In tall, furry black hats and long white dresses, with yelps, chirps, whistles and a pounding drumbeat, Ukraine's punk-folk musical sensation DakhaBrakha showed LA last night that we haven't seen everything yet. Here and there, audience members waved blue and yellow Ukrainian flags. When someone shouted "Slava Ukrayini!" after one song, the woman in front of us responded with "Heroyam slava!" "Glory to Ukraine!" she turned to translate for us. "Glory to the heroes!" It's a call-and-response dating back to the early 20th century Ukrainian War of Independence that has taken on new relevance. Our neighbor in the seats handed out flyers for a fundraiser coming up at a Ukrainian church in LA, then spent the set alternating between shooting video on her phone and waving her small flag, and sometimes doing both simultaneously. We gave DakhaBrakha a well-deserved standing ovation even before they'd finished their last song. There was an encore, then the next. We would have brought them back for another if local regulations didn't force Grand Performances to shut down promptly by 10 p.m. Here's a video of the group in an earlier performance of their knockout opening song, "Tatar": DakhaBrakha is Iryna Kovalenko, Marko Halanevych, Nina Garenetska and Olena Tsibulska. The story is that the group was founded by an underground theatre troupe. The three women and one man bring a mix of backgrounds in folk and classical music plus professional theatre training. They utilize a variety of musical traditions and instruments from Eastern Europe and beyond, including accordion and garmoshka, tabla and darbuka, piano, cello and big bass drums. In their long white dresses (and those hats!), their cello and drums painted with traditional Ukrainian folk motifs, DakhaBrakha has combined theatricality and musicality in a way that sometimes sits at the edge of kitsch, but never crosses the line. One song used birdcalls and other forest sounds. Another began with an eerie wolf's howl. Yet it all is authentic and integral to the performance. You'll sometimes catch a knowing wink or nod from one of the musicians, letting you in on the joke. Only, it's not a joke at all. It's just damn good music. A small Ukrainian flag fluttered at the edge of the stage all night. After the last song, Halanevych softly said something in Ukrainian into the mic, then said in English: "Victory or death." Kovalenko and Tsibulska pulled out a larger flag and stood center stage while Halanevych and Garenetska each held up hand lettered signs. One read "Stop Putin" and the other read "No War." The moment felt as melancholy and yet hopeful as their music. After performing together for ten years, DakhaBrakha is "suddenly" taking the world music scene by storm. Here, just watch the video for their song "Vesna" and you'll see why:
1 Comment
If you look at a map of the Baltic region, you might notice a funny little piece of land sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland that isn't marked with a country name. That's Kaliningrad (Калининград in Russian), also known as Königsberg when it was under German rule for many years. It's a small piece of land that was was the scene of bitter fighting during World War II and eventually ended up as part of the Soviet Union. During the Soviet era Kaliningrad was never integrated into one of its neighboring Soviet states. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, it remained disconnected part of Russia. Today it's a port city of about a million people, where Russia houses its Baltic Sea fleet. It's Russia's only ice-free port in Europe, and Russia is serious about its ports. Some analysts believe one big reason Russia has remained steadfast in its support of Syria's murderer-in-chief Bashar al-Assad is because he lets them use the port of Latakia, which gives Russia access to the Mediterranean Sea. In the past few weeks, Lithuania has reported several incidents of Russian ships interfering with Lithuanian ships in the Baltic Sea. Lithuania has submitted a formal complaint in the form of a "diplomatic note" to the Russian ambassador. Amid today's heightened tensions between Russia and Ukraine, this harassment is getting careful scrutiny. This month also marks the 42nd annual Baltic Operations exercise (BALTOPS 2014) where military forces from the US, NATO and eleven other countries get together in the Baltic Sea and flex their muscles. It's primarily a naval exercise, but the US Air Force is participating as well. It would appear that the US is just as serious about its own ports in foreign locales. At the same time, the US Army is leading Saber Strike 2014, ground exercises in locations across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, involving 4,700 military members from ten NATO countries. Here's the official Army-issued tri-fold brochure: All three Baltic countries - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - are members of NATO.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says these NATO maneuvers are hostile and intended as a threat to Russia, who in response has launched her own military maneuvers in the region. NATO and the Americans say these are longstanding annual festivities, not tied to recent events. Then again, while in Poland last week, President Obama a billion dollar "European Reassurance Initiative" to increase US troop presence in the region. The name is as polysyllabic and professorial as our president. Maybe if he'd given it a shorter name with more hard consonants and better imagery (think Saber Strike!) he might have better luck getting it through Congress. BALTOPS, not so much. Sounds like a brand of cheap candy. Perhaps what's most interesting about these military maneuvers is how little coverage they're getting in the American press. A Google news search generates any number of pieces expressing outrage from outlets like Russia Today, ITAR-TASS and Voice of Russia. Searches for BALTOPS and Saber Strike at the New York Times generated zero results. The same search at the Washington Post generated one AP story about Canadian participation. Even the Huffington Post didn't deliver. Not enough Kardashians? As in 1989 and as in 1939, world history is playing out in the Baltic nations while no one watches. While doing research on Lithuanian culture for Love Songs of the Revolution, I came upon a YouTube video that changed everything for me. Fuzzy images from a massive demonstration in 1989 are overlaid with a rock anthem whose words I couldn't understand, but whose meaning couldn't be more clear.
