Auktsyon performs “Alive” (Zhivoi) at the 8th Leningrad Rock Club Festival, 14 March 1991

In contrast to Kino, which essentially disbanded after Viktor Tsoi’s (1962-1990) death, releasing only the posthumous 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 from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, they continue to tour, perform, and release original albums into the present day. 

 

At the same time, although they began their career alongside other prominent Leningrad rock ensembles, Auktsyon’s position within the Soviet rock canon, while influential and respected, never attained the gargantuan fame of outfits like Kino, Alisa, or DDT. The band’s comparatively niche status may have resulted from their eclectic and experimental performance style and avant-garde roots. Oleg Garkusha’s (1961-) neo-Futurist spoken-word performances; Vladimir Vesyolkin’s (1961-) homoerotic choreography; and Leonid Fedorov’s (1963-) jazz-inspired instrumentation and unconventional vocal style made the band’s aesthetic difficult to market to mainstream Soviet audiences or include in official media. Nevertheless, Auktsyon performed domestically and abroad, appeared on Soviet television, took part in film projects, and enjoyed coverage in Soviet-era newspapers. Perhaps for the same reasons that it drew attention from the Western media, in the USSR the band was perceived as ideologically dangerous because of its open experimentation and advocacy for social change. Vesyolkin, for example, was among the Soviet Union’s first and most vocal activists for LGBTQ rights—although, in the Putin era, he would insist that his earlier queer persona had been merely performative and deny any connection to the movement. 

 

In short, Auktsyon has cemented its position as a well-known, yet hardly mainstream, performance act within Russia’s musical underground. One notable exception to this trend is their hit “The Road” (Doroga, 1993), which appeared on the soundtrack of Aleksei Balabanov’s (1959-2013) massively popular gangster sequel Brother 2 (2000). After Vladimir Putin came to power, the band’s creative output began to take on a gradually more politically charged tone, with song lyrics indirectly expressing displeasure with the country’s leadership, as, for example, on the album Girls Sing (Devushki Poiut, 2008). At the same time, the band’s adherence to the avant-garde tradition, with its tendency toward winking irony and occasional cynicism, 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 (LRC). By 1991, when the festival took place, Gorbachev’s reforms easing control on private commerce (especially the 1988 Law on Cooperatives), had rendered the LRC’s structure, governance, and vision largely obsolete. Auktsyon’s performance at this event, with its clear resistance to established cultural norms, telegraphs the lingering cultural incongruities of late Socialism.