophony 21hidden meaning (podtekst) 74high culture 40, 43-6, 140, 207, 229Hilton, Alison 25, 27, 246n59-60,

246n71-2, 260n98historicism 25, 156Hitler 63Hobsbawm, Eric 243n27Hodge, Thomas P. 265n35

holidays 20, 100; Bolotnoe parishcelebration 153-9; Christmas 212-20;in contemporary village culture 184-5, 189-92, 204-5, 212-20; new versionsin Soviet period 42-3, 143, 189-91;New Year’s Eve 216; restoration byCossack revival 172; videodocumentaries of 208, 212-20;Whitsunday 20, 187, 190-1

Holquist, Peter 266n1, 266n4-7, 267n15,268n42

House of Amateur Art 48House of Culture 48-9, 172, 192House of People’s Art 48Hove, Jowan 244n28, 245n30Howe, Jovan 272n9Howell, Dana Prescott 246n67, 248n8-9,

249n23, 249n28-9, 249n32, 249n36,252n108, 257n29-30, 257n33

Huxley-Blythe, Peter J. 268n32

Iakovlev, M. M. 250n69icons 153-4, 159, 177identity 12-13; national 4-6, 138-9, 194,

219-20; regional 103-5, 147-52; seealso Cossackry; nationalism

Ikonnikova, V. 254n159‘immersion’ in a style 132-3instruments 16-17, 56, 84, 227-8;

accordion 18, 22, 62, 108-9, 155;balalaikas 16-17, 18, 22; brelka (folkflute) 17; domras 16-17; guitar 19, 71-2; gusli 16-17; mandolin 17; pan pipes(kugikly) 101; piano 19, 48; rozhki(folk horns) 17, 101; svireli (folkflute) 17; tambourines 17, 151;timpani 17; zhaleika 227-8

intelligentsia 4, 107, 117, 196’internationalism’ 38interview methods 10-11interviews/interviewees 237-41Ippolitovo-Ivanovo State Musical-

Pedagogical Institute and College 114Isakovskii, M. 262n38Ivan Kupala 225-8, 273n18, 273n24Ivan the Terrible 25Ivanov, Volodia 195Izmailovskaia Sloboda 125, 128Jones, Siân 243n22-3Justus, Ursula 39, 249n30

Kabanov, Anastasia 127-8Kabanov, Andrei 78-87 (incl. Fig. 3.2),

278 Index

125, 204, 232, 256n14-15, 257n39,257n42, 258n47-8, 258n62, 258n64,259n84-5, 259n87, 259n90, 259n96,260n101, 263n50, 263n52, 263n61,265n20-1, 270n1, 270n28, 271n11; oncontemporary village performance200-1; ’immersion’ approach critique133; performance for Tuleev’scampaign 144-6; on teaching/learningsinging 97, 99, 102-3; Vorob’evkaclasses 195-7

Kabanov, Ivan 126, 127 (incl. Figs. 4.3,4.4)

Kabanova, Zhanna 93, 118, 125,262n39, 263n47, 263n53-4, 265n25;on exposure to village life 130-1, 132-3

Kadysheva, Nadezhda 2, 107-8, 109Kandinskii, Vasilii 27Kann-Novikova, E. 247n102kant style singing 21Karas’ev, Alexei 215-16, 272n28Kashcheeva, E. V. 242n3-4Kaz’min, Petr 53Keldysh, Iu. V. 244n10Kertzer, David I. 168, 264n9, 266n42,

266n44, 267n29KGB 88, 158Khitrovo, A. 247n88Khrushchev era 70-1, 72, 172Kidjo, Angelique 224Kingston-Mann, Esther 248n1Kireevsky, Petr 23kitsch 7, 62-4, 106, 110, 151, 222; slang

terms for 117Klement’ev, E. I. 262n25Klimov, Oleg 273n18klub 48-9, 50, 177, 182, 189Knight, Nathaniel 152, 264n5, 265n37-8kokoshniki 115, 120kolkhoz (collective farm) 48, 177; folk

choirs 48, 49-50; workers’independent singing 74

Kolotilova, A. 49Kommissinskii, V. 266n8, 268n38Kononenko, Natalie 271n11Kontsevich, G. 162Koposov, A. 73, 251n85, 256n22Kornblatt, Judith D. 264n6, 264n8,