The Baltic Way was a major milestone in the Singing Revolution that swept the three Baltic nations in the late 1980s and ultimately led to their independence. No one knows exactly how many people showed up in the streets that day, but estimates run between one and two million people across the three countries.
Music and especially mass singing festivals have long played a major role in Baltic political movements. The rock anthem being sung in 1989 is "The Baltics are Waking Up," written especially for the Singing Revolution, in all three languages. The recording is sung by leading singers from each country:
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Baltic Way. It's an amazing story and a historic moment in European history. We in the West know about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in China, both of which happened the same year, but have never heard about the Baltic Way. Once I learned about it, I knew it would have an important place in my novel. There on he streets of Vilnius in 1989, the crowds holding hands around them and singing for their freedom, the lives of Martynas and Indre are irrevocably changed. In Love Songs of the Revolution, I have a minor character, Adolfas the baker, who has given up drinking as a way of resisting the State. The idea of temperance as a revolutionary act may surprise you if you don't know the history of alcohol in Russia. I've recently been reading Vodka Politics by Mark Lawrence Schrad. It's about the role of alcohol - especially vodka - in Russian politics. Today's high levels of alcoholism and related health problems in Russia isn't because of something innate to the Russian soul or even the climate, as some have argued. Schrad lays out a history of how vodka and other forms of alcohol have been used by the Russian state for hundreds of years to earn tax revenues and keep a potentially restive population passive and compliant. It's also been a great tool to keep pretenders to the throne under control. Schrad describes how leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great to Stalin the Soviet would force night after night of drinking-until-dawn parties on courtiers, sycophants and diplomats to get them to spill their darkest secrets. It also ensured they were either too drunk or too hungover most of the time to organize a coup. Back in the 16th century, the Russian government established village taverns - кабак - that functioned as "rent farms," turning cheap surplus grain into relatively expensive vodka and selling it to villagers. Over the years, the share of government revenue that came from vodka grew. As the State became increasingly dependent on vodka taxes, they established policies that encouraged villagers to drink ever more. Round about the 19th century, the temperance movement made its way from England and the US to Eastern Europe, and became entangled with the anti-colonial struggle against Russia, which has tried to control smaller countries at its borders since time immemorial. The movement found particularly fertile ground in Lithuania, where a "Brotherhood of Sobriety" was established, though this movement only discouraged vodka. Beer, wine and mead were still okay to drink. Within a year, membership in the Brotherhood topped one million people, some three-quarters of Lithuania's population. Liquor sales plummeted, as did taxes paid to Moscow. Then the movement began to grow within Russia. The great Russian author Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and well-known Christian anarcho-pacifist, earned the enmity of the State for his outspoken views against alcohol. The situation got so bad that the Russian government tried to make sobriety a crime, going so far as to put people in jail for refusing to drink. Many Lithuanians took this position in the Soviet era as well. Refusing to drink kept their money out of Moscow's pockets, and kept them sober and ready for a revolution. If you're having trouble tracking sides and positions in the current Ukraine crisis, you're not alone. It's a complicated place that doesn't usually get a lot of media coverage in the West. A trio of political scientists recently surveyed Americans and found only about 16 percent could place it on a map with any accuracy. They also found that the more wrong Americans are about where Ukraine actually is, the more they want the US to intervene militarily. The whole region of Central and Eastern Europe has a complicated history. Empires have risen and fallen over many hundreds of years. Wars have been fought and borders have moved back and forth across the map. Then there's also the pesky little problem of the nation state, which boils down to this: a state is a political entity, while a nation is a self-identified group of people. During the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919 at the end of World War I, the idealistic US President Woodrow Wilson proposed the idea that every nation in existence should get its own state, unless the winners of the war decreed they weren't smart enough to manage themselves. It was more complicated than that, of course, and was glossed over in more polite terms, but in its essence, that was the basis of many terms of the treaty. It didn't work out for everyone. For example, Ho Chi Minh led a group that went to Versailles to petition for an end to French colonial rule in their