The Wind

The Wind

Andrey Makarevich is an influential and pioneering Russian singer and songwriter. He founded what is apparently the oldest continuing Russian rock band, Time Machine, in 1969, and has continued to record and perform to this day. He has emerged as a prominent critic of Russian's invasion of Ukraine, and moved from Russia to Israel in 2022.

This song was released in late 2019; though by then, Makarevich had already criticized Russia's aggression against the Ukraine since 2014, I doubt the song was seen at the time as focused on that. But I heard it in the recording of a 2023 concert, where Makarevich was mostly singing about the war, so I think he views it now as connected to current events. You can read the Russian lyrics here, but here's a translation (starting with ChatGPT-4 and then with some revisions on my part):

The wind is awaking,
It's still out past the hills,
And everything seems
Like it's no threat to us.
The wind is still young,
Still not ruling our lives,
Only branches of trees
Subtly notice its breath.

The wind is approaching,
Trees will topple like grass,
You can't pay it off,
Not with all the world's gold.
It will sweep all away,
Both the right and the wrong,
Because nature knows
Neither evil nor good.

The wind is arising,
Now there is no correcting,
Only counting how many
More days we have left.
The wind can't be arrested,
Led, broken, or bought.
With each day, with each hour
It blows stronger still.

The Earth has let go,
Mileposts whirling around us
An age ends yet again,
And that eases our minds.
Across the sky of our land,
All fly carried away,
Far away, far away.
Far away, far away.

Here's the twist: This fits well with the narrative of Russian fatalism, but Makarevich's many recent songs about the war have been all about human agency—he commonly faults his fellow Russians, for instance, for not speaking out enough about the war, or even for backing it (the concert I linked to has several songs like that). The current disaster, he thinks, is very much a product of man and not of nature. Yet perhaps at times it feels to him that the broader Russian disaster of the last few decades—or perhaps even more than just a Russian disaster—is indeed the result of irresistible forces.