"And here's Putin, he's a complete flesh and blood spawn of cops and gopniks. I knew that at first sight. As soon as Putin was inaugurated in March 2000, I had a column in Novaya Gazeta in Russian, it was called "Neznayka in Zazerkale", so my editorial column dedicated to Putin was called "Ugly Growth", which means too many ugly people. Since then, my opinion has only grown stronger and stronger. I have never hidden my contempt for Putin and his regime, and I actively participated in the events of 2011-2012 - I was constantly speaking at rallies. At the last rally in Bolotnaya Square in February 2012, I composed and sang a song. This rally started with me singing a song I had written myself called "Putin's gang on the cavalcade, Sha-Pu-Na-Na-Na". It was a hit at the time, by the way, quite a popular song. And so, of course, I began to have minor problems: of course, I couldn't have my own TV program on the big channels, but I still had TV programs on the smaller channels, on Style TV and something else.
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"Well, I had an absolutely glamorous career in the 90s. I became a TV boss, first at the Rossiya channel, where I was in charge of music, and then at the NTV channel. I had my own TV shows, I hosted them, I got all sorts of prizes and awards, and at the same time I founded the Russian edition of Playboy magazine, I was editor-in-chief there, I hosted radio shows. I did a lot of things. The 1990s was a time of unlimited possibilities, you could try anything. Of course it was a very dangerous time: on the one hand you could make a billion, on the other hand you could fall into a ditch with a bullet in your head, and the odds were about the same. But it was an interesting time. I don't consider myself a Yeltsin fan, though. Simply because I think most of the nastiness that started happening in Russia in the twenty-first century under Putin was mostly laid down under Yeltsin. That is, the shooting of parliament from tanks in 1993, political repression, and Yeltsin's rigged election in 1996. It is, of course, the horrific bloody colonial war in Chechnya. Putin has simply continued, deepened and developed all this, but it all started under Yeltsin. Then, with the early 1990s, I became a political commentator - I started writing about politics for the first time. That's when my friend Derk Sauer, a Dutch media adventurer, started The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper in Moscow, and invited me to write columns there. And I wrote a column in The Moscow Times for more than ten years, which was called the Metro, and it had everything: social life, social life, culture, but also a lot of politics.
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"First I was summoned to the chairman of the Pioneer Company, who told me what a bastard I was for engaging in propaganda. Then the most interesting thing happened - they summoned my parents. It was outside of school hours. I remember it was in the evening. They called my dad and mom, they came after work. The headmaster was there, several other people: the head teacher, the head of the school's Komsomol organization, the chairman of the Pioneer Group Council (a lady of non-Pioneer age). And the picture was like this: dad, mom, me and all these people. They started telling my father and mother what a bastard I was, how badly I had been brought up and how they could have overlooked such an anti-Soviet person. They were already asking questions and saying: You, Kim Lvovich and Rufina Nikolayevna, are Party members, how could you let this happen? And I actually didn't mind at all, I even felt good - I felt like a hero who had carried out a subversive action. I felt good about it. But my parents felt terrible. Horrible in some unbelievable way, because they were standing there red-faced, looking at the floor, and they couldn't say anything. Why? Because if they had said honestly, "Our son is repeating what we say at home, we also think that the intervention in Czechoslovakia is a crime. We also believe, and we don't even believe, but we know for sure, that there was no counter-revolution. That all those Brezhnevs, Pravda, TASS, etc. - that they are all insidiously lying." But they couldn't say that. Because if they had said it, that would have been the end of it - goodbye to Party membership, goodbye to good work, that is, goodbye to our whole present life."¨
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Artemij Troitsky was born on June 16, 1955 in Yaroslavl, the former USSR. From 1963-1968 he attended the embassy school in Prague, at a time when his father, Kiva Lvovich Majdanik, a Latin American historian, was working for the journal Questions of Peace and Socialism. In Prague, he became interested in Western rock music, for which he was expelled from the Pioneers in the Soviet school. His father supported Alexander Dubček’s reforms and the family was returned to Moscow in March 1968. Artemy told his classmates at the Moscow school that there was no counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia, that NATO was not on the border at the time. He was expelled from Pioneer again. Artemij studied at the Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics, and was also interested in Western and underground Russian rock music. From 1972, he held discos at Moscow State University with lectures on Western music until the Komsomol committee cancelled the discos in 1974. With a share of necessary self-censorship, he began writing articles about Western bands for the youth magazine Rovesnik and eventually for all the major newspapers of the USSR, making him the only Soviet rock journalist of his kind. He used his fame to organize concerts and festivals of Russian underground music in youth homes and student cafes. In 1984 he was blacklisted and his articles stopped being published, he was fired from his job at the Institute of Art History and was not allowed to defend his doctoral thesis. In the 1980s he organized “flats” - underground concerts of rock musicians of the USSR - in his and his friends’ apartments, thanks to which he knew all the talented musicians. With the advent of Gorbachev’s perestroika, he became a sought-after TV and radio presenter, headed the music editorial office of the Central Television and was the editor of the Russian Playboy. His book on the Soviet underground, Back to the USSR, was published in England in 1987. In 2000 he became a political commentator and for ten years wrote a column in The Moscow Times. Since 2002 he has taught at Moscow State University in the Department of Music Journalism. He has been critical of Putin’s rise to power. He criticised Putin’s rise to power and wrote a column ‘Ugly Power’ for the popular newspaper Novaya Gazeta during the president’s inauguration. In 2011-2013, he was one of the organisers of the protests in Bolotnaya Square. He wrote the musical manifesto of the protests “Putin’s gang on the dungeons”. His programs were pulled from central TV channels, his teaching activities at Moscow State University were censored, which forced him to resign. He emigrated from Russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He lives with his family in Estonia, lectures at universities in England, Finland and Estonia, and hosts an original programme on Radio Liberty.
Translated by automatic translator (DeepL)
