Keywords

Introduction

It is one of the commonplaces of scholarly reflections on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) that its principle of eschewing politics is honoured more in the breach than in the observance. This triumph of the political can come as no surprise: an utterance bereft of a political dimension is as inconceivable as an utterance free of rhetoric—free, that is, of the property of reflecting a particular interest and advocating for it before a particular audience. A Eurovision song that abides by the rulebanning ‘lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature’ (European Broadcasting Union, n.d.) will nonetheless, inevitably, be readable as a political statement, more or less explicit. Indeed, the idea of a song contest devoted to European ‘goals of unity and cooperation through shared musical culture’ (Raykoff 2007, pp. 2–3), a ‘ritual in the service of the EU’s political visions for a union among the people of Europe’ (Tragaki 2013, p. 2) is political at its very roots. What is more, as perceptive students of the group psychology of the ESC have pointed out, the contest functions as an arena for the relatively harmless enactment of clashes of national identities, self-images and ambitions that would be hazardous in the sphere of inter-state politics. As Jørgen Franck, the Danish musician, broadcaster, and for a time director of the television department of the European Broadcasting Union put it, ‘the song contest is a battlefield where you can allow yourself to be a patriot. […] You can support your own country. You can say the others stink. It’s harmless but it’s very significant. If we didn’t have that battlefield, we might have more battles’ (cited in Frickerand Gluhovic2013, p. 99). But it remains the case that Eurovision, ‘a thrilling dramatised narrative of success and failure’ (Björnberg 2007, p. 16), is about victory and defeat, where winning, for many viewers, brings as a reward the shared emotion of collective pleasure at success.

For the societies of what might be called the ‘non-core’ countries of Europe—those which have only recently joined the European Union or still aspire to do so—the imperative of winning is equalled or even overshadowed by the importance of participation. Many of the songs entered for the ESC by the national broadcasters of Central Eastern and South-Eastern Europe have been analysed as implicit arguments asserting membership by the country in question of a cultural and value system accepted—at least, for purposes of the ESC—as ‘European’. Insofar as such songs articulate worldviews at all, they urge embrace of diversity and non-coercive relations among individuals and identity groups. The earnest connection made thereby to the values of the humanist and Enlightenment traditions is balanced by the rather less solemn argument that ESC entries make at the level of form and style. As a rule, contenders from the ‘non-core’ countries of Europe seek to adhere to a musical and visual formula that has established itself as the mainstream idiom of Eurovision: a formula that combines self-irony, visual excess and various degrees of erotic allusion into a whole that is frequently labelled as ‘camp’ or ‘kitsch’ (Allatson 2007).

What is sought to be achieved by such professions of European faith and such reiterations of the Eurovision style? Any communicative situation, viewed from the perspective of rhetoric, comprises three components: an orator (who speaks in defence of certain identifiable interests), an audience (imagined as a holder of power who is able to resolve the case in favour of, or against, the orator); and the speech, the vehicle of persuasion. In the ESC, the ‘speeches’ are, of course, the songs themselves—their texts, music and visual accompaniments with all their affective force. The ‘orators’ are the performers, conceived of as advocates of worldviews and values that become discernible through interpretation. As for ESC audiences, these divide into two distinct parts: the home audience, which typically has an emotional investment in the success of ‘its own’ representative and which in many cases has participated in the selection of that representative; and the international audience, comprising listeners and viewers present at the contest venue, the millions of remote viewers witnessing the contest on television and later revisiting it on the internet, and critics and commentators of every level of professionalism on every kind of media outlet. In the case of countries that once were Soviet republics, an important subset of this international audience is what might be called the ‘post-Soviet’ audience—a substantial group for which elements of the cultural and worldview inheritance of the erstwhile Soviet Union have not lost their meanings.

The existence of this culturally defined transnational group, and the fact of its real or hypothesised association with the Russian Federation, has ensured that discussion in Ukraine of that country’s ESC entries, especially when these have been controversial, has often focussed on three issues: the potential and actual Russian reaction to the song; its meaning for Ukrainians in their domestic and international predicament; and potential and actual ‘Western’ responses to it. It goes without saying that, given the multifariousness of recipients of Ukrainian cultural products—not only Eurovision songs—there is considerable scope for different, even mutually contradictory, readings. As one scholar has demonstrated in another context, a song performed by the Dakh Daughters during the Euromaidan protests was variously interpreted as ‘a fascist call-to-arms, an ironic subversion of Russian propaganda, or a new form of progressive politics articulated as aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ (Sonevytsky 2016, p. 292).

