“For a long time I have known Vladimir Putin to be an intelligent person,” a woman with an explosion of red hair says, gazing at the camera from an armchair in a 2007 political ad. “I will vote for United Russia — for his party, and, therefore, for him. I advise you to do the same.”
Jump forward 15 years and the same woman addresses an open letter to Russia’s Justice Ministry, asking it, with her 3.5 million Instagram followers as witnesses, to label her a “foreign agent” in solidarity with her husband, who has just received the designation. At the end of the message, she calls for peace, freedom of speech, and the end of “our children dying for illusory goals” — a clear reference to the war in Ukraine that began six months beforehand.
The woman is Alla Borisovna Pugacheva, whose decades of fame as a singer and performer have earned her nicknames including “the goddess” and “the tsarina of Russian pop”, and whose fame in the 1970s was so great that a well-known joke of the period described Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as “a minor government official in the Pugacheva era”.
Unlike the Soviet era, the Pugacheva one is arguably ongoing. Ever since Pugacheva first rose to fame in 1975, few Russian stars have commanded such a large and loyal fan base. Few, too, have seemed so remarkably impervious to the vicissitudes of regime change; Pugacheva lived — and for the most part thrived — under Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and, until recently, under Putin. However, in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine, it appears that the special status and effective impunity she has enjoyed for decades may no longer be guaranteed.
Breakthrough: ‘Arlekino’
The year 1975 was a fateful one for Pugacheva. When the Soviet Culture Ministry granted the young singer permission to take part in the Golden Orpheus International Song Contest in Bulgaria, Pugacheva chose “Arlekino” (Harlequin) by Bulgarian composer Emil Dimitrov as her entry, rearranging the song, translating its lyrics into Russian, and adding a rhythmic cackle to the end of the chorus.