From RIA Novosti, the MVD Choir (Russian Police)
I love this video to pieces.
(Almost as much as I loved this montage of the Barnaul protests which is its antipode).
It's not about loving the Russian police — there's too many of them (Russia has among the highest per capita ration of police/civilians in the world), they're corrupt (they're up all night usually hoping to get lucky with bribes from hapless motorists caught speeding), and they beat people — although the regular cop on the beat isn't so much known for that as much as the separate OMON, or riot police. (This is the MVD [Interior Ministry] Internal Troups Ensemble.)
And it isn't about the sharp contrasts involved in having the staid Russian police under Putin be "corrupted by the West" with this song — although that's funny in a way. (We should now have a reverse genre, and Daft Punk should sing V Lesu Rodilas' Yolochka).
Or is even about the funny bits as these non-English speakers grapple with the lyrics — the planets are "bringing" instead of "spinning" and it sounds like the singer says "the prison has no limits" instead of "present" — and of course they sound like they're singing "We've got to fight to give up who we are" instead of the actual lyrics.
No, it's about this big fellow in the grey uniform (his name is Maj-Gen. Viktor Petrovich Eliseyev) who serves as the police conductor, the choir director. He's just wonderful. Watch him — and watch again — and see how much delight he takes in his work.
RIA Novosti's cameraman picked up on this and decided to make him the star of the show — this is a rehearsal for a November 10 concert — even more than the just-barely-shaving lead singer . The camera lovingly follows his hefty back through the curtains to the smoky stage, creating the feeling of a jazz club — and then lingers on his shaking jazz head.
Yes, he has that little restrained shaking jazz head that you know is the sign of a great afficionado of jazz — it comes from the days of jazz and the big band sound and its descendants, which is this sort of Motown like Daft Punk tune (whose beat and vocals are reminiscent of Earth Wind & Fire's Shooting Star).
Watch the old Benny Goodman videotape from 1937 below and see what I mean by that band leader's hand shaking out the beat, with the little shake of the head that goes with it.
Watch some of the MVD Choir's other work — it's great. Imagine, "Smoke on the Water" on a bunch of balalaikas!
So what I like in this fellow is his obvious love of his work. The way he keeps singing even after the tune is over, and even sings out a funny "Iz-vi-ni-te!" (Forgive me!) at the end. This guy is old enough to have lived through the Soviet Union. No doubt he's seen a thing or two in his years serving in the MVD, we don't know his story. But he seems to me to be one of those Soviets who devoted himself to his craft and immersed in it and took pure delight in it despite the Soviet and then Russian government's encroachments on the individual and his freedom, despite the hardships of life, just leaning in.
If you remember the Soviet Union, you know the type — the musicians, the math tutors, the scientists, the grade-school teachers — there's a certain type of Soviet intellectual, the little guy of the middle or lower class but educated, devoted to his field, perhaps music, perhaps geology. (Eliseyev seems to have advanced most in his career in the Putin era, and now has the perks of privilege such as the cottage in Peredellkino, and the three wives and the scandals that go with such high positions, but you sense he paid his dues and my point here is about how even people who are careerists, even leading something with built-in restraints like "martial music is to music" find a way to make it creative. In other words, yes, if you're going to lead the singing police under Putin, at least let it be Daft Punk.)
You see the kind of dedication Imean in some of these films in the festival 15 Young By Young, for example the old music teacher who demonstrates jazz licks to a 10-year-old girl playing the saxophone in a town in Ukraine. I saw those films at the Ukrainian Museum earlier this year, they were great. See the Tajik singer as well.
Immersing — escaping — into a beloved profession or field or talent was a way for many people to escape Soviet totalitarianism, and it was not only what made it bearable, it was what saved people, culture. I've always made a point of picking these types out.
I'm not one of the bloggers critical of Russia who thinks the Russian people are genetically doomed, or genetically predisposed to xenophobic hate and cruelty and so on, although of course some of them are (Putin). But it's because of people like this guy — always coming across them whenever I have dealt with Russians and Russia — that you feel as if they will be saved.
I remember when a group of journalists from the New York Times and I visited Perm Labor camp in the dead of winter in 1988, accompanied by a stern, tall prosecutor. We had a very long day travelling in the early dark morning, even more hours from Perm itself to the labor camp village, then a long day struggling to get our demands met to see the prisoners, vainly trying to be able to speak to them alone without guards present, and then demanding unsuccessfully to have them bring us one of the politicals, who they had obviously stashed away in the infirmary — as he shouted to us out the window. Finally it grew very late and completely dark outside again, and we were forced to leave without seeing everyone. On the long journey back, we began to nod off.
"Our guests are sleeping," the stern prosecutor clucked gently, solicitious as a parent, wondering if we would be cold. Even in a situation like this — the awfulness of a Soviet labor camp with political prisoners in it being mistreated, and this man presiding over the system — there were still signs of humanity. Of course, as we all know who have dealt with Russia, the famous hospitality and kindness and even sentimentality, especially about the vulnerable, is the other side of the coin from cruelty and cynicial brutality, also notorious.
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