АКВАРИУМ - Дом Музыки, Москва, 22 декабря 2004
Akvarium at Dom Muziky in Moscow - December 22, 2004
Akvarium at Dom Muziky in Moscow - December 22, 2004
Before I upload part II of my brief survey of the history and major bands of the Soviet rock scene, I will offer some personal context. What follows are some observations from my first visit to early post-Soviet Russia and introduction to Akvarium. I have been fortunate enough to see Boris Grebenshikov - a.k.a. "БГ" ("BG" - Grebenshikov is also known by his initials) - and his band Аквариум perform live on two separate occasions: once in Krasnodar in the fall of 1993 and again in Moscow in the winter of 2004 (when I recorded the short clip from the song "Плоскость" that is located above).
In 1993, I was studying Russian at Kuban State University (КубГУ) with a group of fellow American college students. We went on several different "cultural" outings as a group - to see Cossack dance and folk songs, classical music, a trip to Kislovodsk and Pyatigorsk focused on Russian literature and history -- but we did not trot out together to see Akvarium (Aquarium). I do not remember how I learned about the show or got a ticket, but the concert itself was unforgettable. I remember a somewhat inebriated Russian teen turning to me during the show and saying: "эй, братянин - это охуйтельно!" ("Hey, dude, this is f*ckin' awesome!"). I remember the psychadelic, muliti-colored lights projected behind the band. I remember thinking how out of place Grebenshikov and the other band members looked -- at least one in a long froc - like hippies from another era. The music - like Boris Grebenshikov himself - was transcedent and lyrical. It seemed to come from another world.
The Akvarium concert - along with a solo show later that fall by Kostya Kinchev, the front man for АлисА - stand out from an otherwise gloomy time in post-Soviet Russia.
Russia in the fall of 1993 was desperate and uncertain. My professors at Kuban State were earning the equivalent of about $20 a month. They, like so many others who still had government jobs, were whipsawed by a combination of hyper-inflation - which ran about a 1000% for the year - and Chernomyrdin's austerity program. The first privatization of state industries was a disaster. Those who invested their privatization vouchers in the pyramid
scheme known as "MMM" would lose everything while the class that would come to be known as the oligarchs clawed its way to obscene riches. Highly educated professionals were reduced to selling their possessions on the sidewalk in order to get by. Refugees from the fighting in the Caucus Mountains and in the Nagorno-Karabakh created instability and stoked ethnic tensions. For all the Soviet Union's faults, it had done a decent job of providing education, health care, paid leave, and general social security. All of that was rapidly falling away and there was no way to know what would replace it.
One snowy winter day, a friend and I were walking near the center of Krasnodar when we came upon a man lying face first in a snow bank. Nobody stopped to help or see if he was all right. The two of us managed to get him on his feat and back home, while he incoherently told us that he had been beaten up and left out in the snow. But he could have just as easily been on the bad end of a drinking binge.
In late November, a staff member of the Kuban Courier was killed when a bomb was detonated in the newspaper's offices. Someone was apparently not pleased with the paper's coverage. As early as 1993, the still new idea of press freedom was being undermined by violence.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin faced a resistant parliament and vice president, stalling further economic reforms. That fall, the opposition baricaded itself in the white house (the home of the then still constituted Supreme Soviet). At the height of the constitutional crisis, vice president Rutskoy declared himself president of the Russian Federation -- only later be smoked out after Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the white house. It was quite a contrast from only two years before, when Yeltsin himself stood on a tank in front of the white house in defiance of the hard-line communist leaders of the failed putch that brought down Gorbachev.
Watching on CNN from an old Intourist hotel in Pyatigorsk, we were more than a bit spooked when the screen went blank after the first few shells were fired. Those tank shells could have been the first shots in a civil war. We had no idea what would happen next. One of the idealistic Americans in our group began discussing Hemingway and the Spanish civil war, and of taking up sides in another country's internal struggle.
The following day, a hastily organized pro-Yeltsin rally was held in the main government square in Pyatigorsk. A local official implored the people to back Yeltsin and his reforms - and paraphrasing Dostoevsky - said that those who give up freedom for bread end up with neither freedom nor bread. I often wonder how many in Russia today believe in such a philosophy. I do not think it is pessismistic to conclude that if a crisis of this magnitude were to befall America, that many of my fellow citizens would choose bread.
Through it all, Akvarium - in its various forms - kept performing and БГ kept writing new songs. For that one afternoon in Krasnodar, those in the hall could exult in the moment. БГ exudes an other worldly sense of peace and his tranquility drifted down to the audience. БГ is not a very demonstrative performer - but he has a slow, steady, electrifying presence on stage.
