The Hardest-Working Russian in Show Business

By Sergei Verkligen

Besides oil, Russia’s main export has to be effort. From football to pop music, the picture you invariably get is hours of preparation — sweaty brows and clenched teeth. The result is immaterial; the point is for you to appreciate the effort. Take the Kremlin, where we house the massive Tsar Cannon that has never fired a shot, and the Tsar Bell, a bell so heavy that it never rang once. Sure, they’re completely useless, but never mind that — they’re huge! With tsar-caliber treasures like these, who says we can’t have our own Tsar of Pop in 25-year-old Dima Bilan?

After all, he can sing, and every nation deserves its own walking personification of the phrase "lock up your daughters." Russia’s “showbiz generals” had been aching to march through their neighbors’ garden parties ever since the fence came down, and in 2006, this kid from the Caucasus was just the weapon they needed to take the Eurovision Song Contest by storm. They knew there would be no stopping this well-clad, shod and shaven trooper once he got behind enemy lines, because everything in his Eurovision entry was a surefire hit — probably even the song!

In contrast to the mimed synchronized swimming and faux karate moves that characterized other nations’ entries, Dima Bilan’s act involved him dancing around, then leaping onto a grand piano as a ballerina concealed by rose petals magically emerged from a hole in the lid. The moment was simple and perfectly crafted, drawing an audible gasp from the audience. But the effort was all too visible, and Bilan took second place to the costumed freak-show spectacle of Lordi (Finland’s answer to GWAR).

Despite this early snub from the world of Eurotrash, Dima Bilan was still destined to secure his position as the Tsar of Pop. Later in 2006, our hero landed a World Music Award for Russia’s Best Selling Artist and showed up third on the Forbes list of Russia’s Top 50 celebrities. That makes Dima the only male with enough earnings, press and popularity to put him in the same company as Maria Sharapova, whose own vocal manifestations of effort make her the missing link between tennis and erotic film. 

But while the tennis diva’s 100-decibel shrieks may be popular in a way, they are unlikely to secure her a recording gig with a major U.S. producer. Bilan, on the other hand, is a trained tenor, and his next album will feature at least four tracks produced by Timbaland. Spending progressively more time in L.A. and playing shows in Chicago, Miami and New York, the Tsar of Pop is beginning to infiltrate the U.S. scene.

And he’s there for a reason: Bilan is being marketed by the Kremlin as Russia’s cultural ambassador. But are the powers that be just sending us another Russian achiever, a good boy who spends all his time working on his vocal skills and abs, or does the music hold darker secrets? Perhaps we can spell Dima Bilan “Timeo Danaos” — Trojan horse.

What’s more, Dima isn’t even his real name. The story of how a boy named Victor Belan was transformed into the ingeniously packaged pop sensation we see today began, believe it or not, more than a decade before his birth — in a Soviet prison.

Yuri Aizenshpis started his music career managing one of the Soviet Union’s first rock groups. A big part of his job involved buying gear off foreign bands, and at that time, dealing in foreign currency was a ticket to death row. So when he finally got caught in 1970, you could say Aizenshpis was lucky to get a 17-year sentence. As he stewed in his cell, few would have guessed that this hustler would one day become the mastermind behind Russia’s biggest talent factory, a Frankenstein with a knack for building clones of Western pop icons using Russian parts.

He started big, with the band Kino (who sounded like the Cure, but were also fueled by the songwriting genius of frontman Viktor Tsoi). Then he built bland, calculated versions of Depeche Mode (Technologia), Guns N’ Roses (Young Guns) and the Beastie Boys (Dinamit). From there, Aizenshpis attempted to design test-tube versions of Samantha Fox and Madonna, but his Midas touch was already turning into an iron hand: The clones started to complain and quit. It was then that Dr. Frankenstein was approached by the government’s PR division.

It turned out Russia was in dire need of a pop export with a seal of approval from the Kremlin. But apart from boosting the country’s profile, the product was to be deployed on foreign soil to subvert Western minds. So Yuri Aizenshpis was granted access to top-secret brainwashing technologies, and young Victor Belan became Dima Bilan, the new name a registered trademark. Everything the singer needed was now paid for by the government, including cars, apartments and clothes, but they kept him on a tight leash — he was not allowed pocket money. When his creator suddenly died in 2005, Dima tried to get out of the contract. He didn’t get far before he was served with an injunction for using his own stage name.

There was a time when rock ’n’ roll was a weapon of war and young Russian minds were a battlefield. Popular songs touched people in a way no propaganda ever could — a certain BBC DJ was recently decorated with an OBE in recognition of his Cold War effort. Times have a-changed. Pop has replaced rock and thugs have replaced artists, but the urge to retaliate is still there. Dima Bilan is no puppet — he is more like an action hero, a missile aimed at the heart of America. And the plan is in its final phase: An album loaded with subliminal messages is scheduled to hit Western store shelves later this year.