Music, Putin’s “Powerful Weapon”

In January, late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny reported that the Siberian penal colony in which he was held blasted the song “Я РУССКИЙ” (“I Am Russian”) by Putin’s favorite singer, Shaman, every day at 5 a.m., right after the national anthem. But the dictator has also instrumentalized classical music for his own purposes. A performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60 (“Leningrad”) in August 2022 shows how Putin goes about it.

Not too long ago, Putin’s close friend, conductor Valery Gergiev, gave an interview in which he described music as a “powerful weapon.” At the time, the unusual metaphor slipped by. Now we know better. 

In the months following the illegal annexation of Crimea in spring 2014, Putin signed a series of decrees announcing his regime’s cultural-political strategy for the future. These decrees described culture as an important tool to project “feelings of patriotism and national pride” inside Russia and “the authority of the country on the international stage” to the rest of the world. Music would play a special role in this project. It is an important feature in many dictatorships, because music is exceptionally well-suited to summoning the sort of feelings that lend themselves to instrumentalization. Under Putin, music would be used strategically to “encourage a positive image of Russia on the international level,” meaning that “the integration of Russia on the world music market” was to be encouraged. 

Gergiev took on a succession of positions with major Western orchestras and flew around the world as if possessed, sometimes conducting on multiple continents in a single day. Pianist and regime loyalist Denis Matsuev played 250 concerts per year. Russian corporations like Gazprom or Lukoil pumped gigantic sums into prestigious music festivals, and Putin disciples like the German culture manager Hans-Joachim Frey took on leadership roles in European concert life. 

These were calculated moves. Music lovers’ enthusiasm for compositions by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rachmaninoff, and their admiration for the skill of Russian performers, were to be converted into identification with the current Russian regime. Putin and his propaganda apparatus were deploying a method for manipulating public opinion—both at home and abroad—already documented under both Lenin and Stalin. But the conditions of media in the 21st century have allowed these manipulations to achieve altogether new dimensions. 

Putin’s regime appeals to a huge range of musical tastes in these efforts, from appreciators of the Russian classics to fans of patriotic propaganda pop. Music for these different audiences serves as a medium through which the government spreads a narrative that historian Walter Laqueur already described in his 2015 book Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West. After the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, this narrative revealed its full, murderous potential. It includes Tsarist fantasies of empire, the rehabilitation of Stalin, and a sweeping, generalized hatred of “the West.” But the main feature of this narrative is the mobilization of national memory of the “Great Patriotic War,” fought by the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945. 

This component is especially important for the current regime’s global propaganda. The Russian government derives its right to pursue “Nazis” worldwide from the 27 million Soviet victims that victory over Hitler cost the nation. But now, Putin decides who counts as a Nazi, meaning that any military action to encourage the spread of Russian influence is presented as a legitimate fight against so-called fascists.  

Music provides excellent scaffolding for this post-factual narrative. It helps the government speak directly to the emotions associated with the “Great Patriotic War,” which many Russians still connect with the personal suffering of their relatives. It’s no coincidence that the meteoric rise of Putin’s favorite singer, Shaman (real name: Yaroslav Yuryevich Dronov), began on the evening before the invasion of Ukraine, with the song “Bстанем” (“Let’s stand up”). Shaman uses every trick in the sentimental-rock-ballad book to create intense feelings toward “Russia’s heroes” who “remain in our hearts forever.” The music blends a commemoration of the “Great Patriotic War” with the melodramatic call to “let us rise,” an intentionally defiant-sounding phrase that Shaman, belting in his highest register, burns directly into the listener’s ears. 

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Z-pop” by Shaman and other musical favorites of Putin’s aim to bring emotions associated with the past into the present. So it’s no surprise that music from the actual past has also been strategically instrumentalized by the regime. That’s especially true for Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad.” The piece was composed and performed under dramatic historical circumstances, making it an ideal vehicle for the regime’s narrative of resistance. 

