Orange Revolution Anthem Rewritten by EBU Censor

MAY 15 2005 · 12:10

GreenJolly · "Razom nas bahato" · Ukraine · 2005 Placement: 19 · Score: 30 · Language: Ukrainian, English · Composers: Roman Kalyn · Venue: Palace of Sports · Host: Kyiv, Ukraine · Type: protest · Broadcast: digital hd GreenJolly — a Lviv hip-hop collective — take Kyiv's Palace of Sports stage six months after the Orange Revolution they helped soundtrack. The original 'Razom nas bahato' chant included repeated shouts of 'Yushchenko!' — the newly elected Ukrainian president. The EBU ruled that specific-politician references violated the non-political rule. GreenJolly were forced to rewrite the lyric days before broadcast. They perform the sanitized version. 19th place, 30 points. Context The song had been a literal Revolution anthem, played through loudspeakers on Kyiv's Independence Square for weeks during the 2004 protests. Ukraine's Eurovision hosting was partly a post-revolution soft-power statement. The EBU's intervention was among its most public lyrics-content rulings. Legacy The 2005 card is now studied as the clearest example of Eurovision's internal censorship apparatus applied to political speech. GreenJolly released the original unedited version on the Ukrainian charts, where it outsold the Eurovision version. Kalush Orchestra's 2022 win with 'Stefania' is often framed as the completion of the 2005 Greenjolly arc.