Exile, silence or arrest: Russian celebrities against Ukraine war have no good choices

“This was a scream from the heart for us,” the front man for Little Big, one of Russia's most popular bands, said from Los Angeles. “We just wanted to speak out.”

• His songs are fabulously popular, known for their furious dance beats, absurd lyrics and tongue-in-cheek videos that poke fun at Russian stereotypes, pop culture and trappings of wealth. But in just four months, Ilya Prusikin’s life has turned upside down — he is in self-imposed exile for expressing his horror at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

He lives in fear that he will never again see his home.

• “They are depriving me of a right to say that I don’t agree with murder,” said Prusikin, the lead singer for the Russian band Little Big, speaking via Zoom from an apartment in Los Angeles.
• 
  
• As Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in late February, Little Big posted a “No War” message on its social media channels in Russian and English. Less than a week later, Prusikin, 37, along with the band’s female vocalist Sonya Tayurskaya, 31, left their home in Moscow for the U.S.
• 
  
• They faced the stark choice that many Russians opposing the war have confronted amid an unprecedented crackdown on free speech by President Vladimir Putin’s government. For most Russians who don’t agree with the war, new draconian legislation threatening jail time for any criticism of the armed forces has meant a choice between speaking out and leaving their homeland, or staying put and facing probable arrest and imprisonment.
• This intensifying repression, reminiscent of the Soviet era, clashes with the Western-influenced music scene that gave birth to Little Big, a self-described “punk-pop-rave band.” The four-person band viral hit “Skibidi” spawned a dance craze in Russia and around the world in 2018, and has nearly 620 million views on YouTube — numbers on par with world stars like Beyonce and Justin Bieber. The band was also Russia’s pick to go to Eurovision in 2020. 
• The band had not waded into Russian politics until after the war, when it released an “anti-war manifesto” — a new song and video that takes direct aim at the government. Called “Generation Cancellation” the video has been viewed more than 7 million times. In it, soldiers are moved like pawns on a chessboard, TV propaganda flows down sewage pipes into people’s brains, and a man in a power suit pushes a red button with the word “cancel” on it.
• “This was a scream from the heart for us,” Prusikin, sporting his signature patch of black hair on a completely blonde-dyed head, said. “We just wanted to speak out.”
• In a press release announcing the song’s release, the band openly condemned the actions of the Russian government and said their disgust with war propaganda had led them to “leave everything behind and start our lives from scratch.”
• Almost immediately, Prusikin said, they were accused of being “traitors” by pro-government media and what he calls pro-Kremlin bots on social media.