Famously, Shostakovich wrote the symphony between July and December 1941, at the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad by German forces, which lasted 872 days. He wrote the first three movements while in the city—his hometown—and the fourth in Kuybyshev (now Samara) where he had been evacuated with his family. After performances there, in Moscow, in London and in New York, the symphony was finally performed in Leningrad on August 9, 1942. The siege was ongoing; the order to perform the piece reportedly came directly from Stalin. 

The rehearsals and performance took place under unimaginable conditions. The musicians of the radio orchestra who had managed to survive were starving; their ranks were supplemented by musicians from the Red Army. The performance, conducted by Karl Eliasberg, was broadcast on the radio—to the population of Leningrad, but also to the Axis forces surrounding the city. 

A German soldier who met Eliasberg years after the war admitted to the conductor that the performance of the symphony had a “strong effect.” “We began to realize that we would never capture Leningrad,” the soldier said. For the besieged populace, the music made survival seem possible. It generated courage, optimism, and confidence, as diary entries and letters from the time confirm. “This music was dedicated to us and our city,” one person who attended the concert wrote. “Can you imagine its power?” 

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With the “Leningrad” Symphony, Shostakovich created an outstanding musical work of resistance whose effect was felt both inside and outside the city. The composer used musical-linguistic topoi typical for the such works of resistance to achieve this effect. 

One typical topos is the call to national identity. At the beginning of the Symphony, Shostakovich quotes Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a piece familiar to every Russian child. Another topos in works of resistance is the gradual increase of musical volume and density of instrumentation over a long period of time, a topos we might call the “‘Bolero’ model.” This technique is often used to demonstrate either a growing threat or the gradual formation of resistance. Shostakovich used this topos extensively for the famous “Invasion Episode” in the first movement, which conveys the approach of Axis forces. 

A third topos in works of resistance is the chorale. Listeners associate the chorale with the song of a church community: a group of people gathered in faith and hope. This topos evokes a feeling of togetherness and a solemnity that showcases unity to those outside the group. In the “Leningrad” Symphony, Shostakovich places a chorale prominently at the beginning of the third movement. According to the composer’s notes, this movement was conceived as “solemn adagio.” Originally titled “The Expanses of Home,” it was meant to evoke “joy in life and reverence for the natural beauty” of Russia. It’s impossible to miss the organ-like timbre and sacred atmosphere ushered in by the unusual combination of woodwinds, horns, and harps in this passage. 

A fourth topos common in works of resistance is a triumphant finale, evoking, in the spirit of Beethoven, the idea of per aspera ad astra: “through suffering to the stars.” The “Leningrad” Symphony follows a similar dramaturgical scheme, one that Shostakovich described concisely: “The first movement is the battle, the fourth the future victory.” This depiction of victory is based on the musical material of the second movement, originally titled “Memory,” and the third, the paean to the homeland. The composer conceived of the imagined victory in the finale as the “apotheosis of the entire work.” 

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August 9, 2022, was the 80th anniversary of the Leningrad performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh. It was also around six months after the invasion of Ukraine, and Putin did not miss the opportunity to stage elaboration celebrations. The high-point of the ceremonies was a gigantic open-air concert in St. Petersburg, financed out of the President’s personal coffers. It took place on the evening of the anniversary under the slogan “The ‘Leningrad’ Symphony on the Bank of the Neva” in front of thousands of onlookers. 

The concert was also shown on state TV, with the full-strength Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra performing under the baton of Yuri Bashmet, another Putin loyalist. Bashmet’s sappy interpretation of the music was underlined by a spectacular contextualization by experienced opera director Victor Kramer. The main function of this contextualization was to create an emotional bridge between the siege of Leningrad and the present. 

After a brief greeting by popular TV host Andrey Malakhov, Putin himself addressed a three-minute video message to the audience. As it remains uncommon for dictators to expatiate on musical analysis, here are the most important passages of the speech: 

I am delighted to welcome participants and guests, every spectator and listener at today’s concert. It includes Dmitry Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony No. 7, one of the pinnacles of world culture, unique in content and expressiveness, a legendary piece of music due to the story behind it and the great influence it has on people’s feelings, hopes and lives.

