The Russian pop duo protested against war and shocked the world with a lesbian kiss in the early 2000s. Now Tatu has reunited, and is performing in Russian-occupied Crimea. Svenska Dagbladet's Sascha Roslyakov looks into the group's political U-turn.

In 2000, Julia Volkova and Lena Katina are on the set of their first music video, “I’ve Lost My Mind” (the Russian version of “All the Things She Said”). Drenched in cold water, the two girls, dressed in checked school uniforms, try to do what they would become best remembered for: kissing. As they sing “I’ve lost my mind, I need her”, they try to move closer to each other, but burst out laughing again and again. They are so young, only 15, that neither of them has ever kissed anyone before. It is their producer, Ivan Shapovalov, a trained child psychiatrist, who has told them to do it. At last their first kiss is caught on film. And with that, Russia's only truly successful music export was created.

## Accused of paedophilia

The “lesbian” duo soon crossed the Atlantic. After signing with Universal they made it to number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, and in 2001 they stood on stage both at an MTV concert in the Kremlin and at the Met in New York.

The Western world was shocked. NBC refused to show the kiss live and cut to the musicians instead. Child protection groups accused the producer of paedophilia. But Shapovalov liked to shock. He wanted more.

For the second Tatu video, “Not Gonna Get Us”, in 2002, Shapovalov asked Volkova to masturbate in front of the camera. And out of concern that their live act would become too explicit, a recorded performance was ready for the duo's Eurovision appearance in Latvia in 2003.

The band shocked the world with more than sex. When the duo toured the United States in 2003 and appeared on “The Jay Leno Show”, they made their best-known pacifist gesture: they wore white T-shirts with the text “Chuj vojne”, “Fuck the war” in Russian. It was their protest against the US invasion of Iraq.

NBC was not pleased. Shapovalov, on the other hand, was very happy with the result.

“The duo has changed Russia's image. They have turned it into a more peaceful one, one about love,” Shapovalov said.

“Do we get the Nobel Peace Prize for this?” he shouted backstage, caught by a documentary filmmaker.

## Kissed before Madonna and Britney

In 2002, a self-assured Julia Volkova said to a journalist from a Russian TV channel:

“Ask us: are we lesbians?”

The journalist asked the question, and Volkova answered:

“No, we are not … You don't know who we are. Maybe we are bisexual.”

Tatu were never lesbians. That Shapovalov manipulated two such young girls into playing the role anyway, for the sake of publicity, Volkova has smoothed over by saying that he meant no harm.

> “If Tatu had not kissed on American TV, there might never have been a kiss between Madonna and Britney Spears.”

It was in fact a Swedish film that inspired their creation. Ivan Shapovalov saw Lukas Moodysson's “Fucking Åmål” (1998) and asked Julia and Lena to watch it too.

“We watched it. We got the hint. And he said it was a good story to turn into a creative expression, a way of making your voice heard,” Julia Volkova said in an interview with the Russian media personality Ksenia Sobchak.

The inspiration came full circle when music by Tatu was included in Lukas Moodysson's next film, “Lilja 4-ever”, a few years later.

And they had an even greater influence on the world.

“If Tatu had not kissed on American TV, there might never have been a kiss between Madonna and Britney Spears,” the music journalist Boris Barabanov tells Svenska Dagbladet.

Barabanov, who has written about music for Russia's largest daily newspaper, Kommersant, says the people behind Tatu came up with everything themselves, and that the success was due to their being “innovators”.

“The very sound of the group was without doubt a discovery by the people who created it,” Barabanov says.

“First a low verse, a calm intro, then a very high chorus with high notes, a very high, girlish voice. On top of that there was a feeling of apocalypse in the arrangement. It was incredibly cool in the early 2000s.”

## The producer became addicted to drugs

The success did not last long.

Already after the release of their first album the duo decided to part ways with their producer. Unable to handle the success of his own creation, he struggled with drug addiction. In the end, after ten years together, Lena and Julia also chose to end the collaboration, although they turned up now and then in guest appearances.

As Shapovalov would later put it: he paid for the success with his health.

“I thank life that I am still alive,” he said in an interview with Ksenia Sobchak in 2020.

He was struck by leukaemia, and it was Volkova who forced him to seek care. She herself had had thyroid cancer, and as a result of an operation lost part of her voice; she can no longer sing as she once did.

Around the same time the women, now in their thirties, stopped talking to each other and kept in touch only through their managers.

## New anti-gay laws make it harder

Russia, too, went through changes.

Since the 2000s Russia's “peaceful image” on the global stage has been questioned, not least after Russian tanks rolled into Georgia in 2008. The following year the duo performed at Eurovision in Moscow, accompanied by an inflatable Russian fighter jet and a pink tank. But in 2013 Russian lawmakers carried out the first direct attack on the LGBTQ community through their law against “gay propaganda”. That made it impossible to maintain the image on which Tatu had built its career.

That Katina openly criticised the law did not stop the producers from inviting the duo to perform at the opening of the Sochi Olympics, just as Russia was planning to annex Crimea.

“It was more important to have a song the world already recognised than to think about their LGBTQ background,” Barabanov says.

After the Maidan revolution of 2014 and Russia's support for the regions of eastern Ukraine, which it would later annex, Volkova often went to Ukraine to perform at concerts.

There she said it would be fine with her if her daughter were a lesbian, but that she could not support her son if he were homosexual.

“You have no right to be gay,” Volkova said on a TV programme on the Ukrainian channel STB.

Tatu, which once dominated the charts around the world, toured happily in the United States and took a stand against war, but has chosen Russia.

## Performed at the Crimea bridge

“The world did not live up to their expectations. It is a world of tough competition. America did not become a constant source of money, fame and so on,” says Boris Barabanov.

In 2018 Katina travelled to eastern Ukraine to sing the words “I've lost my mind. I need her” in Luhansk, one of the first cities taken over by Russian-backed forces in 2014.

Standing in front of local media, in the fifth year of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Katina said:

“I wish the people of Luhansk strength, patience and a belief in a bright future.”

Volkova, who said in 2014 that she is “apolitical” and not a Russian “patriot”, because she preferred freedom in the United States to that in Russia, performed at the opening of Putin's Crimea bridge, which connects the Russian mainland with the annexed Crimean peninsula, and has, without success, tried to get into the Russian parliament through Putin's party United Russia.

Boris Barabanov is not surprised.

“The same thing happened with the group Gorky Park. It was the first Soviet band to make the Billboard chart, and they recorded four outstanding albums together with some of the best Western musicians.

“Today they are full-fledged Orthodox jihadists, people who defend aggression, annexation and everything in between.”

## The songs matter more than the band

In the summer of 2025 Tatu announced its reunion as a band.

In July this year the first concert was held at a resort designed by Sir Norman Foster, located in occupied Crimea.

The problem is that their songs, such as “Malchik-gay” (“Gay boy”), and their lesbian image are now illegal. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so-called “gay propaganda” has been banned for all age groups, and LGBTQ has been equated with an “extremist organisation”.

A member of the Russian parliament tried to get Crimea's leadership to ban the concert because it “went against traditional values”.

When they performed their most popular songs at an outdoor arena, they still held each other's hands now and then, just as they did in 2000.

“Today they mean nothing to Russia. Do they exist or not? It doesn't matter. The only thing left is their songs.”

> “The only thing left is their songs.”

When Kelly Clarkson in June this year posted her cover of the group's first and biggest hit, “All the Things She Said”, it quickly got 1.9 million views and is now the most popular song on her YouTube channel.

“The songs live on,” says Boris Barabanov.