A Well-Connected Outsider

Ivasiuk hovered on the margins of Soviet culture during the 1970s. Hailing from the Soviet-Romanian borderlands, he did not fit the image of a reliable Soviet citizen. Never allowed to join the professional organisation of composers, he faced hostile cultural bureaucrats in the Communist Party of Ukraine. At the same time, he had powerful friends and patrons in official Soviet institutions like the television, philharmonics and the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine. Ivasiuk's precarious status in the world of Soviet music turned his career into an emotional rollercoaster: he oscillated between feelings of anxiety and relief, despair and joy, loneliness and camaraderie. The composer's emotional struggles took place in a distinctly Ukrainian context. Relying on informal personal contacts to sustain his career, he operated within a network of influential Ukrainian cultural figures who provided support and friendship to the anxious composer. Moreover, in his search for emotional self-expression, the composer drew on Ukrainian folk music to develop a ‘casual, lyrical, individual, fragmented’ tone of voice that had been the main tool in the war against Stalinist totalitarian kitsch during the late 1950s and the 1960s, even as Brezhnev-era youth began to mock such earnest attempts to find new forms of cultural authenticity.Footnote ¹⁴

Several factors explain Ivasiuk's tense relationship with the political leadership of Soviet Ukraine. Albeit a member of the Soviet cultural establishment, his father had spent time in the Gulag after he migrated to the Soviet Union from Romania in the late 1930s.Footnote ¹⁵ This marked the Ivasiuks as a borderland family whose loyalty to the Soviet homeland remained uncertain. Volodymyr Ivasiuk himself was expelled from the Chernivtsi medical university in 1968, chastised publicly as a social parasite after allegedly vandalising a Chernivtsi bust to Lenin (local politics was fickle and he was re-admitted in the following academic year).Footnote ¹⁶ Murky, backstage decisions stood in the way of the composer's career through the 1970s. Ivasiuk had friends among the local officials in Lviv who promised to nominate him for the Mykola Ostrovs′kyi Prize awarded by the Komsomol in Soviet Ukraine, but more senior apparatchiks were suspicious of young talent. Professional problems took an emotional toll. Ivasiuk was reportedly distraught upon learning that the local party secretary, D.A. Iaremchuk, did not forward his application to the higher authorities in Kyiv, effectively disqualifying the composer from the competition.Footnote ¹⁷

Lacking post-secondary musical training, Ivasiuk enjoyed precious little prestige among professionals at the Union of Soviet Composers. He was visibly upset after one cultural bureaucrat reminded him that he was a mere amateur whose music could be taken off Soviet stages and airwaves at any moment; in personal conversations, he complained that official quotas specifying that performers include a certain percentage of songs by members of the composers’ union limited the spread of his music.Footnote ¹⁸ Far from resisting these practices, Ivasiuk tried to fit in and thus faced continued humiliation and frustration. In 1972, he enrolled at the Lviv conservatory to acquire formal musical training.Footnote ¹⁹ The composer's letters to his family in Chernivtsi state that he was proud to study composition under Anatolii Kos-Anatols′kyi, ‘a great scholar of folklore and a wonderful musician’.Footnote ²⁰ The letters may well have been an attempt at fashioning his emotions in line with what Ivasiuk wanted to feel,Footnote ²¹ given that memoirs compiled by Ivasiuk's friends in the late 1980s suggest that Anatols′kyi resented his student's success and regularly put him down (some of his friends added that they had believed Ivasiuk led a carefree life and only learnt about these problems after his death).Footnote ²² Despite repeated efforts, Ivasiuk never graduated from the conservatory.

Ivasiuk gained the reputation of an artist who worked outside, though not in defiance of, Soviet cultural institutions. His friends and colleagues remembered him as a lone wolf who insisted on personally controlling every step of the creative process.Footnote ²³ He avoided large, official meetings and discussed professional matters in small groups of trusted friends.Footnote ²⁴ He was anxious about his artistic prospects, convinced that performers would not play his songs unless he maintained a personal relationship with each of them.Footnote ²⁵ At the same time, Ivasiuk found solace among influential friends in Soviet cultural institutions who propelled his career. The son of a Soviet Ukrainian writer and university lecturer, he knew members of west Ukraine's creative intelligentsia.Footnote ²⁶ Personal connections at the Chernivtsi television studio were crucial in making Ivasiuk a household name in Ukraine: the composer's friends Vasyl Selezinka and Vasyl Strikhovych recorded the hit songs Chervona Ruta and Vodohrai at the studio for broadcast on all-Ukrainian television in 1970.Footnote ²⁷ Ivasiuk also relied on patronage from Kyiv and Moscow. After the first broadcast of his music on all-Ukrainian television, the Chernivtsi branch of the Amateur Composers’ Association complained that ‘unknown music’ by ‘unknown composers’ should not be showcased to such a wide audience. At this point, republican-level institutions saved the skin of Ivasiuk and his friends from the Chernivtsi television studio: fully expecting an official reprimand, they instead received an award from Ukrainian television in Kyiv.Footnote ²⁸ As his sister Halyna recalled, Ivasiuk rejoiced after the leading Russian composer Aleksandra Pakhmutova praised his work.Footnote ²⁹

