- Culture
- 18 Feb 14
A Soviet-loving singer has ruffled Baltic feathers with his misappropriating of Bruce Springsteen.
Russia’s answer to Bruce Springsteen – it must have been a very rude question! – Oleg Gazmanov has received death threats after performing ‘Born In The USSR’, an apparently sincere Boss reworking that proclaims: “The Ukraine and the Crimea, Belarus and Moldova/ This is my country!/ Sakhalin and Kamchatka and the Ural Mountains/ This is my country!/ Kazakhstan and the Caucasus, and the Baltics too/ I was born in the Soviet Union!/ Made in the USSR.”
This has gone down like a lead balloon in the aforementioned former satellites where tens of millions died under Stalin and Lenin, and weren’t exactly mollycoddled by their successors.
Gazmanov, who’s known for being a Putin lickspittle, has been told by the Lithuanian government that he’s an “unwelcome person” in their country.
The row had been simmering away for a few years, but exploded before Christmas when Gazmanov gave the song an airing at the Russian Federation’s 20th birthday celebrations.
A boycott of his December 29 visit to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, proved successful with only a handful of fans crossing the picket line.
tiny.cc/d1ieax has all the contentious details.
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Despite the ‘content cannot be viewed in your country’ message that pops up, the trailer can be viewed here
Is it just us or is Rae a ‘ringer for Proclaimers twins, Charlie and Craig Reid? Indeed, come to think of it, we’ve never seen the three of them on the same stage...
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