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Russians Have Developed a Taste for Channeling Patriotism ...
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Complete article at the following URL:
http://www.russiaprofile.org/page.php?pageid=Culture+%26+Living&articleid=a1211905213
May 27, 2008His Beautiful Russian TorsoBy Dmitry BabichRussia Profile
Russians Have Developed a Taste for Channeling Patriotism through Television Sets
Dima Bilan’s victory at the Eurovision Song Contest unleashed an interesting discussion in the Russian press. The initial upbeat reports on television and radio soon gave way to more thoughtful – and mostly critical – reviews in the more profound of print media outlets.
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Izvestia noted, however, that this year’s Eurovision kept even the people “who would not see themselves at Bilan’s concert even in their worst nightmares” awake well into the night. In the same way, Russia’s recent winning game against Canada in the world hockey championship was watched by people for whom the name “Nabokov” is associated primarily with the elitist twentieth century Russian-American prose writer Vladimir Nabokov, and not with the Russian national team’s lead player Yevgeny Nabokov, Izvestia’s commentator Mikhail Margolis noted. Russians seem to develop a taste for being patriotic through their television sets.
“Russian television seems to have found the national idea, which [former president] Boris Yeltsin’s administration strived to find during the 1990s,” Arina Borodina, a television critic of Kommersant daily said during a roundtable in Moscow. “We are primarily a nation of television viewers, watching various victories of our artists, sportsmen and, last but not least, government people. All of these victories are carefully orchestrated and packaged for us by the teams of the first and second national television channels. If you don’t watch, you are not a part of their national project.”
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In Troitsky’s opinion, shared by many press analysts, Eurovision is no longer prestigious among professionals. “It has become a contest among performers from musically provincial countries,” Troitsky said in an interview to radio Svoboda, a Russian subdivision of Radio Free Europe, broadcasting in Russia on medium waves. “Europe has one musical superpower, Great Britain, and British professional performers have been shunning Eurovision for a long time. If people want Eurovision to get its past prestige again, they should reinstate the old system of voting, when the fate of the artists was decided by a jury of experts, not phone calls. With this jury, Bilan would not be among the top ten performers.”
Russia’s own famous and respected rock and pop singers preferred not to make loud comments about Bilan’s success. “Bilan has a nice sound and his shows are very professional,” said Andrei Makarevich, 55, the lead singer of the famous Mashina Vremeni rock band. “The problem is, I cannot understand what he is singing his songs about. We were singing about freedom.
What he sings about remains to be heard.”
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