For many outside the former Soviet Union, “Siberia” evokes the image of a remote, forested, and mountainous territory, best known for its sub-zero winters and towering snowdrifts.
Therefore many will be surprised to learn that, in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was only beginning to open up to the outside world, Siberia was home to one of the most original and raw punk rock scenes not just in the Soviet Union, but, arguably, anywhere in the world.
Siberian punk is largely defined by its plodding drum beat, fuzzed-out guitars, sing-songy vocals, and powerful lyrics that not only mocked the Soviet system, but also explored a wide range of social, political and personal issues.
The first half of the 1980s was a weird period for underground Soviet culture.
On the one hand, after former KGB Chief Yuri Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as head of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982, there was a broad crackdown on all who were beyond the pale of officially sanctioned cultural norms. Some were jailed for organizing underground rock shows, including Alexei Romanov, of the Moscow rock band Voskresenye.
On the other hand, in some places the KGB cracked down on some illegal music activity, but also tried to co-opt it, allowing musicians to perform as long as they didn’t cross certain ideological lines.
The Leningrad Rock Club, founded in 1981, and the Moscow Rock Laboratory, inaugurated four years later, are now believed to have been curated by KGB agents who made certain that the most subversive bands were not allowed to perform.
Yevgeny Solovyov, founder of BOMZh
At the same time, despite the “Iron Curtain” that separated the Soviet Union from the outside world, Western culture seeped through in dibs and drabs, although often after a delay of several years.
LPs by British punk bands, such as The Sex Pistols or The Clash, were available at semi-legal markets posing as record collectors’ clubs. Just about every larger Soviet city had such a market. Imported LPs were expensive, so most people just borrowed and copied them to reel-to-reel tape (later cassette tapes), though some were able to afford original vinyl disks.
As a result, the young musicians who began playing punk rock in the Soviet Union in the 1980s were familiar with Western punk music, but less savvy about its ideology. There were a few publications about punks in the Soviet media, but of course they portrayed them as an example of the “decadent West,” mentioning their rebellious nature. At a time when few seemed to believe in Communist ideology, many young people liked the idea of punk as something decadent and rebellious.
Siberian punk musicians are hard put to explain why it was Siberia that became the birthplace of the country’s most original punk scene.
One explanation might be that, in more opportune birthplaces, like Moscow and Leningrad, musicians were able to play rock, and, to avoid problems with the authorities, opted for its less subversive versions.
“Islands” of relative freedom and free thought, such as Akademgorodok, a research compound just outside Novosibirsk, could also have been instrumental in shaping the scene.
Scientists working in Akademgorodok on sophisticated physics and math projects were allowed greater access to “bourgeois” culture than the average Soviet citizen. While elsewhere in the Soviet Union it wasn’t possible to imagine a punk band playing a legitimate gig, Akademgorodok gave the first Siberian punk rockers just that opportunity.
In 1983, in Akademgorodok, the band BOMZh was born, fronted by Yevgeny “Dzhonik” Solovyov. Four years later BOMZh became the first Siberian band to perform in European Russia. During their evocative set at the September 1987 Podolsk Rock Festival, BOMZh performed a song mocking the KGB.
Similarly, another punk band, Putti, played its first show in Akademgorodok, although it did not go smoothly. Years later, front man Alexander Chirkin recalled, “Basically, no one knew how to play. But we painted our faces in the style of [the heavy metal band] KISS. We hardly had time to finish our first song before the sound was turned off.”
At about the same time, 650 kilometers to the west, in Omsk, Yegor Letov launched his first musical projects: Posev and Zapad. Then, in the fall of 1984, Letov and Konstantin (“Kuzya UO”) Ryabinov formed Civil Defense (Grazhdanskaya Oborona), arguably the most influential band of the Siberian punk wave.
Civil Defense’s lyrics were far more subversive than those of BOMZh or Putti, so public shows were out of the question. The band focused on recording its material in a home studio – in Letov’s apartment, on the first floor of a five-story khrushchyovka on the city’s outskirts.
Not surprisingly, their activities did not go unnoticed by the local KGB. As a result, Ryabinov was drafted into the army and Letov spent several months in a psychiatric institution, a measure the Soviets frequently used for dissidents and persons suspected of “anti-Soviet activities.”