There was a distinct Ukrainian dimension to Ivasiuk's status as a well-connected outsider. From 1972, he lived in Lviv and cooperated closely with prominent cultural figures in this largest centre of western Ukraine. He befriended the writer Rostyslav Bratun, head of the Lviv branch of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who wrote the lyrics for several of Ivasiuk's songs.Footnote ³⁰ It was through his west Ukrainian connections that Ivasiuk met prominent Ukrainian cultural figures from Kyiv. For example, Bratun introduced Ivasiuk to the famous actress Nataliya Uzhvii and the opera singer Dmytro Hnatiuk (who both originally hailed from the western borderlands).Footnote ³¹ In west Ukraine, Ivasiuk composed and promoted some of his most important works with little institutional or financial support from the Soviet state. At the request of the poet Bohdan Stelmakh, for example, he wrote the music for the play Mezozoiska istoriia, staged in the small Galician town of Drohobych. As a testament to the importance of informal connections, he refused to cash in on his royalties.Footnote ³²

Ukrainian folk culture helped Ivasiuk develop a unique style that further marked him as an autonomous artist.Footnote ³³ After the death of Stalin, folk music provided a useful tool for bending Soviet cultural norms, with composers drawing on ‘national’ raw material to develop and legitimise increasingly diverse, personal styles. Whereas folk melodies had earlier been ‘“homogenised” into an unambiguous tonal and melodic mold’, the more daring composers of the post-Stalin era ‘emphasised a flexible musical phrase’.Footnote ³⁴ In the world of pop, the use of folk elements was likewise a legitimating strategy for the development of eclectic styles.Footnote ³⁵ Influenced by the classical Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk who used Hutsul folk melodies as the inspiration for his score to Sergei Paradzhanov's surrealist movie Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, as well as by Western rock, jazz and country music, Ivasiuk engaged in experiments that broke with the standardised forms of socialist realism.Footnote ³⁶ He collected (and shared with performers) rare scores of Ukrainian folk songs that had not been published by the Soviet musical establishment.Footnote ³⁷ As Soviet stages became spaces for artists to express personal emotions and not just civic loyalties, Ivasiuk's songs featured syncopation and non-harmonic tones which, distinct from the symmetrical mainstream of socialist realist music, have been described as the key to the ‘touching lyricism’ of his work.Footnote ³⁸

Although professional artists and composers shared Ivasiuk's search for the ‘personal’, his friends and patrons in Soviet cultural institutions interpreted his work as quite distinct from mainstream Soviet culture. They saw Ivasiuk's Ukrainian pop as emotionally authentic precisely because the artist hovered on the margins of officialdom. Leszek Mazepa, a faculty member at the Lviv conservatory who took over Ivasiuk's education after the composer's falling out with Kos-Anatols′kyi, claimed that Ivasiuk's lack of exposure to professional pressures made his early work truly original, adding that the composer gradually lost this unique style by trying to conform to his teachers’ requirements.Footnote ³⁹

By the late 1970s, Ivasiuk's professional struggles went hand-in-hand with personal turmoil that became increasingly visible to those around him. The composer seemed to find personal life in Lviv difficult. Friends who later recounted how they had put pressure on Ivasiuk to get married added, almost in the same breath, that ‘malicious rumours’ about the composer spread shortly after his death, implying perhaps that his bachelor status raised suspicions about just how ‘normal’ he was. Ivasiuk only ever travelled abroad to socialist Poland, but gossip about the riches he had supposedly earned on a tour of Ukrainian diaspora communities in Canada was a source of much unpleasantness. Upon meeting an old Chernivtsi friend, Halyna Tarasiuk, Ivasiuk advised her that she should quickly get out of Chernivtsi in search of a better life, but also warned her not to move to Lviv: ‘You will not survive there!’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ivasiuk was diagnosed with depression at a Lviv psychiatric hospital in 1978.Footnote ⁴¹ Throughout the first few months of 1979, he was active on the Soviet Ukrainian music scene, but some colleagues remembered that he avoided social interactions and had a mental breakdown during a concert.Footnote ⁴² The composer thus acquired the reputation of a misfit who tried but failed to belong.