266n49, 267n24Korostylev, Viacheslav 269n17Kostiuk, Aleksandr 107Kostiukovets, L. F. 251n78

Kostroma 100, 225-6, 228, 230Kotikova, N. 255n169, 258n49Kotkin, Stephen 243n24Kotov, Andrei 118Koval’skii, Vadim 167 (Fig. 6.1), 168,

217Kozlov, Vasilii 140 (Fig. 5.1), 147, 149-

52, 193-203, 219, 265n26, 265n34,270n20-4

Krader, Barbara 257n41Krasnopevtseva, Elena 101-2, 125, 210-

11, 259n93-5, 262n44, 271n16-17;’Little Spindle’ children’s group 101,124, 128, 130, 210-11

Kruglov, Iurii 251n87Kubrakova, Valentina 210, 268n36,

271n15kuchka see The Mighty Handful

(moguchaia kuchka)Kudriakov, V. 250n59kulak (rich peasant) 37Kulakovskii, Lev 253n136, 257n41,

273n12-13Kuliakova, Aleksandra 186-7Kunanbaeva, Alma 262n45Kundera, Milan 62-3, 254n148-51Kustovskii, Evgenii S. 244n28, 246n67Kuznetsov, Evgenii 29, 30-1, 32, 243n2,

244n8, 244n16, 244n18, 244n20,245n35, 247n78, 247n83, 247n85,247n87, 247n90-1, 248n107-8,254n161

Kuznetsova, Valentina 82-3

Laba, Roman 265n24, 266n2, 267n19-22lampasy 173-4LaPasha, L. Robin C. 49, 250n61,

250n67-8, 251n74, 251n78-81,251n84, 251n94-5, 252n112-14,252n118, 252n122-3, 254n142

Lapin, Viktor 247n102, 248n112, 255n10Lebed, Alexander 142Lenin, Vladimir 248n2Lenskii, A. 250n65Leont’ev, N. P. 256n18Levin, Eve 249n41Levin, Theodore 152, 243n18, 252n109,

255n6, 256n24, 258n54, 258n65-9,260n102, 266n11

liberals (in revival movement) 120-37Lineff, Eugenie 247n98-9Lineva, Evgeniia 28, 31, 33, 85, 244n27,

Index 279

245n30, 247n100-1, 260n98; folkchoir description 102

Linnekin, Jocelyn 23-4, 245n49Lipinskaia, V. A. 272n30Listopadov, A. 265n20, 267n14, 267n17’Little Spindle’ 101, 124, 128, 130, 210-

11Liubimov, Iurii 96Liuter, A. 250n59Livingston, Tamara 70, 97, 245n48,

247n95, 248n110, 255n2, 256n17,257n28, 263n67

Lixfeld, Hannjost 242n6Lobanov, Mikhail 247n100Loginova, Viktoriia 272n4Lokshin, D. 247n80-4Lussier, Danielle N. 264n17Luzhkov, Iurii 143-4Lvov, Nikolai 22lyric songs 21, 30lyrical (‘cantilena’) style 64

McCaskill, Mary Elizabeth 252n126McNay, Lois 243n24McNeal, Robert H. 267n16McReynolds, Louise 185, 269n14magic 182-3, 213mainstream folk performance 106-9,

110, 118-20Makarova, Olga V. 214, 271n20, 272n24,

272n34, 272n38Makashina 272n23Makhova, Liuda 230Mally, Lynn 265n30Marshalkina, Ania 242n1, 272n33Martynov, Vladimir 96masculinity: and Cossack image/myth

160-75; gender separation/roles 51-2,54, 181; and Orthodox Churchparticipation 158-9; see also gender

mass singing 47Mazhola, A. 268n40Mazo, Margarita 245n34, 245n40Mead, Margaret 94Medvedev, V. 268n33Mekhnetsov, Anatolii 122-3, 124, 129,

255n171, 262n40, 263n51, 263n57;and ’immersion’ in a style 133; andsexuality in performances 134

Mel’gunov, Iurii 26, 246n69memory 4, 70, 187; ’genetic memory’

