A Different Kind of Chilling Effect

What am I doing? As I write, I have before me a ticket that will bring me back to Moscow shortly before you read this. Meanwhile, a quick survey of Russian blogs shows that things are worse there (here) than they have ever been.

The last time it was this cold in Moscow, I was a child. I don't remember if school was canceled, but I do remember three things. One, it was so frigid indoors that everyone turned on gas stoves; the gas pressure then dropped extremely low and some official on television berated "unaware citizens" for wasting natural gas. Two, my father and our male neighbors created a car-key pool and took turns going out to start and idle all their cars every two hours. Three, that week we applied for an exit visa to leave the Soviet Union. Somehow, these events have stayed linked in my mind, so I have always considered myself something of a climatic refugee.

My family settled in Massachusetts, which is where I am now, visiting my father. It's not the warmest state in the United States, but for the last three weeks it's been above freezing almost every day. Some days I haven't worn a jacket. This is not the day to address the issue of why I moved back to Russia a dozen years ago: It certainly wasn't for the weather. But what am I doing going back today?

The only saving grace is that I bought an iPod on this trip. So now as I am preparing for the 15-hour journey, I am loading up my new toy with tunes. Like most people who know next to nothing about music, I call my tastes "varied." Translated, that means that for the last couple of days I have been browsing music sites, stumbling upon one artist's name or another or something that will trigger some memory that will send me looking for a melody.

A half hour ago I suddenly remembered a very funny song I first heard a year ago. It was by a group called the Belomors, and it was called, "Vladimir Putin Is Not a Dog's Penis." It is a parody of a paean, and it is brilliant. "He is the world's guiding light. / He will absolve your sins and deliver your baby. / He will make a blind man see and blind a seeing man. / Vladimir Putin is not a dog's penis." (As you may have guessed, in the original it all rhymes, and I use "penis" as a substitute for a Russian vulgarism.)

I happen to remember the circumstances under which I first heard the song. I was in Kiev, covering the Orange Revolution, and someone had sent me a link to the Belomors site. I said to a colleague, "Hey, this could be the anthem of a Russian revolution."

The song was not fated for popularity, though. In April of last year, a company called Shaurma Records compiled a CD of songs about Putin. The record was initially meant to include the Belomors song along with a number of genuine paeans, but the producers seemed to change their minds at the last minute, explaining that they simply couldn't fit the "Dog's Penis" song on the disc.

Several months later, a friend who was organizing a protest rally in Moscow called asking for advice on musical groups she might invite. Naturally, I recommended the Belomors. The group arrived at the start of the rally, saw -- well, I am not exactly sure what it was they saw, but it was probably the scores of police -- and left, apparently in fear. Around the same time, the Belomors also removed the song from their web site. I think this is what they call a "chilling effect."

I reconstructed this story as I searched the web for the song to download. I found it, but it all made me wonder again why I'm going back to the cold country.