https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/vopli-vidopliassovas-tantsi-9781501363115/

Ifigeneia Gianne: What is the central focus and argument of your book on Tantsi, and why did you select this album as an ethnographic lens for Ukraine’s late Soviet cultural history?

Maria Sonevytsky: In 2019, I was approached by the editor of the 33 1/3 Europe series, Fabian Holt, and asked whether I would pitch an idea for the series based on a Ukrainian album. That’s the conceit of the 33 1/3 series – each short book is dedicated to one album. I was excited by the invitation but then confronted a small crisis: what album should be (at least for the foreseeable future), the representativeUkrainian album represented in the series?

Honestly, my first thought, which I thought was too idiosyncratic to take seriously, was VV’s Tantsi, if only because of my longstanding fascination with the title song and accompanying music video: I simply wanted to know more about this strange artifact and to understand the late Soviet social world from which it emerged a little better. But then I listed all the amazing Ukrainian albums I love. I crowdsourced on social media and among friends. I debated with myself and some of them about the downsides of picking something as obscure as Tantsi, when I could have picked something much more mainstream and/or contemporary, like the Ukrainian rapper Alyona Alyona’s debut album Pushka (2019), or the “ethno-chaos” band DakhaBrakha’s Light (2010), or even the important Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy’s Model (2001) or Gloria (2005). And then I considered Soviet Ukrainian albums I love, like The Marenych Trio’s 1979 record (the Peter, Paul, and Mary of Ukrainian state-sanctioned folklore), or the cosmic folk trio Golden Keys (Золоті Ключі) and their Soviet-era recordings, or the amazing from-the-vault reissues put out by labels like the Kyiv-based Shukai. In short, it felt weighty to settle on one.

At the same time, I had already put out feelers to VV’s original band members and started to see that this research might be possible—while not everyone associated with the band at that time was willing to speak to me, many people, including the lead singer and original bass player, were. I was on sabbatical in Kyiv with my family that year, and was falling freshly in love with that amazing city. The Tantsi idea also became a way to focus on Kyiv as a dynamic urban space in late Soviet society. And then I had a moment of researcher’s serendipity in which a late Soviet map of the Kyiv Underground fell practically into my lap out of a random encounter on the street (I write about this in the book). That map, made by Ukraine’s foremost rock journalist at the time, superimposes the network of late Soviet rock, jazz, punk, and indie bands onto a map of the literal Kyiv Metro. I realized I needed a lot of help to decode it, just to orient myself. So that sent me down the first deep rabbit hole, but also helped me justify my choice. VV was depicted as the central node in the network of lines of musical-aesthetic influence on the map. If they were so central to this Kyiv Underground, maybe the choice wasn’t so idiosyncratic after all.

It’s funny because the individual who demystified that map for me more than anyone else, Oleksandr Rudiachenko—who had been an influential newspaper editor in the 1980s and instrumental in the Tantsi cassette’s circulation through the Kyiv Underground—told me in an early conversation that I was making the wrong choice by choosing Tantsi. He worried that I had failed to select an album that would do Ukrainian music justice. But now, having written the book, I see how Tantsi also allowed me—as a Cold War kid—to revisit the 1980s, and to make sense of a part of Ukrainian cultural history not yet explored deeply in scholarship. Tantsi is more than just the story of an odd and hastily recorded semi-illicit cassette album that traveled through networks of late Soviet nonconformists; it is a monument to a time and place that is so often misrepresented along stark or reductive Cold War imaginaries.  It was a moment inhabited by people who faced historically specific constraints, and acted in novel ways within and against them.

Ultimately Tantsi pulled me more strongly than anything on my list because I wanted to attempt to humanize that late Soviet period by exploring what I saw as weird and cool people and their weird and cool Kyivan scene. So the choice was also subjective: I liked the music and band’s affect. I also wanted to evaluate how those last years of the Soviet experiment in Ukraine are remembered today. Tantsi became the focal point for triangulating among the rather scattered Soviet historical accounts of this scene (the fragments that exist in official archives and the more robust informal archives created by fans), against the first-hand recollections of people who were there at the time; and to interpret how volatile memory politics complicate the picture. Of course, the Russian full-scale invasion of 2022, which occurred while I was about 75% of the way through the first full draft, surfaced difficult questions about which leg of that methodological stool to lean on: how to evaluate the scattered archives against the current testimonies, especially now that the question of Russian revanchist imperialism was on the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Ifigeneia Gianne: In paraphrasing the band’s declaration, “Ok fine, we will dance, but we will do it in our ungovernable way,” (p. 5) you foreground a tension between embodied joy and political resistance. How do you understand this unruliness, not only as a musical aesthetic, but as a cultural stance, emerging within the specific post-Soviet moment? To what extent might Tantsi be read as enacting a form of sonic sovereignty through its genre-bending performance?