A Soviet Ukrainian Nation Builder

Yet Ivasiuk was an important part of Soviet public culture during the 1970s. As he sought to abide by mainstream cultural and emotional norms, his Ukrainian-language songs linked Soviet patriotism to deeply personal themes. Like much pop music, Ivasiuk's work made clear distinctions between positive and negative emotions: the message was that the Soviet system facilitated positive feelings like love and protected its citizens from negative emotions such as grief. The black-and-white emotional world of Ivasiuk's pop obscured the kinds of anxieties and uncertainties which characterised his professional and personal life.

Although the 1970s witnessed far-reaching Russification of public life in Ukraine and other non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union, state-sponsored Ukrainian-language culture provided an important source of legitimacy for Brezhnev's regime. Somewhat ironically, the movers and shakers of public culture promoted notions of unity through celebrating the cultures of select non-Russian ethnic groups in the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, Soviet leaders sought to overshadow what they considered subversive memories of the Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Jewish and German past in the western borderlands, creating instead a legible system of Ukrainian cultural references which more easily lent themselves to institutional control.Footnote ⁴³ During the 1970s, Soviet propaganda still mobilised ethnically and geographically defined identities to disarm nationalist critiques of the Soviet Union, to excise dissent as foreign and unpatriotic and to rally citizens against real or imagined threats to the Soviet Union's territorial integrity.Footnote ⁴⁴

In line with these longer-term trends, Ivasiuk's music demarcated Ukraine as a coherent part of a broader Soviet community. Echoing state-sponsored narratives about the 1939 incorporation of the western borderlands into Soviet Ukraine,Footnote ⁴⁵ Ivasiuk expressed the ambition to compose ‘Ukrainian’ music that would bridge east and west Ukrainian musical traditions.Footnote ⁴⁶ In private correspondence, he proudly emphasised that this songs were performed in Lviv as well as in Donetsk.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ivasiuk saw Ukrainian pop as part of the Soviet world of entertainment, aspiring to conquer audiences outside the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Working on a Ukrainian-language song that Nazarii Iaremchuk performed on all-Soviet television in 1979, he requested that Stepan Pushyk replace lyrics which were not immediately recognisable to Russian speakers with words common to both Ukrainian and Russian.Footnote ⁴⁸ The people who promoted Ivasiuk's music were careful to frame it as an expression of the Communist Party's ideology, rather than as an articulation of local identities specific to regions annexed by the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Organising a large, multi-lingual pop festival featuring bands from different Soviet republics in 1972, staff at the Chernivtsi philharmonic emphasised that folk-inspired pop testified to the victory of ‘Leninist nationalities policy’.Footnote ⁴⁹

The attempt to infuse Soviet patriotism with undertones of positive personal emotions was clear in the musical film Chervona Ruta which shot Ivasiuk to fame in 1971. The movie opens at Donetsk train station. About to set off on a trip across Ukraine, a local miner Borys promises a group of friends on the platform to pass east Ukraine's miners’ greetings to west Ukraine's mountains. On the train, Borys meets a group of young women and soon breaks into a romantic, Ukrainian-language song about the industrial landscapes of the Russian-speaking Donbas. Borys is keen to impress Oksana, a young woman played by the famous singer Sofiia Rotaru. Sure enough, the couple fall in love as they hike in the Carpathians and sing folk-inspired songs. Produced in Soviet Ukraine, Chervona Ruta achieved great popularity in other Soviet republics, testifying to the rising influence of Ukrainian musicians from the western borderlands who wrote the lyrics and the music for most songs in the movie.Footnote ⁵⁰ Chervona Ruta marked Ivasiuk as a Soviet Ukrainian composer. It framed his music as part of Soviet culture in the sense that the movie was released by state television and the dialogues were dubbed into Russian for audiences who did not speak Ukrainian. Songs from the film were promoted on the central television programme ‘Song of the Year’ (‘Pesnia Goda’), with Ivasiuk himself performing on the show. Most song lyrics were Ukrainian, but the one Russian song performed at a campsite in the Carpathians made it clear that the ‘language of interethnic communication’ helped spread Soviet camaraderie to the western borderlands. Chervona Ruta helped Ivasiuk make a name for himself as a Ukrainian composer insofar as his music presented Ukraine as a homogenous space stretching from Donetsk to the Carpathians, united by a common language and folk traditions, as well as positive emotions facilitated by the Soviet system. This Soviet image of Ukraine was underpinned by clear hierarchies between the work-dominated, industrial, male east and the personal, pastoral, female west.