105, 144, 218-19; reconstruction byrevivalists 185, 204-21

mentoring 61, 210methods of study 10-15Meyer, Alfred G. 251n88Miakisheva, Tatiana 189Michrina, Barry P. 243n17The Mighty Handful (moguchaia

kuchka) 24, 25-6, 44-6, 246n57Mikhailova, Nikita 143-4, 245n37Miller, Frank J. 249n38, 249n40, 251n98,

256n19-21Minenok, Elena 178-9, 249n34, 268n4,

269n6Ministry of Culture 147, 149-50, 199modernism 90-1Modleski, Tania 185, 269n13moguchaia kuchka see The Mighty

HandfulMolesworth, Charles 254n138, 254n153Moller-Sally, Steven 250n57Moreeva, A. 254n159Moscow Conservatory Folk Ensemble

206Moscow ’Folklore Spring’ festival 110-

16, 118, 120, 139Moscow House of Composers 83Moscow State Musical Theater of

Folklore 108Moscow State Shnittke Institute and

College 114Moscow State University of Culture 114Moscow University Musical-

Ethnographic Commission 31-2Moscow University Society of Lovers of

Natural Science, Anthropology andEthnography 26, 31

MTV 109Mukhin, A. A. 266n13Mukhina, Vera 39’multi-track’ recordings 87, 132-3mummery 212-15Muradeli 64Muratov, L. 267n31music CD (of text examples) 15music high school 48Musical-Ethnographic Commission 31-2Muslim condemnation of Tuleev 145Musorgsky, Modest 24, 96

Nadezhdina, Nadezhda 66narod (the people) 5, 38-9, 222;

redefinition by revivalists (PokrovskyEnsemble) 90; terminology changes39, 117, 152; use of narodnyi as

280 Index

modifier 39, 117, 184; see also thefolk; peasants

narodnoe tvorchestvo (’people’screation’) 41, 43, 73

narodnost’ (nationality) 46, 139, 152national character 25, 37-8, 205, 222national identity 4-6, 138-9, 194, 219-20National Salvation Front 142national style 24-7, 28, 35-67; pan-

Russian (obshcherusskii) principle53-4, 119-20; Russian ’nationalschool’ 44; Soviet national (narodnyi)dance 66

National Theater of Folk Music andSong 108

nationalism 71, 123-4, 138-59;narodnost’ (nationality) 46, 139, 152;and Orthodoxy 112, 144, 147, 150,153-9; polycentric vs. ethnocentric142; and regionalism 147-52; symbolsof 6, 109, 138-42, 151; see alsoCossackry

Nefedova, Maria 96, 259n82-3, 261n19,262n33

Nekliudov, Sergei 262n37Nekrylova, A. F. 245n35Nelson, Amy 249n44, 250n52NEP (New Economic Policy) 35, 37Neuberger, Joan 185, 269n14Nevalainen, Pekka 262n25New Economic Policy (NEP) 35, 37’new martyrs’ (novomuchenniki) 169’New Russians’ 4, 198Nicholas I (Tsar) 152, 164Nicholas II (Tsar) 169Nichols, Robert L. 264n7Nikanorova, Ekaterina 186-7, 206Nikitenko, Ol’ga 113, 125, 166, 232Nikitich, Dobrynia 69Nikitin, Roman 260n7Northern Russian Folk Choir 49nostalgia 56, 70, 142; in kitsch 62-3nouveau-riche 4, 132, 198Novikov, V. 268n40Novitskaia, Marina 205, 270n4Nozick, Robert 254n145

Oinas, Felix J. 248n11, 249n34, 249n37Old Believers 144, 224olympiads (olympiady) 47Omsk Folk Chorus 81opera: divertissements (intermission

acts) 3, 19, 22, 28; specific operas 25-

6, 64, 151, 161; use of folk song in 25-6, 57

Oracheva, Oksana 264n11oral tradition 73, 122orchestras see folk orchestrasO’Rourke, Shane 266n3Orthodoxy 138, 140, 212, 220; Bolotnoe

parish celebration 153-9; andCossackry 141, 144; and fistfightinggames 157-8; icons 153-4, 159, 177;and nationalizing performances 112,147, 150; and pagan practices 40, 157

Orttung, Robert W. 264n17Osipov, D. 255n168

pagan folk culture 40, 157, 212, 230-1Palace of Culture 48Palace of Pioneers 48Pal’chikov, N. 246n69Pamiat’ 142pan-Russian (obshcherusskii) principle

