Hutsul music, making those discourses accessible to fans of Eurovision who had never considered Ukraine as a space of such enticing exoticism before the ESC. In other ways, it diluted the specificity of Hutsul positionality and their unique history of being represented as “wild.”
Ruslana’s capitalization on Wildness—as it echoed generic conceptions of “otherness” and as it was negotiated in daily use as a result of her numerous “wild projects”—is one theme of this chapter. I examine, in turn, Ruslana’s initial musical experiments exploiting tropes of Hutsul Wildness, the reception of this Wildness by the Hutsul community that bears the stigma of a deep history of objectification as the “wild folk” of Western Ukraine, and then Ruslana’s shifting ideas about and politicization of Wildness in recent years. This chapter, then, provides an overview of how one celebrity musician’s wild music exploited different tropes of exoticism for the benefit of different audiences in order to make different political claims over the span of a decade bracketed by popular revolution.
The force of Ruslana’s celebrity and her widely circulated depictions of Wildness also offer some insights on emergent sovereign imaginaries between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions. After the ESC, Ruslana’s new visibility as Ukraine’s premiere pop cultural export endowed her with authority as the promoter of what she called “the Ukrainian image” for international audiences, a role in which she reimagined the meaning of Wildness and its relationship to Ukrainian-ness in accordance with shifting visions of Ukrainian statehood between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions. When Ukraine plunged into political turmoil with the start of the Orange Revolution in late 2004 following rampant electoral fraud in the contest for the presidency, Ruslana allied herself with the pro-Western reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was eventually elected to the presidency. In the winter months during which Ukrainian state activities were effectively frozen due to the enormous protests that paralyzed the Ukrainian capital, Ruslana performed “Wild Dances” and other hits on the revolutionary stage that was erected in central Kyiv.
After the Orange Revolution, Ruslana was appointed to be Ukraine’s first Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2005. In March 2006, she was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, as a representative of President Yushchenko’s Nasha Ukraina (Our Ukraine) coalition (a position she relinquished in June 2007).2 Meanwhile, she became the spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) campaign against female trafficking in Europe, appearing in television commercials in Ukraine and throughout Europe. In 2008, she premiered what she called the “social single” titled “Not for Sale,” which she composed as the anthem for the anti-human-trafficking league based in Vienna, Austria. She also used it to tease her new album, Wild Energy, which featured Missy Elliott and T-Pain, two prominent US hip-hop artists, as guests on two tracks. In recent years, Ruslana has been photographed with former First Lady Michelle Obama, and has performed for audiences throughout Europe, North America, and South America. Along with other post-Soviet musical luminaries, Ruslana has been a judge on the popular televised reality TV singing competition in Ukraine known as Holos Kraïny (Voice of the Nation), which I take up in Chapter 4.
During the 2013–2014 Maidan Revolution, she sang the Ukrainian anthem nightly to motivate protestors through the cold winter nights, and played John Lennon’s “Imagine” on the upright piano (painted yellow and blue, the colors of the Ukrainian flag) that had become a symbol of that revolution’s somewhat quirky creative energy (see Figure 1.1). Billing herself as a “humanitarian pop star,” Ruslana has never again reached the meteoric heights of fame that accompanied her 2004 ESC win, yet she remains a permanent fixture at the nexus of Ukrainian cultural policy, activism, and popular music.
From her first success as a “wild dancer” influenced by the traditions of the Hutsul minority of Western Ukraine, to her later rebranding as a social activist invested in “wild energy,” the “wild projects” mirror contemporaneous changes in Ukrainian coalitional politics, as earlier post-Soviet ideologies of ethno-nationalism gave way to new ideas about citizenly belonging within the state, including—in some corners of Ukrainian society—an emergent idea of civic nationhood (Plokhii 2016). Early in her career, as Ruslana reconfigured the source of her Wildness from a concrete local language attributed to Hutsuls to an aspirational category that dissolved specifics and let a more inclusive notion of Wildness stand in, Wildness morphed from a term of ethnic intimacy, to marketable auto-exoticism, to one of eco-conscious infrastructural and civic activism. This transformation maps onto broader Ukrainian political concerns following the Orange Revolution, as revolutionary fatigue and disenchantment with the revolutionary government’s failures paved the way for the emergent civic-oriented and pragmatic sovereign imaginary that would eventually come to motivate the Maidan’s politics of dignity.
FIGURE 1.1 Ruslana Lyzhychko plays the blue and yellow Maidan piano during a concert organized for Maidan activists. Photo by Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto/Sipa USA via AP Images.
This chapter follows Ruslana’s transformation from a marginal figure of post-Soviet Ukrainian estrada to a global “ethno-pop” (etno-pop) star, and then to a political activist with ambitions to transform state policy and redefine Ukrainian futurity. I observe this transformation through an examination of three songs that mark this trajectory: “Znaiu Ya” (Знаю Я / “I Know”) (2002), the ESC winner “Wild Dances” (2004), and “Wild Energy” (2008). However, rather than represent three disjunct nodes in this pop star’s career arc, I elucidate how the hybrid influences present in “Znaiu Ya” and “Wild Dances”—despite the discourse of ethnic purity that marked them—anticipated the project of civic belonging announced by “Wild Energy” by drawing together diverse national myths, including those of Scythian primordialism and post-Soviet categories of femininity. This chapter also returns questions of representation in Ruslana’s Hutsulian Project to Hutsuls themselves, allowing them to evaluate Wildness on their own terms.
In this chapter, I introduce the term “ethnic intimacy” as a minor variant of Michael Herzfeld’s influential coinage “cultural intimacy,” in part to emphasize that the utilization of Hutsul motifs represents a regional collective space that overlaps with ethnic identification but bleeds across state borders; this distinguishes it from the nationally bounded collective space within which cultural intimacy is articulated. In this example, Hutsul ethnic intimacy is nested within the national imagined space of cultural intimacy, though it also exists in latent tension to the state’s political sovereignty, since Hutsuls also inhabit villages in modern-day Romania. Like cultural intimacy, the space of ethnic intimacy is also one in which stereotypes operate as the identifying codes of communities. In the Ukrainian case, the historical uses of “Hutsul-ness” have particular resonance as a kind of post-Austro-Hungarian imperial formation of the “authentic folk,” and therefore have little in common with other regions of Ukraine that were shaped through different imperial regimes. That said, Hutsul-ness becomes deployed as a form of (national) cultural intimacy—when the borderland “folk” became elevated to the status of national symbol, as happened in Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” performance on the Eurovision stage.
This chapter assesses how Wildness has been defined by Ruslana in shifting post-Soviet sovereign imaginaries that draw upon nested and varied histories of postcolonial representation and geopolitical affiliation. Through Ruslana’s controversial use of tropes of exoticism, we observe how Wildness becomes metonymic for shifting sovereign imaginaries between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions, that is, Wildness as sovereign imaginary. First, Wildness is represented in the service of a vision of Ukrainian statehood rooted in ethno-nationalism (drawn in particular from the exotic representation of Hutsuls and later exported to both domestic and international audiences). Then, in a later iteration, Wildness becomes a trope of wilderness and eco-activism rooted in a civically minded pragmatic patriotism. Through her wild music,