Exactly 80 years ago – on August 9, 1942 – the most important premiere of this brilliant work took place. By that time, it had already been performed in the Soviet Union and abroad, but none of this could compare with the scale and significance of the performance in besieged Leningrad.

The premiere was scheduled for the day when the Nazis were going to celebrate the capture of the city, but their plans to break the Leningraders were doomed to failure from the start. And, as an anthem to the courage and resilience of Leningrad, this grandiose music was played there. It sang the people’s feat, their fortitude and steely determination, which was the most powerful weapon of the Great Patriotic War… Its musical themes spoke piercingly about the most difficult trials, about pain and great sorrow. But most importantly, they also carried a truly prophetic affirmation of victory, and this strengthened the faith of the people of Leningrad, all Soviet people, all those who fought against Nazism, in the triumph of humanity and justice.

Today, many decades later, Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony continues to evoke the strongest feelings in new generations… love for the Motherland and readiness to defend it.

This is a sign of genuine great art, where works that glorify true and eternal values are recognised as great for all times, unite people of all ages, nationalities and religions; they affirm truth and light, which always prevail over lies and the forces of darkness.

The speech demonstrates the importance bestowed upon the work by the regime. Putin was using the Symphony to channel memories of “the people’s feat, their fortitude and steely determination” in the “Great Patriotic War”; to evoke “the strongest feelings in new generations,” namely “love for the Motherland and readiness to defend it” against “Nazism”; and to create faith in the inevitable “triumph of humanity and justice,” with Shostakovich’s finale as the “truly prophetic affirmation of victory.” 

The 2022 staging of the “Leningrad” Symphony in St. Petersburg was a dazzling adaptation of the piece to suit Putin’s goals. The dramaturgy aimed for the closest possible identification between the audience and Leningraders who survived the Nazi siege. The location of the concert, on the easternmost point of Vasilyevsky Island, gave those present the sensation of being cut off from the rest of the world, analogous to that which the population of Leningrad experienced. Malakhov and his co-presenter Darya Zlatopolskaya reminded the audience of the circumstances of the 1942 Leningrad performance of the piece in an introduction before the symphony.

Between the first and second movements, the hosts also read testimonies by survivors of the siege. These readings interrupted the flow of the piece, but were overshadowed by another ten recitations placed in different points throughout the symphony. Popular actors stood up individually in front of the orchestra and spoke into a microphone as Shostakovich’s music continued. The choice of texts and performers, as well as the dramatic placement of the recitations in the context of the music, created a striking, melodramatic effect. 

Another addition to the music, the audience saw a series of pre-produced film portraits of survivors of the siege, which showed them at their former workplaces. Each about a minute long, the films were played over the music of the symphony, which took on the characteristics of a soundtrack. There was no speech in the films: instead, subtitles showed the person’s name, age, profession, and status as a survivor of the siege. Finally, there was an elaborate light show, combined with other visual effects. These effects gained in intensity throughout the symphony, culminating in a gigantic firework display for the finale. The pyrotechnics were precisely synchronized with the score, turning the musical vision of victory into an optical display with further acoustic emphasis. 

Leading actors from film and TV joined the spectacle, cementing the audience’s sympathy. In some cases, previous roles seem to have played a part in the choice of actors: Aleksei Guskov, who played the main character, conductor Karl Eliasberg, in an eight-part limited series about the performance history of the “Leningrad” Symphony from 2021, was one of the readers. Guskov recited passages from Eliasberg’s memories of the time. 

One important goal of the recitations was to recall the heroic will to victory that the besieged populace of Leningrad displayed in horrific conditions. Besides Eliasberg’s notes, two poems were particularly important to this goal: “Courage” by Anna Akhmatova and “I speak” by Olga Bergholz. Other texts were primarily aimed at inducing emotion. The child actress Vitaliya Kornienko, in an angelic white dress, read a stanza by Bergholz, in which the children who survived the siege are imagined as carrying hope into a new world. Critical implications in the original text were obscured both by a lack of context, and the calculated use of Shostakovich’s music as the soundtrack for the words, eliminating any shades of gray in the immaculately maintained atmosphere of the performance. 

