A Russian lawmaker offered to make Stoptime’s teenage frontwoman a patriotic star — if she’d repent on camera. Diana Loginova chose exile instead, and the band just released its first album.

Last summer, 18-year-old Diana Loginova and 22-year-old Alexander Orlov had just started dating. They founded a band, named it Stoptime, and began performing on the streets of St. Petersburg. By fall, the group had attracted attention, and videos of them covering banned songs by musicians labeled “foreign agents” went viral on social media and reached law enforcement. In November, after a series of “carousel” arrests, the musicians were forced to leave Russia. Six months later, they released their debut album. Meduza tells the story of what the musicians went through during their arrests and what they hope for now, living in exile.

Warning: This article contains profanity.

‘A lost generation leafing through scraps of magazines’

For the second day running, Russian speech fills the Wola district in western Warsaw. Despite the rain, people stream toward the concert grounds of the Outloud festival.

The festival has drawn some of the most prominent Russian musicians who spoke out against the war in Ukraine and were forced into exile. The lineup at events like this has barely changed since 2022: Noize MC, Monetochka, Mashina Vremeni, Pornofilmy, Kasta, Bi-2. But the act now taking the stage is new — Stoptime, from St. Petersburg: three young men and a young woman in a black shirt and loose light-colored trousers.

As the musicians walk out, one fan starts chanting in a singsong voice: “Stop-time! Stop-time!” No one joins in — the crowd settles for applause. A man in the front row unfurls a Ukrainian flag.

Only a handful of people know Stoptime’s songs by heart, but over the past year, the band’s name has become familiar to anyone who follows Russian news: in the fall of 2025, members Diana Loginova and Alexander Orlov were forced to leave Russia after facing persecution over the anti-war songs they performed on the streets of St. Petersburg.

Right up against the stage, where the security guards stand, a woman of about 50 in a bright blue blouse frets over the band. This is Ira. She lowers her voice and nods toward Stoptime’s lead singer: Loginova, 19, stares intently ahead. “She’s nervous,” Ira explains. “This is nothing — you should have seen her when she performed with the piano. Best not to go near her in the morning.”

Loginova plays the synthesizer and sings out clearly:

Ira films the whole performance on her smartphone, crying during some of the songs. Now and then, she turns the camera to capture the people crowded against the barrier. Some have their own phones up, filming; others nod along to the beat.

Stoptime’s set on the second day of the open-air festival runs about half an hour. Naoko — the stage name Loginova took from a character in Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood — continues:

Today, Stoptime is playing its new lineup for the first time: joining Diana and guitarist Alexander Orlov, 23, on stage are the Bortnik brothers — drummer Aviv and guitarist David, sons of Bi-2 frontman Leva.

The Bortniks met Stoptime through a cover contest organized by the festival itself — the brothers submitted their entry, a cover of Noize MC’s “Oblomki Chuvstv” (“Shards of Feelings”). Diana suggested they perform together.

From the stage:

Naoko invites the audience to sing along. The crowd happily obliges.

All these songs are from Stoptime’s new album, “V Niotkuda s Nikuda” (“From Nowhere to Nowhere”), released on June 26, two weeks after the band’s set at Outloud. It has 10 tracks, an intro, and an outro.

As the musicians, arms around each other, come out for their bow, Ira cups her hands around her mouth and tries to catch her daughter’s eye. “Diana, the al-bu-u-um!” she shouts, straining to carry over the crowd. Diana doesn’t hear her.

Backstage, it emerges that something went wrong during the set.

“For some reason, we had no playback in our in-ears,” Loginova says glumly, coming down the steps.

“It was a fucking mess!” Orlov adds, pulling the guitar off his shoulder.

“Sasha, language!” Ira cuts him off. “You didn’t announce the album! The rest doesn’t matter.”

‘During street performances, I felt understood and appreciated’

Their spacious rented apartment has three rooms, high ceilings, and white walls. Diana, Alexander, and Ira won’t say exactly where they’ve settled: “Let’s just write ‘in Europe.’” They have been living in exile for six months now.

Diana’s old synthesizer made the trip with the Loginovas — her family gave her the instrument when she was five. They turned one room into a home studio, soundproofing it themselves.

They first tried to record the new album there, but as soon as they started on the arrangements, they heard “unwanted noise” and had to re-record at a professional studio, Diana and Sasha say. Loginova wrote two songs before the arrests and several more while held in detention. Most, though, she wrote in exile.

