'A bunch of white roses, love lingers in each petal.' Like an amusement park, the sickly sweet music is fired on the million or so tourists crowding the long coastline around Sochi. It is inescapable. If there is no singer performing his tricks, the music pounds from huge speakers, and if there are no speakers, the music blares from several televisions. The same songs are played everywhere. You could fill notebooks with the number of times Biz Tebya (Without You) is played. Chansons and Sochi belong together like sausage and mash. Those looking for a relaxing holiday would do well to come in the winter, because in the summer Sochi is the capital of the Russian chanson.
Chansons are Russian ballads, but the comparison with French chansons is only partial. The songs have their origins in the age-old Russian tradition of labour camps and prisons. They are tragic songs, about lost loves, life on the taiga and the longing for home. The prison songs were mostly sung by men with raw, rough voices. The typical prison genre still exists, but nowadays the term ‘chanson’ more often refers to the saccharine genre of Russian-language dance music. It is usually accompanied by a heavy disco beat and occasionally even a dash of techno. We rarely encounter acoustic music on our trip along the boulevards of the Russian costa.
The modern Russian chanson is also called popsa, giving disco, house and pop music influences their own place in the genre. Although our Russian interpreter and – it appears - chanson specialist can tell us precisely whether a song is chanson or popsa, we struggle to make a distinction. In theory, popsa is pop music while chansons are ballads. However, many chansons have also been given a thumping beat. The chansons of past and present are often remixed into house music numbers which young and old can dance and sing along to.
Young and old, because seniors refuse to be banned from the dance floor. With skirts hitched up and breasts strapped down, davay, the women are off. Older men excel at dancing as though they have just sat in a red ants’ nest. Small children are hoisted onto shoulders or wrap their arms around a partner their own size. After each song the dancers shuffle back to their tables, but often turn around again midway when they hear the beat of the next number.
The region’s promenades extend for dozens of kilometres, from Adler in the south to Dzhubga in the north. The coastline is composed of long stretches of pebble beach, concrete and the occasional tuft of grass. To visit the resorts, we take the slow train from Dzhubga back to Sochi. The train lives up to its name, stopping every few hundred metres or so at another station, often nestled in a small valley where rivers flowing down from the mountains are hemmed in by apartments, hotels, a promenade and beach. In the few places where there are no beaches or hotels, the train passes the rugged foothills of the Caucasus, through which the road winds with difficulty.
The promenades in the various resorts are almost identical: packed with the same wooden souvenir stands and a long row of restaurants, almost all serving the same food and playing the same kind of music. There must be thousands of them; the singers who grace the dinner and drink joints every evening with their chansons and popsa.
The singers are all ages. The older and more serious they are, the greater the chance that they were classically trained, at the Conservatory in Rostov or Krasnodar, sometimes even in Moscow or St Petersburg. For 2,000 roubles a night they are happy to display their vocal talent. Some do it all year round, others move from restaurant to restaurant throughout the summer. Some work solo, others form duos. Some accompany themselves on a synthesizer, while others play real instruments. And while some put their heart and soul into the songs, others seem miles away.
Every self-respecting restaurant has a singer. Restaurants that have to share the cramped space on the riverbank – like at Sochi’s desirable Riviera Park location – have built special singing booths of ribbed glass to direct the sound towards their own restaurant. These stand back to back with the booth of the next restaurant. It does little good. In restaurant Romashka it is a cacophony of different songs. Many guests seem to appreciate this and choose the exact spot where the sound converges. Two songs for the price of one. And why not?
The restaurants further from the promenades attract older visitors and families. In Novy Afon restaurant, the dance floor is empty. An exhausted group huddles around a table. The music renders most conversation impossible, but the guests do not seem to mind. After a long, scorching day on the beach, in the amusement parks, gardens and shops, most of them seem to enjoy losing themselves in the dramatic lyrics of chansons and popsa. 'My soul cannot sleep without you,' issues almost cheerfully from the speakers. Satisfied heads bob to and fro. 'I am beaten and crushed and am writing to you for the last time...' and at the table the guests drink a toast.
