CULTURE

MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY IN THE MIRROR OF CRIMINAL SONG
By Marina Aptekman (Dept. of History, Brown University)

In Soviet times, city folklore and criminal song ("street songs") never received serious critical attention. This situation has changed in recent years. City folklore is coming to occupy a large place in official culture. Russian publishing houses are bringing out anthologies of street and criminal songs, while such projects as Eduard Uspensky's radio series "Ships Came to our Harbor" and Mark Rosovsky's "Songs of Our Communal Apartment" have resulted in a number of CDs, TV programs, and concerts. The only American scholar who has studied these genres is R. A. Rothstein (see references below).

Official Soviet culture banned street songs and banished them from mind. But they were always a cherished presence in the Russian popular mind. The reason for their popularity lay in the fact that they gave a voice to the "little person," whose perspective on events they expressed.

The average Russian thinks about criminal song as a uniform genre, making no distinction between such famous songs of the 1920s as "Murka," labor camp songs of the 1930s such as "Kolyma," and the early songs of the post-Stalin singer Vladimir Vysotsky. However, the songs of each period were different.

The origin of the earliest Soviet criminal songs can be traced to the "city romance" of the first decade of the 20th century and its popularization in the cabaret culture of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and (from the early 1920s) Kiev and Odessa. Their emergence owed much to the domination of economic life during the New Economic Policy (NEP) by newly rich profiteers, many of whom had criminal connections. They reflected the breakup of the old society, its structure and rules -- not only by detailed description of criminal activity, but also through unexpected development of traditional plots of city romance.

A good example is the song about Yenta, the rabbi's daughter. The situation portrayed is typical for city romance. A Jewish girl falls in love with the director of a new factory, a Russian and a Bolshevik, and runs away with him, leaving her father a short note: "Goodbye, I've left. Citizen Ivanova." But the typical tragic ending is replaced by a finale that is most unexpected and in tune with the general "emancipation" of the new society. The rabbi shaves off his beard, leaves for Odessa, becomes a successful businessman dealing in foreign currency and jewels, and dances Argentine tango every evening. Such mocking twists to traditional plots occur in many songs of the 1920s, placing them close to parody.

The songs of this period express a cynical attitude toward the new regime. Relations between the criminal world and the Soviet authorities are always negative, and the person who wants to become a part of the new society is considered a traitor and has to be punished. Soviet functionaries are disdainfully portrayed as poor and dirty. In the most famous Soviet criminal song "Murka," the female character who betrays her fellow criminals and takes a job in the police station because she falls in love with a police officer is condemned to an impoverished life with no good clothes ("without a single pair of stockings"). The heroine is killed for her direct contact with the police.

It is important to note that the 1920s were the only years in Soviet history when the criminal song was still permitted as part of official popular music culture, being sung not only in restaurants but also in concert halls by such famous singers as Leonid Utesov.

In the 1930s a new genre was added to criminal song -- the labor camp song. Camp songs had not been part of the pseudo-criminal cabaret culture, nor were most of them composed by criminals. Long before the first written works about the Gulag appeared, songs like "Kolyma" and "People with Enormous Terms Are Going North" bemoaned the fate of innocent people destroyed in Stalin's purges. Many songs combined criminal and non-criminal elements, being a product of an environment in which criminal and innocent non-criminal prisoners were held together.

The majority of camp songs, like the songs of an earlier era, were by unknown authors. Many circulated in a number of versions. Often one version was more criminal, another more political, as was the case with the song "The Express Train Vorkuta-Leningrad."

The next period in the development of the criminal song was that of the post-Stalin Thaw. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when many people returned from the camps, the anonymous camp song suddenly acquired a very broad audience. The famous bard Alexander Gorodnitsky recounts in his memoirs how he got to know these songs for the first time during his summer student practice in the mines near Vorkuta: "I kept asking who was the author of these songs. The reply usually was: 'The music is a folk melody. The authors of the lyrics will be released soon.'"

In the general intelligentsia mind, the criminal song that openly and honestly spoke about the horrors of Stalin's camps and rebelled against official Soviet norms became a symbol of freedom. Such an attitude changed the original meaning of criminal song. The classical criminal songs of the NEP period expressed rebellion not specifically against the Soviet system but against any state system, since in any country a criminal is always in opposition to the state. However, the Thaw intelligentsia interpreted these songs in symbolic terms, transforming their heroes into dissidents rebelling against the norms of Soviet totalitarian society. Criminal folklore, coming from below, confronted the Soviet pseudo-folklore created from above and imposed by force.

This attitude of the intelligentsia led, as many bards themselves believe, to the birth of "bard song," which at first was greatly influenced by criminal song. The 1960s witnessed many imitations of criminal song by authors who had nothing do with the criminal world but were actors, poets, or engineers. The best-known of these "bards" was Vladimir Vysotsky. The symbolic interpretation of criminal song is clearly seen in his lyrics. In one of his pseudo-criminal songs, a person asks a cab driver to take him to the famous Taganka prison, only to discover that it has been demolished. He than asks to be taken to the Butyrka prison, and learns that it has been demolished as well. He then declares: "Wait a moment, first let's have a smoke. Or better let's drink to the hope that one day there will be no prisons and no camps in Russia at all!"