Although most of Ivasiuk's work focused on love and other lyrical themes, songs on such sombre themes as Soviet soldiers’ suffering during the Second World War were part of a search ‘for a meaningful way to link deeply personal feelings and experiences with the Soviet system that ostensibly had made them possible’.Footnote ⁵¹ ‘A Song about Mallows’ (‘Pesnia pro Malvy’), released for the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in 1975, was one of his proudest musical accomplishments. Experimenting with lyrics on different themes which he ultimately deemed inappropriate for this touching tune,Footnote ⁵² Ivasiuk finally decided to set the song to Bohdan Hura's poem about a Soviet soldier's death during the Second World War.Footnote ⁵³ The song commemorated the war in Ukrainian and thus adapted Soviet narratives for the context of Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine. Such grounding of a war memory infused Soviet historical narratives with a personal meaning, shifting focus away from the celebration of the (Russian-speaking) state and its institutions. The intimate melody differed from march-like patriotic songs, the accompanying film featured shots of a small Ukrainian cottage and the lyrics focused on the relationship between a dead son and his grieving mother.Footnote ⁵⁴

Ivasiuk's music carried special significance for Soviet youth politics.Footnote ⁵⁵ Young people in Ukraine had a clear preference for foreign music over the Soviet estrada and looked to Moscow and the Russian-language mass media (and, in the western borderlands, to Polish mass media and Polish tourists) to learn about Western culture.Footnote ⁵⁶ Still, Ukrainian pop held its own during the 1970s. The Chernivtsi philharmonic's pop ensemble ‘Red Rue’ (‘Chervona Ruta’), who performed Ivasiuk's songs, brought in substantial profit. In contrast, the philharmonic's large folk song and dance ensemble consumed more funds than it generated.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ivasiuk was clearly aware that his music was supposed to promote happiness and thus foster a sense of commitment to the Soviet project among the youth. He thus strived to avoid any lyrics that could have ‘negative’ connotations for his audience.Footnote ⁵⁸ In a 1973 newspaper interview, he underlined that he wrote explicitly patriotic as well as more lyrical and folk songs to praise the virtues of ‘our joyful, hard-working, life-affirming and proud Soviet youth’.Footnote ⁵⁹

A Lviv Martyr

Despite the composer's contributions to Soviet public culture, it was the image of Ivasiuk as a Ukrainian outsider facing an overbearing bureaucracy that overshadowed memories of Ivasiuk as a Soviet Ukrainian composer. As state controls over cultural production tightened in the late 1970s and the early 1980s and pop music became increasingly Russophone, party authorities alienated many members of the Soviet Ukrainian intelligentsia. For Ivasiuk's relatives, friends and patrons, repressive cultural policies had a particularly immediate dimension following the composer's tragic death. In 1979, party leaders in Lviv launched a vile campaign to control public commemoration of the composer which became enmeshed in broader attempts to crack down on non-conformist cultural expression under Iurii Andropov.Footnote ⁶⁰

The local authorities in Lviv anticipated that Ivasiuk's premature death would provoke a mass outpouring of grief and raise troubling questions about his professional and personal struggles. They consequently made every effort to ensure that he not be celebrated as an outsider repressed by the Soviet state, subjecting the composer's parents to a brutal bureaucracy that displayed shocking insensitivity to familial love and grief. The post-mortem was conducted without the family's approval and Ivasiuk's mother was called in to identify the body after it had been cut open. Arriving from Chernivtsi, the composer's father demanded to view the body again only to face a barrage of insults from the Lviv public prosecutor: ‘Take him to hell and look at him for the next one hundred years for all I care!’. When Ivasiuk's parents returned to the morgue one more time, they were forced at first to wait for two hours and were then subjected to long questioning about their son's disappearance right there by the body. The composer's father believed that this was a deliberate strategy aimed at gauging how they would commemorate their son when they were at their most vulnerable. In his account, a middle-aged man who introduced himself as a legal counsellor, but was likely a KGB officer, made it clear that the family were not to attract attention to Ivasiuk's tragic death: ‘Now look at me . . . There won't be any talk about it, get it? Otherwise you'll have us to deal with’.Footnote ⁶¹ For the next eleven years, the Ivasiuks were not allowed to erect a monument at their son's grave.Footnote ⁶²

