On Sep. 1, Red Hot Chili Peppers, an American superpopular rock band, posted a photo on Facebook in which their lead vocalist Anthony Kiedis is draped in blue-and-yellow national flag of Ukraine on the stage during RHCP concert in Miami, Florida.
“Love Ukraine,” the musicians wrote under the photo. It’s doubtful that RHCP have ever read poems by the Ukrainian prominent poet Volodymyr Sosiura. Nevertheless, in 1944, Sosiura wrote a verse called exactly like that: “Love Ukraine.” For this verse, Soviet authorities stigmatized the poet as a “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist,” which was far from being funny in the Soviet Union, the more so with Uncle Joe still alive. Since then, the Russian attitude toward Ukraine and Ukrainian has not changed for the better, so let’s wait and see the Kremlin’s reaction. They might well call Red Hot Chili Peppers “Californian bourgeois nationalist.”