In Tyumen, just over 620 kilometers northwest of Omsk, musicians who tried to play punk rock also faced a crackdown, although their punishments were a bit milder. Survival Instruction (Instruktsiya po Vyzhivaniyu), a band that grew out of Tyumen State University’s Rock Club and was led by the poet Miroslav Nemirov, played its first electric gig in the university’s auditorium. Posing as an innocuous and “ideologically safe,” “anti-capitalist” musical play, the concert featured a number of Survival Instruction’s future hits and attracted scrutiny from authorities. Soon enough, several band members, including singer Roman Neumoyev, were expelled from the university, and Survival Instruction was temporarily disbanded.
Civil Defense performing at Syrok, 1988.
Survival Instruction at the 1988 Tyumen festival.
Cultural Revolution performs at the 1988 Tyumen festival.
“We didn’t even know there was such a thing as the DIY movement in the United States,” said Oleg Sur, front man of the band Flirt (from Usolye Sibirskoye outside Irkutsk), two decades after the group was founded.
Yet the way Siberian punk rockers recorded and distributed their material was perfectly in sync with punk’s DIY ideology – only it was out of necessity, rather than choice.
The state-run music publisher Melodia was the Soviet Union’s only record label. While a number of “harmless” Soviet rock bands had released albums on Melodia by the end of the 1980s – often altering lyrics to comply with strict censorship, not a single punk band did, as they were far too subversive.
All that was left was for Siberian punks to produce homespun records in their homes, then distribute them illegally by copying the music on cassette players or reel-to-reels.
Letov was among the pioneers of home recording. In the summer of 1987, he recorded six Civil Defense albums and was later instrumental in helping other Siberian musicians, including Yanka and Cherny Lukich, to record their material. His home studio was eventually dubbed GrOb Records, an acronym for Grazhdanskaya Oborona (notably, grob is the Russian word for “coffin”).
With public performance options limited or forbidden, many Siberian punks played acoustic shows in apartments. While in the West the acoustic guitar largely epitomized folk music, acoustic sets by Siberian punkers featured the raw energy of their electric shows, and, in the cases of profound lyricists like Letov or Yanka, did more justice to their biting lyrics.
Unlike Western punks, for whom clothing and adornment was often as important as their music and ideology, Siberian punks did not typically seek to stand out from the crowd.
This was not simply because punk-style clothes were not available in the USSR. Instead, sporting punk fashions could easily lead to trouble, as those who dressed differently were not tolerated in the Siberia of the 1980s.
“We didn’t really look like punks. We didn’t wear Mohawks or ripped clothes,” Survival Instruction’s Neumoyev recalled. “For one thing, if you had had a punk look in Siberia, you wouldn’t have survived long on the street. Some guys would have taken you around the corner and beaten the crap out of you. We were not into styles, we were into the essence of that music.”
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Soviet Union endured the painful changes that would eventually lead to its collapse, authorities were less concerned with what underground punk bands said in their lyrics. The cultural sphere had become more open and underground rock music, including punk, was allowed to play legitimate shows, mostly at rock festivals organized throughout the country. Their lineups featured everything from heavy metal to classic rock and punk. Yet the recording industry was still strictly censored, and releasing an album on Melodia was not an option.
Meanwhile, the degree of subversion varied from artist to artist. As Putti almost innocuously sang “Write my name on the Kremlin wall,” Civil Defense recorded “Everything Goes According to Plan,” a brilliant and powerful verdict on the agonizing Soviet empire.
With communism everything will be like *****
Everything will come soon, we just have to wait
There, everything will be free, there, it will be total bliss
There, you probably won’t even have to die!
– excerpt from “Everything Goes According to Plan”
Siberian punk rock was mostly a male dominated affair. Yet there was a notable exception – Yana Dyagileva, better known as Yanka. Born in Novosibirsk, in her late teens she was exposed to music by singer/songwriter Alexander Bashlachev. Soon thereafter she began writing songs.
She later met Letov and became his partner and protégé. Although probably less “punk” in sound than some other acts on the scene, she possessed a unique voice that helped her to translate her sensibilities in a stripped-down, minimalist musical context.
Yana Dyagileva
In 1988 Siberian punk “exploded,” reaching far beyond Siberian cities and gaining fans all across the Soviet Union. This was largely thanks to two major events held that year.
In June, the Festival of Alternative and Left Radical Music was held in Tyumen, attracting a gamut of underground acts from Siberia and elsewhere, including Civil Defense, Yanka and the locals Cultural Revolution, fronted by Artur Strukov, Survival Instruction and Kooperativ Nishtyak.
