It had seemed like a relationship that was destined to be long and even meaningful, but now it appears to have gone wrong very quickly.
Against a balmy Black Sea backdrop, U2’s frontman, Bono, and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had swapped views on poverty, ecology and music on Tuesday.
Bono even made fun of Medvedev’s devotion to Deep Purple.
“I come here to cross the great divide between me, a Led Zeppelin fan, and you, the Deep Purple fan,” Bono joked, strolling next to Russia’s leader at his summer residence.
A day later, U2’s first concert in Russia ended in political controversy.
The Moscow authorities took a dim view when activists from Amnesty International and Greenpeace put up tents at the concert venue and invite fans to sign petitions. Officials detained five Amnesty volunteers hours before the show started and ordered others to remove their Amnesty T-shirts and to tear down their headquarters.
“We were collecting signatures to support prisoners of conscience and to call on the [Russian] authorities to investigate the murders of Anna Politkovskaya and Natasha Estemirova,” Sergei Nikitin, the director of Amnesty International Russia, said on Thursday.
“We’d been doing this for about three hours. At 5pm the riot police turned up. They told us we were holding an unlicensed picket, and took away all our placards. We were also strongly recommended to strip off our T-shirts,” Nikitin said.
The Kremlin’s heavy-handed tactics provoked howls of outrage from Moscow’s liberals, who pointed out this was the first time a country had prevented U2’s partner organizations on its 360 Degree tour from taking part in a concert.
The activists had been due to join Bono, a long-time Amnesty supporter, on stage during Walk On, dedicated to the jailed Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi.
“The police officers even asked us if we were planning some kind of rebellion. We didn’t go on stage. It was very disappointing,” Nikitin said.
Russia’s celebrated rock critic Artemy Troitsky told the Moscow radio station Echo Moskvi: “These organizations take part in every concert in every city in the world. They are an organic part of the U2 tour. It always goes off peacefully. Unfortunately our law enforcement agencies have a kind of allergy or sickness towards people and their human rights.”
Activists said they had agreed their campaign with U2’s management and administrators at the venue, the Luzhniki stadium. The five detained activists were released after two-and-a-half hours without charges, Nikitin confirmed.
Bono made no mention of the incident on stage. Before a 50,000-strong crowd he instead thanked Medvedev for the “gracious” reception he had received. He went on to praise the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, an unpopular figure blamed by the regime and many others for destroying the Soviet Union.
In a move that will have further irked Russia’s leadership, Bono invited the Kremlin’s least favourite singer, Yury Shevchuk, to take to the stage. The pair belted out a duet of Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, to an ecstatic response from rain-drenched fans.
Shevchuck, who speaks no English, managed the refrain, but reportedly sang the other bits in his native tongue.
Shevchuk led protests on Sunday last week against the demolition of the ancient Khimki oak forest north of Moscow to make way for a new highway to St Petersburg. He had asked Bono to raise the subject with Medvedev, and yesterday the pro-Kremlin United Russia party also urged the president to take another look at the controversial scheme. There are signs that the Kremlin may be preparing to back down.
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