“The DJ should be sent to the front, the person who ordered it should be sent to the mines,” “Burn down this Nazi cafe!”, “The person who ordered it is probably already in Kyiv, at her workplace in the GUR,” “Why haven't they issued a warrant for the arrest of everyone who danced to it?”, “Cut off all their legs”...

These are comments from subscribers to the Telegram channel “Crimean SMERSH” under a post about a scandal that occurred recently at the Peschane resort near Bakhchisaray. At the local club “Atmosfera,” one of the visitors asked the DJ to play Serdyuchka's song “Gulyanochka.” The entire disco danced joyfully to “Ukraine has not yet died, if we dance like this,” but the very next day, Crimea's chief informer, Alexander Talipov, found out about it. It is after reports on his information dump “Crimean SMERSH” that the FSB comes to Crimeans who are disloyal to the occupiers. That's what happened this time. The club's director was fined 300,000 rubles (about 150,000 hryvnia - Ed.), and DJ Pavel Korotky was arrested and forced to apologize on camera. The occupation court has not yet decided on his punishment. The girl who ordered the song was lucky: she was most likely a vacationer, and the FSB was unable to establish her identity. 

Before the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian music was played at all Crimean discos. The “first swallow” flew into Shchelkino. DJ Yuri Radionov was arrested for 10 days for playing the track “Wild Field” by rapper Yarmak. The visitor who requested the song was fined 50,000 rubles. This happened in August 2022. Less than a month later, an even more powerful musical bomb exploded in Bakhchisaray. A video of a Crimean Tatar wedding dancing to “Chervona Kalyna” instantly went viral on social media — and enraged the occupiers. Not only did the owner of the banquet hall, the wedding organizer, and the DJ appear before their court, but also the guests and mothers of both newlyweds.

And so it began. Three animators from the Alushta water park were fired and fined for dancing to Serdyuchka. A group of special forces broke into the home of a Yevpatoria resident who was listening to the song “Oy, chogo zh ty, mama” (Oh, why, mother). In Saki, a man was punished for listening to Okean Elzy. In Kirovskoye, two fellow villagers were fined for listening to “Stefaniya” in their car. A resident of Feodosia was charged with an administrative offense for saying during an argument with a neighbor: “Fate will smile on us, brothers Ukrainians.” Human rights activists do not provide accurate statistics on the number of Crimeans punished for listening to Ukrainian music, saying only that the number is already in the hundreds. Those punished for publicly displaying swastikas and Nazi slogans are significantly fewer, according to experts from the Crimean Process organization.

Listening to Ukrainian music is dangerous not only in the occupied territories but also in Russia itself. A citizen of Moscow who did so in a closed car served 15 days in prison. A student in Krasnoyarsk was fined 45,000 rubles for sending a video of herself singing Ukrainian songs to her friends in a closed chat room — one of her “friends” was vigilant. And 63-year-old philosophy professor, Alexander Nesterenko from a Moscow university, was sentenced to six years in prison for posting a remix of the song “Our Father Bandera, Ukraine Mother” on a Russian social network.

Immediately after the start of the anti-Ukrainian “musical” hysteria, Putin commented on the situation. He was hardly sincere, but he publicly stated that just as no one has the right to abolish Russian culture, we cannot abolish Ukrainian culture. Perhaps that is why the punishments that were de facto imposed for songs were de jure formalized as “indecent behavior,” “violation of public order,” or “discrediting the army.”

The Crimean speaker, who had previously proposed outlawing Ukrainian songs, seemed to have put an end to the matter. “They must be consigned to oblivion,” Konstantinov said.