The Songs of Evil Men

 In the last half of 2014, several trolls tweeted this:

“Evil men have no songs.” How is it, then, that the Russians have songs?

Even though a couple of these trolls had followings in the thousands, this message got no traction on Twitter – no retweets, no likes, nothing.

On the other hand, I asked Ken Anderson of the folk band Hungrytown if he had heard the saying “Evil men have no songs,” figuring it would be the kind of thing a folk musician would be familiar with if it were legitimate. He had heard it before … on Facebook, complete with the extra bit about Russians.

That wasn’t what I was going for, but at least I learned that the trolls either got the message from Facebook to begin with or they put it out on multiple platforms, having no success on Twitter but at least some on Facebook.

What were they trying to say?

There are two obvious but contradictory ways to interpret this message. Either it is saying that Russians are evil and so the expression is inaccurate, or it is saying that Russians must not be evil because they “have songs.”

Of these, the first one makes the most sense given who is saying it. If you’re a Russian troll pretending not to be Russian, suggesting that Russians are evil would be one way to deflect suspicion.

Is “Evil men have no songs” a real saying?

Yes. Either directly or through Facebook, the trolls got the entire quote including the afterthought about Russians from Nietzsche. Unfortunately, Nietzsche didn’t provide any context for the remark or identify the source of the quote. Instead, he simply put it in a list of shower thoughts at the beginning of a book before moving onto the actual topic of the book.

So who was Nietzsche quoting?

It appears that he was quoting Johann Gottfried Seume, who was an unsuccessful mercenary and obscure German writer, at least according to some guy who was inspired by a statue to maintain a website about him.

Perhaps one reason for Seume’s failure as a mercenary is that he believed that where there is singing you can relax because “villains don’t have songs,” as he noted in a poem. He elaborated further down in that poem that “tyrants tremble before the song.” We’ll come back to that topic in a bit, but for now suffice it to say that if you’re writing poems along these lines you simply aren’t paranoid enough to succeed in the violence industry.

Russians again

I found Seume as Nietzsche’s source for the quote thanks to the dissertation of a University of South Carolina Ph.D. candidate with a Russian sounding name. The dissertation was on the Russian “terrorist and littératuer Boris Savinkov,” according to the title.

It’s odd that someone writing a dissertation in comparative literature would misspell litterateur, especially when it is a title word. It is also a shame in this case. If only, instead of flipping the u with the e, she had simply added a second u before the e, she would have had littératueur. That would have changed the meaning from “literature enthusiast” to “literature killer.” Which, in my opinion, is an apt description of Savinkov as a novelist. [See my Goodreads review here: Savinkov Pale Horse.]

Coincidentally

One of the most difficult aspects of studying Kremlin trolls is deciding when to follow a coincidence to see if it leads to a troll and when to let it go. To that end, I find it helpful to keep a diary of weird coincidences just to remind myself of how often they naturally occur. One recent entry has to do with the research I did for this tweet.

Savinkov, in a nutshell, was a professional killer who lived (mostly) in Russia around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and who had a knack for aligning himself with non-prevailing factions. One of his fictionalized memoirs was called The Pale Horse.

Agatha Christie also wrote a novel called The Pale Horse, about a ring of poisoners for hire. [Goodreads review: Christie Pale Horse] Both novels were presumably alluding to the same passage in the Bible where Death sat on a pale horse, which is why the coincidence of two authors coming up with the same title is not very exciting in this case. But that isn’t the coincidence that made it into my journal.

What other coincidence could there possible be here?

When I stumbled across the Savinkov novel, I happened to already be rereading the Christie mystery, as the Kremlin’s recent poisoning of Putin foe Alexei Navalny had gotten me in the mood. Putin’s unofficial assassination squad has become famous in the world of geopolitics for its attempted poisonings, and that makes Christie more pertinent to modern Russia than Savinkov, if you want to make a literary contest out of it.

Here’s what caught my attention: You find out toward the end of the Christie novel that the initial murder happened on October 7th. Now, if you follow events related to Russia closely enough, you will notice that the major ones are more likely to occur on October 7th than on any other date. That’s because it’s Putin’s birthday, and that matters for some reason.

So what does Agatha Christie have to do with Putin?

Nothing. Putin was nine years old when Christie wrote The Pale Horse.

It is easy to become overly fond of such a coincidence, especially when you are liable to be the only person to have noticed it. You may feel the urge to look for ways in which it might be more than a coincidence in such a case. That, in my view, is how conspiracy theories come into being.

The lurking troll in this story

The main title of the dissertation I referred to earlier was, “Evil Men Have No Songs.” It was submitted in 2016 and had presumably been in preparation in 2014 when the trolls started repeating the saying in tweets. Knowing that the Kremlin commonly attempts to manipulate Russians living abroad into helping to advance its agenda, I wondered if there was a connection there. Specifically, I wondered if she was a troll or if she was being followed or monitored by trolls.