Ukraine first participated in the ESC in 2003. Up to and including 2016 there had been thirteen Ukrainian entries in the contest (there were none in 2015, a year of intense military conflict with Russia and its separatist proxies in the east of Ukraine). Of these entries, the great majority—nine—dealt with the theme most common in popular song, love and its tribulations.1 Of the remaining four, three had in common the fact that they appealed to universal human and political values. ‘Razom nas bahato’ [Together We are Many], the song that made the rap group Green Jolly (Gryndzholy in Ukrainian) famous during the Orange Revolution of 2004 and became Ukraine’s entry in the 2005 contest, proclaimed a message of solidarity against tyranny in seven European languages. In 2010 ‘Sweet People’ by Alyosha (Olena Kucher) made a plea against war and environmental irresponsibility. Most forcefully, in 2016 Jamala’s ‘1944’ decried the murder and dispossession of innocents that accompanies war—an appeal that, though formulated in universal terms, alluded explicitly through its title to Stalin’s expulsion of the singer’s Crimean Tatar compatriots from their homeland and, implicitly, to their present plight in Crimea, occupied and annexed by the Russian Federation in 2014. The fourth, Verka Serduchka’s ‘Dancing Lasha Tumbai’, runner-up in 2007, was superficially a nonsense song that, however, was widely decoded as a proclamation of severance from Russia.

The nine Ukrainian songs on the theme of love formulated an uncomplicated argument concerning cultural identity that was shared by many other Eurovision entries from Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe and that has been well identified in the scholarly literature. Their display of formal properties similar to those of entries from ‘mainstream’ European countries was intended to attest a command of the genre rules of Eurovision and therefore, by synecdochal implication, of the rules of Europeanness tout court.

It is my objective in the following to offer a reading of Jamala’s ‘1944’ against the background of the other two most widely discussedUkrainian Eurovision entries: Serduchka’s ‘Dancing Lasha Tumbai’ and Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’. ‘Dancing’ had been regarded as directly, if inexplicitly and deniably, ‘political’ in the sense that it made statements about Ukraine’s relations with its former colonial master. The argument of ‘Wild Dances’ was no less geopolitical, if less obviously so. Each of the three songs, I contend, recommended to its domestic audience and represented for its international recipients a particular model of Ukrainian identity, moulded by long gestating traditions and inflected by recently encountered circumstances.

Ruslana: The Folkloric as Global

Ruslana (Ruslana Lyzhychko) won the 2004 ESC with the spectacular entry ‘Wild Dances’, of which one commentator remarked that it ‘cemented the concept that to win, the stage show has to be overwhelming, which it certainly was’ (O’Connor 2006, p. 177)—an observation that remained true until at least 2010, when the German singer Lena (Lena Meyer-Landrut) secured victory with a relatively austereperformance of the song ‘Satellite’. The spectacular showmanship of ‘Wild Dances’ made an argument that was quite sophisticated, as I have shown elsewhere. By means of costume (furs; metal-studded leather impressed with intricate patterns), props (trembity, long straight wooden trumpets traditionally used by Hutsuls, the native inhabitants of the Carpathian Mountains), a few locutions encountered in popularsongs associated with the Carpathians, and commentary generated by Ruslana herself and her team, the song and its visual accompaniment were presented to the domestic and international public alike as indebted to Hutsul folklore and material culture. At the same time, other sartorial allusions—Ruslana’s invocation of the ‘tough girl’ image familiar, for example, from the television serial ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ was scarcelyaccidental—proclaimed the participation of Ruslana’s spectacle in contemporary global (ergo: Western) popular culture discourse. Meanwhile, the motif of a woman’s power—the song’s lyrical subject demands of the implied male addressee that he obey her command to desire her—introduced into the song a feminist element that, likewise, represented Ruslana (and, thereby, the pre-Orange-Revolution, Europe-oriented, non-Soviet Ukrainian youth culture whose emissary she was) as sharing in the modern European or Western value system (Pavlyshyn 2006).

The song developed a separate line of argument through its deployment of languages and language codes. English was the frame language through which the content of the song was made intelligible to its audience. Also present were standard contemporary Ukrainian and allusions to Hutsul dialect. Thus, the global, the national and the local environments of the song’s potential reception were acknowledged: each linguistic code represented a dimension of identity which, through the act of being invoked by the song, was declared to be relevant to contemporary Ukrainian experience. Russian was absent from the universe that Ruslana’s song thus conjured forth, less because it was deplorable than because, in Ruslana’sutopia of colonialism transcended, it was superfluous.

The exclusion of Russian from the hierarchy of the song’s active cultural references, however, was carefully managed in the publicity accompanying Ruslana’s preparations for the ESC in Istanbul. The Ruslana phenomenon was promoted as being the opposite of nationally exclusive. In media appearances Ruslana underscored her embrace of Russian fans (and of the large popular-culture market of the Russian Federation and the territory of the former Soviet Union at large). In the period preceding escalation of Russian neo-colonial pressure on the newly independent states, the endurance of Soviet-era Russian-language dominance of the entertainment media was viewed relatively benignly by many in the successor states of the USSR. As one commentator remarked at the time with reference to Lithuania, tolerance of a Russophonepopular culture sphere was not synonymous with ‘masochisticnostalgia for the Soviet past or for Russian-language hegemony’ (Ingvoldstad 2007, p. 101). Ruslana’s efforts to retain access to a broad post-Soviet receptive space was not seen as contradicting her dismissal of Soviet hierarchies or her vision of Ukraine as dynamic and Europe-focussed.