Akvarium represents the best of Russia - its poetry, creativity, curiosity, love of and respect for nature, intelligence, freedom, humor, and soulfulness. The band found a way to exist within the constraints of the Soviet Union and survive the transition to modern Russia without a loss of dignity. БГ was writing songs from the early 1970's -- long before there could have been any hope of being able to make a career from singing the non-state sanctioned material he was creating. It is not that БГ's songs were overtly anti-communist or anti-Soviet (at least not before "This Train is on Fire" - which includes the line "the people who shot our fathers are building plans on top of our children"). But his songs are multilayered and are open to interpretation -- open to meanings that did not fit official Soviet dogma. Their early avante garde, punk-influenced performance at the Tblisi music festival in 1980 got БГ fired from his day job, kicked out of the Komsomol, and the band lost its rehearsal space. But like other Soviet rock musicians, he found a way forward, performing in apartments and recording music on the sly, growing ever more popular by word of mouth and magnitizdat. By the mid 1980's -- by the time Akvarium was featured on Joanna Stingray's revolutionary compilation, "Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR," after their music was featured in the film Асса, and after political reform began to take hold, all of this changed. [For more about the history and music of Akvarium check out this two part documentary with extended interviews of БГ (in Russian) produced in 1993 - Part I and Part II - as well as the Wikipedia entry on the band.]
A couple of years ago, I read in the magazine Ogonyok about a group of elementary school kids in rural Russia who were asked to write birthday cards to then President Putin. The interviews with the children were chilling. When asked by reporters about Putin, they spoke of him as some sort of mythical hero who had come to save mother Russia, as one who could do no wrong. One child's explanation read something like: "he must be great - they never say anything bad about him on TV like they do about others." Many of these children will simply become cynical about politics -- the overwhelming attitude Russians now have towards politicians and government -- some will continue to believe government propaganda, and others will devote themselves to making Russia a better place. For them, Akvarium and the other great Russian rock bands that got their start in the Soviet Union may not be inspirational. Regardless, these musicians have played an outsize role in keeping the idea of freedom alive.
And on one crisp autumn day 1993, БГ and Akvarium rocked the tired city of Krasnodar.
In 1993, I was studying Russian at Kuban State University (КубГУ) with a group of fellow American college students. We went on several different "cultural" outings as a group - to see Cossack dance and folk songs, classical music, a trip to Kislovodsk and Pyatigorsk focused on Russian literature and history -- but we did not trot out together to see Akvarium (Aquarium). I do not remember how I learned about the show or got a ticket, but the concert itself was unforgettable. I remember a somewhat inebriated Russian teen turning to me during the show and saying: "эй, братянин - это охуйтельно!" ("Hey, dude, this is f*ckin' awesome!"). I remember the psychadelic, muliti-colored lights projected behind the band. I remember thinking how out of place Grebenshikov and the other band members looked -- at least one in a long froc - like hippies from another era. The music - like Boris Grebenshikov himself - was transcedent and lyrical. It seemed to come from another world.The Akvarium concert - along with a solo show later that fall by Kostya Kinchev, the front man for АлисА - stand out from an otherwise gloomy time in post-Soviet Russia.
Russia in the fall of 1993 was desperate and uncertain. My professors at Kuban State were earning the equivalent of about $20 a month. They, like so many others who still had government jobs, were whipsawed by a combination of hyper-inflation - which ran about a 1000% for the year - and Chernomyrdin's austerity program. The first privatization of state industries was a disaster. Those who invested their privatization vouchers in the pyramid
scheme known as "MMM" would lose everything while the class that would come to be known as the oligarchs clawed its way to obscene riches. Highly educated professionals were reduced to selling their possessions on the sidewalk in order to get by. Refugees from the fighting in the Caucus Mountains and in the Nagorno-Karabakh created instability and stoked ethnic tensions. For all the Soviet Union's faults, it had done a decent job of providing education, health care, paid leave, and general social security. All of that was rapidly falling away and there was no way to know what would replace it.One snowy winter day, a friend and I were walking near the center of Krasnodar when we came upon a man lying face first in a snow bank. Nobody stopped to help or see if he was all right. The two of us managed to get him on his feat and back home, while he incoherently told us that he had been beaten up and left out in the snow. But he could have just as easily been on the bad end of a drinking binge.
In late November, a staff member of the Kuban Courier was killed when a bomb was detonated in the newspaper's offices. Someone was apparently not pleased with the paper's coverage. As early as 1993, the still new idea of press freedom was being undermined by violence.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin faced a resistant parliament and vice president, stalling further economic reforms. That fall, the opposition baricaded itself in the white house (the home of the then still constituted Supreme Soviet). At the height of the constitutional crisis, vice president Rutskoy declared himself president of the Russian Federation -- only later be smoked out after Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the white house. It was quite a contrast from only two years before, when Yeltsin himself stood on a tank in front of the white house in defiance of the hard-line communist leaders of the failed putch that brought down Gorbachev.
