By Alex W. Palmer - The New Yorker, 24 November 2015
 |
| © Roman Pilipey / Demotix / Corbis |
On
August 31st, while the Ukrainian parliament debated a bill to grant
greater autonomy to separatist regions in the country’s restive east,
ultra-nationalist protesters hurled firecrackers, Molotov cocktails, and
a grenade at National Guard troops and riot officers stationed outside.
In the resulting chaos, three people were killed and a hundred and
thirty injured. The unity and coherence of the Ukrainian government, and
of Ukraine itself, appeared to once again be unravelling.
That
same day, Slava Vakarchuk, the frontman of the Ukrainian rock band
Okean Elzy, and perhaps the country’s most beloved artist, donated two
hundred thousand Ukrainian hryvnia (some nine thousand dollars) to the
family of an officer murdered during the protest. “We cannot just stand
aside!” the band declared on its Web site, announcing the donation.
The
gesture was about more than positive publicity for Okean Elzy, the
country’s most popular band. It reflected the complex role that the
group, and especially Vakarchuk, plays in Ukrainian public life. In the
past two decades, as Ukraine has stumbled through a succession of failed
governments and would-be saviors, Ukrainians have lost faith in almost
everything associated with the euphoria that greeted national
independence in 1991. But Vakarchuk and Okean Elzy have yet to
disappoint. The band formed in 1994, when Vakarchuk was nineteen, making
it nearly as old as independent Ukraine; the two have grown up
together. Okean Elzy may be the closest thing Ukraine has to an enduring
national institution.
Vakarchuk,
meanwhile, is a cultural and intellectual force—and, though he has
attempted to shed this identity, a much-loved political figure as well.
In his early thirties, he became a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, the
Ukrainian parliament, before renouncing his seat in 2008 in protest of
Ukraine’s corrupt political culture. Today, as the country struggles to
rebuild amid economic turmoil and a roiling insurgency in the east, many
are calling for Vakarchuk to reënter politics. He insists, though, that
he can play a more unifying, and more influential, role as a musician,
removed from the messy work of government.
When
parliament was attacked at the end of August, Vakarchuk was a world
away from the violence. Earlier that month, he had arrived in New Haven
to spend a semester as one of sixteen Yale World Fellows. “I want a
break from the way that I have been the last fifteen years, like a
squirrel on a wheel,” he told one interviewer. “I decided to rest
usefully.” Part pop star and part populist, Vakarchuk has always been
ambivalent about his influence and the expectations that come with it.
But his absence has intensified speculation that perhaps, when he
returns to Ukraine, he will finally fulfill the hope of millions of
Ukrainians by again taking up the mantle of politics. “I would be
happier if somebody else does that job,” he told me. “But who knows?
History is long. I wouldn’t say anything at this moment.”
Now
forty, Vakarchuk was the first Ukrainian artist to make it big in
post-Soviet Russia. Ukraine was long derided for its “peasant” culture,
but he has helped transform the country into a regional exporter of
music, art, and writing. He has inspired and mentored younger artists
and cultural figures, from screenwriters to rappers. Largely because of
Vakarchuk, it is cool to sing in Ukrainian, and cool to wave the flag.
“He has helped open up the windows of Ukrainian culture and allowed
lungs to breathe again,” Rory Finnin, the director of the Ukrainian
studies program at the University of Cambridge, says. “That is a huge
achievement.”
In
February, I watched Vakarchuk at work in a dilapidated Soviet-era
recording studio in downtown Kiev, listening as a choir recorded
background vocals for a new song he’d just written. Titled “Not Your
War,” the track is sweeping and mournful, with an elegiac orchestral
score, smashing crescendos, and Vakarchuk’s raspy wail. Despite
obsessing over every note, he insisted that what mattered most was the
message:
The Kalyna berry branches have fallen
Mama who were we praying to?
How many more of your children will it take,
This war that isn’t yours?
The
song, Vakarchuk said, is an open letter to his country about all that
has gone wrong since independence—about what has caused the Kalyna
(viburnum) branches, a national symbol of Ukraine, to wilt and fall.
“The main battle is inside each of us, inside our society,” he said. “
‘Your war’ is the struggle with one’s own complexes, one’s own fears of
changing something.”
The Maidan
protests amplified the cultural and political import of Vakarchuk and
Okean Elzy throughout Ukraine. Before the protests, the band was already
enormously popular in the country. But because Vakarchuk presented
himself as inclusive, open-minded, and idealistic during the revolution,
his music “became even more symbolic,” Zhenya Sakal, a graduate student
in Russian history from Kiev, told me. Their music became “a part of
Ukrainian identity,” she added. Today, as the war in the east drags on
and promised reforms stall, Vakarchuk’s music is a source of comfort.
“People feel safe hearing it,” Martha Bojko, a public-health researcher
who was on the Maidan, said. That familiarity has given Vakarchuk
something that any politician would envy: the trust of the people.
But
many of his fans now want something more than he is able—or at least
willing—to offer. “People believe Slava can change things,” Vladimir
Opsenica, Okean Elzy’s lanky, hirsute Serbian guitarist, says. Vakarchuk
insists, though, that his music is the best and only contribution he
can make, and that, despite an expanding war and a failing government,
the country can be reborn on the strength of arts and culture alone. “We
are not here to entertain you!” he is fond of telling jubilant concert
audiences. “We are here to unite you!”
