If the Russians Love Their Children Too

1985: Six years before the end of the Cold War and the Doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction policies that pitted the United States against the former Soviet Union. For me, the war had been raging for 39 years, more than the entire lifetime of my parents and me combined. My father bemoaned living in the suburbs because we had no room to build a bomb shelter in the backyard. 

That was also the year Sting released his solo debut album, Dream of the Blue Turtles, and a song titled Russians. In a congruent interaction of lyrics and inconsolable melodies resembling Russian communist music, Sting incongruently sang of love and hope and finding common ground between enemies by crooning, 

We share the same biology, regardless of ideology

But what might save us, me and you

Is if the Russians love their children too

Click here to play video.

The overtly rhetorical message was a hopeful boon to those afraid that “the man” could open the briefcase and “push the button,” annihilating the world before we woke for breakfast.  I truly thought that if the people of Russia could hear this song and think about the lives of their children, the war would be over. 

Storrey qualifies my experience through the lens of the 1980s industrial and technological coming-of-age, where employers owned their employees until retirement. He says,

Distraction is bound to the present mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject. This mode of production, which engenders fears and anxiety about unemployment, loss of income, war, has its ‘nonproductive’ correlate in entertainment…they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously. 

According to Storrey, songs such as Russians, We Are the World, and Born in the U.S.A. led us to believe that we could have some effect on the world around us without actually doing anything. The “patterned and pre-digested” production of the era's music brought us hope without action. 

I thought: I can help save starving people in Africa by purchasing the We Are the World cassette tape! (The one with Michael Jackson on the cover. Not Johnny Cash - ew.)

Storrey goes on to say, 

The promoters…exonerate themselves by referring to the fact that they are giving the masses what they want…What is supposed to be wish fulfillment is only the scant liberation that occurs with the realization that at least one need not deny oneself the happiness of knowing that one is unhappy and that one could be happy.” 

At that time, we wanted peace at home and abroad and to be a part of a strong social movement, without joining the military or the Peace Corp. Our music gave us that.

What song has made you feel like part of a movement?

(Sting re-released Russians in 2022. All proceeds went to help victims of the Russian-Ukrainian war. He “never thought [it] would be relevant again. But… the song is, once again, a plea for our common humanity.”)