Sting’s ‘Russians’: A Cold-War Classic

What connects Soviet children’s TV with John Connor from The Terminator? Before I come back to this most important question, here’s another: what has the Russian composer Prokofiev ever done for pop music?

This second question is easy enough to answer. For it turns out that Sergei Prokofiev has done a fair bit for popular culture. The best part of arguably the best (not necessarily the best-loved) Christmas song, Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’, is a setting of the Russian composer’s ‘Troika’, while any fans of the UK reality TV show The Apprentice should know that the theme tune to the show is from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

To date, however, no episode of The Apprentice I’ve seen has ended with the double-suicide by poisoning and stabbing, inadvertent or otherwise, of two of the hapless candidates. But you never know: they’ll need to prop up the flagging ratings at some point.

And then there’s the best 1980s song about the Cold War: ‘Russians’ by Sting, which makes sublime use of the great composer’s Romance theme from the Lieutenant Kijé Suite.

Context

The context for the song is integral to understanding its meaning. Released in 1985, ‘Russians’ is about the Cold War between East and West: between the eastern Soviet bloc and the West (and the USA and UK in particular).

Sting, an Englishman born and bred, meditates on the threat of nuclear war in the mid-1980s and the fear of ‘mutually assured destruction’, whereby if one side launched their nuclear missiles against the other, their enemy would immediately retaliate by nuking them, so both sides would be obliterated. This is one war that really is ‘unwinnable’, as the lyrics have it.

How real this threat was in the 1980s is hard to quantify. We like to think of the media in those days as calm voices of reason in comparison with our own climate of clicks, social media reels, and 24-hour rolling news, where tensions are ramped up for the sake of keeping eyeballs on screens (phone screens as much as television ones). And of course, there was a risk that the USSR might indeed seek to ‘bury’ its enemies, even though it knew this would mean the destruction of its own people, too (including its children).

At the same time, one suspects the media have latched onto overarching ‘narratives’, much as they seek to link so many of today’s news items to three or four big themes, such as climate change or the culture wars. And the Cold War and the possibility of ‘MAD’ (mutually assured destruction) was one such media narrative of the 1980s, although one that was not without its seriousness as a real threat.

(Interestingly, a few years ago I read an interview with J. G. Ballard from this time, included in his Extreme Metaphors, where he played down the fear of nuclear war, precisely because the Russians did love their children as much as the West loved theirs. Instead, Ballard – always a visionary – remarked that he was much more worried about the increased propensity of governments and organisations to gather personal date on its citizens and members. That man really was a prophet! The Cold War came to an end just a few years after ‘Russians’ was recorded, but the State continues to gather its data on us.)

Meaning

The song’s lyrics, then, express a real anxiety surrounding the possibility of mutually-assured destruction, with the only hope – as that refrain has it – lying in the idea that the Russians care as much about human life, or at least the lives of their own children, as British and American people do.

But this is obviously tongue-in-cheek. And what’s clever about this haunting song – with its ticking clock and simple throbbing synthesiser creating an impending sense of doom – is that the lyrics almost risk cutting through the very fears the song gives voice to.

After all, whilst Nikita Khrushchev did indeed say to the West, ‘We will bury you’, the Soviet leader actually made that statement in a speech calling for peaceful coexistence with the West. (Instead, he was referring to the idea of the Communist eastern bloc ‘burying’ the capitalist West in terms of prosperity and economic health.)

I’m not suggesting that Sting wasn’t sincerely voicing a genuine concern about the idea of East and West possibly nuking each other into oblivion. But the song’s genius lies in the way the lyrics risk naivety and hyperbole – and deliberate misinterpretation of Khrushchev’s infamous statement from nearly three decades earlier – to make this point.

In other words, the song risks the same ‘hysteria’ which the singer detects in both Europe and America: hysteria over a very likely threat, or an exaggerated sense of fear about something that’s probably not going to happen? After all, Russian people do love their children, just as British people do.

Well, apart from me. I don’t have any children. I’m quite fond of my cat though. Or I would be, if I had one of those either.

Origins

Sting explained in 2010 that the song’s genesis lay in the singer’s time spent watching, of all things, Russian TV. And, more specifically, children’s programmes on Russian TV. He had a friend who had invented a way to steal the satellite signal from Russian TV, and the pair of them, dosed up on a few beers, would spend hours watching Russian television.

For some reason, the only Russian TV they could pick up was children’s television, such as the Soviet Union’s version of Sesame Street. Sting was ‘impressed’ with the care and attention the USSR gave to their children’s programmes. Did the Russians, then, love their children too, just as the British and American leaders of the West did?

Well, obviously the song’s refrain – wondering whether the Russians love their children too – is rhetorical, a point missed by that noughties sitcom loser Jeremy Usborne in Peep Show, who was convinced the question was posed in earnest.

And while we’re on the subject of TV, I began by asking what connects Soviet children’s television with John Connor, from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The answer? Well, just as Russian TV inspired Sting to write ‘Russians’, so listening to Sting’s ‘Russians’ inspired James Cameron, the creator of The Terminator, to create the character of John Connor: the saviour of future mankind in the Terminator universe, and a lead character in the 1991 sequel to the original film. In Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Connor and his mother Sarah learn that a nuclear war will wipe out most of humanity just a few years in the future.