“By some remarkable coincidence, this is a musicians’ building,” Diana and Sasha say of their new home. “The woman upstairs is a violinist, for instance. There’s an understanding: no playing after 10 p.m. The rest of the time, we can raise all the noise we want.”

Ira calls everyone to tea — she has made blini. The musicians ask her to let them finish the interview first.

“We really want our songs to build a bridge between listeners who are trying to resist all the evil bearing down on them,” Diana says.

Before the arrests and her departure from Russia, Diana was a third-year student at St. Petersburg’s Rimsky-Korsakov Music College. Her family had been preparing her for the piano program since she was six. It was Ira’s decision to steer her daughter into music, made after consulting her own mother, Diana’s grandmother. “We saw potential in her,” Ira recalls.

Diana calls her mother simply Ira; she no longer remembers how that started. When Diana was small, Ira worked long hours, and her grandmother did most of the child-rearing. Diana counts her mother, grandmother, and aunt as her parents, adding that she was “raised by strong women.”

Afraid of disappointing her family and teachers, Diana never argued and dutifully learned to play the piano, she told Yury Dud. “What interested me was that you could travel abroad for piano competitions,” she said. “You play one day there and rest for a week.”

Music college was hard going. “You just constantly hear what a piece of shit you are, and that’s supposed to spur you to some kind of musical achievement,” Diana recalls. Some teachers, she says, screamed obscenities at students or humiliated them over their appearance.

She couldn’t bring herself to quit — “too much effort and money had been sunk into the performances.” Her family advised her to “pay no attention” and let the insults wash over her.

“And sure enough, by the end of my second year, it was starting to work,” Diana sighs. “I tried to focus on my studies, and that helped. Then the street performances came along. That’s where I felt understood and appreciated.”

After conservatory, Diana wanted to get a second degree abroad so she could become “whatever she wanted” — a sound engineer or a songwriter.

Sasha is 23. Born in Nefteyugansk, he grew up in Tyumen before his family moved to Sakhalin. He had dreamed of seeing St. Petersburg ever since his brother came back from a trip there — Orlov remembers how impressed his brother was with the city. At 18, Sasha was admitted to the St. Petersburg Institute of Railway Transport and presented his parents with a done deal: he was moving. When they protested, Sasha resorted to leaving home. It worked; his parents gave in.

Orlov never became a ground transportation engineer — he was expelled “because of one professor.” In recent years, he performed on the streets of St. Petersburg with various musicians.

Talking about St. Petersburg, Diana and Sasha listen closely to each other, occasionally filling in details. Sasha rarely smiles and betrays almost no emotion. He sits ramrod straight and now and then glances at his laptop. Diana fidgets on the couch. Recalling the arrests, she jokes about the police one moment and turns serious the next.

In mid-October 2025, three members of Stoptime — at the time, drummer Vladislav Leontyev was performing with Diana and Sasha — were detained and placed under administrative arrest. They were charged with “organizing a rally”: the musicians had been singing songs by artists labeled “foreign agents” on the streets of St. Petersburg.

The musicians had performed what Diana calls “unofficially banned songs” since June 2025, hoping to bring together people who felt lonely. To the musicians themselves, the performances were a personal “safe space,” Orlov says. Friends came to hear Stoptime, and fans soon followed — by mid-October 2025, the band’s Telegram channel had 12,000 subscribers.

Loginova didn’t see the performances as a protest. “I wanted to show people my favorite music and see for myself that it hadn’t been forgotten, and that this unofficial ban doesn’t apply to everyone — not everyone observes it,” she said in an interview with Yury Dud in December, by then in exile. “And of course, to see people respond. So that the loneliness that set in after 2021 and 2022 would go away.”

Among the comments under one video of a later Stoptime performance is this one:

‘I realized I needed to gather information on how to get out and lie low’

After a few performances, “the emotion of the audience’s response took over,” and the musicians “lost their caution,” Diana recalls. She sometimes wonders whether Stoptime “could have lasted longer” if it hadn’t performed, say, Noize MC’s “Kooperativ Lebedinoye Ozero” (“Swan Lake Cooperative”), a song banned by a Russian court.

St. Petersburg started talking about the band two months before the arrests. In August 2025, the local outlet Bumaga wrote about Naoko, publishing a video of a performance on a closed-off Nevsky Prospekt.

