The Russian War on Music: Intra-Elite Cohesion and State Violence


Tomiris Frants, University of Toronto

Russia’s relationship with music has had a long and contentious history, continuously ebbing through periods of intense patriotism and high cultural surveillance. In the last decade alone, Russian authorities have intensely policed creative production and curtailed ideologies that differed from national narratives. This has directly implicated high profile, public facing, cultural actors - which I’ve titled as cultural luminaries, in their increased surveillance in regime-supporting media outlets. This paper analyses a blacklist of musicians that was released by the Russian state in 2022, tracking their discursive presence in the media to understand the types of threats cultural luminaries pose to an autocratic state. Cultural luminaries generally and these musicians specifically are frequently tied to moral regulation, Western influence, and the Ukraine-Russian conflict in their media presence. This research is pivotal to understanding how non-state actors are targeted by autocratic regimes and how dissent is managed through formal and informal means.

This paper will be presented at the following session: