Singing Revolutions: Music, Nation, and Freedom in the Late 1980s

How does a song become a weapon? What role does music play in the construction of national identity and the struggle for independence?

We invite you to a lecture by Bohdan Shumylovych on the phenomenon of "singing revolutions". This is the name given to the peaceful protest movements in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in the late 1980s, which preceded the collapse of the USSR.

During the lecture, we will look at how folk and popular music became instruments of political resistance, why protest can be an aesthetic and collective experience, and how singing and public gatherings turned into acts of self-identification and cultural emancipation. Padraic Kenney called such forms of group resistance in the late 1980s the "carnival of the revolution," where protest, aesthetics, and irony mixed and manifested themselves in unusual projects. In the context of Lviv, the Vyvych festival is such an example. 

One of the main focuses of the lecture will be the Chervona Ruta festival, which took place 36 years ago. Can we consider this festival part of the "singing revolutions" that are still relevant as an example of non-violent resistance? How did the paradoxical mixture of Soviet imagination, Ukrainian folklore, rock music, and national revival have the potential to decolonize not only popular culture, but also art and politics?

This lecture continues the public series "Let's Have a City," which offers different views and approaches to the study of the modern city.

Credits

Cover Image: Youth at the Vyvych festival / photo by Lyubomyr Petrenko / Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History