Russia's Regional Identities by Edith W. Clowes Gisela Erbslöh Ani Kokobobo

Author:Edith W. Clowes, Gisela Erbslöh, Ani Kokobobo [Edith W. Clowes, Gisela Erbslöh, Ani Kokobobo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science
ISBN: 9781315513317
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Movers and shakers of the Sverdlovsk “Cultural Revolution”

Rock music

One of the most visible aspects of Sverdlovsk’s cultural explosion was associated with the formation of the Sverdlovsk Rock Club (opened in 1986, the second after the Leningrad rock club, which consisted of more than 40 bands) and ensuing rock festivals. Its permanent participants included such Sverdlovsk-based groups as Urfin Dzhius, Nautilus-Pompilius, Chaif, Agata Kristi, Nastia, and Aprel’skii marsh. Movers and shakers in this process were, among others, Aleksandr Bashlachev, Nikolai Grakhov, Ilya Kormil’tsev, Aleksandr Pantykin, Egor Belkin, Viacheslav Butusov, Vladimir Shakhrin, and Nastia Poleva. Although many articles and books have been written about “Ural rock,” it is typically discussed outside of its “local” context, although it is in fact inseparable from it. In his documentary book, Ëburg (2014), Aleksei Ivanov discusses the birth and development of this phenomenon in great detail. He emphasizes that Sverdlovsk rock-n-roll was born among university students – mainly in the Sverdlovsk Institute of Architecture and Ural Polytechnic Institute:

Sverdlovsk rock musicians […] predominantly were young engineers and architects. Neither freaks, nor marginal, nor martyrs, they were more or less well-off and well-educated kids. They received support from powerful colleges and didn’t feel like members of a sect.9

Yet in Ivanov’s apt characterization,

Sverdlovsk rock manifested the industrial city’s reaction to the “sovok” [Soviet lifestyle]. Hence, the imagery in their songs was urban – apartments, building entryways, city parks… . Straightforward and direct social protest distinguishes Sverdlovsk rock from other trends in late Soviet nonconformist music and bears the legacy of the urban center.10

Ilya Kormiltsev, the lyricist for Nautilus-Pompilius and one of the most interesting translators and publishers in post-Soviet Russia, wrote in his memoirs, “This was a typical spontaneous reaction of young idealists against the overpowering falsity of the social world.”11 This is why Sverdlovsk rock, despite its growing national popularity, constantly balanced on the verge of the permissible; while working under the stifling control of the KGB, it nevertheless steadily expanded the limits of censorship.

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