"Did we offend the hurray-patriots last year?" The Grushinsky Festival at Mastryukovskie Lakes will not take place.
The festival field in the Samara region will be closed to visitors.
The organizers explained the festival's cancellation by "the risks of holding it under current conditions" and the landscape's peculiarities, which make it impossible to ensure adequate safety measures.
"We sincerely value the life and health of every participant who comes to the festival field, and we are confident that singing songs around open-air bonfires and sitting shoulder to shoulder on the Mountain on our song night is impossible in today's reality," explained organizers.
They promised to prepare a series of concerts, "On the Grushinskaya Wave," to be held in the region this summer, as well as a traditional meeting in 2025.
Last summer the festival didn't work outA torrential rain flooded the clearing and the tourists' tents; they barely managed to get out of the impassable mud, singing, "How wonderful that we're all gathered here today." Furthermore, the organizers refused to allow Z-patriots onto the main stage with songs glorifying the war in Ukraine. Festival directors Oleg Mityaev, Galina Khomchik и Boris Keilman They also refused to let Pobeda finalist Mikhail Kalinkin perform at the final gala concert, but he still went on stage. The situation is very outraged State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein.
The cancellation of the traditional festival has upset regular participants. "I've been waiting for it so long, I live from Grusha to Grusha, a piece of my soul is there!", "I'll still come, I don't care, this is the most important thing of the year," "Did we offend the hurray-patriots last year, didn't we let them into the main concert?", "The pandemic times have returned, they took everything away again," — they shared their experiences.
Over the past 56 years, the festival has been canceled only twice. It was first cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic, and in 2021, it was not held in its usual format for the same reason.
Photo: from the Grushinsky Festival's VK page, Oleg Pomogaybin
