Pesnyary, Babkina, and 191 countries: an international youth festival where locals are not allowed
The government-sponsored International Youth Festival will be held in Yekaterinburg The event will run from September 11th to 17th. Its main venues are the new UrFU campus in Novokoltsovsky and the Yekaterinburg-EXPO exhibition center. Organizers promise that approximately 10 participants will attend, half of whom will be international, representing 191 countries.
The program includes lectures, tours, a gastrofestival, and concerts. However, only those who have applied in advance and received approval from the commission will be able to attend. Even the full list of events planned "behind closed doors" is not available to the general public. Local media write about future meetings of teenagers with artists Igor Butman, Dmitry Malikov и Hope Babkina, but getting to them won't be easy.
The organizing committee of the International Youth Festival has only released details about the concert portion. It is known that the event will take place from September 13th to 16th at venues on the campus of the Ural Federal University. will perform dozens of Russian and foreign artists.
Among those whose performances young Russians will be able to attend are: Dima Bilan, Sergey Bobunets from "Semantic Hallucinations", the group "Zveri", the Sretensky Monastery Choir, as well as the Soviet VIA "Pesnyary" and "Singing Guitars", which for some reason also found themselves among the youth.
Organizers are also preparing a separate Ural Music Night to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Sverdlovsk Rock Club. Headliners include Chizh&Co and Vadim Samoilov. But even here, not everything is smooth sailing:
"Then why post this information if ordinary residents can't attend this event?", "This isn't Music Night, it's some kind of closed event, like a corporate party," "Has anyone even seen the registration information?", — local residents don’t understand.
Despite the closed nature of the event, limited information in the public domain and a strictly selected list of participants, Yekaterinburg has already pulled off Hundreds of police officers arrived with duffel bags and festival badges.
Photo: Evgeny Komolov, 66.RU, "Signal Ural"