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The anniversary concert on August 9, 2022, was, at least for now, the pinnacle of the Putin regime’s instrumentalization of the “Leningrad” Symphony. The event signifies the government’s abuse of the memory of Nazi crimes and their victims in the Soviet Union. The horrific conditions in which Shostakovich wrote the work, and the rousing call he summoned up in a time of existential threat, were co-opted by Kremlin propagandists. Their goal is to represent a hostile invasion of a sovereign nation based on “Great Russia” ideology as a war of resistance fought by the Russian people against supposed “Nazis.” 

Putin clearly hopes that the “Leningrad” Symphony will be as helpful for his invasion of Ukraine as it was for Stalin’s defense against the German invasion. The piece has a lofty moral position, not just in Russia and the other countries that fell victim to Nazi terror; it serves as a global symbol for legitimate resistance to evil and as a musical monument to humanism. It certainly has special resonance in the Soviet Union’s former allies: the U.S., Great Britain, and France. But it is perhaps Germany where the symphony evokes the strongest emotions outside Russia, reminding Germany of its guilty history (and, in the former German Democratic Republic, the old alliance with a “brother state”). Every performance of the “Leningrad” Symphony transports Shostakovich’s mission—to create pride and the will to victory within, and empathy with the resisting Russian people without—to the present day. The past and the present meld together in our emotions, and this is where the strategy of its instrumentalization begins. For German listeners especially, many emotions come into play in this piece: awareness of historical guilt; sympathy with the victims of the siege; and the imperative to act humanely in the present. It can be hard to disentangle these emotions from feelings of naive solidarity with the current Russian regime. 

That also makes Putin’s musical propaganda unusually effective in Germany, as shown by the debate that erupted after Gergiev was relieved of his position as music director of the Munich Philharmonic in March 2022. While discussions were muted in Milan, Rotterdam, Lucerne, or New York, German listeners found the firing more controversial. Commentators who pointed out that the conductor had a political agenda were met by disbelief. Since the advent of German romanticism, many here seem to still believe that music represents an otherworldly sphere, distinct from current events. 

Fatally, music’s potential to manipulate is deeply intertwined with this assumption. The more people believe that music has nothing to do with politics, the more effective a tool of politics music becomes. The problem is not blunt musical propaganda, which is often immediately recognized as such and only affects the thinking of a minority. Instead, the issue is the infinite possibilities music has of summoning emotions, making the past come alive in the present, and changing our view of the time in which we live. And music stays amorphous while doing so, making its effect more potent while allowing it to be pushed in a given direction by strategic contextualization. 

Music is a medium with many applications in post-factual propaganda. The emotions that a work evokes remain more or less the same; what changes is the context. So it makes a fundamental difference if a conductor praises or rejects Putin; the message and the effect of the music changes diametrically. By the summer of 2008, Gergiev’s frequent performances of the “Leningrad” Symphony in the concert halls of Munich, London, Paris or New York were part of the narrative of legitimization produced by the Putin regime. They were never neutral cultural events, but ideological injections meant to prepare the world for Putin’s military operations. When an artist like Semyon Bychkov, who, along with many other Russian musicians, has spoken out decisively against the dictatorship, puts the “Leningrad” Symphony on the program, the exact same music can be heard as a vehement rejection of the war in Ukraine. 

Pact with the Dictator

This extreme dependence on context is one reason why audiences demand prominent interpreters take clear positions on political events or boycott problematic repertoire. These tendencies are understandable, but unproductive, because such position-taking aims for a clarity that music cannot provide. The responsibility to work against manipulation through music, and the imperative of empathy, lies with each individual: the artistic director inviting performers; the conductor leaving the audience in doubt about his position; the interpreter putting together a program for a piano recital; the concert planner sparing Ukrainian musicians from having to play Glinka’s “Overture to ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’”; the director staging Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”

It also lies with us, the listeners. We have to decide if we’re willing to consider context, or if we’d rather just enjoy the beautiful sounds, unbothered by the reality outside the concert hall. ¶