Why I didn’t go down that rabbit hole …

I decided not to try to pursue the answers to those questions for several reasons. For one thing, it would have been extraordinarily time consuming, and the effort probably wouldn’t have gotten me much closer to the answers.

Besides, it could well be that the “songs” saying is fairly well known in Russian culture and that the trolls didn’t realize how obscure it is here. That would make the odds of the dissertation writer having anything to do with the tweets pretty small. More importantly, I could have ended up defaming a person whose biggest mistake was missing an opportunity to make a play on words that only someone who speaks both French and English would be able to appreciate.

Back to the question at hand

Do evil men have songs? Apparently they do. I once watched a clip of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte singing “you are the light” to Donald Trump. Since Duterte once claimed that he committed his first murder at the age of sixteen “over a look,” he ought to qualify as evil, certainly in the sense that Seume meant it.

Note of caution: Before you go running off to YouTube to look for the clip, you should know that while Duterte may have a song, he can’t carry a tune.

On a similar note, I’ve also seen the clip posted by Russian state media outlet Sputnik where Putin plays President Xi’s piano. Xi is nowhere to be seen, so apparently Putin did this without asking first. One wonders what would happen to the maid or the cook if they tried something like that. The consensus in the YouTube comments, though, is that it’s the piano tuner who is done for.

“A standing ovation and applause”

Russia’s other main propaganda outlet for non-Russians, RT (formerly Russia Today), also posted a musical video that included Putin. They titled it, “Russia’s Got Talent: Extra video of Putin singing & playing piano for charity.” (“Extra” appears to be a word choice error, though it isn’t clear what word they were going for.)

RT’s video description includes a blow-by-blow account of everything Putin did at the event, whether or not it was in the clip. This comes in handy when Putin seems to be reading Russian poetry, more or less to the rhythm of the music being played by the band behind him, but really (we learn from the RT description) he is singing Blueberry Hill.

Then the clip cuts to Putin playing the piano, the same song “he sang with the exposed Russian agents” according to RT, referring to a group of deep cover spies who had recently been expelled from the U.S.

Putin plays the song with only his left index finger and three fingers on his right hand, like the piano version of two-finger typing. He plays thirty-seven notes before giving up – if you count as two notes the one where he hits two keys with the same finger. The RT account concluded, “The audience loved his performance and showed their appreciation with a standing ovation and applause.” Apparently, in St. Petersburg, a standing ovation is really just standing. If you’re really good, then you can have applause, too.

Many of the YouTube comments echoed the ovation. For instance, a Serbian person said, “I'm very glad that Russia has a president that is a truly great man and whose primary concern are interests of Russia and Russian people.” Another fan wrote, “is there anything this man cant do,,,Im falling in love with this guy.”

The Conductor

If any doubt remains about whether evil men can have songs, it can be dispelled with two more examples.

As alluded to earlier, in August of this year (2020), Putin critic Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the Soviet-developed nerve agent Novichok. Following much diplomatic wrangling, he was allowed to be taken from Siberia to Germany for treatment. Then, after he regained consciousness in late September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited him in the hospital.

Later, Navalny called for sanctions against a broader range of people in Putin’s entourage, and Germany, France, and the UK announced upcoming sanctions against more people close to Putin. Not coincidentally, these announcements all took place on the same day, Putin’s birthday.

Notably for the purposes of this post, the overseer of the troll farm, which posted the tweet under discussion, made the list of newly sanctioned individuals. (He was already under U.S. sanction.) Even more notably, the person Navalny gave as an example of those to include in the new list was Valery Gergiev, chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic. Specifically, Navalny said, “If he loves the regime so much and wants Russia to not take the European path, then one must say to him: you're a very talented musician, but we're not allowing you to stay on in the EU. You can enjoy Putin's regime in Russia." Apparently, European officials share a bit of Seume’s naivete about people who have songs, as they don’t appear to have taken any action against Gergiev.

The Cellist

Another noteworthy musician in this story is far closer to Putin than Gergiev is. His name is Sergei Roldugin, and he is one of Putin’s closest and most trusted friends. His hidden wealth is one of the things uncovered by the Panama Papers, a massive trove of leaked financial documents relating to the offshore accounts of tax evading rich people. In some way that he hasn’t been able to explain, he became a shareholder in Bank Rossiya, which holds Putin’s massive slush fund, and became a controlling influence over a network of companies that enable the Kremlin to hide its money. Rodulgin’s main gig, though, is his career as a professional cellist.

According to Catherin Belton in her book, Putin’s People, in their youth, Putin and Rodulgin used to cruise around in a cheap Soviet car singing songs together. Anybody can have songs, even villains.