If you want to know what departure feels like, you should watch the concert that Billy Joel, who has just turned 75, gave in Saint Petersburg in 1987. The city was still called Leningrad back then, and Joel was the first US rock star that the Soviet regime let in for a tour. In Leningrad he put on a modest show – by today’s Taylor Swift standards – but rarely do you believe you have seen so much happiness in young faces as back then in the audience, which was still closely watched by uniformed state forces.
It was a time when there was hope for an end to the Cold War. Completely different than now. You have to have all the more respect for US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who didn’t make it to a Russian concert hall – you don’t even want to know what the consequences would have been – but he did perform in the Kiev bar “Barman Dictat”. Blinken, 62, picked up the electric guitar and played “Rockin’ in the Free World”, the song with which Neil Young criticized the terribly divisive policies of Republican US President George Bush in the late 1980s.
The Ukrainian audience celebrated Blinken for the performance. And even if – as you can see on cell phone videos – it was much tighter and less lively in the bar than at Billy Joel’s in Leningrad: It was just good to see that there are still politicians who are not only under the instrument Understand military equipment. Who prefer a casual dark shirt to a bare torso and would rather squeeze past microphone stands than have their security guards open ten-meter-high golden doors for them. Yes, that was really a blessing. Because as the great Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky said? “If there were no music, you would actually have a reason to go crazy.”