At the same time, Ruslana’s song was a declaration of resistance to the kind of embrace of Europe that could readily be deconstructed as surrender to a new dominance of Europe as a ‘cosmopolitan empire’ (Sieg 2012, pp. 248–254; 2013, pp. 221–227). It refused to reinforce the gradient between West and East as a gradient between a generator of the norms of ‘European universalism’ (Wallerstein 2006, p. 49) and the uncritical and obedient imitator of these norms. Instead, through the visually overwhelming dynamism—the emphatic ‘wildness’—of ‘Wild Dances’ Ruslana figured Ukraine as a revitaliser of Europe. In media appearances Ruslana repeatedly referred to Ukraine as a force almost biological in nature and capable of rejuvenating an increasingly effete and exhausted ‘Old Europe’ (Shchotkina 2004).

Ruslana’s song, then, sustains interpretation as an essentially optimistic proposal, on the one hand, for a Ukrainian identity unashamedly grounded in the authentic traditions of the people of Ukraine and, on the other, for a happy transcendence of the pangs of recent colonialism. The ESC of 2004 preceded by some six months the commencement of the Orange Revolution, a mass protest ignited by the falsification of Ukraine’s presidential elections, a process in which Russian propaganda specialists—‘political technologists’—closely linked to Vladimir Putin, then approaching the end of his first term as President of the Russian Federation, played a major role (Kuzio 2005, p. 495). Ukrainian public attitudes toward Russia cooled after the Orange Revolution, but during the publicity campaign leading up to the ESC it was still possible for Ruslana to adopt a stance sympathetic toward Russians. Her song ‘Wild Dances’ could even go so far as to imply that the old Soviet Russian cultural hegemony had been so thoroughly transcended that it could be ignored. Viewed from such a perspective, ‘Wild Dances’ appears as part of a rhetorical strategy to bring about a desired state of affairs by treating it as already existent: to promote the modernisation of the Ukrainian audience by flattering it with assurances that it was already within the European discursive sphere, and to persuade the global spectator and listener that this was, indeed, the case.

Serduchka: Ambivalent About Culture, Decisive on Geopolitics

Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’ had addressed the problematic issue of Ukraine’s unequal power relationship with Russia by positing, optimistically, a cultural world in which the former colonial relationship had been so fully consigned to history that it was unnecessary to include Russian among the languages relevant to the new Europe-oriented Ukraine. By contrast, three years later, when the gleam of the Orange Revolution had dulled and the European Union had made clear that it would not contemplate membership for Ukraine, Verka Serduchka highlighted the enduring tension between Ukrainian and Russian (more precisely, Soviet Russian) modes of cultural self-definition while enacting a sad parody of Ukraine’s European aspirations.

Prior to his Eurovision adventure, Andrii Danylkohad developed the persona of Verka Serduchka as a comic figure exemplifying one element of the Soviet cultural heritage in Ukraine: the practice in informal speech of unsystematically mixing Ukrainian and Russian. The resulting variety of linguistic performance, known as surzhyk, is much decried by linguistic purists in Ukraine—although surzhykand its ambassador, Verka Serduchka, have also been understood more sympathetically as symptoms of post-Soviet cultural hybridity. According to this view, surzhyk embodies the distance between state-promoted projects to foster a traditional national identity allied to a normative literary language, on the one hand, and the lived reality of post-Soviet life, on the other. Andrii Danylko’s stage name itself was an example of surzhyk: ‘Verka’ is the diminutive of the Russian name ‘Vera’ (vs. Ukrainian ‘Vira’), while ‘Serdiuchka’ is a colloquial, but not grammatically normative feminine form of the common Ukrainian surname ‘Serdiuk’. The serdiuky of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were paid infantrymen employed by Cossack hetmans, in contrast to Cossacks proper, who were voluntary participants in the Cossack movement. The allusion to mercenary service was, perhaps, not accidental.2

