St Petersburg

“The seventies…. Dead, inert times. Fatal for art’s breathing.” The poet Gorbovsky thus described the Leningrad situation in the Brezhnev era. There was little left to breathe in Leningrad—even literally, thanks to unchecked industrial pollution in the city. Freshly fallen snow turned black overnight. The chemical-laden Neva was covered with toxic green sludge.

The stifling atmosphere hastened the disintegration of talent and led to an increase in suicide and early death among the young, including the promising poet Leonid Aronson. Some potential intellectual leaders emigrated to the West, and many of the remaining were forced to make humiliating compromises with officials. Censorship seemed all-powerful.

A terrible blow fell on the budding Soviet feminist movement, which for a while had been centered in Leningrad. Women had long been cultural leaders in the city: Akhmatova, Yudina, Ermolaeva, Berggolts, Ustvolskaya, Ginzburg, and the translator Tatyana Gnedich. In the 1960s a group of original women poets appeared—Elena Kumpan, Nina Koroleva, Lydia Gladkaya, and a bit later, Elena Shvarts. Maya Danini and Inga Petkevich wrote interesting prose. So the late-1970s appearance in Leningrad of the first Russian samizdat feminist magazines, Woman and Russia and Maria, was natural.

“Our magazine caused such a sensation, such a furor, which even I had not expected,” recalled one of the editors of Woman and Russia, Tatyana Mamonova. “People passed around our little volume, it was retyped over and over.” The secret police reacted with searches, interrogations, and harassment. Mamonova was expelled to the West, as were other Leningrad feminists—Tatyana Goricheva, Natalya Malakhovskaya, and Yulia Voznesenskaya.

The writer Alexander Zhitinsky compared the Leningrad authorities with a boa constrictor. “We froze, like rabbits, in the stare of the state’s unsleeping eye.”112 Cultural Leningrad was demoralized. At that moment there appeared a new and unprecedented force—Russian rock and roll; as Zhitinsky recalled, “Rock and roll burst into our country at the most terrible time, when freedom seemed unnecessary, and we invented the stagnation period for ourselves, so we could sit quietly.”113

The rock movement in Leningrad, which started in the mid-sixties, owed its birth to the influence of the Beatles, who created a revolution in the consciousness of young Russian nonconformists. The popular Leningrad rocker Mikhail (“Mike”) Naumenko sang about this later in his hit, “Right to Rock”:

I remember that every Beatles record

Gave us more than a year in school.

Records by the Beatles, which quickly reached Leningrad through tourists and seamen, excited musically receptive young people. The Beatles craze engulfed even Brodsky, who translated “Yellow Submarine” into Russian in the 1960s.

The pioneering Leningrad rockers, who had more or less mastered their homemade instruments (the necks of their guitars were sometimes sawed out of the headboards of their parents’ beds) and slavishly imitated Western bands, performed primarily in schools, dormitories, and cafés. They did not become a strong social presence until the early 1970s, when they began composing original music on topical Russian texts. The trailblazer was the band Sankt-Peterburg, led by Vladimir Rekshan, the self-styled “first real star of rock music in Russia.” Official propagandists were offended by the group’s name and immediately charged the band with monarchist leanings.

Rekshan described the expansion of the Leningrad rock scene: “Rock groups multiplied like rabbits, and every Saturday there were concerts in dozens of places. Daring fans exhibited the ingenuity of urban guerrillas in getting into concerts. The most successful got in through women’s toilets. Others climbed up rainspouts. Sometimes they took apart the roof and came in through the attic.”114

Emboldened by their young audiences, Leningrad rock bands became more defiant in their songs, reflecting “the taste of those years—astringent, with a touch of rebellion, through which the new generation in the big cities, lost in the thickets, tried to find themselves.”115 The rockers sang about the alienation of young people from Soviet society, which they saw as hypocritical and hostile, about their distrust of the official system of values, and their vague search for alternative paths.

For Leningrad’s apparatchiks all this was totally unacceptable. The authorities, trying to isolate the rockers from their audience, organized a hostile campaign, both backstage and in the media, whose main theme was sarcastically summarized in a song by Konstantin Kinchev, a devotee of the poetry of Gumilyov and Brodsky.

You are all fags,

Addicts, Nazis, thugs!

All socially dangerous,

All ready for jail.