Press Release: 2-24-2023
Contact: Steve Balkin, Professor Emeritus, Roosevelt University in Chicago, Russian Peace Video Project, Email: sbalkin@roosevelt.edu Phone: 312-341-3696
Chicago Has Soft Power Resources to End the War in Ukraine
“The war in Ukraine has been going on too long. Too many Ukrainian and Russian lives have been lost in this senseless war. The USA has not been using enough of its soft power resources to defeat the Putin Russian regime,” says Steve Balkin, professor emeritus at Roosevelt University.
Balkin has started the Russian Peace Video Project to create peace songs in the Russian language to smuggle into Russia and to Russian troops on the front lines of battle in Ukraine. According to Balkin, the elite intellectual people in Russia know what’s going on but they have mostly fled Russia to avoid the draft and incarceration for speaking out against the war. Ordinary non-elite Russians have been ignorant about the reality of this “special military operation” but they are slowly beginning to find out from the number of deaths of soldiers that are family, friends, or neighbors. They too face drastic penalties for speaking out and have learned to live peaceably with authoritarian regimes.
The purpose of the Russian Peace Video Project is to nudge ordinary Russians to speak out, or to covertly oppose the Putin regime, or to desert the military, refusing to fight against Ukrainians. These peace songs would use existing folk and popular Russian melodies but the lyrics would be changed to have a war cessation message.
Balkin has found it very difficult to find collaborators. While he has some background for this Project, having ancestors from Chernihiv, Ukraine who were Russian speakers and draft dodgers from the Czar’s cavalry, his grandparents did not speak Russian while he was growing up, wanting him to assimilate and learn English. Therefore, the Project is in need of people fluent in Russian to write peace song lyrics and Russian singers and musicians to record music videos and make mp3 audio files of the music, to be smuggled into Russia. In Chicago these collaborators exist. There are many immigrants from Russia and Ukraine living in Chicago who are fluent in the Russian language. The response from them is that either they are too busy with their jobs and careers or they think people in Russia are too apathetic to ever do anything to oppose the Putin regime.
Balkin thinks it is easy and fun to create peace lyrics but they have to be in Russian with Russian cadence and rhyming. He recalls the power of American peace songs during the Vietnam war that had influence in ending that war.
Thanks to the peace propaganda of the old Soviet Union, a gift from Soviet communism, some of these songs exist and can be smuggled and distributed widely into Russia. It seems the CIA, NSC, and Radio Free Europe has dropped the ball here. Two examples of these songs are: White Cranes, here is the Russian version with English subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSHdcMcCE1U
and May There Always Be Sunshine. Here is the English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d51vYKHT5zk ; here is the Russian version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcdfQsnUHuk
Hearing the voices of Russian children and seeing their faces as they sing the Russian version of May There Always Be Sunshine, it is hard to not want the war in Ukraine stopped immediately to save the lives of their fathers and brothers. This is powerful peace propaganda waiting for us to use extensively.
Ukrainians have created many songs about the war in Ukraine but these are mostly patriotic songs of solidarity to encourage Ukrainians to courageously fight in the war. I have not found songs by Ukrainians written in Russian to encourage Russians to courageously stop fighting nor for ordinary Russians to courageously oppose the policies of the Putin regime.
In peace propaganda songs, less is more. To enhance the power of songs that exist and the songs to be created, the short jingle form is most effective. Jingles are easy to remember and often stick in your head repeating itself over and over. American marketing and advertising are based on the jingle.
Balkin says, “He hopes more people will join or take over this Project and create a global competition, like Eurovision with cash prizes, for the best original or modified peace song, in the Russian language, to stop Russia’s war on Ukraine. Maybe call it Ukraine-o-vision – The Peace Song Version. Chicago has the media resources, foundations, and networks to do this. Our colleges have great music schools; the members of the Chicago Symphony and the Lyric Opera know how to create stirring music and librettos; our combo groups that play at clubs know popular songs well, as Blues, Country, Folk, Jazz, Rock, Rap or Ethnic music. We’ve got the soft power propaganda ammunition. It should be used to save some lives. Remember what Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar: This machine kills fascists. ”
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