Auktsyon’s performance at the 8th Leningrad Rock Club Festival

In contrast to Kino, which essentially disbanded after Viktor Tsoi’s death and the band’s posthumous release of the Black Album (Chernyi Al’bom) in early 1991, the Leningrad-based art-jazz-rock ensemble Auktsyon followed the opposite trajectory, gaining even more acclaim and visibility throughout the late 1990s into the early 2000s and continuing to tour, perform, and release original albums to the present day. While the band began its career alongside the other prominent Leningrad rock groups, its position as an art-rock group within the Soviet rock canon, while notable, influential, and respected, always remained on the periphery of the type of gargantuan fame reached by Kino, Alisa, or DDT. Much of this has to do with the band’s eclectic performance style and avant-garde roots, as well as its highly experimental performance style. Oleg Garkusha’s neo-Futurist spoken word performances, Vladimir Veselkin’s [see Thomas Keenan’s artifact #...] homoerotic choreography, as well as Evgenii Fedorov’s jazz-inspired instrumentation and unconventional vocal style, made the band’s aesthetic difficult to market to mainstream Soviet audiences and include in official media. Nevertheless, Auktyon were able to perform domestically and abroad, were broadcast on Soviet television, took part in film projects, and stories about the collective appeared in Soviet-era newspapers. While the band drew attention from Western media, domestically it was seen as ideologically dangerous with its open experimentation and advocacy for social change – Veselkin, for example, was one of the first and most vocal activists for LGBTQ rights in the USSR. For the most part, Auktsyon has cemented its position as well-known, yet hardly mainstream, performance act within Russia’s musical underground. One notable exception to this trend is Auktsyon’s hit “The Road” (“Doroga,” 1993), which appeared in the soundtrack of the motion picture Brother 2 (2000), directed by Aleksei Balabanov [see #00151]. Moreover, the band’s creative output began to take on a gradually more politically charged tone, after Vladimir Putin came to power, with song lyrics indirectly referencing displeasure with the country’s leadership, as, for example, in the 2008 “Girls Sing” (Devushki Poiut) album. However, the band’s adherence to the avant-garde tradition has made its ideological position difficult to trace.

This live performance of the song “Alive” (“Zhivoi”) took place at the eighth and final festival of the Leningrad Rock Club [see artifacts # 00153, #00171]. With Gorbachev’s reforms easing control on private commerce that came about with the law of cooperatives, by the time the 1991 festival had been organized, the LRC’s structure, governance, and vision, had become by and large obsolete. The above performance, with its clear provocation of established cultural norms, is representative of the cultural incongruences of the socioeconomic transitions of late Socialism.