From: "ChrisD(RJ)" <chrisd at russiajournal.com> Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 12:44:57 +0300
> ...and that no one on the staff knows Russian, and that they were too
> provincially American to ask what they words meant? God bless
> American, man.
>
> Doug
>
> -- For the record, these are snippets from the Komsomolskaya Pravda
> article (translated by me).
>
> Tatu gave the war three letters
> The scandalously famous duet has shocked the public again. This time -- in
> Amerika.
>
> ...
> "This idea cane to us in the airplane while we were on the way here," the
> group's producer, Ivan Shapovalov, told me. "We considered the situation,
> and we needed to do something to express our relationship to the impending
> war. We came up with the text when we were still in the air... Is it
> shocking? But that's our style. Where did we get the tee-shirts from? We
> went and bought them from a nearby Los Angeles store. And the girls wrote
> the letters themselves."
>
> "Why diid you write it in Russian and not in English, so the Americans
> would understand you?" I asked Yulya, embarassed to repeat the words
> aloud.
>
> "'Fuck the War,' what the big deal?" she said, not embarassed in the
> slightest. "How would we know how to say it in English? We decided, let it
> be in our language. In Russia, they will understand us. We are against
> this war."
>
> ...Of course, with an English translation on their chests, they would not
> have let them into the studio. And not just because Leno's show doesn't
> accept foul language. Participants in the recent Grammy awards show were
> told beforehand: No antiwar propaganda of any sort, or we will shut off
> your mike.
>
> But, the sense of the foreign writing on Lena's and Yulya's shirts slipped
> past the censors, who could not fathom it.
>
> ....
>
>
> "When, in the evening, we went to the show of a different televsion
> company, they met us fully prepared," Lena narrated to me. "They had
> deliberately invited a man who spoke Russian. He read the writing,
> translated it and explained it to the Americans. In horror, shaking their
> arms, the categorically demanded that we give them the tee-shirts. We had
> earlier discussed different ways of acting. In one of them, we would
> obediently take off the tee-shirts and... sing without them. But, if we
> had done that, they really would not have aloowed us on the air. We
> exchanged the tee-shirts with others that had been prepared earlier. With
> the word "Censored," which means "Removed by the Censor." And that is how
> we sang...
>