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By Sean Rayment
Hundreds of young people gathered in St Petersburg to sing an outlawed song calling for Vladimir Putin to be overthrown.
In a rare moment of public dissent, the crowd joined street musicians in a central square on Tuesday night to shout anti-war lyrics that have been branded “extremist” under new Russian censorship laws.
“Where have you been for eight years, you f—— monsters? I want to watch ballet, let the swans dance,” the crowd chanted in Russian in the busy thoroughfare. “Let your grandpa tremble with excitement for Swan Lake.”
The song, titled Co-operative Swan Lake by Noize MC, a pro-Ukrainian rapper, has become an unofficial anthem for the growing disillusionment and anger felt by young, liberal Russians towards Putin’s regime.
The 40-year-old musician, whose real name is Ivan Alekseev, fled to Lithuania soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Moscow has since declared him a “foreign agent”, a legal designation that has been used aggressively since the war began to punish critics of the Kremlin.
Alekseev released Co-operative Swan Lake in 2022 as a call to end Putin’s rule and condemn the apathy in Russian society towards the war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
To date, more than one million mainly young Russian men have been killed or wounded fighting in Ukraine. Thousands more have deserted or fled the country to avoid being drafted into the army.
The ballet Swan Lake became an unexpected symbol of political upheaval in the final years of the Soviet Union. It was broadcast on state TV on a loop following the deaths of Russian leaders and after the failed coup of 1991, which ushered in the collapse of the USSR.
The song’s title also references Lake Co-operative in north-west Russia, where members of Putin’s inner circle holiday. In the lyrics, Alekseev refers directly to Putin: “Let the old man shake in fear for his lake.”
Earlier this year, a St Petersburg court ruled that the song amounted to “propaganda for the violent change of the foundations of the constitutional order” and argued it was “harmful to minors” and to their “moral and ethical development”.
Video footage of the crowd chanting its chorus has sparked outrage on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, with prominent propagandists calling for those involved to be punished immediately.
So far, no arrests have been reported.
There have been other reports this summer of public gatherings in St Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, where bands and young crowds have sung anti-war songs together, often featuring more of Alekseev’s work.
Under Russia’s new censorship laws, any material designated “extremist” is effectively banned. As of July, anyone caught accessing outlawed content can also be labelled an “extremist” and face punishment.
For musicians, the new laws have evoked memories of Soviet-era suppression of the music scene, when authorities deemed rock musicians an ideological threat to the Communist regime and forced them underground.
Despite Alekseev’s music being banned on Russian platforms, millions of Russians continue to listen to it in bars, stream cover versions online, or use VPNs to access it on YouTube.
Last month, Alekseev told The Atlantic: “People don’t want to hear, think, or talk about the war. They push it out of their conscience.”
He also described the “indifference” of his compatriots towards the nearly four-year conflict as a “tragedy”.
In another song, Yes Future!, he urges Russians to imagine a country free of Putin and his repressive regime.
The lyrics read: “The weather will be great in St Petersburg! Someone good will end up in power; and everything will be fixed unexpectedly; the b—–s will be punished – no one will get away with it.”