Unannounced fire safety inspections. Last-minute bomb threats. Pressured club owners. These are just some of the measures the IC3PEAK techno group says the authorities have used to cancel their concerts over the past week since the start of their month-long tour around Russia.



In one instance, the Moscow-based group says they were even told directly to leave town.

After three attempts to hold a concert in the Urals city of Perm on Tuesday were thwarted, the musicians say that members of the Federal Security Service (FSB) demanded they leave. The musicians refused but, they say, security officers tailed them until they left by train the next morning.

“They’re treating us as if we are some kind of criminals,” Nastya Kreslina, a member of the group, said in a joint phone interview on Thursday with her bandmate Nikolai Kostylev.

The musicians spoke to The Moscow Times from Yekaterinburg, another Urals city where they were scheduled to perform as part of the next stop on their tour. They were waiting to find out from local police if their concert would be allowed to go ahead as planned that evening. Two of the upcoming stops on their tour had already been canceled.

Kreslina and Kostylev, who said they are in their 20s but would not give their exact ages, have not officially been charged with any crimes. But they have been caught up in an increasing wave of restrictions against musicians in Russia, including concert cancellations and bans on music videos and songs over indecent lyrics and alleged extremism.

The restrictions have affected artists across a range of genres, including some of Russia’s most popular artists: Allj, whose 2017 hit “Pink Wine” has been viewed over 176 million times on YouTube, and pop star Monetochka, whose last album took Russia by storm this summer. Other affected artists include the rappers Matrang, Jah Kahlib and HammAli & Navai, as well as the pop-punk group Friendzona.

One popular rapper, Husky, even ended up in prison last Thursday. He had climbed atop a car parked outside a concert venue after a show he had been scheduled to hold was abruptly canceled without explanation and performed for his fans. The punishment: 12 days behind bars for hooliganism and refusing to take a drug test.

The view of musicians as having a negative influence on society is not new in Russia: Local officials and law enforcement, backed by vigilante and parents groups that support traditional values, have long gone after artists that they believe promote narcotics, sex, suicide or other social ills.

But experts say that the recent wave that has swept across the country, particularly over the past weeks, stands out.

“This always happened from time to time, but the number of stories coming out this month is unique,” says Alexander Gorbachev, who covers the music scene for the Meduza news outlet. “Every day another artist is targeted.”

In a phone interview, David Shelter, a Perm-based club promoter who worked with IC3PEAK when they visited, described the fall tour season that started in September as “very strange.” Police have called Shelter in for questionings about IC3PEAK, Friendzona and Husky this month, and he was even paid a visit by Alexander Kosenkov, the head of a district in Perm, several days before IC3PEAK’s scheduled show, Shelter says.

“He said, ‘We don’t recommend that you hold this concert. They have suspicious lyrics,’” Shelter, 28, recalled. “I am a law-abiding person. If it was illegal to promote these groups, then I wouldn’t have.”

“But I have never been shown any documentation that would stop me from doing so,” he added.

Pavel Chikov, the director of the Agora international human rights group that has advised many of the affected musicians, says that local law enforcement officials rarely provide evidence to back up any illegal activity. Chikov has claimed that the FSB headquarters in Moscow has a “blacklist” of musicians “whose concerts are to be banned in Russia’s regions.”

The FSB did not respond to a request for comment for this story.