Soviet Rock

Rock music became known in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and quickly broke free from its Western roots. According to many music critics, its "golden age" years were the 1980s (especially the era of perestroika), when the Soviet underground rock bands became able to release their records officially. Since then, Russia and Russophone artists in various other countries have developed a varied rock scene that covers virtually all rock genres, from classic and alternative rock to punk and heavy metal. The majority of the Russian bands perform in the Russian language.

According to various polls, the most popular Russian rock bands include Kino, Aquarium, Aria, Alisa, Agatha Christie, and DDT.

History

The early 1960s: Local bard music and first western influences

Prior to the late sixties, music in the Soviet Union was divided into two groups: music published by state record company Melodiya, and everything else. Under this second group were the bards, underground folk singer–songwriters.

Bards such as Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava were among the many artists who created the style which is referred to as ''avtorskaya pesnya'' (), mostly played on unaccompanied acoustic guitar and characterized by a strong emphasis on lyrics that sometimes carried a subversive meaning. Their music was often suppressed by the government, and yet enjoyed massive popularity, with Vysotsky becoming a highly popular cinema and theatre actor and an iconic figure of the times. having been regularly hailed as "the Bob Dylan of the USSR.".

Meanwhile, some Western music was either being smuggled across the border or released by Melodiya as part of what essentially was state-run media piracy, with The Beatles taking a firm place in Soviet popular culture, and artists such as The Rolling Stones and Deep Purple completing a somewhat distorted picture of Western music.

The first rock bands in the Soviet Union appeared in the mid-1960s. At the time, they mostly performed covers of songs by The Beatles on home-made equipment. In 1965, the band Sokol released the first rock song in Russian, "Gde tot krai?" ().

The late 1960s and 1970s: First signs

Live bands grew popular in spite of governmental restrictions. This continued into the 1980s, when native bands gained some success, but were still hampered by state regulators who would not allow them to be officially recorded and placed restrictions on lyrical content, plus a virtual monopoly of the then sole record label, Melodiya, which would later forge a partnership with international label EMI in the 70s.

Guitar-driven bands evolved during this time, including Leningrad-based Pojuschie Gitary () and Belarusian Pesnyary. These bands started the VIA () movement, and were followed by others, such as Tsvety, , and Sinyaya Ptitsa. At the same time, Mashina Vremeni in Moscow and Aquarium in Leningrad started as nominally amateur bands and soon became popular, performing underground concerts.

In the early 1970s, Yuri Morozov invented a kind of Russian psychedelic rock, using elements of progressive rock and ethnic Russian music. His sound influenced DDT, Aquarium, Chizh & Co, and many others, while he worked with them as a sound engineer.

Another notable artist who started his activity at the same time is Alexander Gradsky, who fused bard music with rock. There was no protest against the Soviet government in the lyrics he sang, so he was able to release records through Melodiya. Millions of Gradsky's records were sold throughout the country.

The 1980s: "Classic" Russian rock

In the 1980s, an underground scene of rock artists emerged who based their style on a mix of Western rock music (particularly from the 1960s and 1970s but also, increasingly, on the emerging Western punk rock and New Wave) and the Russian bard traditions. Bands such as Alisa, Agatha Christie, Autograph, Kino, Mashina Vremeni, Nautilus Pompilius, Aquarium, Krematorij, Grazhdanskaya Oborona, Voskreseniye, Secret, Piknik, and DDT became influential in the development of the genre, with subsequent artists influenced by their style.

Russian rock was also influenced by the Russian art group Mitki and by the Western hippies.

In 1980, Spring Rhythms: Tbilisi-80 took place in Tbilisi in the Georgian SSR. It was the first official rock festival in the Soviet Union. Almost all the performers and prize-winners at the festival were rock groups from the Russian SFSR.

The lyrics of the Soviet rock bands often dealt with the darkest sides of 1980s Soviet life, such as domestic violence, alcoholism (an infamous song by Nautilus Pompilius contained the lines " Alain Delon drinks a double bourbon/Alain Delon doesn't drink eau de cologne" as a sarcastic contrast to the alcoholic father described in the song and an indictment of the escapist attitudes of state-run media) and crime, and often carried a hidden political message.

In consequence, the mainstream Soviet radio and television ignored Soviet rock bands, which often reached audiences only through word of mouth. The monopoly for music publishing in the USSR belonged to Melodiya, the Soviet record label owned and operated by the Council of Ministers through the Ministry of Culture. Melodiya had a strict policy against publishing rock music or underground musicians, while promoting VIAs, whose members as well as the composers and writers who worked with them were members of the Union of Composers. Some rock musicians (Yuri Shevchuk, Yegor Letov and many others) had problems with the KGB due to their public activities. During the early 1980s, Soviet authorities started to exert heavy pressure on amateur bands, banning underground concerts as a sort of illegal commercial activity and imprisoning some music promoters and sound engineers for earning money from underground concerts.

Many of the 1980s bands remain active and popular among Russian youth. The term ''Russian rock'' is often used to refer to the particular sound of these bands.

Various music scenes

In the early- to mid-1980s, rock clubs were founded in Moscow, Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). These three cities had their own rock scenes and friendly collaborations between artists were commonplace.

The Leningrad Rock Club, founded in 1981 and supported by the CPSU, Komsomol, and the city and federal governments, was probably the biggest venue, featuring "classic Russian rock" by Aquarium, Kino, Zoopark

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