Russian Woman

By her own account, Manizha wrote "Russian Woman" on 8 March 2020 while on tour, but did not perform it until a year later. She described it as a song about how Russian women's sense of themselves has changed over the centuries: from the peasant hut to the right to vote and stand for office, from factory floors to space flight, always ready to resist stereotypes. Exactly a year after writing it, on 8 March 2021, she won Russia's national Eurovision final with 39.7 percent of the public vote. The singer behind it had her own long road. Manizha was born in Dushanbe in 1991, and her family fled the civil war in Tajikistan in 1994 and settled in Moscow. Her great-grandmother had been one of the first women in Tajikistan to remove her veil and start a career of her own. The song's selection set off a storm. Many Russian viewers objected to a singer of Tajik descent singing about Russian women and to her support for LGBT and women's rights, flooding her video and Instagram with hate comments and demanding she withdraw. A senior Duma deputy, Yelena Drapeko, even suggested banning her from representing Russia. Manizha went to Rotterdam anyway and finished ninth with 204 points. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which she opposed, the country was excluded from the contest, so her song remains Russia's last Eurovision entry, a record of a public argument about who gets to speak for a nation.