Sochi’s coastal region almost exclusively attracts Russian tourists. They arrive by plane, or more often by train and car. The point where the road through the mountains finally reaches the sea is bursting with roadside campers, exhausted from the journey but glad to finally see the sea. Or they hang out of train windows, sweaty and unwashed, hankering for the beach and fresh sea breeze after travelling for 24-hours from Moscow or a week from Siberia.
Vasya sits on a concrete slope with pebbles and rusty piers that run into the sea. A cameraman from Moscow, he has just completed an assignment in Abkhazia further to the south. He is now enjoying a short holiday in Adler, just over the border. His older girlfriend Yulia has come with him. She has stuck two silver stars over her nipples; topless sunbathing is not done in Russia. 'Look around you,' Vasya points to the stone desert. 'It's fantastic.' The waves break on the beach and make a magical sound as they retreat, dragging the pebbles with them. The sound almost drowns out the popsa and house music coming from various phones and ghetto blasters. 'There aren't many good nightclubs, but hey, we Muscovites are spoiled.' Yulia’s only reservation is 'all the Caucasians' who live here. 'We're from Moscow and the culture here is very different. There are more Muslims.'
Our conversation is interrupted by a passing train. Then the woman next to us interrupts. Ekaterina, she introduces herself. 'Sochi is the Florida of Russia,' she says, 'but cheaper. My daughter lives in Kansas and we bought an apartment together in Sochi, so that I can retire here. It's heavenly. The climate is subtropical but you can hike in the cool mountains whenever you want.'
Many tourists come from far-flung places like Murmansk, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Tagil or Novosibirsk. Yelena is from Novy Urengoy. She has spent days on end lying motionless on the beach. She occasionally rotates her arms to distribute as much sun over her body as evenly as possible. 'Where I live, summer lasts three weeks; there's snow and ice until late May. And when summer finally arrives, so do the mosquitoes. We spend three weeks slapping ourselves and itching.' Loo is paradise in comparison.
The smell of sunscreen, sweat, alcohol and roasting meat pervades the air. On the beaches, perspiring men with baskets of blackberries, popcorn and corn advertise their wares. Respectable families and drunks carrying large bottles of beer walk side by side. In the alleys and streets behind the beach, clouds of smoke from grilling shashlik drift upwards. On the promenades, voluptuous girls lure visitors to the attractions. Throwing darts at balloons, shooting, having the skin on your feet nibbled off by special fish, parasailing, banana boating, posing for a photo with wild black people – whatever takes your fancy.
The real Sochenskis can be found in the residential neighbourhoods behind the promenades, far from the incessant flow of tourists. They disdainfully call the tourists Bzdykhs, a word unknown outside Sochi. But anyone who has been to a beach resort understands what it means: the overweight bodies sweating beer and spirits, the bare torsos in sandals, the noisy eaters surrounded by drunken bluster and tacky music.
The locals have little choice but to put up with it. Well-heeled Russians take refuge in Sochi’s fancier hotels or more often opt for Italy, Turkey or Thailand. The Olympic Games in Sochi may bring the level of quality that would keep the Bzdykhs away. It is more likely, however, that as a result the city would become more expensive, chaotic and crowded, making it difficult even for the Bzdykhs to come on holiday here and listen to their favourite chansons or popsa hits.
The long, hot summer is coming to an end. On our last evening on the coast we walk into restaurant Lilya. Just at that moment, a singer wearing leopard-print trousers starts playing our favourite song, Digi Digi – no translation – which we had been bombarded with in every bar in the North Caucasus on previous trips. When the song ends, the most beautiful woman in the world takes the microphone and begins to sing provocatively in a whiskey-soaked voice. 'Deep inside, I cry cry cry,' she croons the instant classic and we melt. We order another carafe of vodka and gherkins and like a couple of melancholy Russians stare silently at the stage. For a moment, everyone is in love. As the evening draws to a close, the woman seems to be singing just for us. ‘We're leaving, but we'll come back to where the sun melts into the haze of autumn.’
This article is from the third annual publication 'Sochi Singers'. Please click here to order the book in our online shop.