Watching on CNN from an old Intourist hotel in Pyatigorsk, we were more than a bit spooked when the screen went blank after the first few shells were fired. Those tank shells could have been the first shots in a civil war. We had no idea what would happen next. One of the idealistic Americans in our group began discussing Hemingway and the Spanish civil war, and of taking up sides in another country's internal struggle.
The following day, a hastily organized pro-Yeltsin rally was held in the main government square in Pyatigorsk. A local official implored the people to back Yeltsin and his reforms - and paraphrasing Dostoevsky - said that those who give up freedom for bread end up with neither freedom nor bread. I often wonder how many in Russia today believe in such a philosophy. I do not think it is pessismistic to conclude that if a crisis of this magnitude were to befall America, that many of my fellow citizens would choose bread.
Even as the U.S. endures its worse economy in seventy years, few here have any idea what it is like to live in a society in absolute economic free-fall; it is estimated that the GDP in Russia fell by as much as 50% from 1990 to 1995. Even with a return ticket to the United States in my pocket, it was impossible not to be deeply unsettled by these chaotic conditions. The rapidly deteriorating social and economic situation caused an uncertainty and bitterness in many of those I got to know that was painful to behold. Back home, Americans viewed the end of the cold war triumphantly, as affirming America's - or capitalism's - inherent superiority. Bearing witness to the cold reality that followed in the wake of that supposed triumph was depressing.
Through it all, Akvarium - in its various forms - kept performing and БГ kept writing new songs. For that one afternoon in Krasnodar, those in the hall could exult in the moment. БГ exudes an other worldly sense of peace and his tranquility drifted down to the audience. БГ is not a very demonstrative performer - but he has a slow, steady, electrifying presence on stage.Akvarium represents the best of Russia - its poetry, creativity, curiosity, love of and respect for nature, intelligence, freedom, humor, and soulfulness. The band found a way to exist within the constraints of the Soviet Union and survive the transition to modern Russia without a loss of dignity. БГ was writing songs from the early 1970's -- long before there could have been any hope of being able to make a career from singing the non-state sanctioned material he was creating. It is not that БГ's songs were overtly anti-communist or anti-Soviet (at least not before "This Train is on Fire" - which includes the line "the people who shot our fathers are building plans on top of our children"). But his songs are multilayered and are open to interpretation -- open to meanings that did not fit official Soviet dogma. Their early avante garde, punk-influenced performance at the Tblisi music festival in 1980 got БГ fired from his day job, kicked out of the Komsomol, and the band lost its rehearsal space. But like other Soviet rock musicians, he found a way forward, performing in apartments and recording music on the sly, growing ever more popular by word of mouth and magnitizdat. By the mid 1980's -- by the time Akvarium was featured on Joanna Stingray's revolutionary compilation, "Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR," after their music was featured in the film Асса, and after political reform began to take hold, all of this changed. [For more about the history and music of Akvarium check out this two part documentary with extended interviews of БГ (in Russian) produced in 1993 - Part I and Part II - as well as the Wikipedia entry on the band.]
"Rock and Roll's Dead but I'm Alive"
(including scenes from the infamous 1980 Tblisi Music Festival)
Seeing БГ perform back in 1993 - during the depths of Russia's post-Soviet depression - and again in 2004 - during the height of the oil-fueled boom years - provided a kind of continuity between these radically different times. His is one of many voices that rise above the din of conformity in present day Russia. Within the Soviet Union, poetry and song became a kind of non-political form of resistance to the stale ideology and dogma of the Communist Party. As Russia suffers through a new authoritarian phase - though less onerous and rigid than the one that preceded it - artists like Grebenshikov, Shevchuk, and Kinchev can still draw crowds and speak their mind throughout Russia. They, and those that follow, express a kind of freedom and truth; even when their songs are apolitical, these musicians constitute a small counterbalancing force to the effects of state censored/intimidated media and shallow pop music.(including scenes from the infamous 1980 Tblisi Music Festival)
A couple of years ago, I read in the magazine Ogonyok about a group of elementary school kids in rural Russia who were asked to write birthday cards to then President Putin. The interviews with the children were chilling. When asked by reporters about Putin, they spoke of him as some sort of mythical hero who had come to save mother Russia, as one who could do no wrong. One child's explanation read something like: "he must be great - they never say anything bad about him on TV like they do about others." Many of these children will simply become cynical about politics -- the overwhelming attitude Russians now have towards politicians and government -- some will continue to believe government propaganda, and others will devote themselves to making Russia a better place. For them, Akvarium and the other great Russian rock bands that got their start in the Soviet Union may not be inspirational. Regardless, these musicians have played an outsize role in keeping the idea of freedom alive.And on one crisp autumn day 1993, БГ and Akvarium rocked the tired city of Krasnodar.
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