Statement regarding our concert in Moscow

 On July 23^rd, we (Rioteer, Franz Fjödor and Kakawaka) played a concert in Moscow, which didn’t really work out the way we hoped for. In this statement we will give our view on what happened and how we feel about it. We have been used and misled by an organization called the Eurasian Youth Movement whose nationalist political goals and strategies we do not share in any way. We want to distance ourselves from them as an organization and point out how they try to lure young people into their organization by putting up concerts.

 We have been invited by our friend Philipp Volokitin to take part in a tour through Russia and the Baltic states. Our Moscow show was supposed to be located at Vinzavod, which is a very well known venue in the Moscow art scene. We were told that they were worried about their art getting damaged so they moved the gig to a related gallery where they do concerts more often. Our friend Philipp Volokitin neither saw any harm in the organizers of the evening or their reasons to put up a concert with us as their guests nor in the change of location. When we arrived at the venue he was as surprised as we were to see political statements and symbols which we didn't know the meaning of.

 We had our doubts at first and decided to confront the people involved in the organisation of the concert. We asked them about their political motives and the meaning of their symbols. We were told that the symbols stood for freedom and chaos linked to the left wing movement. They described their ideas and ideology as anti-globalist / anarchic and that they were internationalists trying to unite Russia, Europe and the Asian continent in further collaboration. Besides that they noted that they were not a political movement, but more a philosophical action front. They assured us that they were neither racist nor anti-semitic, fascist, nazi or anything close to that and that they weren't extreme left wing or right wing and that they and their leaders weren't taking extreme political actions. They further claimed that the venue was a place for them to simply have fun and that the political aspects of their organization were not really taken seriously here anyway.

After a thorough discussion we concluded that there was not much to be afraid of and started preparing our performances although it felt awkward. The people who came to see the show gave us no signs of being interested in any form of political or philosophical matter of what the location was about. After our shows, which went really well and got a good response from the crowd we talked to some people, drank some beers and had a good time. But after a while we got more and more clues that there might be more going on underneath the harmless image the Eurasian Youth Movement tried to present us. In the streets around the venue we asked more people about the organisation and what they knew about it and the stories they were telling us started to get us worried once again. A young guy who lives in the building the venue was located in told us about them being white supremacists and anti-Semites who were looking forward to the rise of a new Russia, based on Stalinist ideas. When we asked the person to say this on camera (for a small documentary we're making about our tour) he became very reluctant to say anything negative about the organisation as he didn't want to be the source of rumours.

Still confused we got home by taxi and asked our host (who is a spokesman for the Eurasian Youth Movement) some things about Russia nowadays and how people look to history. The answers we got were all about glorifying Stalin, 'the great Soviet era' and the return of a great Russia with a great leader. Asking for his opinion on all the killed people by Stalin he waved it away and said it was just not true.

When we finally were able to do some internet research on our own on Eurasianism in Russia and its background we found some very disturbing things. First of all, the Eurasian Youth Movement is directly linked to a political party. This party has strong connections to extreme nationalist right-wing organizations in different countries, such as Le Pen’s Front National in France. Secondly their leader Alexander Dugin has repeatedly written for anti-Semitic magazines and newspapers and has openly glorified Fascism in Germany, saying the Third Reich was founded on strong ideas which were just not executed well enough. Furthermore

Dugin stated that Stalin was the true founder of Russia and the builder of the nation. To Dugin the Stalin era serves as an example of the greatness of Russia which he is trying to re-achieve.

Thirdly we found that the Eurasian Party does political commentary on current events on their website. On the day of our arrival in Russia Karadzic was arrested in Serbia and two days later, when we were visiting the Eurasian Party’s website we found an extensive article proclaiming Karadzic the “True Hero of the Serbian people,” lauding his political achievements and again diminishing his war crimes. On top of that we found that parties such as the Eurasian Youth Movement deliberately organize concerts to get young people involved in their organization. It is tragic to witness  that pulling off a concert in Moscow can be so difficult that the open arms of this kind of organisation are being accepted to get something to happen. This seems to be exactly the plan of the Eurasian Movement: getting kids into their venue where they then try to win them for their cause by giving them the same vague clues of what they stand for as they gave us.

We feel we've been misled and used by the Eurasian Youth Movement. If we had known what we know now we NEVER would have played there, because we strongly disagree with the political agenda and tactics of the Eurasian Youth Movement and the organization behind it. We hope that this statement also provides a warning to other artists who may be confronted with similar situations in the future.

Riga, July 29^th 2008,

Bas Welling, Wouter Jaspers, Christoph Petermann