Maria Sonevytsky: I often think of the line that Sashko Pipa, VV’s bass player and (in my view) chief philosopher in the 1980s, repeated to me: “We simply made the music we wanted to hear.” The Soviet 1980s were characterized by so many governmental reforms and not-always-durable constraints—rules that seemed to change weekly and often arbitrarily, as I was told by a VV superfan at the time—that these young creative punks brilliantly played against them, to great and often hilarious effect. The Soviet Party-State in the mid 1980s was a gerontocracy. It maintained a sclerotic censorship regime and had declared a War on Rock that identified neofascist themes and images in Western bands like AC/DC, 10cc, and Sparks. It had its Leninist Youth League, the Komsomol, sponsor ideologically correct dance parties at government-controlled Houses of Culture, and it expected dutiful Soviet youth to attend these discotheques where they would dance, I suppose, in an ideologically correct way.

The song “Tantsi” ludicrously skewers these expectations placed upon young people by the state – the song is an over-the-top fantasy of dancing at the House of Culture after a long hard week of work. In the music video, the band members dance in their raucous way, juxtaposing their manic movement against scenes of the band standing stock still, shoulder-to-shoulder in a line. In the video, and in live performances at the time, they would bring out familiar signage in the form of the agitprop parade banner, but instead of a Soviet political slogan, the banner read “dances” (tantsi). The effect is classic stiob, a form of late Soviet satire written about perhaps most influentially by Alexei Yurchak in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, his study of the last (mostly Russian) Soviet generation. Stiob, a form of extreme satire that works by overidentifying with its target, is meant to blur the lines between complicity and protest. “Tantsi” the song, and many of the songs on Tantsi the album—“There Were Days,” “Politrok,” “Polonyna,” etc.—do this expertly, perfecting the art of total stiob.

VV and their allies did not think, at the time, that they were enacting any deliberate kind of politics. Even in interviews done in 2020, and 2022, people laughed if I asked this too pointedly: “was this the music of resistance?” It is of course a romantic idea—rock as resistance is a Cold War trope—but I was struck by how everyone I interviewed sought to nuance that idea, or rejected it out of hand. Some people reflected that their awareness of the political effect of the music came later, as new frames emerged in the post-Soviet 1990s that allowed them to reinterpret what they had been doing back then—whether within what we could call decolonizing frameworks (for many, this was the rather personal confrontation with internalized inferiority instilled through Soviet Russo-supremacy), within emergent civic nationalist frameworks, or in the new political economic frames afforded through the explosion of wild capitalism and commercial music industries. In the conclusion, I refer to their politics across these temporal frames as “accidental anti-imperialism.”

The band members of VV, and the allies and fans that surrounded them, were not particularly fearful of the state. This was not the Stalinist 1940s. Yes, one of Ukraine’s brightest poetic lights, Vasyl Stus, died in a labor camp in 1985 at the age of 47, but most Ukrainians at the time did not know that because the state suppressed such information. Yes, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor had irradiated much of Ukraine and Belarus and displaced some of its population in April 1986, but to the punks, this confirmed the state officials’ incompetence and hypocrisy; these were not the people leading contemporary so-called eco-nationalist movements in Ukraine. The members of VV and the Kyiv Underground tusovska went to the Balka black market to trade in illicit records expecting, almost ritualistically,that it would be broken up by the police every week. They went anyway and spotted their young hip professors there; they saw their friends from the shows and the cafes; they found the music they wanted to hear there. Yes, they thought the state was irredeemably corrupt, but they also thought it was feckless.

If we read Tantsi as enacting some kind of incipient “sonic sovereignty” in the 1980s, we can appreciate the range of ways in which this music was received in its time and place: while many cultural elites dismissed or decried it as punk grotesque, or as demeaning to Ukrainian culture, others recognized it as exorcising the demons of a colonized subjectivity, of the inferiority complex instilled by centuries of Russocentric messaging that overtly or obliquely demeaned the Ukrainian language and questioned the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and culture —as the future culture minister of post-Soviet Ukraine, Ivan Dzyuba, reportedly did. Dzyuba perceived the punk satire of the Tantsi music video to be a valuable step in Ukrainian culture’s emergence from centuries of structurally unfavorable comparison to culture produced in the Russian imperial metropoles. It is easy now to assume that this was a dominant position at the time, but I try in the book to take seriously what people who were there then told me: this was about revealing hypocrisy and reveling in the creative possibilities that the contradictoriness of daily life afforded much more than it was about attempting to bring about a change in political conditions. This was something more elemental for many young punks. As Eugene Hütz—then a teenaged VV superfan, now the frontman of Gogol Bordello, poignantly explained to me over a series of conversations—VV allowed for a kind of shared recognition: this irreverent punk display, with its hybrid language and its murky Ukrainian themes and its obscure messaging and its sense of humor, is ours.