“Art right now is the only language — at least in Russia — through which you can say what you think,” an 18-year-old Diana said at the time. “I’ve chosen it, and I don’t want to speak any other.”

Diana saved the money she earned performing: that fall, she bought herself the iPhone she had long wanted. In late summer, police detained the band members for the first time, for violating noise rules after 10 p.m. The musicians spent several hours at the precinct before being released with a fine.

A month later, on September 30, the American magazine The Atlantic published a piece headlined “Moscow Can’t Stop the Music.” Journalist Anna Nemtsova described how, on a summer night, hundreds of young Russians gathered on St. Petersburg’s main street to hear songs the authorities had banned — a recent gathering of the musical underground where anger at the Kremlin was on open, loud display.

Alexander Orlov recalls that this report was the first thing to make him anxious: “That’s when I understood that something could go wrong. And when I saw that video with Kazan Cathedral, I realized I needed to gather information on how to get out, lie low, so nothing would happen.”

In mid-October, denunciations of the band were filed by Larisa Tyurina, a supporter of the Russian Community movement; Marina Akhmedova, a propagandist and the editor-in-chief of the Regnum news agency; and Mikhail Romanov, a State Duma deputy from United Russia. All three called for the authorities to investigate the musicians, who were drawing dozens, if not hundreds, of spectators to their performances.

“Around eight in the evening on October 14, Sasha got a call from a neighbor in his communal apartment saying that officers from the criminal investigation department had come looking for him,” Diana says of the day before her arrest. “Sasha went to spend the night somewhere else, and I went to a friend’s place. We were still hoping we could do something, get out somehow.”

That evening, Diana and Sasha met friends at a cafe. After the neighbor’s call, they decided to take a photo to remember the moment. “Oh, look, the last photo with Diana in Russia,” someone in the group joked, prophetically.

Orlov was living in a communal apartment on Vasilyevsky Island; Diana lived with her family in Rakhya, a town of fewer than 4,000 people in the Leningrad region. Neighbors there know one another well, so when Center “E” officers — from the police directorate tasked with fighting “extremism” — parked their Lada Granta near the Loginovs’ home in the early hours of October 15 and began surveillance, locals noticed the suspicious men in plainclothes right away.

“I didn’t sleep at all that night,” Orlov recalls. “I wrote to OVD-Info [a Russian human rights group], and they sent general advice on what to do if detained. I decided we needed to lie low for a couple of days: stop using our phones, hide our location.”

Those precautions look naive now, Diana says. Sasha had warned her she might be arrested, she recalls, but she didn’t believe it. “Because I had so much going on — school,” she laughs. “I had a schedule! And they [the security officers] didn’t fit into it.”

At six in the morning, insistent knocking began at the door of the St. Petersburg apartment where Diana was staying. Loginova believes her phone had probably been tapped before her detention.

There were three officers. One turned out to be Aram Khachatryan, a police lieutenant colonel with St. Petersburg’s Center “E.” In a conversation with OVD-Info, a St. Petersburg lawyer called him the city’s “chief handler of dissidents.” Khachatryan, a short man with a beard, ordered Diana to get dressed and pack her things for the trip to the station.

“When I heard the lead officer’s name, it stung! I love the composer Aram Khachaturian — I’ve played his pieces,” the pianist says, joking sadly. “I asked them to show me their IDs; all they showed me was their weapons.” The officers never explained why Loginova was being detained.

Loginova doesn’t remember what she brought to the station: “I think there was a bag of food my friend’s mother shoved into my hands. With one hand she’s on the phone — ‘Ira, they’re taking Diana!’ — and with the other she’s packing me provisions.”

For some reason, the pianist was driven to St. Petersburg’s 78th police precinct in a low-slung black sports car. “At the station, they asked: ‘You do understand why you’re here?’ I answered: ‘No.’ They said it was for ‘Swan Lake Cooperative’ and Monetochka’s ‘Ty Soldat’ (‘You’re a Soldier’).” After questioning, Loginova was locked in a cell.

Alexander was detained the same day, though not on the first try. On the morning of October 15, after learning of Diana’s arrest, he went to the precinct himself. He describes the decision to turn himself in without emotion: “I turned on my phone, saw a mass of missed calls, read that she’d been detained. Well, off we go…”

The police weren’t ready for him. “They said, ‘We don’t need you right now,’” the musician recalls. “Then in the evening, they called back and said I had to come in urgently. That’s when I knew they were going to detain me.”