In ‘Dancing’, however, Serduchka departed from the stereotype established for her by her creator, conferring a new meaning upon surzhyk while making an audacious and explicitly anti-colonial statement. At one level the performance was an exercise in clowning: Danylko’s extravagant female impersonator’s shape was tightly encased in a glittering silver dress, while the lyrics of his song at first encounter could well be apprehended as illiterate multilingual gibberish. Closer examination, however, reveals a structured political argument. While its nuances were unlikely to have become transparent to a large proportion of listeners, its essential anticolonial message was driven home to audiences both international and domestic by the sixfold repetition of a phrase that appeared on the Eurovision website as ‘lasha tumbai’ (Danylko, n.d.) but which, when performed, sounded to many like ‘Russia, good-bye!’ (Morris 2011, p. 204). As Serhy Yekelchyk has pointed out, Russian audiences had previously been able to interpret Serduchka as a representation of Ukrainianness as amusing, peripheral and derisory; the character’s surzhyk speech branded her with colonial inferiority. That Serduchka was the fruit of a Ukrainian self-representation could be expected to add to this (unreconstructedly colonialist) audience’s pleasure: the colonial stereotype was being confirmed by the colonised subject itself. Now, in a blaze of global publicity, the carnivalesque Serduchka inverted this world order, congenial to recidivist Soviet instincts, by adopting an attitude emphatically anti-colonial (Yekelchyk2010, pp. 229–230). Danylko’s crafty assertion that ‘lasha tumbai’ was a term signifying ‘churned butter’ in Mongolian, and the subsequent dismissal of this mystification by Mongolian authorities, only extended the longevity of the media attention lavished upon the idea of Ukraine’s farewell to Russia.

For the culturally well-informed, Danylko’s ‘Russia, good-bye’ was a polite popular-culture reprise of the emphatic slogan ‘Away from Moscow’ for which Mykola Khvylʹovyi, the most provocative spokesman of the early Soviet Ukrainian literature of the 1920s, is popularly remembered. In the series of pamphlets titled ‘Apolohety pysaryzmu’ (Apologists of Scribbling, 1926) Khvylʹovyi argued that the new Ukrainian literature would be unable to develop independently unless it drew its inspiration, not from Russian literature, but from the socially progressive figures of (West) European literature (Khvylʹovyi 1978–1986, vol. 4, pp. 239–320). The phrase ‘away from Moscow’, used by Stalin in his letter to Lazar Kaganovich about Khvylʹovyi (quoted in Khvylʹovyi 1978–1986, vol. 5, p. 488) has since been adopted as shorthand, not only for Khvylʹovyi’s cultural autonomism, but for Ukrainian anti-colonial standpoints in general. The connection between Danylko’s slogan and Khvylʹovyi’s was pointed out, for example, in a forum sponsored by one of the major Ukrainian news sites (konstantin2a 2007). Danylko’s cultural about-face was not lost upon his Russian audiences: negative commentary appeared almost immediately, and within months he was banned from appearing on Russian television.3

But ‘Dancing’ also directed its ire or, more precisely, its resigned dissatisfaction at the frailty and, perhaps, even the incongruity of Ukrainian, ineluctably post-Soviet, aspirations to be part of Europe. The surzhyk in ‘Dancing’ was no longer the familiar low-prestige mix of Ukrainian and Russian—the song’s few lines in these languages are in the normative, if colloquial, versions of each. The new surzhyk offered to the listener is put together out of comically, even painfully, illiterate utterances in English, the language of triumphant globalism, and German, the language of the major power in the European Union. German is also—and herein lies a more sinister attestation of what the song presents as an ill fit between Ukraine and Europe—the language of the regime that occupied Ukraine during the Second World War, with well-known deadly consequences. The parodic silver uniforms and the march-like dance steps of Serduchka’s companions on stage contribute to this allusion. Having introduced himself to the globe in English (‘Hello everybody’), Verka announces in his new Anglo-Germansurzhyk, ‘Me English nicht verstehen’, flaunting thereby a lack of the credentials for the global citizenship that almost all Eurovision contestants seek to demonstrate by singing in English. ‘Let’s speak dance’, the song continues, inviting the listener to communicate in a pre-literate, if primal and vibrant, way; as the dancers on the Helsinki Eurovision stage performed movements parodically suggestive of dark wartime history, Serduchka repeated four times with minor variations the stanza ‘Sieben, sieben, ai lju-lju / sieben, sieben, ein [sic], zwei / sieben, sieben, ai lju-lju, / ein [sic], zwei, drei’. The line ‘sieben, sieben, ai lju-lju’, repeated eight times—even more often than ‘Russia, good-bye’—thus becomes the song’s most emphatic statement. It is not a random piece of nonsense verse, but a slightly distorted quotation from the 1968 film Brilliantovaia ruka [Diamond Arm] (Miazhevich 2012, p. 1513), one of the most popular Soviet film comedies and thus easily recognisable to post-Soviet audiences.