Despite these efforts, Ivasiuk became a focus for members of the local intelligentsia, university students and other residents of Lviv to celebrate Ukrainian culture outside party-approved channels. As William Risch describes in detail, the composer's funeral turned into a massive event, with some 50,000 people in attendance. Ivasiuk's friends, including Rostyslav Bratun and Roman Kudlyk, read poems that ‘equated Ivasiuk's death with a great loss for Ukraine’. Reflecting Ivasiuk's popularity beyond the creative intelligentsia, taxi drivers offered to transport mourners to the Lychakiv cemetery free of charge.Footnote ⁶³ Although Ivasiuk had never been explicitly anti-Soviet, at least not in any public forums, proponents of Ukrainian nationalism defined in opposition to the Soviet state also sought to appropriate him for their purposes. On 12 June 1979, Petro and Vasyl Sichko, who had previously been convicted for ‘nationalist activities’, organised a meeting by Ivasiuk's grave where they accused the Soviet regime of having killed Ivasiuk and raised slogans glorifying OUN-UPA far-right opposition to Soviet rule during and after the Second World War. This was the most radical way of framing Ivasiuk's memory, and the Sichkos were both given prison sentences.Footnote ⁶⁴

The party did not so much try to suppress the memory of Ivasiuk but rather to control the narrative. Against the Ivasiuks’ wishes, the authorities sent the political agitator V. Antonenko to tour west Ukrainian universities and factories with party-approved lectures about the late composer.Footnote ⁶⁵ Local apparatchiks in Lviv saw all spontaneous ways of commemorating Ivasiuk as a threat to their authority. They thus organised compulsory Communist Youth League meetings on the day of Ivasiuk's funeral to prevent students from attending – those who disobeyed faced expulsion and had their stipends cut. Party bosses also confronted the creative intelligentsia who, in their assessment, had spoken out of turn: they thus removed Bratun from the leadership of the local writers’ union.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ivasiuk's grave became a symbolic site of confrontation between Lvivians keen to celebrate the life of a Ukrainian outsider and the local party authorities who did not want Ivasiuk to be remembered as anything other than a Soviet composer.Footnote ⁶⁷

A Symbol of Perestroika

With the onset of Gorbachev's glasnost policies in 1986, members of the Soviet Ukrainian intelligentsia who had helped sustain Ivasiuk's career in the 1970s regained control over public portrayals of the composer. They capitalised on his reputation as an outsider to publicly distinguish themselves from the political leadership of Soviet Ukraine. By the late 1980s, the composer's father, as well as his friends – including the writer Rostyslav Bratun and the journalist Ivan Lepsha – evoked memories of Ivasiuk-the-misfit to refashion themselves as champions of change. In collaboration with the Ukrainian Komsomol leadership and students from the Kyiv conservatory, they launched the Volodymyr Ivasiuk Chervona Ruta festival in 1989 (‘Chernova Ruta’ or ‘Red Rue’ was the title of Ivasiuk's most popular song and the movie which made him famous in the early 1970s).Footnote ⁶⁸ Naming the festival in honour of the composer, the organisers claimed that Ivasiuk could inspire new generations to create and consume Ukrainian-language music distinct from mainstream Soviet entertainment in the range of emotions that it expressed. The festival was conceived not only as a way to commemorate Ivasiuk's despair but also as an opportunity for younger generations to express uncertainty, anger and irreverence.

The conflict between local party officials in western Ukraine and Ivasiuk's friends and relatives exploded into the open in the second half of the 1980s. From 1986, Mykhailo Ivasiuk took a leading role in organising public events devoted to his son, with no support from (and perhaps despite obstacles created by) the political leadership of Soviet Ukraine. The Komsomol and other Soviet organisations engaged in public commemorations of Ivasiuk from 1988, while newly-established organisations that pushed the limits of acceptable cultural expression (the Lion Society and the Ukrainian Cultural Fund) promoted the image of the composer as a Ukrainian hero from 1989.Footnote ⁶⁹ Mykhailo Ivasiuk propagated the notion that his son had been repressed by the Soviet state. In a 1989 newspaper interview, for example, he claimed that performances of his son's music in Soviet mass media and concert halls had been banned or at least severely curtailed in the first few years after his death.Footnote ⁷⁰ These ideas found fertile ground among Ivasiuk's fans in Ukraine. The official press organ of the Soviet Ukrainian union of writers Literaturna Ukraina received letters from readers who, reflecting a new public interest in the history of terror, called for the ‘rehabilitation’ of the composer. As the editors explained, ‘we were surprised [because Ivasiuk] did not experience repressions during his life . . . and his songs are still played on the radio’.Footnote ⁷¹ The magazine did not otherwise shy away from raising troubling questions about the Soviet past and present in the late 1980s and its scepticism regarding the repression narrative should not be seen as an attempt by the conservative establishment to preserve the status quo. Rather, it testified to how unclear the circumstances surrounding Ivasiuk's death remained. Arguably, it further signalled that Ivasiuk's fans conceived of repression in broader terms than those outlined by the perestroika-era political and cultural leaders: Ivasiuk had not experienced terror or imprisonment, but he was a misfit at odds with the late socialist emphasis on self-realisation and happiness.Footnote ⁷²

