During the 2013–2014 Maidan Revolution, she sang the Ukrainian anthem nightly to motivate protestors through the cold winter nights, and played John Lennon’s “Imagine” on the upright piano (painted yellow and blue, the colors of the Ukrainian flag) that had become a symbol of that revolution’s somewhat quirky creative energy (see Figure 1.1). Billing herself as a “humanitarian pop star,” Ruslana has never again reached the meteoric heights of fame that accompanied her 2004 ESC win, yet she remains a permanent fixture at the nexus of Ukrainian cultural policy, activism, and popular music.
From her first success as a “wild dancer” influenced by the traditions of the Hutsul minority of Western Ukraine, to her later rebranding as a social activist invested in “wild energy,” the “wild projects” mirror contemporaneous changes in Ukrainian coalitional politics, as earlier post-Soviet ideologies of ethno-nationalism gave way to new ideas about citizenly belonging within the state, including—in some corners of Ukrainian society—an emergent idea of civic nationhood (Plokhii 2016). Early in her career, as Ruslana reconfigured the source of her Wildness from a concrete local language attributed to Hutsuls to an aspirational category that dissolved specifics and let a more inclusive notion of Wildness stand in, Wildness morphed from a term of ethnic intimacy, to marketable auto-exoticism, to one of eco-conscious infrastructural and civic activism. This transformation maps onto broader Ukrainian political concerns following the Orange Revolution, as revolutionary fatigue and disenchantment with the revolutionary government’s failures paved the way for the emergent civic-oriented and pragmatic sovereign imaginary that would eventually come to motivate the Maidan’s politics of dignity.
FIGURE 1.1 Ruslana Lyzhychko plays the blue and yellow Maidan piano during a concert organized for Maidan activists. Photo by Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto/Sipa USA via AP Images.
This chapter follows Ruslana’s transformation from a marginal figure of post-Soviet Ukrainian estrada to a global “ethno-pop” (etno-pop) star, and then to a political activist with ambitions to transform state policy and redefine Ukrainian futurity. I observe this transformation through an examination of three songs that mark this trajectory: “Znaiu Ya” (Знаю Я / “I Know”) (2002), the ESC winner “Wild Dances” (2004), and “Wild Energy” (2008). However, rather than represent three disjunct nodes in this pop star’s career arc, I elucidate how the hybrid influences present in “Znaiu Ya” and “Wild Dances”—despite the discourse of ethnic purity that marked them—anticipated the project of civic belonging announced by “Wild Energy” by drawing together diverse national myths, including those of Scythian primordialism and post-Soviet categories of femininity. This chapter also returns questions of representation in Ruslana’s Hutsulian Project to Hutsuls themselves, allowing them to evaluate Wildness on their own terms.
In this chapter, I introduce the term “ethnic intimacy” as a minor variant of Michael Herzfeld’s influential coinage “cultural intimacy,” in part to emphasize that the utilization of Hutsul motifs represents a regional collective space that overlaps with ethnic identification but bleeds across state borders; this distinguishes it from the nationally bounded collective space within which cultural intimacy is articulated. In this example, Hutsul ethnic intimacy is nested within the national imagined space of cultural intimacy, though it also exists in latent tension to the state’s political sovereignty, since Hutsuls also inhabit villages in modern-day Romania. Like cultural intimacy, the space of ethnic intimacy is also one in which stereotypes operate as the identifying codes of communities. In the Ukrainian case, the historical uses of “Hutsul-ness” have particular resonance as a kind of post-Austro-Hungarian imperial formation of the “authentic folk,” and therefore have little in common with other regions of Ukraine that were shaped through different imperial regimes. That said, Hutsul-ness becomes deployed as a form of (national) cultural intimacy—when the borderland “folk” became elevated to the status of national symbol, as happened in Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” performance on the Eurovision stage.
This chapter assesses how Wildness has been defined by Ruslana in shifting post-Soviet sovereign imaginaries that draw upon nested and varied histories of postcolonial representation and geopolitical affiliation. Through Ruslana’s controversial use of tropes of exoticism, we observe how Wildness becomes metonymic for shifting sovereign imaginaries between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions, that is, Wildness as sovereign imaginary. First, Wildness is represented in the service of a vision of Ukrainian statehood rooted in ethno-nationalism (drawn in particular from the exotic representation of Hutsuls and later exported to both domestic and international audiences). Then, in a later iteration, Wildness becomes a trope of wilderness and eco-activism rooted in a civically minded pragmatic patriotism. Through her wild music, Ruslana, the pop-star-cum-political-activist, dreams of distinct visions of statehood. She enacts these visions of statehood in part upon her own body as she toys with self-representations in extreme gendered, sexualized, and cyborgish modalities. The etno-pop celebrity’s public and commodified body, then, becomes a generative site through which the sovereignty of a body becomes bound to broader political sovereignties.
To begin, I return to the premiere of the 2002 megaklip of the song “Znaiu Ya” (“I Know”).
IN THE KNOW
In 2002, Ruslana’s guests to the newly renovated downtown cinema in L’viv were treated to back-to-back screenings of the five-minute megaklip of “Znaiu Ya” (“I Know”), the first single released as part of her Hutsulian Project (and later, the first track on the 2003 Ukrainian-language album Dyki Tantsi). The evening also included a live performance by a trio of Hutsul musicians who had traveled from the mountains that day, a performance by Ruslana herself, and speeches by local politicians and tastemakers. Attendees were told that the evening marked a trailblazing achievement by Ruslana and for Ukraine: as the biggest budget endeavor to date in Ukrainian popular music at the time, the “Znaju Ya” video brought in two hundred fifty specialists from seven companies in four countries (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Finland), who utilized state-of-the-art camera and special effects. The video was the first Ukrainian cinematic product filmed on color 35 mm film in high definition and adhering to the sonic standards of Digital Dolby. The project included a fleet of ten helicopters, and at least one Hummer. Scenes were filmed in the Carpathian and Crimean Mountains, and in Belarus. In the village of Kosmach, the team filmed a “folk” Hutsul wedding. (The press release noted that it is “interesting, that the Hutsuls, their costumes, and the wedding itself are real,” though of course the locals I spoke to disputed this account.) Press highlighted Ruslana’s daredevil stunts (scaling rocky crags to get an “unparalleled vista”) and sense of innovation (such as the rock concert stage built into a waterfall, where Ruslana performed “without any security”). One thousand people reportedly traveled to witness the concert-on-the-waterfall.
Years before her victory at Eurovision, the hullabaloo around the advent of the Hutsulian Project marked a substantial shift in Ruslana’s status among the pantheon of post-Soviet Ukrainian popular musicians. Born in 1973 in L’viv, Ruslana Lyzhychko completed her studies in classical piano and conducting at the Lysenko Academy of Music in L’viv. In 1996, she was awarded first place at the Slavic Bazaar music competition in Belarus with the performance of the folk song “Oi Letily, Dyki Husy” (which was made famous throughout the Soviet world in the 1970s folk-pop rendition performed by Nina Matvienko). Ruslana’s first album, Myt’ Vesny (A Moment of Spring, released in 1998) contained small ethnic gestures such as melodies played on sopilka (wooden recorder), but mostly aligned itself stylistically with the saccharine aesthetic of Soviet estrada pop ballads. It was not until 2002, with the release of “Znaiu Ya” and her Hutsulian Project, that Ruslana differentiated herself from scores of other singers reared on Soviet-style popular forms.
The hit single “Znaiu Ya”