The nature of the distortion and the detail of the reference to the film are revealing. In Leonid Gaidai’s film a rendezvous takes place in an Oriental-looking port city between local jewel smugglers and their inept Soviet contact (who does not speak their language). It soon dawns upon these local criminals, who speak but a few words of Russian, that they have mistakenly given their contraband to the wrong Soviet tourist, the film’s naive and virtuous hero—who, likewise, is unable to communicate in their language. They engage in a furious dialogue, invoking the phrase ‘tsygelʹ tsygelʹ ai-liu-liu’, which the hapless Soviet villain repeats as he tries to persuade them of the urgency of his returning to his ship (Gaidai1968 at 19 minutes 46 seconds). The scenes construct a comedy of errors arising from failed communication and, more specifically, from the Soviet citizens’ ignorance of the language that they must know if they are to function effectively in a non-Soviet cultural environment. Both hero and villain are compromised by their cultural illiteracy: the villain’s suavity and Western clothing are no more a passport into the strange world beyond the Soviet borders than is the hero’s guilelessness. It is this lack of cultural fit that Verka Serduchka invokes as she intones ‘sieben, sieben, ai-liu-liu’. Exaggerating to the point of self-parodythe kitschdress code of Eurovision does not make her European; nor does substituting ‘sieben’ for ‘tsybelʹ’ enable her to communicate in a European code. The final twist of Serduchka’s satire derives from the fact that the ‘foreign language’ that the Soviet characters encounter in the foreign country is not a language at all, but a macaronic succession of sounds agreed upon between director and actors on the eve of the shoot (Vokrug.kino, n.d.). Thus, post-Soviet isolation from ‘the foreign’ is raised to a higher power: the foreignness to which Verka alludes is not even ‘real’ foreignness, but foreignness as invented for the Soviet audience by the Soviet film industry.

‘Dancing’ thus begins by constructing Europe and the West as out of communicative reach for the post-Soviet person; the desideratum ‘I want to see – Russia, good-bye’ forms the middle of the song and its main statement. What remains, with the western and eastern Others thus out of the picture? Why, the Self: Ukraine. Switching to Ukrainian, and thus narrowing the comprehending part of the audience to his Ukrainian compatriots and (given the simplicity of the Ukrainian text) the recently farewelled Russians, Verka asks, ‘Ukraïna – tse kruto?’ [Ukraine—is that cool or what?] and ‘Ukraïna – tse klʹovo?’ [Ukraine—is that awesome or what?] ‘Kruto’, and ‘klʹovo’, voices in the Helsinki audience are heard to reply, affirmatively. A vaguely folkloric-sounding non-verbal vocal obbligato follows; it, and the song itself, end abruptly with Serduchka’s spoken words, ‘OK, happy end’. The performance has reached a conclusion, and so has the song’s story of possible identities. The one still standing at the end is the national. The song offers no guidance as to whether this affirmation of a Ukrainian national self is to be taken (‘happily’) at face value, or ironically, like most of the Serduchka oeuvre.

Jamala: Minority Part for National Whole

Writing about Gaitana, a singer of Congolese and Ukrainian descent who was Ukraine’s representative in the 2012 ESC, a scholar approvingly observed that the Contest reflects the diversity, including the racial diversity, of contemporary nations: ‘the flesh and blood of the nation [is present] on the ESC stage, … a site on which neoliberal European values of belonging are performed’ (Tragaki 2013, p. 11). Others have thought such choices of singers from minority groups to be mendacious gestures by the cultural establishments of countries which have recently joined the European Union or aspire to do so: designed as demonstrations of the multicultural tolerance favoured by a liberal West, they mask discrimination against minorities at home (Sieg 2012, p. 255).

Whatever the motivations behind their choice, televoters participating in the selection of Ukraine’s 2016 ESC representativeclearly supported the Crimean Tatar singer Jamala (Susana Camaladinova) for the role. 382,500 SMS votes—a Ukrainian record—were received. According both to the voters and the expert panel, the two leaders were Jamalaand The Hardkiss, who tied on points. The judges preferred The Hardkiss, but according to the rules the popular vote prevailed (Meniv 2016). For the voting public, the question of whether a member of an ethnic minority within Ukraine could stand for the country as a whole had been resolved in the affirmative, as it was, after her victory, for many of the public figures who congratulated her. Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko tweeted that ‘today through her voice the whole of the Ukrainian people spoke to the world’ (Ukraïnsʹka pravda2016a). The prime minister, Arsenii Iatseniuk, was equally ready to underscore Jamala’s Ukrainianness, as well as the Ukrainianness of Crimea: ‘Bravo Jamala! A brilliant and deserved victory. Ukraine wins and will continue to win. Crimea will be Ukrainian’. The same topoi were invoked by the foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin: ‘The truth always wins as Jamala and Ukraine did tonight. Congratulations and many thanks:) And please don’t forget that #CrimeaisUkraine’ (Ukraïnsʹka pravda2016a). Many Crimean Tatarsrejoiced in Jamala’s victory as a triumph for the Crimean Tatar cause. In a widely recirculated Facebook post the journalist Sevgil Hayretdın Qızı Musaieva, for example, wrote, ‘You can’t even imagine what all Crimean Tatars feel at the moment—both in occupied Crimea and far from their homeland! Last week was especially hard. More searches, arrests, charges brought against İlmi Ümerov, and suddenly such joy—on the eve of the Day of Commemorationof the Victims of Deportation! Europe has heard us! When I say that we shall certainly return to Ukrainian Crimea, I’m not making presumptions! I know! Because our whole people is just as incredible as Jamala!’ (Musaieva2016). Crimean Tatar political leaders, on the other hand, were at pains to underscore Jamala’s connection simultaneously to the Crimean Tatar people and to Ukraine. For example, RefatChubarov, president of the Mejlis, the parliament-like representative body of Crimean Tatars, and a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, phrased his congratulatory message as follows: ‘On behalf of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People I congratulate all citizens of Ukraine and our many friends in other countries on Jamala’s brilliant victory in Eurovision. We are witness to the unbelievably large number of true admirers of Jamala’s talent, friends of independent Ukraine and allies of the Crimean Tatar people’ (Ukraïnsʹka pravda2016a). The embrace of Jamala as a representative of Ukraine was praised by some commentators as symptomatic of the kind of civic nation that, in their view, Ukraine had become: ‘By choosing a representative of the Crimean Tatar people to take part in Europe’s most popular song contest Ukrainians demonstrated their civic maturity and their respect for their compatriots from Crimea’, a Warsaw Ukrainian-language newspaper editorialised (Nashe slovo2016). Two rightist politicians who objected to Jamala on the grounds that she was not a native Ukrainian were excoriated in social media (depoua 2016).

