A choir in the Russian city of St. Petersburg has drawn criticism for performing a satirical song about firing a missile on the United States from a Soviet nuclear submarine.
The video of the Saturday performance by the St. Petersburg Concert Choir was published over the weekend but only gained attention on Tuesday.
‘For three rubles’
The choir promptly turned off the option of comments on its social media page after it was inundated with indignant remarks. The song, popular in the 1980s, jokes about Soviet troops being willing to fire a missile on the U.S. “for three rubles”.
The choir said in a statement on Tuesday that it performs a variety of songs authentic to the time they were written, and that it refuses to “rewrite lyrics for the sake of political correctness”.
St. Isaac’s Cathedral, which hosted the concert, told that the song was not on the pre-approved programme and was performed as an encore, and that the cathedral does not approve of it. The cathedral’s spokesman said although the song is a satirical one “it would be better to refrain from performing it”.
The song, written by Andrei Kozlovsky in the 1980s as political satire of the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, goes: “Forgive us, America, fair America, but 500 years ago they discovered you for nothing.”
The choir’s performance happened amid the highly charged rhetoric in Russia following the U.S. decision to withdraw from a key security treaty with Russia.
