At the start of his meeting with the governor of the Vologda region in late August 2025, Aleksander Lukashenko recalled how, at the beginning of his presidency, he supposedly had to revive the Pesnyary ensemble. The Telegram channel Pul Pervogo published a video of this part of the meeting on Aug. 25.
“Few people talk about it now, but during the years of rampant nationalism in Belarus — which, after all, thrived for several years before I was elected president — there were attempts to reject everything Russian, and some did reject it, trying to force it on society. But, as you can see, society did not accept those messages. At that moment, in the first and second year of my presidency, I often had to visit Pesnyary in their basement space, where the poor guys were rehearsing. And I remember when Volodya Mulyavin asked me, begged me, to help them return to the stage. Of course, we did everything to bring Pesnyary back,” Lukashenko recalled.
Vladimir Mulyavin did turn to Aleksander Lukashenko for support. But it was not in the first or second year of his presidency. As WTF journalists found, the reasons were also different.
Pesnyary had no trouble performing: in 1992 the musicians played at the Slavianski Bazaar in Vitebsk, and in 1994, for the ensemble’s 25th anniversary, they sang "Berezovy sok (“Birch Sap”) together with Alla Pugacheva. The group did not go underground and did not suffer because of the Russian language or performing with Russian artists.
The split in the group happened under Lukashenko. In the second half of the 1990s, the ensemble’s activity began to decline. The performers complained of exhaustion and a lack of touring. By 1998, the conflict within the group had reached a breaking point: according to Vladislav Misevich, the saxophonist and vocalist from the original lineup, the musicians were unhappy that founder and leader Vladimir Mulyavin had withdrawn from the band’s affairs and was increasingly abusing alcohol. Ultimately, Belarus’s Ministry of Culture removed Mulyavin from his post as director, keeping him as artistic director, while Misevich became director.
Mulyavin was unhappy with this decision. He turned to Aleksander Lukashenko for support, which led to the creation of a new Pesnyary lineup made up of younger musicians. In response, the old group quit and continued touring under the name Belarusian Pesnyary. For several years, the ensembles existed in parallel.