nation and establishment of the independent country of Vietnam. The Western powers ignored him, and we see how well that went for both the French and the Americans. The Paris Peace Talks that led to the Treaty of Versailles met 145 times, during which the winners of the war debated where lines would be drawn that separated, for example, the state called Romania from one called Hungary, Austria from Czechoslovakia, and so on. They divided up Africa amongst themselves, and decided the Kurds didn't need their own homeland. Trouble was, the lines they drew didn't line up nicely with where "nations" lived, because people have a habit of moving around and mixing amongst themselves. As a result of how lines were drawn, many thousands of people had to pack up and leave the homes where they'd lived for generations because the "state" allotted to their "nation" was on the other side of a border from where they lived. Margaret Macmillan's terrific book, Paris 1919, describes the positions and negotiations in a way that clarifies many of today's political troubles. While the idea of providing a homeland (or state) for every self-identified group of people (or nation) might sound fair or reasonable, nationalism itself tends to be thuggish. Its most extreme manifestations have been genocidal, as in Rwanda in 1994 or Germany from 1933-1945. State borders created by the Versailles treaty were meant to diminish conflict between nations. Some argue they did exactly the opposite. In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, the Marxist argument for ending the nation state entirely found fertile ground in some circles. At least in theory, the Soviets sought to build a single international union that would ultimately become one big happy family where differences of nation, language and culture fell away and all would be treated equally. As part of that plan they sent large numbers of Russians to settle in places from Ukraine to Lithuania to Turkmenistan. They also rounded up hundreds of thousands of nationals of those countries and shipped them off to Siberian work camps, where more than a million people died. This isn't the only explanation for what's happening in Ukraine right now, but it's one point that should be better understood. Many Ukrainians - as well as nationals of other former republics - have bitter memories of when their parents or grandparents were sent to the camps. At the same time, Russians whose parents and grandparents were moved to one of the far-flung Soviet republics, were born and have lived their whole lives there. Other Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine have even deeper roots there. As the Treaty of Versailles taught us, drawing lines between states in a way that will please nations is a difficult task at best, fraught with risks that may not be fully understood until it is far too late. In 1989, neocon political scientist Frances Fukuyama published an essay arguing that the impending breakup of the Soviet Union marked “the end of history.” It was highly controversial in its day and generated plenty of ink. We still used ink to print newspapers and magazines back then. The phrase “end of history” sounds ridiculous on its face, and Fukuyama didn’t mean it literally. Of course time would march onward and stuff would continue to happen. What he was arguing instead was that all the great “isms” had been tried and proven to be failures. He believed what was left – what every country in the world was on its way toward – was Western-style liberal democracy. From there on out, he argued, the major battles in society would no longer be over Great Ideas like communism versus capitalism, but over small mechanistic things, like increasing worker productivity and figuring out how to access Game of Thrones without having to pay for fifty other channels of crap. Recent events in Ukraine might suggest that the demise of history has been overstated. Residents of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, we’re told, want to reunite with Russia, while those in the west of the country want to join the European Union. The current crisis was set off when then-president of Ukraine refused to sign a free trade treaty with the EU during a November summit in Vilnius. Does Ukraine signal a return to grand ideological struggles? Kleptocracy versus technocracy? Or are we simply feeling the aftershocks of the end of Cold War? Which may themselves be aftershocks of the end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Or are we looking at a fight over who will control the oil and natural gas resources needed to fuel the globe’s insatiable appetite for power of an electrical kind? Many countries calling themselves democracies certainly aren’t. There are others that have refused to become Western-style liberal democracies and are doing fairly well for themselves, like Iran and China. Arguments against Fukuyama’s thesis on the end of history have come from both the left and the right. It’s been nearly 25 years since his essay appeared. Eliane Glaser - not a fan of his work - has a thoughtful piece at The Guardian about it. She looks back on the past quarter century and explores some the things Fukuyama may have unfortunately gotten right. It’s definitely worth a read. |
AuthorLooking for your next book to read? I can recommend all these great indie press books. Archives
May 2018
|