As I was reading Heller’s article, I found myself understanding t.A.T.u.’s Eurovision performance as a means of flaunting post-Soviet musical freedom: making up for lost time, perhaps, or sending a message to the rest of Europe about what it means to be musically uninhibited. Nicolas Nabokov, in a sense, had a similar project in constructing the “L’Oeuvre du XXe Siecle,” although his predominant aim was to expose the relative un-freedom of the Soviet Union. Nabokov chose to showcase Russian compositions that actively opposed the Soviet Union’s official ideology regarding music. In doing so, he demonstrated the Western Bloc’s unique ability to engage with music deemed avant-garde or “formalist,” works that could provoke discomfort or question existing moral codes. According to Nabokov, the lack of rules or censorship within the Western music world was precisely what made it “freer” than the musical culture of Soviet Russia.
However, Heller notes queer activist Yevgenia Debrianskaia’s assertion that “…people are much freer [in Russia] than in the West, because [in Russia] we spit on any rules, we break them whenever we want. This is exactly what freedom is” (Heller 204). This understanding of freedom suggests that Russia was keen on showcasing dissident ethos when they chose t.A.T.u. to represent the nation at Eurovision. t.A.T.u.’s image is based on transgression; the homophobia of Russia and other European nations combined with the presentation of “queer” sexuality is precisely what labels the performance as “free”, in the Russian sense of the word (of course, this is complicated by the role of Shapovalov – something I hope we can discuss further in class). This, in turn, begs the question of whether Nabokov’s festival actually demonstrated “freedom” at all. If, as Heller notes, Russian youth were continually engaged in the illicit distribution of unauthorized music, was the transgressive musical life of Russia more musically liberated than the relatively ungoverned musical culture of the West? How do we understand t.A.T.u.’s performance with regards to these two definitions of freedom?
It seems as though in the Cultural Cold War, neither Soviet nor Western artists existed in a context of true freedom, as the concept of “freedom” was, to an extent, defined by and articulated through government agencies and institutions influenced by them. To this end, after the end of the Cold War, post-Soviet Russia’s concept of “freedom” seems to be a contested and constantly negotiated definition, while the artistic freedom of the West seems, to an extent, broadly assumed to be the case from a Western standpoint. The dissident ethos articulated by Debrianskaia in the Heller article points to an individualism (or at least, to a projected ideal of an individualism) which is to an extent perhaps unfettered by the West’s limitations of a naturalized history government influence. This individualist, dissident ethos can perhaps be located in both a response to the Soviet Union’s past policies in regards to censorship, and in the centrality of the West in the global, capitalist market Russian artists must successfully engage in.
In this context, perhaps one can understand t.A.T.u.’s performance at Eurovision as both a provocation to the West’s concept of freedom, and as a question of legibility when they ultimately lost the title. I agree with your assertion that Western cultural events like Nabokov’s festival asserted less of a freedom than perhaps (in my opinion) an ideology of capitalism and propriety, obscured by a veil of exceptionalism and “genius.” Perhaps t.A.T.u.’s deviant sexuality and dissident ethos be considered a direct assertion of individual worth, creativity and intelligence in this context; outsmarting, outperforming, and outpleasuring Western artists in their own arena seems to be their intentions going into the competition. Yet ultimately, t.A.T.u. had to remain legible to Western audiences the context of Nation, presenting a distinct Russianness the West would anticipate and be able to understand. Perhaps one way to frame their performance, and their ultimate loss at 3rd place, would be to consider how t.A.T.u. were rendered legible and illegible in the context of Eurovision, and the West.