Ivasiuk turned into a powerful symbol of emotional rebellion. In 1989, the composer's sleepy hometown of Chernivtsi hosted a large popular music festival named in his honour. It was the culmination of numerous contests for pop, rock and guitar ballad performers from across Soviet Ukraine who sang in the Ukrainian language. Ivasiuk's friends and patrons saw the promotion of Ukrainian popular music as a search for originality and a means to escape excessive state controls over emotional expression. In Rostyslav Bratun's vision, Ivasiuk was a suitable patron of Chervona Ruta because he had been an ‘original’ composer whose artistic endeavours, fuelled by ‘painful doubt’, provided a source of inspiration for young people in the late 1980s. Bratun argued that composers and lyricists inspired by Ivasiuk were to replace ‘pseudo-Ukrainian’ sounds that only encouraged listeners to dance with new types of popular music reflecting the independent spirit of Ukraine (samobutnist′).Footnote ⁷³ The notion of an ‘authentically Ukrainian’ culture was divisive and unclear, but Bratun's emphasis on innovation in music suggested that the festival would help discover unconventional, irreverential singers.

Organisers of the Chervona Ruta festival evoked Ivasiuk's name to launch an attack on Soviet Ukraine's cultural hierarchy and the emotional norms it promoted. Justifying the need to hold a festival for amateurs in November 1988, Anton Zhadan contrasted Ivasiuk's artistic spirit with the oppressive ‘moral-psychological climate’ of the 1970s created by an ‘ill-meaning narrow group of culture officials’ out of touch with Ukraine's multi-million audiences.Footnote ⁷⁴ These views, though often expressed in mainstream media, had strong undertones of dissent. They were inspired in part by the famous dissident Ivan Dziuba's January 1988 essay ‘Do We Comprehend National Culture as a Single Whole?’, reflecting widespread disappointment with the slow progress of glasnost' in Ukraine, where the Brezhnev-era leader Volodymyr Shcherbyts′kyi still called the shots in the late 1980s. As members of the Soviet Union of Composers bemoaned the fact that new types of entertainment furthered the ‘social myth about the eternal animosity of generations’,Footnote ⁷⁵ the festival in Chernivtsi aimed to give voice to young performers who, like Ivasiuk in the 1970s, felt stifled by the musical establishment. While some organisers hoped that Chervona Ruta would simply popularise Ivasiuk's music from the 1970s, this approach was widely seen as anachronistic. The dominant view among supporters of the festival such as the rock musician and the namesake grandson of the early twentieth-century Ukrainian composer, Kyrylo Stetsenko, held that Chervona Ruta should encourage original, modern, ‘surprising and even extravagant’ artistic endeavours.Footnote ⁷⁶

While members of the intelligentsia and leaders of the Komsomol mobilised memories of Ivasiuk to portray themselves as champions of change, youth rebellion at Chervona Ruta went further than Ivasiuk's friends and patrons had anticipated. The widespread use of humour and pastiche meant that Ukrainian culture on the festival's stages resembled Dmitry Prigov's or Ilya Kabakov's postmodernist Russian poetry more than Ivasiuk's pop from the 1970s.Footnote ⁷⁷ The band Snake Brothers (Braty Hadiukiny), looking distinctively more dishevelled than mainstream pop singers, performed a satirical song about the Sovietisation of western Ukraine in 1946, told through the prism of a hapless man called Mykola who lost his house after a bomb he had kept in the attic for forty years finally exploded. The band adopted an unconventional approach to a theme that carried enormous importance to both the Soviet state and Ukrainian nationalists who rejected Soviet power, to some extent distancing themselves from both political master narratives. Still, they ended their performance with a slogan associated with the anti-Soviet nationalist resistance: ‘Glory to Ukraine’ (‘Slava Ukraini’).Footnote ⁷⁸ This music stood worlds apart from Ivasiuk's work which celebrated Soviet victories in the Second World War or else focused on non-political, lyrical themes. Whereas most Russian rockers of the perestroika era avoided political statements in favour of ‘spiritual’ lyrics,Footnote ⁷⁹ innovative Ukrainian-language rock at Chervona Ruta helped to undermine the Soviet Union's claims to have protected and promoted Ukrainian culture.Footnote ⁸⁰ The artist with the stage name Little Sis Vika (Sestrychka Vika) performed the song ‘Shame’ (‘Han′ba’) which featured distorted motives of a traditional folk song about the Cossack Morozenko's death at the hands of the Tatars, as well as lyrics juxtaposing official Soviet notions of Russo-Ukrainian friendship with citizens’ indifference towards Ukrainian cultural rights. Vika's look broke with Soviet norms of femininity. Playing with the Cossack theme, she discredited a myth which Soviet leaders mobilised to suggest that the Soviet Union provided avenues for Ukrainian cultural self-realisation.Footnote ⁸¹ While artists like Sestrychka Vika and Braty Hadiukiny used abstract lyrics and non-harmonious melodies to question Soviet master narratives, other performers expressed more direct political criticism. The linguistic Russification of Ukraine and aggressive secularisation policies of the Soviet state were their favourite targets.Footnote ⁸² In the aftermath of Chernobyl, Ukraine was also portrayed as a victim of central Soviet environmental politics.Footnote ⁸³ The Chervona Ruta festival transgressed late Soviet emotional norms, with artists expressing a sense of frustration, anger, cynicism and even amusement at the absurdities of Soviet life. At the same time, combining diverse musical genres, the festival reflected not only (or primarily) a set of subcultural identities but also aspirations to craft a new mainstream Ukrainian culture.