The band’s drummer, Vladislav Leontyev, also came to the precinct voluntarily that day. He, too, was detained. Loginova, Orlov, and Leontyev were caught in “carousel” arrests — each time they were due for release, they were tried and sentenced again. Leontyev was handed a new term twice; Orlov and Loginova, three times each. Loginova also faced four charge sheets: three for “discrediting the army,” over songs by the “foreign agent” musicians Noize MC and Monetochka, and one for “petty hooliganism,” for performing songs with profanity on Nevsky Prospekt.

During one trip in the police van, Alexander proposed to Diana, offering her a ring made from a napkin.

‘When I saw journalists in the courtroom, I was glad’

As the persecution of Stoptime unfolded, several ethical debates broke out on Russian-language social media. Russians argued over whether the musicians had knowingly taken the risk and understood where their performances could lead.

An even hotter debate erupted over the role played in the musicians’ persecution by fans who posted videos from the St. Petersburg streets — and by journalists who covered the band (Stoptime itself also posted performance videos to its Telegram channel).

The musicians themselves, though, don’t blame journalists for their arrests. “When I was arrested the first time and saw journalists in the courtroom, it immediately calmed me down,” Loginova recalls. “I was glad that people would at least find out about this.” She credits the outcry over the Stoptime case to press coverage of the arrests, including by Western outlets.

Alexander says he chose not to show the court the marks left by his beatings, so as “not to inflame relations” with the security services. At the end of his first arrest, Center “E” officers led by Khachatryan grabbed the musician as he left the detention facility and tried to shove him into a car. Orlov resisted, and Khachatryan pressed him against the vehicle hard enough to leave a wound. On the way to the station, the officers dealt Orlov “a couple” more smacks upside the head.

“At our next meeting, he [Khachatryan] apologized to me,” Sasha adds, unexpectedly. “And I believe it was sincere.”

“I still tell Sasha I don’t believe Khachatryan,” Diana counters. “He apologized so we wouldn’t keep dredging up the incident later.”

Ira doesn’t blame journalists for the security forces’ persecution of her daughter either, but she did once quarrel with them in court. During the hearing on Diana’s first charge, Ira reproached reporters for writing only about Stoptime’s “foreign agent” repertoire and ignoring the fact that Diana also sang “patriotic” songs — including numbers by the pro-Kremlin singer Shaman.

Loginova’s YouTube channel still has footage of two of her performances from 2023. In one, a ninth-grade Diana sings Shaman’s “Vstanem” (“We Will Rise”), apparently dedicated to soldiers; in the other, she performs “My” (“We”), a song about the resilience of “our people.”

In her interview with Dud, Loginova said she’d had an arrangement with her homeroom teacher: she would perform patriotic songs at school events, and in return she was excused from her last classes to attend prep courses at the music college.

“They [the teachers] said it would be dedicated to the heroes of World War II — we rehearsed with a black screen,” Diana said. “And then, in the recording of the concert, I see what’s behind me: ‘Donetsk, Luhansk…’”

Diana insists that, at the time, she “took Shaman as a joke.” Treating Yaroslav Dronov (Shaman’s real name) as a patriotic performer is “inherently strange,” she says, given his cartoonish image and delivery.

But Stoptime did once perform “Vstanem” on a St. Petersburg street — at the demand of drunk passersby in military uniform. By Diana’s account, the whole band could barely keep a straight face.

“And then I went: ‘And now, a truly patriotic song,’” she recalls. “And we launched into Pornofilmy’s ‘Eto Proydet’ (‘This Too Shall Pass’). The soldiers turned around and left.”

Today, Diana considers the Shaman covers “a very bad joke.” “Age is no excuse for me. That I wanted a laugh is no excuse either,” she says.

‘The FSB officers said that if I wanted to be popular, I needed to cooperate with them’

Over her 39 days in detention, Loginova was questioned not only by Center “E” officers but also by the FSB. Shortly before the end of her second arrest, Diana was taken from her cell and led to another wing: “Two men were sitting there. They introduced themselves and said they ‘handled the cultural side of things.’ They talked to me differently than the Center ‘E’ guys: those ones mostly made threats, while these two just spelled out the grim fate awaiting me if I stepped onto the wrong path. They said that if I wanted to be popular, I needed to cooperate with them.”

The FSB officers asked Loginova whether she knew any Ukrainian acts — the band Okean Elzy, for example. Diana said she did. They asked her to sing a few songs. Diana sang.