At this time the history of criminal song entered a new stage. Previously it had been an anonymous genre. Authorship had been of no importance. Songs were frequently rewritten, new couplets or rhymes were added, and new versions might have very little in common with the original. In the 1960s, the era of pseudo-criminal song, the author was quite present and often sang his songs himself, as did Gorodnitsky and Vysotsky.

However, by the 1970s the Thaw had given way to Brezhnev's "era of stagnation." Criminal songs became if not officially forbidden then definitely unwelcome in official cultural circles. Some authors, such as Yuz Aleshkovsky, the author of the famous song "Comrade Stalin, you are a Great Scientist," emigrated. Others, like Gorodnitsky, shifted to officially approved genres. Yet others, including Vysotsky himself, simply grew out of their criminal-song phase.

But the songs themselves remained very popular. No longer performed by their authors, they returned to their former position as anonymous products of the common people. Sometimes they were attributed to a different author. For example, Aleshkovsky's songs were for a long time attributed to Vysotsky. Some songs were even attributed to a real criminal, who was considered long dead. Gorodnitsky recalls how on a research trip to the Russian North he was shown the grave of an anonymous criminal who allegedly wrote his own famous pseudo-camp song "Do Not Swear from Cruel Anguish." When Gorodnitsky tried to explain that the song was actually his, he narrowly escaped a beating. From then on, he did not try to contest such false attributions.

With the end of the Soviet era came a radical change in the position of criminal song. From an underground phenomenon it suddenly turned into one of the most influential trends in official popular musical culture. I believe that the underlying reason is the similarity between the situation in Russia in the early 1990s and the situation during the NEP. In the early 1990s, as in the 1920s, the economic and political system was -- as in some areas it still remains -- largely controlled by wealthy criminal or near-criminal figures.

If criminal song is so popular in Russia today, it has nothing to do with the symbolism of freedom or other dissident underground motifs. First, let's recall the Russian saying that "the one who pays is the one who orders the music." The people with a criminal past, who now have a very stable and powerful presence in Russia, pay to promote the songs they enjoy. Second, the interest in criminal imagery is part of the general interest in the world of criminals, which also reflects current social conditions. Detective and crime novels and films were among the most popular forms of entertainment in Russia in the 1990s. Moreover, many of these books and films, such as "Bandits' Petersburg" and "The Brother," do not show that a criminal gets caught in the end. Quite the contrary. They either romanticize the image of the criminal or demonstrate how the police have been totally corrupted by the criminal world.

This romanticization of the criminal world can be seen not only in numerous recordings of old criminal songs, but also in the enormous popularity of new groups -- like "Lesopoval" (Tree-Felling) and "Leningrad" -- that make extensive use of pseudo-criminal lyrics and old criminal tunes. One "Leningrad" song says: "Maybe at this moment we are both looking at the same bird, but I am in prison and you are free." The sympathies of the singers are clearly on the criminal's side. Another "Leningrad" song is about a little boy who works as a thief at a railroad station and is beaten to death by police officers:

On byl parnishkoi malykh let Rabotal vorom na vokzale V odin prekrasnyi letnii den' Ego menty s polichnym poviazali Oni lomaiut emu ruki I kirzachami biiut boka A on krichit Kharkaia kroviu: "Ne nado, diaden'ka!"

He was just a young lad Working as a thief at the railroad station One splendid summer day The cops caught him red-handed They break his arms And kick him in the sides with their boots And he cries out As he coughs out blood: "Don't do it, granddad!"

The story of the development of criminal song in Russia suggests that over the last 80 years Russia has now come full circle and returned to the era of the NEP. It seems to me that criminal song helps us better understand both Russian cultural life and Russian political history.

REFERENCES

R. A. Rothstein. "Popular Song in the NEP Era" in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alexander Rabinovich, eds. Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington IL, 1991.

R. A. Rothstein. "How it Was Sung in Odessa," Slavic Review, No. 4, 2001, pp. 781-802.

EDITOR'S AFTERTHOUGHT

Another sphere in which the criminalization of Russian culture can be observed is that of children's games. Some of the games on sale were described in a lecture by child psychologist Vera Abramenkova:

'One game is called Cain. On the lid is a deformed face with the words: "I am a traitor. I killed my brother. I enjoyed it..." etc. Another is called Sadist. On the box the "hero" says: "I am a sadist. I love to kill. It fills me with delight. I kill and drink the blood." Another game is called Disemboweler. A sort of monster or puppet. It comes with a little knife and several small boxes. The instructions tell the child: Take the knife, stab him in the belly, pull out his heart, and put it in the box marked "heart." And so on for the liver and other organs. Gradually the child extracts all the monster's innards... One young mum left her baby with his 8-year-old brother while she went shopping. On her return the baby was in such a state that he barely survived.

[SOURCE. My v otvete za budushchee [We Are Responsible for the Future]. Moscow: "Mysl'", 2000.]