53-4, 119-20Panina, Elena 147-8, 149, 265n27Pankrat’ev, I. P. 270n3Paretskaya, Anna 264n17parish celebration 153-9Parthe, Kathleen F. 255n3-5, 255n8,

256n11Paskhalov, V. 32patronage (shefstvo) 61, 205, 209, 214peasants 35-6, 38-9, 76-7; and

authenticity 70; depicted as female166; kulak (rich peasant) 37;romantic view of 5, 23, 132; see alsothe folk; narod (the people)

Pegg, Carole 252n109the people see narodPeople’s University 49Perushkin, V. 268n33Peter the Great 143Petrozavodsk Music School ensemble

114, 117-19Piatnitskii Choir 34, 47, 57, 85Piatnitskii, Mitrofan 28, 32-4Pliusnin, S. D. 263n62podgoloski (counter-melodies) 21, 26,

180, 182Pokrovsky, Dmitri 9, 10, 69, 80, 94 (Fig.

3.3), 257n40, 258n55, 258n59-60,258n62, 271n11; Cossack ancestry of163; disclaimer of nationalist views152

Pokrovsky Ensemble 69, 78-88, 94 (Fig.

Index 281

3.3), 128; acting out of folksongs/rituals 93-4, 100; artisticdissidence of 88-97; choreography for119; and Cossack music/costumes163; and ethnography 92, 94-5, 103-5;interactions with village folk groups83-7, 129-30; lecture-demonstrations89-90, 97; performance in film 71;performance in theater productions91, 96, 100, 118; sexuality inperformances 92-4; studios 97-9

Poles’e region (in western Russia andBelarus) 92, 104-5

Polianovskii, G. 254n143Pol’shina, A. 243n1, 244n15polyphony 20-2, 26, 48; in contemporary

performance 208-9; contrived use fornational image 54; folk polyphony(mnogogolosie) 33, 64-5, 67, 182,208-9

Pomerantsev, Vladimir 75, 257n27Poponov, V. 248n109, 252n102, 252n117,

255n166Popov, Viktorin 249n39Popova, T. 244n26Popular Conservatory 32popular culture 40, 222-36; see also

mainstream folk performance’populism’ 85populists 25, 71, 144Potemkin village 37, 41, 70Prach, Ivan 22precentor (zapevala) 21, 89, 102preservation of folklore 187-93, 204-21Pribylovskii, Vladimir 266n13Primakov, Yevgeni 212‘primitive’ art/traditions 92, 94-5, 136,

223, 224professionalism 58-62, 64; in festival of

folklore collectives 110-16; inmainstream performances 106-9;professional folk choruses 47-8, 50,52-5, 64, 162

Prokofiev, Sergei 96Prokunin, V. 246n69proletarian culture 37propaganda 36-8; and Cossackry 169,

173-4; Potemkin village 37, 41, 70;use of folklore/folk songs 41-2, 54-5,73, 77, 220

protiazhnye pesni (drawn-out songs) 21,88-9

‘pseudofolklore’ 30-1, 42, 73-4

Pskovitianka (opera) 25, 26puppets 124, 128, 130 (Fig. 4.5)purists (in revival movement) 120-37purity 76, 132Purtova, T. 252n111, 253n128, 262n31Pushkin, Aleksandr 96Pushkina, S. 258n63

Ranish, I. 251n77RAPM (Russian Association of

Proletarian Musicians) 37, 39, 44;effort to eradicate the folk chorus 52

RAPP (Russian Association ofProletarian Writers) 37, 39

Raspopova, Irina 272n9Rasputin, Valentin 71, 255n9realism 90-1; socialist realism 39-40, 43-

4, 45recordings: audio cassette 87, 132-3, 137,

210; ethnographic field recordings225-6; learning from 132-3; multi-track 87, 132-3; wax cylinder 31, 32