She recalls telling them: “I had no clue I was singing banned songs!” Recounting it now, she adds: “It seemed like you could tell them anything at all — they’d just come to check a box.”

At the same time, Loginova continues, she really did “see no danger” in the Noize MC song: “For the life of me, I didn’t see it there!” Zemfira’s “Rodina” (“Homeland”), though, she was wary of performing. The song includes these lines:

On the rare days when Stoptime did perform “Rodina,” some passersby winced at the words. But those who stopped listened intently. “I badly wanted to sing it, and it mattered to me,” Loginova recalls. “But I felt the danger, and in October I stopped singing it altogether.”

Ira came to almost all of her daughter’s street performances. She saw no problem with the repertoire. “Not one warning from her!” Diana says, laughing. “If she’d told me: look, these songs are going to wreck our lives… There wasn’t a single conversation.”

A relative once saw a video of Diana singing Pornofilmy’s “Eto Proydet,” her mother recounts. “He asked me: ‘Ira, do you think it’s okay to sing songs like that? There’s a line about “a wet bag over your head.”’ And I said: ‘What’s wrong with that?’” Ira says she had no idea it referred to police torture:

After her daughter was born, Ira spent eight years as an assembly fitter at a car plant in Vsevolozhsk. In recent years, the family earned its living growing and selling berries, saplings, and seedlings. Shortly before leaving Russia, Ira became a driving instructor — her “dream job,” she called it.

The other verses of “Eto Proydet” didn’t trouble her either. This one, for instance:

‘I’ll sing in the hospitals — and then they’ll rub my nose in it for the rest of my life’

In November 2025, Mikhail Romanov — the same State Duma deputy who had denounced Stoptime — published a post on his Telegram channel saying he had met with Diana Loginova’s mother. The post appeared the day after the Loginovas and Orlov left Russia.

Romanov wrote that Ira had approached him “with a request for intercession when the threat of criminal prosecution arose,” and he published her handwritten statement. According to Romanov, Loginova’s mother assured him that the musicians were remorseful and “ready to apologize for their foolish behavior and serve our country using their talent.”

Romanov’s aides came to Ira and pressed her to take a deal: Stoptime would repent at a press conference, then give charity concerts at hospitals treating veterans of the war against Ukraine. Only then, they insisted, could Diana walk free after her third arrest and avoid criminal prosecution. “They tried to scare us; they threatened my grandmother, saying: ‘If the mother won’t cooperate, we’ll take measures,’” Diana says.

Romanov and his aides proposed “making a second Shaman out of Diana,” Ira said in her interview with Dud: “I said no — we don’t need a second Shaman. Better she just stay Diana.”

When her mother relayed Romanov’s terms, Diana at first agreed. But the next day, she called Ira from the detention facility and said she “wouldn’t grovel before anyone and would rather sit in jail.”

Recalling this, Loginova starts to seethe again. “I sing at those concerts — and then for the rest of my life, they’ll rub my nose in what I did,” she says, biting off each word. “And for the rest of my life, I’ll owe them for letting me stay in Russia.”

The FSB officers who visited the detention facility also figured in Diana’s decision not to repent publicly. They told her in advance that “the third term was certain” and advised her “not to count on the deputy.”

On November 23, at the end of their third administrative arrests, Loginova and Orlov were finally released. In her interview with Yury Dud, Diana recalled:

According to Diana’s mother, the security forces never so much as hinted to her or her daughter that they should leave the country. On the contrary: the FSB officers said they would “be in touch” with Naoko.

“The FSB presented Diana with a fait accompli: if she was released, she’d have to do whatever they said,” Ira says. “That was one of the main reasons we left.”

The Loginovas went straight to the airport: Ira had started packing in advance. In court, before the third arrest, Diana had whispered to her that they needed to leave. “We had about a minute,” the pianist recalls. “I suggested she leave with me. I was scared that Sasha wouldn’t emigrate. And there’s no way she would have let me go alone, because she worries.”

Before the flight, both women’s phones rang nonstop. “As soon as we got to the airport, everyone started calling again: the same Center ‘E’ officers, Romanov’s aides,” Diana recalls. “Later we learned they’d come to our home again. And they had promised me they wouldn’t bother my family anymore, wouldn’t bother me. They gave me their word. Their word is worth nothing.”

