The concert "Aloe Vera" in Moscow, which was supposed to take place on August 6, was canceled the day before by the organizer, but this was done under pressure from the authorities, said the soloist of the group Vera Musaelyan on Instagram.
According to her, the group's concerts are illegally canceled, they come to the owners of the venues just before the concert and say: "Contact the group – you're done: FSB, searches, closing the club." So it happened this time, the singer emphasizes.
After the cancellation of official concerts, the group holds them in secret places, and invitations are sent out a few hours in advance by e-mail. After another "secret" concert, FSB officers came to the owner of the venue. The organizers were interrogated, the employees establish the identity of those who came to the concert.
On February 24, Musaelyan spoke out against the war in Ukraine, calling the Russian invasion criminal.
Earlier, Fontanka published a list of "banned artists" with 37 names, it is distributed in the internal chats of promoters and concert organizers in Telegram and WhatsApp. The list included the Aloe Vera group.
Boris Grebenshchikov, whose group is also on the list, in an interview with The Insider told why one should speak out against the war, even when there is no hope of influencing anything. The Russian group Little Big, which got into the same stop list, released a new clip Generation Cancellation in June with anti-war rhetoric. And the leader of DDT, Yuri Shevchuk, who turned out to be among the “banned artists”, spoke at a concert with a speech: “Motherland, friends, this is not the president’s ass, which must be procrastinated and kissed all the time. Motherland is a beggar grandmother at the station selling potatoes. This is the motherland." After that, a protocol was drawn up against the musician under Part 1 of Art. 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation – about discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, but the court returned the Shevchuk case to the police to eliminate the shortcomings. The group's concerts began to be postponed or canceled altogether.