Red Army Choir 52Red Army Song and Dance Ensemble of

the USSR 53regionalism 103-5, 147-52Remeta, Daniel Robert 252n125,

253n129, 253n131Renaissance and Unity 144resistance to Soviet-style folk art 49-50Reviakin, Dmitri 230revival 6-9, 13-14, 64-7; authenticity

redefined 39, 74-8, 121-3; exposure tovillage life 83-7, 129-33; liberals vs.purists 120-37; methods of study 10-15; reconstructing village traditions184-5, 204-10; syncretism andcollectivism 100-3; unstagedexamples 231-6; and World Musicmovement 228-9; see also folklore;memory; village

revival movement: origins 68-105;artistic dissidence 88-97; bard (guitarpoetry) movement 71-2; discourse of72-5; dissemination of folk music 97-100; Gippius, Evgenii 77-81;Kabanov, Andrei 78-87; PokrovskyEnsemble 69, 78-97; village prose 70-1

revival movement: post-Soviet 106-38,160-75; Cossack revival movement141, 146, 160, 163-4, 168-75; festivalof folklore collectives 109-16;

282 Index

mainstream performance 106-9, 118-20; the mythical village 129-33;regional performances 147-52; self-expression 124-8; sexuality inperformances 133-6; terminologychanges 117, 184; use of stageaesthetics 128-9; youth folklore(oppositional) revival movement(molodezhnoe fol’klornoe dvizhenie)106, 108-10, 117, 120-37

Riabykh, Aleksandra 178-9Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. 260n100Rice, Timothy 252n109Richards, CherylAnne 243n17Ridenour, Robert 24, 246n51, 246n54Ries, Nancy 5, 242n5Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 24, 25-6, 26,

44Rite of Spring 27ritual 20, 40, 76-7, 153-9, 234-5; and

Cossackry 144, 153-9, 168-71; icons153-4, 159, 177; in popular culture(Kostroma) 225-6, 228, 230-1;preservation by video documentaries204-5, 208, 211-21; and sexuality 133,135-6; in Vorob’evka festival 147-52;see also memory

Rodygin, E. 258n49Rogalina, N. L. 248n18Rogger, Hans 244n16, 245n34romances 22; cruel romances 40, 122,

182, 185Romani choruses 19Romantic movement 5-6, 44-5, 62, 76,

77, 122Roosevelt, Priscilla 244n21, 245n35Rothstein, Robert 23, 245n36, 245n39,

245n45, 245n47, 245n50Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 23, 245n42Roziner, Feliks 249n42RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative

Socialist Republic) 48, 50Rubtsov, Feodosii 30, 66, 74, 81, 121,

245n30, 247n79, 247n92-3, 249n35,255n164, 256n23, 257n25-6

Rudneva, Anna 49, 80, 208, 257n41,258n63, 269n15

Rudneva, Evgeniia 119, 259n92Rumiantsev, S. 250n63Rusin, Viacheslav 273n15Russian Association of Artistic Crafts

149

Russian Association of ProletarianMusicians (RAPM) 37, 39, 44, 52

Russian Association of ProletarianWriters (RAPP) 37, 39

Russian Culture Fund 144Russian Geographical Society 26, 31Russian language 38Russian Ministry of Culture 147, 149-50Russian Music (singing group) 128Russian national character/spirit,

Russianness (in music, folklore) 28,29, 54, 110, 123, 205, 218-20

Russian Orthodoxy see OrthodoxyRussian Shield 157Russian Song - Russkaia pesnia 106Russian Soviet Federative Socialist

Republic (RSFSR) 48, 50Russian Zemstvo Movement 147

Sabonis-Chafee, Theresa 260n1-2St. Petersburg Center of Folklore and

Ethnography 129St. Petersburg Song Commission 31Sanachev, Igor’ 265n27Sandle, Mark 264n4, 264n12-13, 265n23,

265n28Sapozhnikova, Natal’ia 260n5, 262n43,

272n1Saprykin, Iurii 273n11sarafany 29, 115, 155; derogatory slang

use of term 117Sargeant, Lynn 249n44Schechner, Richard 274n32Schieffelin, Edward L. 274n32-3Schleifman, Nurit 149, 265n32-3Schnittke, Alfred 96Scholl, Tim 252n109Schwarz, Boris 249n43, 252n124Scott, James 183, 269n11self-expression 124-8Senatov, Nikolai Nikitych 269n6serfs (choruses of) 19Serostanoff, Dmitrii 273n17, 274n25Serov, Alexander 25sexuality in performances 90, 92-4, 133-

