Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

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Younger Russians, more online and less beholden to state television, began rediscovering the Gershovitzes on their own terms.
* YouTube uploads of underground Iron Flowers performances, passed from USB drive to drive, now reached thousands.
* An anonymous TikTok-style app began circulating video montages of Yakob’s music paired with footage of 2011 anti-Putin protests.
* Israel’s censored poems appeared on Instagram accounts alongside banned verses by Pasternak and Mandelstam, tagged with #RedGhosts and #OurSovietMourning.

In 2013, a viral art project titled “Footsteps of Franka” placed chalk silhouettes of barefoot dancers throughout Moscow on the anniversary of her death.

Within days, they were scrubbed away by city workers.

===== Meanwhile, the West wasn’t unified either. =====

In American and European universities, the Gershovitzes became case studies in state suppression and cultural erasure.

But a growing faction—particularly among right-wing populist intellectuals—recast Yakob as a “patriotic modernist destroyed by cultural Marxism.” One 2014 article in a U.S. journal titled Tradition & Culture claimed:

: 

It was a distortion—but it found traction.

In Russia, state cultural festivals began featuring “acceptable” portions of Yakob’s music—his early, more melodic pieces—while excluding his late experimental works.