Ifigeneia Gianne: You reflect on growing up in the Ukrainian diaspora and describe the affective dissonance between a romanticized Ukraine and the country you came to know through fieldwork. How did that personal and diasporic vantage point shape your approach to the album and your interpretation of its cultural significance?

Maria Sonevytsky: In graduate school, I first read Sherry Ortner’s famous essay that asserts that ethnography attempts to apprehend social worlds “using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing.” That formulation remains an anchor point for me, it confronts a core instability in our scholarly accounts that simultaneously contributes to the truthfulness of what we do as anthropologists. So yes, my position vis-à-vis the object of study is always something I want to foreground, so that the reader has some sense of who the self is that mediates the knowing in any given project.

In this book, I write in the opening pages about how astonished I was when I first heard the song “Tantsi,” and later again when I saw the video, because it fundamentally shook up the gray-scale imaginary I had of late Soviet Kyiv—it infused the scene with vivid color (even though the music video is in black and white!). I was born in 1981 into a family of political refugees from Soviet power, who appreciated Reagan’s tough stance against the “evil empire.” From early childhood, I was inculcated with a strong sense of my Ukrainian heritage, of my duty to this imaginary elsewhere. I possessed a dual sense of this Ukrainian elsewhere: on one hand, it was a place of radiant beauty, endless sunflower fields, folk songs, a halcyon and mythical homeland, round dances, freedom-loving anti-imperial fighters, potato dumplings that we called varenyki instead of pierogies, a place proud of its 19^th century poet-hero who rose from serfdom to articulate an ideal of democratic statehood. Second, it was a place sucked bone-dry through cycles of repression, Russian domination, mass violence, and Soviet hypocrisy. This vision of Soviet Ukraine was of a captive society; it was thuggish, corrupted, gray.

When I started to travel to Ukraine—first, as a child with my family; then independently, as a teenager; and eventually as a researcher—I was always negotiating between these two incommensurate visions. How to square my beloved aunt’s warm recollections of being a competitive cyclist in the Soviet 1960s if everything was always so sad and hopeless? How to make sense of the conviviality of people I encountered in all regions of the country if social life had really been so stunted, so shot through with fear? The “Tantsi” song and video was a kind of evidence that, even as I was growing up on the other side of the Cold War superpower line, there were people familiar to me who had been making noise in Soviet Ukraine. I wanted to know more.

Ifigeneia Gianne: Given the current context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the fact that Tantsi was reissued in 2023, how did the experience of writing and publishing this book during wartime affect how you understood the stakes of the project? Did your interpretations, methods, or sense of what was at stake shift in light of these events?

Maria Sonevytsky: As I mentioned earlier, this presented a real methodological challenge. I did not want current events and the understandable emotion associated with them to overtake my analysis. I began the research in 2019, and by late February of 2022, I had completed practically all of the research. But I did reopen conversations to take stock of whether, how, and to what degree, the full-scale invasion might prompt new interpretations of the moment in history that Tantsi represents. Personally speaking, the full-scale invasion knocked all the wind out of the project for me initially. It felt pointless to write a book like this when Ukraine’s survival as an entity distinct from Russia was in question. I turned my attention elsewhere for a while. But after a few months, some of my interviewees—one of whom, I remember, was by then living as a refugee in Germany—started checking in on the project, wanting to know when it would be done. This motivated me to pick it back up; if it mattered to them, it should matter to me.

The plan to reissue—or really issue, for the first time, formally—the Tantsi album had been in the works since 2020, when Sashko Pipa alerted me to the existence of the master tape from the 1989 session, and I located a label (the wonderful Org Music, based in the US) interested in putting it out. Oleg Skrypka, the lead singer of the band back then and now, gave permission for the remastering to happen, even though he had doubts about the value of the record, since it was made before the band had access to a proper recording studio or high-quality equipment.

It was in the winter and spring of 2022 that we were actively translating the lyrics. I worked on that most intensively with Sashko Pipa as I was in the Hudson Valley, he was in Kyiv. After late February, Pipa generously gave his time (in between air raid alerts, electricity outages, and his volunteer work in territorial defense and drone-building operations) to debate how to best capture the nuances of 1980s jargon—I remember we cracked up trying to render some of the playful obscenities—in translation. I worried that I was asking too much, but Pipa reassured me that this collaboration was giving him a sense of normalcy during a time of intense violence in the city and acute uncertainty for Ukrainians facing Russian aggression.

For me, it has been gratifying to see the instances where Tantsi has been accepted as a small but significant contribution to fleshing out the late Soviet Ukrainian social world. Because the album is so emblematic of its time, I think it resists being easily co-opted into present-day wartime narratives that dehumanize both victims and perpetrators, even as I sympathize especially with Ukrainian rage at the present circumstances. Tantsi is proudly, almost freakishly, Ukrainian, but it is also enmeshed in global popular music histories that traverse the West-East divide, Soviet imperial relationships, changes in the political economic order, and the apparently perennial will of young people to make culture anew.