Shanson Remains an Enormously Popular Music Style in Russia.

RussiaProfile.Org, an online publication providing in-depth analysis of business, politics, current affairs and culture in Russia, has published a new Special Report on the performing arts in Russia: Bodies in Motion.  Twelve articles by both Russian and foreign contributors examine the current trends in theater, music and adjacent forms of art both as creative activities and as social institutions. The following article is part of this collection.

The Russian genre “shanson” may have a French name, but it is a particularly Russian music style that includes influences as diverse as Jewish tango, folk music, and the prison songs known in Russian as “blatnyak.” Despite enjoying more popularity in Russia’s regions, it can be heard blaring out of most of Moscow’s cabs and beer tents, as well as on Radio Shanson, a station that claims to have eight million listeners across Russia.

The lyrics are an important component, dealing with regret, prison life and lovers kept apart, either by the criminal justice system or some other cruel twist of fate. The words are sentimental, but enriched by decades of slang spurred by Russia’s criminal underclass. The chorus of “Vladimirsky Central,” a shanson anthem written and performed by Mikhail Krug, is a good example:

“Vladimirsky Central, the northern wind,

On my way to prison from Tver, a pile of misfortunes,

A heavy load weighs on my heart.”

Krug was a hugely popular shanson singer before his underworld connections caught up with him in late June 2002, when he was brutally murdered in his home. The fact that the song is about Vladimirsky Central, a famous prison in the city of Vladimir, built to detain some of Russia’s most notorious criminals, reflects the heavy influence of Russian prison culture on Krug’s work.

Another notorious prison that crops up repeatedly in shanson lyrics and stage names is Butyrka in Northern Moscow. Built by Catherine the Great, Butyrka has housed some of Russia’s grizzliest villains (or rebellious heroes, depending on who you ask), including Cossack rebel leader Yemelyan Pugachev. Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky also served time there, just one example of the cultural capital of Russian and Soviet prisons in the last century.

A Way to Unwind

Opposite the prison is “Traktir Butyrka,” a shanson-themed club owned by Igor Kruzhalin. He deliberately chose a location near the prison when he decided to open the venue 11 years ago. “Butyrka is a special place, even Pugachev served time there. Now it’s a pre-trial detention center and houses all kinds of prisoners, from financial criminals to more serious offenders,” he said.

Kruzhalin is surprisingly unassuming for a man who runs a club in a rundown part of town that celebrates prison culture. Intelligent and calm, he is clearly passionate about the music, asking the pre-concert DJ to play his favorite songs while he gives a tour of the place. A huge map of the Soviet prison system hangs above the entrance, and the basement bar has simple wooden furniture and small alcoves, giving customers the chance to feel part of the criminal underworld for the night. On the wall behind the stage there is a tiled picture of the prison. The clientele are not the ex-cons one might expect, with a few couples and groups of middle-aged Muscovites drinking shots of vodka and waiting for the concert to begin. The DJ talks to the audience so often that he has his own microphone and is enthusiastic about requests.

Concerts are held in “Butyrka” on Friday and Saturday nights, and Kruzhalin estimates that about 80 percent of his customers are regulars, some of whom love the place so much they organize their wedding parties there. When the official concert has ended, anyone in the audience is free to get up on stage and sing.

Tonight’s act is the glamorous Svetlana Ternova, a young blonde girl in an ankle length sequined dress with bright red nails. She was born in Tver and toured with another native of her hometown, Mikhail Krug. “We worked together for three years. We performed duets and I played solo songs at his concerts,” said Ternova, who started performing in 1998 and confesses to listening to Barbados-born pop star Rihanna more often than shanson in her spare time. Ternova said shanson is to her above all about “unlucky love.” Playing in “Butyrka” for the third time, she has toured extensively around Russia and Israel, where the music remains popular among Russian expats. She is preparing to tour the Leningrad Region this fall. She talks about love and life in between songs, bantering with the audience and accepting roses from a stream of young men who approach the stage.

