Pure, white and native: the birch as a symbol of Russian nationalism

The image of the birch tree in popular Russian culture is as manifold as the trees themselves, but we could do worse than to begin with the song ‘Why do the birches rustle so loudly in Russia?’ By the patriotic band called Lube — apparently Putin’s favourite — it’s a melancholic guitar ballad that also mentions the soul, accordions, suffering, falling leaves, an old woman waving goodbye, and a beloved woman (rodnaya) ‘my own’, from the same root as rodina, motherland. It also happens to be sung by a handsome young village policeman. Na zdarovya! A shot of birch kitsch at its most potent.

As Tom Jeffreys mentions in his introduction: ‘For Russia’s intelligentsia, the birch is an old cliché, something they would rather forget about.’ After having the ‘peasant poet’ Yesenin’s verses thrust down their throats at school and silvery trunks deployed in Soviet propaganda ad nauseam, the only way the birch is going to appear in contemporary Russian art is beneath a deep layer of irony — like the branch holding up a gold-painted Eiffel Tower that Jeffreys spots at a Moscow art fair.

In popular culture, however, the beryoza still reigns, its luminous trunk a receptacle for all the most heart-wrenching elements of Russian national identity. Here is the pastoral golden age of birch in which merry peasants lived off the traditional products of the forest, wearing lapti (shoes made of birch bark), carving household utensils from birch wood, drinking birch sap and lightly flagellating each other with birch twigs in their steam baths.

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Further back, here is the primordial birch, worshipped by ancient pagan Slavs from time immemorial (if you are willing to accept the officially sanctioned anti-Normanist account of early Russia).