Alexander left Russia a day after his release. He had first wanted to get to Sakhalin, where his parents live. He didn’t make it in time: a summons from the military enlistment office arrived.

“During the arrests, I had a conversation with the Center ‘E’ officers. They said I’d be going into the army, no question,” Orlov recalls. “And then I find out that some letter had arrived at my communal apartment on Vasilyevsky Island. And I realize: a couple more days, and they’ll bar me from leaving. I wasn’t wrong. Two days after I landed in Yerevan, a text arrived: ‘Exit from the Russian Federation is prohibited.’”

On December 20, Diana Loginova and Alexander Orlov performed in Vilnius — alongside Monetochka and Noize MC, whose songs they had sung on the streets of St. Petersburg.

‘People wrote to me: Don’t play dumb — you knew what you were getting into’

“There were a lot of comments saying that if my loved ones really were dearer to me than ‘some little songs,’ I would have chosen not to sing them and to stay with my family,” Diana says. “People wrote that it was my own fault, that I shouldn’t have sung. ‘Don’t play dumb — you knew what you were getting into.’ And I want to say: before my detentions, you didn’t know those songs were banned either!”

Diana’s grandmother, 73, and her aunt stayed in Russia. The Loginovas urged them to leave, but they flatly refused. The family hopes they’ll manage to see each other somewhere in Europe.

“My family and friends will always matter more than my art,” Diana says. “But I never imagined I’d be jailed for it and forced to emigrate! I’m not complaining about being here. I have a good, free life. I’m finding my footing. But I would have liked to make that choice myself — to leave without being pushed.”

Sasha says that of everything he’d accumulated over four years in St. Petersburg, he didn’t even take his guitar. He left with one small carry-on suitcase. “I figured, fine, I’ll buy things later,” he recalls. “The main thing was to have pants, underwear, socks, a T-shirt, a light jacket.” Before leaving, he “asked his parents’ permission.” And into the suitcase went a jar of red caviar he’d once brought back from Sakhalin.

Sasha and Diana aren’t thinking about returning to Russia yet: the end of the war in Ukraine, they say, could still be a long way off. “I think you can’t dwell on the past — you need to integrate here,” Sasha says.

Ira tries to object, needling him: Sasha only thinks that way, she says, because he has “nothing” in Russia. “And what do you have? You have the same thing I do,” Sasha replies.

Diana stops them both. “A home is just walls if the people you love aren’t in it,” she says evenly. “What keeps us all at home is our parents, our people.”

For now, all three live on concert fees: in late May, Stoptime played a short tour through several European cities. Diana jokingly calls her mother her “faithful knight” — Ira accompanies the couple on every trip. “At 50, she’s finally going to see the world!” her daughter says, delighted.

Ira misses Russia badly. “To me, it still feels like we just came here for work,” she says. But she has no plans to go back “until it’s all over there.”

“At home, I’d get up in the morning knowing I had work first, then the garden,” Ira says. “When we first got here, I kept trying to get everyone up early, too: come on, why are you sleeping, how long can you sleep? But now I’ve somehow settled down. I wake up — everyone’s asleep. So I lie back down.”

Alexander and Diana both plan to pursue higher education in Europe. They won’t say where they’re applying, only that it will involve music. Interest in Stoptime may someday fade, the musicians say — they’re prepared for that, which is why both plan to train for a profession in a related field.

Ira has no plan for her own life yet. “For now, I’m helping the kids with the day-to-day. What I could do for work in exile, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it,” she says.

‘I can start crying or get angry for no reason. It started in exile’

In May, Diana and Sasha marked the anniversary of their relationship. Asked what they’ve learned about each other over this difficult year, Diana starts not with music or the persecution but with domestic life. “Sasha’s a slob… If something isn’t where it belongs, to me that’s already a mess!” she complains, half joking.

Sasha explains that his work requires a whole tangle of cables — at least seven — which can look like disorder. “It’s not even about the cables: you leave dirty mugs around the room. They belong in the sink!” Diana objects.

“The trash has to go out before three in the afternoon,” Sasha deadpans, needling Diana and Ira about their habits.

“It’s a superstition!”

It’s the couple’s first time living together. It can be hard on both of them, Diana says — partly because they share the place with her mother. In six months of exile, Diana and Sasha have “broken up about 10 times already,” retreating to separate rooms. The pianist admits that she’s usually the one who overdramatizes, while Ira “adds fuel to the fire.” Within a few days, they make up.

