A New Song for a New Motherland: Eurovision and the Rhetoric of Post-Soviet National Identity

In March 2009 Russia's Channel One aired a live competition to choose Russia's entry for the 2009 Eurovision Song Competition, which was scheduled to be held in Moscow in two months time. The results were scandalous: Anastasia Prikhod'ko, a former participant in Russia's equivalent to the American Idol competition, Fabrika zvezd, who was Ukrainian in both citizenship and nationality, won with Mamo (Mother) an emotional ballad on the pain of love and female suffering that she performed half in Ukrainian and half in Russian. This article considers what Prikhod'ko's selection as Russia's national entry for Eurovision and the ensuing scandal tell us about the construction of Russian national identity in the post-Soviet era and about Russia's attitude to its closest geographic neighbors. The author argues that Prikhod'ko's performance can best be understood as part of the larger phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia: both the way Mamo was staged for the Eurovision international competition in Moscow and public statements made by a variety of cultural figures in defense of the song evoked Soviet aesthetics and Soviet rhetoric about the friendship of peoples (Druzhba narodov). In the context of Russia's on-going quarrels with other former Soviet Republics, the presence of these nostalgic elements in Mamo inevitably seemed politically freighted: the song effectively juxtaposed to present tensions Soviet style ethnic harmony and hence, depending on one's point of view, either read as a touching appeal for peace and tolerance or as an veiled threat that hinted at the possible renewal of Russia's cultural dominance over the other former Soviet republics.