All About Love

Mikhail Dyukov, a shanson historian based in Kaliningrad, traces the earliest components of shanson back to the 12th century and the birth of Russian song. By the 16th century there was already a burgeoning folk music tradition in Russia, and evidence suggests that part of this included obscene and anarchic lyrics. “Actor Rolan Bykov tells a story about Andrei Tarkovsky when they were working on the film ‘Andrei Rublev,’ which is set in the 14th and 15th centuries,” said Dyukov. “Tarkovsky was granted access to the folklore archive at the Lenin Library to find songs from the period. It turned out that philologists on expeditions to research folklore mainly brought back ‘chastushki’ and obscene couplets, which were kept marked secret.” Dyukov sees the literacy and professionalism of this tradition as an indication that texts celebrating criminal life have existed in Russia for centuries.

By the beginning of the last century shanson was quickly growing in popularity, enjoying the genre’s first major boom. “By the early 20th century there were even convict choirs (most of which were fake), they made records and in 1909 a ‘Prison Songs’ book was even released including about 100 prison classics,” said Dyukov. There were stars of the genre who toured the Russian Empire, people like Ariadna Gorkaya, Valentin Valentinov and Yuliya Ubeyko. “It’s no secret that Aleksander Kuprin, Alexander Blok, and many writers and poets saw these concerts and took inspiration from them,” Dyukov noted.

But the scene’s glory days were not to last. The October Revolution decimated the ranks of shanson performers, as large numbers fled the country, were killed, or found there was no place for the subversive and criminal content of their music in the fledgling Soviet Union.

For many the difference between the broader term shanson and blatnyak is about the lyrics, with criminal themes essential to the latter. Dyukov has a lyrical way of explaining the relationship between the two. “Shanson and blatnyak are brothers: one goes to school and gets straight ‘As,’ excels at music at the same time, goes to college, ends up working as a manager in a respectable company and goes to the Conservatory on Sundays. The other smokes in back streets and drinks cheap wine. He works at a market and in the evening sings songs in the streets.”

Dyukov is also doubtful of shanson as a uniquely Russian phenomenon. He said that his CD collection includes recordings in Yiddish, Polish and even Japanese. “Mikhail Krug and many like him are considered shanson, in so much as their songs about captivity and bandit settlements are uniquely characteristic of Russian culture. I think that’s a major delusion. This kind of music exists in the United States, France, in many countries. It is not just in Russia that people sing about love and hate, prison and barbed wire, hooligans and gangsters, their girlfriends and mothers,” he said.

The development of similar music scenes in certain cities, such as Warsaw, is understandable. The Polish capital was part of the Russian Empire when the first major shanson movement was gaining ground in the late 19th century. “There was a whole bandit district of Warsaw called Chernyakhovsky, which no longer exists, that was akin to the famous Moldavanka area of Odessa,” said Dyukov. “Lots of street songs came from here, which are still performed by Polish artists today. The Poles even consider ‘Murka’ to be their own national song.”

Murka is a particularly dark blatnyak song about a young woman, “Murka,” who betrays a criminal gang operating in Odessa. Her husband kills her in revenge and the song is his lament, asking her for forgiveness.

“Hello, my Murka, hello darling

Hello, my Murka and goodbye!

You told on all our dealings,

And for that you’re going to die!”

Reviving Tradition

It was not until after the collapse of the Soviet Union that shanson would flourish in Russia again. Kruzhalin remembers the 1980s as his first exposure to shanson. “The first time I heard shanson was after the Olympics were held in Moscow in 1980, when illegal recordings flooded into the Soviet Union,” he said.

Shanson’s ability to survive the Soviet period perhaps has a lot to do with the huge volume of the population that had at least second-hand experience of prison or labor camps, making them more likely to relate to the themes in the songs. Dyukov disputed this theory: “It is probably not about who was in prison and why they were sent there. Firstly in Russia we love the humiliated and insulted. In old folk songs even murderers are shown pity and compassion,” he said, adding that the Soviet-era ban on shanson gave it the added appeal of “forbidden fruit.”

