Let's Go To War!

Born in Leningrad, Natalia Medvedeva (1958-2003) left the Soviet Union in 1975 and moved first to the United States and later to France, where she worked as an actress, model, and piano bar singer of Russian folk and cabaret songs. She moved back to Russia in the early 1990s with her third husband, Eduard Limonov (1943-2020)—and, like Limonov, soon became a celebrity by cultivating a rebellious image and occupying a niche lying somewhere between counterculture and mainstream. Medvedeva wrote for Russian periodicals like Novyi vzgliad, Smena, and Limonka, and guested on all the main talk shows of early post-Soviet television, including “Matador,” “Tema [Theme or topic],” “Akuly pera [Sharks of the Pen],” and “Pro eto [About That].” She also published autobiographical novels chronicling her transgressive lifestyle. In fact, in terms of extravagance and excesses, Medvedeva’s reputation outshone even her husband’s, who attained notoriety by detailing alleged sexual encounters with homeless Black men in 1970s New York; befriending Serbian war criminals like Radovan Karadžić (1945-) and Željko Ražnatović (alias Arkan, 1952-2000); and founding the radical nationalist organization-cum-punk movement, the National Bolshevik Party. Soon after they returned to Russia, Medvedeva left Limonov for the lead guitarist of the trash metal band Korrozia metalla (Metal Corrosion). She died at the young age of 45, likely as a result of drug and alcohol abuse. In the mid-1990s, Medvedeva formed her own band, The Tribunal of Natalia Medvedeva, which released one album of original songs in a genre Medvedeva described as “punk cabaret”—songs that often centered on the sordid, surreal essence of the “wild 1990s.” The song featured here is “Let’s Go to War!” (Poedem na voinu, 1993), which was popular among disenfranchised alternative youth and presents a paradoxical celebration of war as an escape from the mediocrity of modern life. With her deep, heart-wrenching voice, Medvedeva evokes romanticized visions of recent conflicts, celebrating war as absolute freedom and a “beautiful way to die.” From there, the lyrics seamlessly move to post-Soviet bespredel—“the lawless streets of Moscow,” with “dirty snow” and “danger in one’s own house”—where the only way back to reality and meaning is to embrace arbitrary violence and chaos as a new, quintessentially masculine and heroic way of life. As in the cases of Limonov, Yegor Letov, or Alexander Dugin, this initially countercultural view of lawlessness and violence as sources of authenticity and identity soon extended to mainstream media and politics.