The couple jokes about who gets ready faster and who sleeps longer. When Diana commuted to school in St. Petersburg, she planned her days to the minute. “If we need to leave at six, I walk out at six,” Sasha says. “For Diana, that means standing at the door by 5:50.” Sasha, meanwhile, can let himself run late or sleep until one in the afternoon. For Diana, that’s unthinkable.

Loginova concedes she’s a control freak. She asks Sasha, for instance, to write out point by point what she should do to help manage the band. “It’s important that I spend my working time productively, so nothing has to be redone later,” she explains. She adds that she does, in fact, “still love Sasha very much.”

The arrests and exile have left their mark on the pianist. “I feel like I’ve become somehow more aggressive, or more emotional,” Loginova says. “I can start crying for no reason, get angry, start shouting. It started in exile — and that anger often hurts them. Then I’m ashamed, I apologize… I try to fight it, but it isn’t working.”

‘I just want a quiet life’

Like every earlier milestone in the band’s history, Stoptime’s new album, “V Niotkuda s Nikuda,” has become a hot topic for Russian-speaking social media users.

The music video for the song “Zachem?” (“Why?”), released on the eve of the album, was filmed in Berlin — at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. In it, Diana and Sasha stand between the monument’s vertical slabs as Loginova sings:

Tell me, why do I need this green grass now

If I can’t even feel it under my feet?

Words that got mixed up in letters that never arrived

Will be exchanged for a line on my cardiogram.

I’m lying in someone else’s bed, in a foreign city,

Where charred walls whisper bad news to me.

Someone above promises: “They’ll come for you later

Along with data from the rear and Cargo 200 coffins.”

Criticism came immediately: people were outraged that, “for the sake of visuals,” the musicians had used “a place of memory and mourning” — a memorial to murdered Jews. Among the band’s critics was Kevin Lik, a former political prisoner freed two years ago in a prisoner exchange between Russia and the West. Lik holds Russian and German citizenship; in 2023, while still a schoolboy, he was convicted on a “state treason” charge.

Lik called Loginova a “guest” in his country and said the musicians had shown “disrespect for Germany’s history.” He added that Naoko had written to him saying she had no intention of deleting the video, since she “answers for her actions and words.”

Another former political prisoner, Alla Gutnikova, took Lik on publicly. Gutnikova was 23 when she became a defendant in the case against the student magazine Doxa. She called Lik’s position “nationalist” and criticized “right-wing narratives about migrants.” In her view, “the culture of memory is alive and fluid,” and memorials “can be reinterpreted.”

Gutnikova also pointed to an interview with the memorial’s architect, Peter Eisenman, who has stressed that his work is “not a sacred place” and allowed that the monument would be woven into the city’s everyday life.

Diana Loginova responded to the critics on her Instagram. The band used the memorial “as a symbol of memory for the victims of wars, repression, violence, and crimes against humanity,” she wrote, and “Zachem?” “is written from the perspective of an invading soldier and does not romanticize that image.”

Naoko added that “most of the band’s members are Jewish” and that the memorial holds “great significance” for them. In one comment, she shot back at a critic: “An interesting reproach from one Jew to another.”

After the Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which oversees the monument, told Deutsche Welle that the band had never obtained the foundation’s consent to film there, Stoptime deleted the video from its social media.

“The memorial asked us to take it down. Turns out you need permission to film there,” Ira explains. “We didn’t argue with anyone. They asked — we deleted it. No need for any problems.”

The album also includes a song in Ukrainian: “Sertse” (“Heart”), about love, parting, and longing. Loginova wrote it in Russian first, then decided to translate it. Only then did “Sertse” “really start to sound the way it should”:

Diana says she and Sasha have Ukrainian roots, and she’d like to learn the language. Under the video’s teaser on the band’s Instagram, the thank-yous come in both Russian and Ukrainian. Many Ukrainians write that they’re grateful for the band’s support and are waiting for Stoptime to come play a concert in Kyiv. But the musicians aren’t looking that far ahead.

“I just want a quiet life with Sasha someday — I want to live freely,” Diana says. “And if fate has it that I’m no longer popular and no longer fill big venues — fine. I never really chased that. I never wanted the popularity that landed on me. I don’t mind it. But if it goes, I don’t think I’ll suffer.”

You have to hold yourself together; you have to build a new life now. I will be happy here. The happiest. I’ll show everyone yet how happy I am!