Another side-effect of the swelling prisons in the early 20th century was the exposure of some of Russia’s cultural elite to shanson. “I keep coming back to the theme of convict songs because amongst the thieves and murderers locked up in prison, there were literate, educated people, maybe they created blatnyak, whether due to public demand or to earn a piece of bread,” said Dyukov. “Many poets found themselves in the GULAG, and so as not to waste their talent they wrote songs about captivity,” he added.

Popular melodies were also reworked in the camps, and the new versions spread across the country. George Ipsilanti’s song of exile “Longing for the Motherland” was turned into a convict song “Cargo Train” by Boris Emelyanov, and describes conditions on the long journey made by convicts to labor camps.

“Here there is a lock on every carriage,

Two boards instead of soft blankets,

And wrapped in blue smoke,

Gloomy pines nod at us.

Twenty years hard labor,

And as a gift to the working class,

There, where there used to be animal trails,

We will put a taiga highway.”

When restrictions on access to the music were lifted in the early 1990s, shanson boomed. “At that time, shanson was everywhere, from festivals to gala performances,” said Kruzhalin. Lawlessness on the streets combined with the return of exiled musicians, who had been playing shanson in clubs serving expat Russian communities from New York to Tel Aviv, to fuel demand. One of the most successful performers who chose to return was Moscow native Mikhail Shufutinsky. Leaving Russia in 1981, he spent the next decade building up a reputation in the booming Los Angeles Russian restaurant scene of the 1980s, recording ten albums before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1990 he returned to Russia to play to packed stadiums across the country. He has released almost an album a year ever since.

But Kruzhalin said the situation has changed significantly in the last decade. “Vladimir Putin does not like shanson,” he laughed. “There used to be a lot of shanson on television, but now most of it is gone.” And while regulars continue to seek out weekend performances at Butyrka and big names such as Shufutinsky can still attract a crowd, the genre may indeed be less popular than it was. Kruzhalin said that one problem is that only a few of today’s performers are popular among the younger generation. “Young people are only into a handful of artists, such as Alexander Dyunin and Zeka,” Kruzhalin said. The latter, whose stage name means “prisoner,” had a big hit titled “Identical Dreams:”

“We are far apart again,

The dawn knocks on your window with splitting rain,

Here darkness clings to the cedar branches,

But we will be together until the morning,

In our dreams.”

The song is about an imprisoned man waiting for nightfall so he can be with his sweetheart in his dreams. The hardships of prison life play a secondary role in the lovers’ separation—something which a younger audience can more readily relate to than the physical realities of a cargo train speeding to a labor camp.

A Question of Relevance

But as the genre evolves, there is a risk that it could lose some of the elements that define it. “Shanson, whether it’s pop, or pseudo-blatnyak, or genuinely from the prisons, comes from the lyrics, the emotions that grab you, the performance is at the root of this story. When Nikolai Baskov sings ‘Murka’ it makes a mockery of the genre,” said Dyukov. Nikolai Baskov is a former opera singer who has forged a career in Russian pop, singing, amongst other things, about being a “natural blonde.” “If you take the songs of a band like ‘Butyrka,’ take away the hoarse voices and all you have is banal pop. It is the same with many other performers—they have slightly sugary voices, they are slightly modern and their arrangements are softer and that’s it. Blatnyak is over, pop remains—the notorious shanson,” said Dyukov.

Kruzhalin agrees that blatnyak is playing less of a role in shanson that it did previously. “Blatnaya music still exists, but it is becoming less and less influential since it peaked in the late 1990s,” he said, adding that there are still some shanson artists who have served prison time, though they tend to keep this hidden as much as possible.

Eduard Vidny is another shanson singer who goes to “Butyrka.” Sharply dressed and upbeat he started performing shanson songs five years ago. “I personally don’t sing about prisons,” Vidny said, “the music now is more about love and life in general.” “Blatnyak always existed in Russia, but it has been less and less popular since the 1990s,” said Vidny, and he has a theory as to why: “Everything should be relevant; today criminal gangs are not shooting each other on the street, so people aren’t singing about it. If that started up again tomorrow, it would come back immediately.”