Dubbed the “Siberian Woodstock,” the festival was the only event of its kind featuring nearly all the major bands in the Siberian punk scene.
Then, in early December, the first Syrok Festival was held in Moscow, aiming to bring to the capital bands that had never performed there before. Although the lineup included several bands that went on to become major stars, such as Agata Kristi and Vopli Vidoplyasova, the festival’s most anticipated set was the one by Civil Defense. By then, the band’s albums had found their way to Moscow, as had legends about the band and its front man. Those who were looking forward to Civil Defense’s set at Syrok were not disappointed, as it emitted a stream of raw energy that few local bands of that era were capable of producing.
After the Syrok festival, which was covered in samizdat magazines throughout the country, Siberian punk became a national phenomenon, and its fan base quickly grew. For most of 1989, Civil Defense and other bands toured the Soviet Union, performing public shows and festival sets.
But Siberian musicians were not in a hurry to be co-opted by newly arrived showbiz players, most of whom had a Komsomol background. Punk is all about rebellion and anti-authoritarianism, so it is not surprising that the musicians were reluctant to “sell out” by turning their music into a career, albeit on the margins of the fledgling Russian music industry.
Some musicians reacted to the creeping commercialization of formerly underground rock more emotionally than others. In May 1990, Letov announced that Civil Defense was disbanding. Although the band eventually reunited, its hiatus lasted more than two years.
In May 1991, Yanka’s body was found floating in a river near Novosibirsk. She was 24 years old. The precise circumstances of her death remain unknown to this day. One theory has it that she committed suicide, though accident and even murder were never ruled out.
Yanka’s death turned into a symbolic end to the Siberian punk era. By then, Civil Defense had been on hiatus for about a year, and would not return for another year or so. And the collapse of the USSR at the end of the year meant that Siberian punks no longer had something to rebel against.
“I’ll always be against something,” Letov sang in one of his songs. That was probably why he, along with a few other Siberian bands, sided with political forces – some of which were rather dubious – opposing Boris Yeltsin’s regime. In mid-1994 they played a series of politically-themed Russian Breakthrough (Russky Proryv) shows, but it was a last gasp. Their political activism subsided soon thereafter.
Some bands from the 1980s Siberian scene, like Cultural Revolution, broke up. Others, like Survival Instruction and Putti, continued to record and perform, albeit for a limited circle of hard-core fans, having never broken into the “mainstream.”
BOMZh existed on-and-off until the 2006 death of front man Yevgeny Solovyov.
Civil Defense attracted substantial crowds of devoted fans to its shows until Letov’s death in 2008, at 43, even though its tracks received very little airplay and the band never appeared on major national TV networks.
Fortunately, many original 1980s recordings by Siberian punk artists can now be found online, as can rare videos of their performances (video was far from widespread in the USSR in the 1980s, and very few performances were captured).
Igor Letov, of Civil Defense
Today, almost 25 years after the Siberian punk scene’s heyday, there are few artistic links between it and contemporary Russian music. Although there are some younger musicians who respect and even worship the heritage of Letov or Yanka, musically the connections are few and far between.
What is more, Russian punk was highly commercialized in the early 1990s, and what contemporary audiences see as “punk rock,” might be musically similar to the 1980s’ Siberian bands, but there are few similarities in lyrics or ideology.
Among the few exceptions is the band Adaptation (Adaptatsiya), from North Kazakhstan. The band seems to be inspired by Siberian punk bands, though not all of its material reminds listeners of 1980s punk.
Siberian Punk, it seems, had its time and place – an era when young people far from the Imperial Center were looking for ways to express their rebellion against the dying communist system. The genre was tailor-made for a time when hand-to-hand distribution and DIY production were the only options for those interested in edgy experimentation.
Today, technology and culture has marched on. Experimentation is the norm, rebellion is a given, and there are interesting contemporary Russian musicians creating and performing in all genres.
Whether they owe a small measure of their freedom and creativity to those Siberian musicians of three decades ago is something for history to judge. RL
Punk rock (or simply punk) developed between 1974 and 1976 in the US, UK and Australia in reaction to “mainstream” rock. It had its roots in garage band rock and the songs were typically shorter, faster, with edgier melodies and styles. It also quickly gained a subculture that expressed its rebelliousness through distinctive (often deliberately offensive) clothing styles.
Anti-authoritarian ideology and DIY - do it yourself – were integral to the punk movement. Many bands self-produced their recordings and distributed them through informal networks – the very ethos required by the style’s underground and illegal status in the USSR.
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