Even
so, Vakarchuk disputes the idea that his songs are political. “I don’t
write political songs, I write social songs,” he said, tapping his leg
restlessly as the choir rehearsed on the other side of the studio glass.
“Did Bob Dylan write political songs?” he asked. “I prefer
philosophical things. I don’t answer, I just put questions to the
people. Let them think and answer.”
Vakarchuk
won a seat in parliament in 2007, but retired less than a year later.
It was “an experience,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “An experience
of something people shouldn’t do.” The only reason fans are clamoring
for him to take on a political role today, he says, is because he
refuses to. “People believe in me because I’m not” in politics, he says
with a shrug.
In the studio, as he
listened to the track one final time, Vakarchuk nodded, his foot
thumping loudly to the beat. “There couldn’t be a better time for this
song than right now,” he said. “I’m completely sure.”
For
many, however, Vakarchuk’s music no longer feels like enough. The day
after the recording session, I joined him on a visit to the Main
Military Clinical Hospital, in Kiev. To accommodate the overflow of
wounded patients, offices had been converted into treatment rooms, and
people filled every available corner. At his surprise appearance, nurses
gathered in tight circles, giggling and adjusting their hair; a doctor,
passing by with a colleague, whispered, “Vakarchuk!” Vakarchuk went
from bed to bed, signing CDs and T-shirts and taking photos. “To prove
to my wife that you’ve really visited,” one soldier said, as he and
Vakarchuk posed for the camera.
One
of his last stops was a stifling recovery room where three men were
lying in their beds, watching a small TV. As he chatted with the wounded
soldiers, Vakarchuk’s assistant signalled it was time to move on. “If
there is a need, please give me the gun and I’ll be there,” Vakarchuk
said, without irony, as he prepared to leave. “If you need some help,
just turn to me.”
“The best thing would be to see you in parliament,” one of the soldiers said.
“I’m not a politician,” Vakarchuk replied, shaking his head. “I fight with my words and my music.”
“It would be good to have you in parliament,” another soldier said.
“I’ll
give my words,” Vakarchuk said, “but I’m not ready yet.” On his way
out, he stopped and turned back toward the men. “It’s a pity we had to
meet here and not at a concert.”
Later
that week, I walked with Vakarchuk as he attended a memorial held on
Maidan Square. February 20th marked one year since the bloody
culmination of the Maidan protests, when government snipers opened fire
on protesters in central Kiev, killing more than fifty people. It was
the city’s worst spasm of violence since the Second World War.
The
Square had been transformed to mark the anniversary. Beside apartment
buildings and atop pristine knolls, blue spotlights pointed upward into a
cold, misty sky, each beam marking a location where a protester was
shot. Vakarchuk was dressed all in black, as if for a funeral. He pulled
up the fur-lined hood of his jacket and waded into the crowd, carrying
an unlit candle and a bouquet of yellow flowers. “I hope people don’t
see me,” he said, and tugged the hood down farther. But they did.
Whispers of “Vakarchuk!” traced his path through the otherwise silent
crowd. When he reached the memorial, it took only a moment for the
cameras to abandon their sombre vigil and pivot his way. As he kneeled
down to place the flowers and light his candle, the crowd came alive
with the snap of cameras and the hum of murmured exclamations.
When
he turned to walk toward the center of the square, his way was blocked
by eager fans, all of them doing their best, given the occasion, to
respectfully stifle their shrieks of joy. He was accommodating but
businesslike, posing for photos, signing autographs. Soon a microphone
appeared in front of him: he was interviewed for the TV news. “People
believe in something simple,” he told me after he escaped the crush of
people. “They want to see someone like them. Not a king, but someone
close to them, someone to listen to and be inspired by.”
Vakarchuk
is a symbol of unity because, in his music, he can be whatever his fans
want him to be. When he sings “I won’t give up without a fight,” it
doesn’t matter that the song is about a boyfriend desperate to keep a
relationship together; many Ukrainians hear an anthem of national
survival. (The line became an unofficial motto of the Maidan protests.)
And when Vakarchuk cries, “This is prison, this is dolce vita” in
another song, he doesn’t need to clarify if his fans interpret the verse
as a condemnation of élite privilege under the ousted president Viktor
Yanukovych.
Politics,
on the other hand, does not offer the luxury of ambiguity. If he were
to get back into politics, “he would be either a bad politician or a bad
singer or both,” Volodymyr Kulyk, a professor of ethnopolitics in
Ukraine, says. “That involvement would kill Vakarchuk as something
people like and need.”
A few weeks
ago, I called Vakarchuk in New Haven. During his absence, the clamor
for leadership in Ukraine had only grown louder. Vakarchuk was focussed
on his studies at Yale and on Okean Elzy’s upcoming tour, but he felt
the weight of expectation, even from across the Atlantic. “I’m very
careful. I’m cautious about these things,” he said. “It’s easy to open
the door to politics and to come in. It’s very difficult to close the
door. Before you come in, you had better think about whether it is
really the most important, effective role for you. If it’s not, you
should do another job.”
His
faith in Ukraine remained unshaken, though. “I certainly understand the
big geopolitical game that is being played,” Vakarchuk said. “But I
think the most potent, the most powerful, player in this game is
actually the Ukrainian people.” As he sees it, the hope for a political
messiah is a self-imposed obstacle that stands in the way of Ukraine’s
success as a nation. “I think that, unless the whole society cohesively
and jointly wants to start changing things themselves, nothing will
happen,” he said. “There will be no change from heaven.”