Jamala’s song reflected both the tribulations of her family and the modern history of the Crimean Tatars. Jamala was born in 1983 in Kyrgyzstan, the daughter of an Armenian mother and a Crimean Tatar father. In 1989 Jamala and her family were able to resettle in her father’s homeland as part of the large-scale return to Crimea by deportees and their descendants. The family’s story was symptomatic of the fate of the Crimean Tatars. Deported after the Second World War to Uzbekistan and other parts of Soviet Central Asia, they suffered a catastrophic deathrate during the deportation and in the first years of resettlement (Williams 2015, pp. 86–116 and 109). Mainstream Soviet and, in many cases, post-Soviet discourse cultivated the stereotype of Crimean Tatars as a ‘traitor nation’ (Bezverkha 2017, p. 128).4 The term ‘genocide’ was avoided in Russian-language discussions of Crimean Tatar history, and even the word ‘deportation’ was typically replaced by euphemisms. Authorities before and after the disintegration of the USSR pursued ‘naturalization of the idea of the unity of all ethnic groups in Crimea under the tutelage of the Russian cultural and political majority’ (Bezverkha 2017, p.136). After the annexation of Crimeaby Russia in 2014 pressure on the Crimean Tatars moved from the discursive to the practical: the independent television station ATR, which broadcast in Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar, was closed and replaced with a station funded by the government of the Russian Federation (Moscow Times2015); the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar parliament-like representative body, was banned (Cooper 2016); many Crimean Tatars were subjected to house searches and arrests (Sharkov 2016); and Crimean Tatar activists faced harassment and prosecution on false charges (Amnesty International 2016, pp. 3–10).

Unsurprisingly, given the prohibition of explicit political contentin the ESC, Jamala generally underplayed the contemporary political significance of ‘1944’, insisting that the song was a personal lament stimulated by memories of her great grandmother’s accounts of the tribulations of her family during and after deportation. In an interview given a month before the 2016 ESC, for example, Jamala said that ‘the roots [of this song] are in my childhood. When I was five, my great grandmother told of how they experienced deportation. She had five children; only four survived. […] This tragedy is not a story about what happened somewhere to somebody. It happened in my home; it was to my place specifically that they came’ (My Vin 2016). In some interviews, however, Jamala’s reflections on family experiences spilled over into remarks about the present which, inevitably, implied criticism of the Russian annexation of Crimea: ‘Of course it’s about 2014 as well. These two years have added so much sadness to my life. Imagine, you’re a creative person, a singer, but you can’t go home for two years. You see your grandfather on Skype who is 90 years old and ill, but you can’t visit him. What am I supposed to do: just sing nice songs and forget about it? Of course I can’t do that’ (The Guardian2016).

Such inability to forget was articulatedin the lyricsof ‘1944’, composed by Jamala in collaboration with the Armenian poet Art Antonian in the simple and not entirely idiomatic English that often characterises the lyricsof East European Eurovision contributions.