A National Hero for Independent Ukraine

During the early 1990s, prominent cultural activists continued to evoke memories of the composer to promote Ukrainian-language music after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the notion that Ukrainian-language entertainment could express emotions suppressed during the late Soviet period was less prominent in the 1990s than it had been in 1989. As the Volodymyr Ivasiuk Chernova Ruta festival moved eastwards to Zaporizhzia in 1991, Donetsk in 1993 and Crimea in 1995, the organisers placed more emphasis on ‘educating’ east Ukrainian audiences than on questioning political and cultural authority. Ivasiuk lost currency as a symbol of rebellion against state-led attempts to limit the range of emotions that could be expressed in public.

For some members of the Ukrainian elites in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Ivasiuk's music helped frame Ukrainian identities in Soviet terms. To the frustration of Chervona Ruta festival organisers, political and commercial players who celebrated close Russo-Ukrainian ties appropriated Ivasiuk's image for their own purposes. Immediately after independence, members of the Volodymyr Ivasiuk Foundation, supported publicly by the Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk, spoke of ‘friendship’ between Eastern Slavs.Footnote ⁸⁴ They enjoyed clear political and institutional advantages over the organisers of Chervona Ruta.Footnote ⁸⁵

At the same time, members of the Soviet cultural elite from the 1970s used memories of Ivasiuk to portray the composer (and themselves) as dissidents who had made an important contribution to independence. Ironically, as Ivasiuk's biography during the early 1990s was sanitised to fit the image of an anti-Soviet Ukrainian patriot, he increasingly resembled a typical socialist realist literary protagonist. Mykhailo Ivasiuk fondly remembered his son as an idealistic young man with bright blue eyes (a typical socialist realist device) who fought injustice in the small, closed off world of west Ukraine. Similarly, Ivan Lepsha relayed the views of Ivasiuk's friends and acquaintances who spoke about the composer as an uncompromising fighter for Ukrainian independence who struggled against malicious schoolteachers, local party apparatchiks and professional composers dead bent on suppressing the Ukrainian national movement. In his endeavour to become the ‘Ukrainian Schubert’, they suggested, Ivasiuk faced prosaic obstacles represented by complacent bureaucrats, as well as dramatic challenges posed by mysterious people seeking to murder him.Footnote ⁸⁶ The imagined anti-Soviet Ivasiuk of the early 1990s learned from older mentor figures like his father, as well as Ukrainian cultural heroes from the pre-Soviet past such as the composers Sydir Vorobkevich and Mykola Lysenko.Footnote ⁸⁷ These ways of commemorating Ivasiuk left little room for a rational debate about Ivasiuk's life or Ukrainian culture more broadly. They also effectively overshadowed memories of Ivasiuk's emotional turmoil which undermined the image of a courageous, determined and straightlaced Ukrainian national hero. In his father's memoirs, the idea was that Ivasiuk ultimately transcended his selfish desires and achieved ‘enlightenment’ which allowed him to manifest the ‘genius of the nation’ and to recognise Brezhnev and the Soviet state as ‘enemies of Ukraine’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Post-Soviet narratives of Ivasiuk's life suggested that his world had been free from doubt and weakness. During the late 1980s and the 1990s, Ivan Lepsha was adamant that the composer had not in fact suffered from depression (and only checked himself into hospital to obtain a medical excuse for missed classes at university). The suggestion was that the party authorities fabricated Ivasiuk's illness to fake his suicide. Lepsha even publicised the views of a fortune teller who ‘confirmed’ that Ivasiuk had been killed.Footnote ⁸⁹ He also reported suggestions that that the KGB planted transmitting devices in Ivasiuk's brain to make him hear voices and thus induce schizophrenia.Footnote ⁹⁰ Similarly, in an apparent attempt to make the bachelor Ivasiuk seem more ‘normal’, the composer's sister painted a desexualised image of a young romantic secretly in love with his ‘pure and rustic’ female friend, while Ivasiuk's friend and lyricist Stepan Pushyk stressed that Ivasiuk's blue eyes made him ‘popular with women’ and suggested that he would have got married had he lived longer.Footnote ⁹¹