6, 231-2, 234-5; childrens’performance of chastushki 125-7, 134

Shablinskaia, Ol’ga 260n3Shaliapin, Fyodor 17Shangina, I. 267n25Shchadrin, Aleksandr 262n38Shchedrin, Rodion 95, 96Shchurov, Viacheslav 81, 83-4, 244n24,

Index 283

244n28, 245n38, 253n132-3, 255n1,255n170, 257n44-5, 258n50, 258n53,258n63, 259n73-4, 263n48, 263n63,268n3, 272n9, 273n21-2; censoredversion of ’Porushka Parania’ 135;criticism of Pokrovsky Ensemble 91-2, 95; and lifestyle practices offolklore performers 129, 177

shefstvo (patronage) 61, 205, 209, 214;alternatives to 210-11

Shevchenko, I. I. 247n101, 247n103Shilin, Alexei 119, 261n20, 262n32,

266n9Shilkloper, Arkady 227Shishov, Ivan 250n71Shostakovich, Dmitri 96Simon, Paul 223sincerity 70, 76singing artel 102Sirin Choir 118-19skomorokhs (professional performers)

16, 18Skuntsev, Volodia 105slang use of terms 117Slavianskii kapella see Agrenev-

Slavianskii chorusSlavic Congress 28Slavophilism 16, 25, 100, 120, 205; in

post-Soviet folk revival 142, 147-8Slezkine, Yuri 35, 248n4-6, 248n12,

248n20-1Slonimsky, Nicholas 250n56Smetannikova, Praskov’ia and Polina

188-9Smith, Anthony D. 142, 263n2, 264n12Smith, Gerald Stanton 256n12-13Smith, Katherine E. 142-3, 264n14-15Smith, Susannah Lockwood 247n104-6,

249n24, 249n27, 250n58, 250n67,250n70, 251n100-1, 252n104,252n119-20

Smolitskii, V. G. 245n37smotry (competitions) 47, 53Smyslova, Tamara 81, 83-4, 100, 257n46,

258n51, 258n61, 258n68, 259n84,260n103, 266n12

soap operas 177, 185-6Soboleva, G. G. 252n110sobornost’ (collectivism) 100-3, 130socialism 35, 37, 39socialist realism 39-40, 43-4, 45Society of Lovers of Natural Science,

Anthropology and Ethnography 26,31

sociological studies of folklore 24, 40,76-8

Soimonov, A. D. 245n46Sokolov, F. 243n3-4Sokolov, Iurii M. 248n7, 249n39Sokol’skaia, A. 249n45, 253n128solo singing 102, 115, 125-6,Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 70, 142, 147songs see folk songsSongster Workshop (Pesel’naia artel’)

123, 233Sosnina, N. 267n25Soudakoff, Stephen 248n11Soviet folk choruses 17, 80, 93, 102, 229Soviet identity, New Man and Woman

55, 64, 90sovkhoz (large state farm) 177, 178spontaneity (stikhiinost’) 77, 125stage aesthetics 128-9, 197; stsenicheskii

(stage-oriented) style 116, 117, 120,128, 130; see also estrada

Stakhanovite movement 55Stalin, I. V. 248n17Stalingrad 169, 170Stallybrass, Peter 259n72, 274n36Stanitsa 113-14 (incl. Fig. 4.1), 128, 163,

210‘star’ system 124Starostin, Sergei 108, 227-8, 260n8,

261n10, 273n21, 273n23State Academic Kuban Cossack Choir

106-7State Academic Moiseev Ensemble of

Folk Dance 107State Academic Piatnitsky Russian Folk

Choir 107stealing 178Štefániková Zuzana 261n18Stites, Richard 229, 274n26Stompelev Great Russian folk orchestra

56Stravinsky, Igor 27, 96, 112stsenicheskii (stage-oriented) style 116,

117, 120, 128, 130Stul’nev, I. 267n31Sugarman, Jane 243n18-19, 243n21supernatural/superstitions 182-3Surin, V 249n22, 252n103, 252n105,