The pathos of the song is universalist. It opens, not with the narrative of a particular atrocity inflicted on particular historical victims, but with a dark statement about the general nature of deadly violence that can be exercised by one group (‘strangers’) against another (hapless innocents, murdered in their own homes) and the subsequent denial of responsibility by the victorious perpetrators: ‘They kill you all / and say, / We’re not guilty / not guilty’ (Eurovision Song Contest 2017; all quotations from ‘1944’ follow this text). Using the second-person pronoun ‘you’, the song addresses the whole of its audience as potential victims. The song condemns such a state of affairs—the outcome of worldviews that divide people into one’s own kind, and strangers—from an ethical position inspired by values and convictions that have their roots in the European Enlightenment. ‘Humanity’—the human race conceived of as a totality undivided into Self and Stranger—is appalled, and urges the perpetrators to exercise their reason, the faculty which, as Enlightenment consensus would have it, people have in common regardless of cultural difference: ‘Where is your mind? / Humanity cries’. Mortality (‘everyone dies’) stands as evidence of the irreducible equality of humans and rebuts the supremacist claims—indeed, presumptions akin to those of Satan (‘you think you are gods’)—of those who would dominate through violence. Violence, the lyrical subject urges, must not consume the spiritual dimension of humanity, whether individual or collective: ‘Don’t swallow my soul, / Our souls’.

After its initial appeal to human reason, solidarity and spirit, the song briefly abandons its universalist diction to formulate, in the refrain, a personal lament that alludes transparently to the Crimean Tatar predicament: the aggressor has deprived the lyrical subject of a youth spent in her (or his) homeland and thus of the state of being that the song designates as ‘peace’. The change is paralleled and underscored by the song’s shift from English to Crimean Tatar.

The second half of the song returns briefly to the universalist plane and resumes the pathos and conceptual vocabulary of the Enlightenment, proclaiming the potential for utopia that resides in humanity and proceeds from the emotional dimension of the human that augments the rational: ‘We could build a future / Where people are free / to live and love. / The happiest time. // Where is your heart? / Humanity rise’. If in the song’s first half the lyrical subject had challenged the aggressors’ ‘mind’, it now appeals to their ‘heart’. The song’s utopian vision encompasses freedom and happiness, but also the assurance of life (in defiance of the threat from those who choose to behave as ‘strangers’) and the liberty to exercise the most intense form of solidarity, love. Utopia, however, remains only a possibility, its fragility signalled by the lyrical subject’s return to those historically attested realities that necessitate reiteration of the two entreaties made in the first half of the song: that the perpetrators of violence abandon their presumption of godhead and, second, that the human soul, individual and collective, resist capture by the ‘strangers’’ culture of violence and hate.

Who is the implied addressee of Jamala’s song? It is not the bifurcated audience that one scholar concluded to be Verka Serduchka’s virtual Ukrainian interlocutor, one part nostalgic for the Soviet past, the other pro-Ukrainian and concerned lest the ‘Ukrainian brand’ be undermined by such as Serduchka (Miazhevich 2012, p. 1517). The song does not allude to particular nations or national minorities. Its ideal audience is humanity at large. Of course, some members of the audience—the real people who listen to Jamala at home and throughout the world—may well be less universalist in outlook than the lyrical subject of Jamala’s song. If the song acknowledges them at all, it does so implicitly, through a version of captatio benevolentiae, the topos of flattery: one seeks to modify the outlook of one’s addressees by praising them for being (already) what they are not (yet). You, too, the song implies, are part of the consensus upholding universal human virtue and decrying violence.

The seriousness of the text of ‘1944’, together with the relative sobriety of Jamala’scostume and stage demeanour, challengedthe kitsch cultural style generally associated with the ESC.5 As one Ukrainian commentator put it, ‘Not only does Jamala’s song refuse to be an easy-entertainment pop music hit; it also reminds West Europeans that they are surrounded by a multitude of things about which it is unpleasant, but necessary, to think’ (Fediuk 2016). Textually and visually, Jamala’s performance paid little homage to the Eurovision ‘ultra-mainstream’ (Björnberg 2007, p. 20), only partly manifesting the features that one study identified as definitive for a Eurovision entry: the song’s catchy and singable quality; the projection of the contestant’s character as embodying youth, naïveté, and energy; emphasis on the contestant’s sex appeal, underscored by revealing or provocative costume; and lyrics predominantly in English (Meerzon and Priven 2013, p. 115). Jamala took up a position outside the paradigm of ‘post-Soviet performances, with their excessive aesthetics and aberrant sexuality, [which] can be read in terms of an implicit dialogue with West European constructions of “bad taste”’ (Miazhevich 2012, p. 1507).

Polemical distance from the idiom of West European bad taste went hand in hand, in Jamala’s song, with a reaffirmation, as demonstrated above, of ethical and political virtues once revered as West European and with a reconnection to the Enlightenmenttradition of humaneuniversalism. But the universality of the song’s message did not obscure its relevance to the contemporary Crimean situation. One commentator eloquently pointed out the interconnection of the two: ‘Jamala […] called out to the whole world about the tragedy of human destinies affected by totalitarianism and war. Now every viewer will ask, “What happened in Crimea in 1944? What’s happening there now?”’ (Nashe slovo2016).