Those who cultivated the memory of Ivasiuk as an anti-Soviet hero also warmed up to the idea of state involvement in the sphere of popular culture and entertainment. During the early 1990s, the Volodymyr Ivasiuk Chervona Ruta festival failed to attract artists or large audiences in predominantly Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine.Footnote ⁹² In response, Ukrainian journalists supportive of the festival promoted the notion that popular culture was a political project which needed state support. This was a gradual process fuelled by growing disappointment with market reform. In the late 1980s, while the head of the Soviet composer's union Tikhon Khrennikov still condemned the ‘bourgeois-commercial show-business machine’,Footnote ⁹³ the famous and controversial performer Taras Petrynenko looked at private investors and the newly formed cooperatives to free artistic production from excessive state controls.Footnote ⁹⁴ As self-financing of state-owned enterprises became the catchword of Gorbachev's economic reforms in the late 1980s, Chervona Ruta would advertise Ukraine's large industrial enterprises and collective farms in return for financial support.Footnote ⁹⁵ Were it not for Canadian Ukrainian private impresario agencies, Molod′ Ukrainy emphasised, Ukraine's artists would be completely dependent on the Moscow-based record label Melodiia and the impresario agency Goskontsert which treated them as second-class artists.Footnote ⁹⁶

Although the early 1990s editions of Chervona Ruta were still sponsored by individuals from among the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as companies seeking to conquer new markets in Ukraine,Footnote ⁹⁷ the festival reflected the first wave of frustration with economic reform. As in Poland, where ‘private presses [created] opportunities for bands that otherwise would not have had the opportunity to record’, but also ‘brought a new sort of restriction in the form of complicated contracts designed to extract profit from musicians’, Ukrainian performers during the early 1990s found that the capitalist music industry limited the ‘small spaces of freedom’ which the socialist system with its inefficient oversight had offered.Footnote ⁹⁸ One of the winners of the first Chervona Ruta, Andryi Mykolaichuk, warned other performers against the pitfalls of singing for profit. He cancelled his tour of Canada, explaining that the organisers imposed a hectic schedule on its contracted artists.Footnote ⁹⁹ Chervona Ruta's reliance on foreign investors caused distinct unease by 1991.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Frustration with the outcomes of market reform went hand-in-hand with calls for affirmative action. Facing powerful competition and struggling to win over audiences, activists seeking to strengthen cultural boundaries between post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia saw an important role for the state in managing popular culture in the early 1990s. The journalist Iryna Lukoms′ka, who was invited to join the jury in 1993 after publicly criticising the 1991 edition of the festival for its failure to capture mass audiences, called for Kyiv to grant Chervona Ruta the status of a state festival, to introduce tax breaks for festival sponsors and to found music schools to train a new generation of Ukrainian artists. In the Ukrainian-language press, she also suggested that songs from Chervona Ruta be promoted at school discos and on the state railways, where music was played over loudspeakers.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This stood in contrast to the anti-statist sentiments of Chervona Ruta 1989 and rather reflected Soviet-era notions of pop as a state-sponsored identity building project.

Cultural activists keen to promote Ivasiuk's music and to cultivate his memory in the late 1980s and the early 1990s viewed popular culture through the same prism as the political and cultural elites of the 1970s. In his reincarnation as an anti-Soviet national hero, Ivasiuk resembled one-dimensional socialist realist literary protagonists committed to grand ideological projects and deferential of older generations. Placing Ivasiuk among other Ukrainian national heroes, organisers of Chervona Ruta reduced Ukrainian-language music to resistance to the Soviet state and Russification and overshadowed the image of the insecure, probing and irreverent artist which fuelled a search for ‘original’ music in 1989. In this sense, Ukrainian culture framed in anti-Soviet and anti-Russian terms left little room for the articulation of emotional ambiguity or difference during the early 1990s.