252n107Svadebka (’The Wedding’) 96Swan, Alfred J. 244n27

284 Index

symbols: Cossack masculinity 166-8;national 6, 109, 138-42, 151; religious155-6, 159

syncretism 76, 100-3Sysoeva, T. 255n171

Tabolina, T. V. 268n34taboo subjects (expressed through

folklore) 134, 135-6, 229, 232, 234Talorin, Volodia 195, 270n19tape recordings see audio cassette

recordingsTarasova, Irina 265n25Taruskin, Richard 26, 246n53, 246n57-8,

246n61-5, 246n68, 246n70, 246n73-4,246n76-7, 248n111

Taylor, Timothy 271n18Tchaikovsky 17, 24, 44, 247n86; on

Agrenev’s folk song repertoire 29television 177, 185; documentaries of

village folk culture 108-9, 208, 211-20Tevlin, B 250n64Thaw period 50, 70, 75Tikhonov, A. V. 244n13-14time depth 76Toelken, Barre 242n7, 242n9Tolstoi, Nikita 92, 259n75Toporkov, A. A. 263n62Toporkov, A. L. 263n62Torgovnick, Marianna 94, 259n77-9,

263n66traditions 4-6, 24, 38, 105, 219;

reconstruction of 14, 204-21; see alsoauthenticity; folklore; revival; village

Trutovskii, Vasilii 22Tsar’ Maksimilian 68, 91, 100Tuleev, Aman 144-6, 264n18Turner, Victor W. 235, 274n35Tuvan throat singers 224, 227Tychinina, Elena 202-3, 270n30

Ulam, Adam 249n25Union of Soviet Composers 77, 78unison singing 54, 87, 103Ural Russian Folk Chorus 61Ural’skaia, V. 252n111, 253n128, 262n31Ustinova, T. 255n163, 261n13

Velichkina, Olga V. 259n93-5Verdery, Katherine 152, 263n2, 266n40Vertkov, K. 244n5video documentaries see documentariesvillage 20-3, 57, 176-203; amateur folk

choirs 50, 74, 229; and authenticity offolklore 184-7, 195-8, 203; club (klub)48-9, 50, 177, 182, 189;documentaries of 108-9, 204, 208,211-20; gender and singing 179-83;’ghost villages’ 177; the mythicalvillage 129-33, 140, 196-7, 211;Potemkin village 37, 41, 70;preservation/reinvention of traditions204-21; revivalists’ exposure to villagelife 83-7, 129-33, 137; singingcollectives (kollektivy) 80, 119;statistics on active folkloreperformance 192-3; Vorob’evka ascontemporary example 193-203

village prose 70-1Vilochkova, Zinaida 272n26Vinogradov, V. 251n97Viola, Lynne 243n24, 251n93, 269n11Volga Volga (film) 45volia (free will/freedom) 90, 164Volksgeist 6Volkskunde 5Vorob’evka 193-203, 231

Walicki, Andrezej 259n97, 270n5the Wanderers 27, 246n57Warner, Elizabeth A. 244n28, 245n35,

246n67Waters, Elizabeth 251n91wax cylinders 32website for audio examples 15‘The Wedding’ (Svadebka) 96White, Allon 259n72, 274n36‘white sound’ 118Wilson, William A. 245n41, 245n44Winter, Paul 96, 225witches 182women see genderWorld Music movement 223-5, 228-9World of Art 26-7World Village (television program) 108-

9, 227, 260n8Wortman, Richard S. 246n56, 265n36,

266n45Writer’s Union 40, 53

Yeltsin 143, 165Yemelianova, Galina 264n18youth folklore movement (molodezhnoe

fol’klornoe dvizhenie) 83, 106, 108-10, 117; censored version of’Porushka Parania’ 135; split between

Index 285

liberals and purists 120-37; see alsorevival

Zabava (’Fun’) 131, 211-20Zakharov, Vladimir 53zapevala (precentor/leader) 21, 89, 102Zavolokin, Genady Dmitrievich 109,

261n9zemstvo organizations 147Zemtsovskii, Izalii 50, 61, 244n22-3,

244n25, 245n29, 245n31, 246n64,

246n68, 247n96-8, 251n72, 251n82,252n115, 253n134-5, 257n41, 258n50,258n52, 262n45; studies oneducational levels 60

Zernov, N. 270n5Zhelannaia, Inna 227-8, 273n20-1Zhivtsov, A. 252n106, 259n81, 261n14Zhulanova, N. I. 30, 247n79, 247n94,

256n16, 270n2Zubkova, Elena 254n154Zykina, Ludmilla 106, 107, 108

286 Index