The argument implied by Jamala’s song and its victory in the ESC was perceived as a strong one by supporters of the Russian annexation of Crimea, who quickly mobilised a counteroffensive. Among the more innocuous Russian responses were efforts to neutralise the critical content of the song. The televisionchannel Rossiia-1, for example, paraphrased ‘1944’ as a ‘prayer for people who willingly or unwillingly leave their homes in quest of a better life’ (Ukraïnsʹka pravda2016b). Less gentle were the many iterations of the main motif of anti-Crimean Tatar prejudice—the labelling of Crimean Tatars as a nation of collaborators on the grounds that some Crimeans had served in German military units during the Second World War (e.g., Sotirovic 2016). Sergei Lazarev, Russia’s entry in the contest, was reasonably successful, coming third, but his failure to secure first place where the winner was Ukraine, represented by a Crimean Tatar, in the context of the annexation of Crimea and the Russo-Ukrainian war in the Donbas, was experienced as especially irksome by practically the whole of the Russian commentariat.6 (Australia, which came second, was seen as irrelevant to the real battle.)

Conclusion: Envisioning the Culturally Multifaceted Nation

Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’ had offered an optimistic project for a Ukrainian national identity and an activist role for Ukraine in the world. Serduchka accomplished an altogether more complex task. On the one hand, Andrii Danylko presented to the international audience, in the midst of one of the most quintessential distillationsof Eurovision kitsch, the defiant and audacious image of Ukraine turning its back on Russia. On the other hand, for Ukrainian audiences Danylko produced an affirmation of their homeland as ‘cool’ and ‘awesome’, albeit within the context of a parodic dramatisation of his compatriots’ unreadiness—alongside that of the whole post-Soviet world—for Europe. ‘Dancing’ was, in this sense, a tarantella over the tragicomic inevitability of a self-regarding nationalism.

Jamala’s ‘1944’, more than Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’ or Serduchka’s ‘Dancing’, insisted on a Europe of principles. Unlike Ruslanaor Serduchka, Jamala in her ESC entry did not mount a discussion concerning the real or desirable relationships between Ukraine, Europe and the post-Soviet cultural space. Rather, she invoked as already existing a single virtuous identity for all—an identity simply human, and one that eo ipso mandated humane behaviour toward one’s fellow human being. The refrain in Crimean Tatar, lamenting, as it did, a youth far from home and the deprivation of peace, was no less universalist than the rest of the song. The Crimean Tatar language was not, in this instance, a signal of the uniqueness of the Crimean Tatar predicament, but an attestation that Crimean Tatars share in the same universal humanity, possess the same moral instincts, and respond in the same way to hurt, as all of the human beings addressed by the personal pronoun ‘you’. Crimean Tatar is, thus, the language of the Crimean Tatars, but it is also a language of Ukraine, of Europe and of the world. Jamala’s song attests to the reality and importance of nation, but in a manner reminiscent of Johann Gottfried Herder and his advocacy of the distinctive cultures of the peoples of the world as manifestations of a single humankind. A nation—in this instance, the Crimean Tatar nation—has rights (to a home, to safety, to youth in peace) by virtue of being one of the many incarnations of humanity.

What the three Ukrainian ESC songs discussed above have in common is recognition of the culturally multifaceted nature of Ukraine. Perhaps the unwritten rules of the genre of the Eurovision song impose multiculturalism as the compulsory ethos of the ESC. But the inflections of the multicultural by Ruslana, Serduchkaand Jamala, all of whom in their own way pay homage to Europe, differ in important nuances. Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’ celebrates the local as pars pro toto for the national and offers a vibrant Ukraine to an effete Europe as part of a deal: accept us as one of your own, and we shall rejuvenate you. Serduchka’s ‘Dancing’ accepts the cultural (and, especially, linguistic) diversity of Ukraine as a fact, but a dispiriting one: a fact that creates boundaries and gradients of prestige. Jamala takes as a given the cultural multifariousness of Ukraine that can make Crimean Tatar the language that is as representative of the country as Ukrainian, and turns the particularities of one national past (that of 1944) and of one national present (that of 2013–2016) into a lament over humankind’s deadly fallibility and a hymn to humankind’s utopian potential.

Notes

  1. 1.

    For a quantitative study of the prevalence, and trends in the representation, of the erotic in popular song, see Madanikia and Bartholomew (2014).

  2. 2.

    For an account of surzhyk and the debates surrounding it as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, see Bilaniuk (2005), especially Chapter 4, ‘Surzhyk: A History of Linguistic Transgressions’.

  3. 3.

    For an account of the phases in Danylko’s fall from grace in the Russian Federation, see Dyczok (2009, p. 382).

  4. 4.

    Bezverkha’s article is based on pre-invasion data collected in 2010–2012.

  5. 5.

    For discussions of the dominion of kitsch in Eurovision, see especially Miazhevich (2012, p. 1506), and Allatson (2007, p. 87).

  6. 6.

    For documentation of Ukrainian and Russian media coverage of Jamala’s victory, see Lefter (2016), and Burkovsʹkyi (2016).