Band Survey from the Leningrad Rock Club completed by Sergei Kuryokhin of Pop Mekhanika

An official “Initiative Group Survey” from the Leningrad Rock Club completed by Sergei Kuryokhin of Pop Mekhanika (circa 1980s). The Leningrad Rock Club was a semi-official municipal organization dedicated to supporting amateur rock musicians, which was run and organized under the patronage and surveillance of the KGB. By the late 1980s, the LRC fulfilled the multivalent function of serving as Soviet rock’s protector as well as its staunch censor and evaluation measure. Membership in the club required a lengthy bureaucratic process including auditions, vetting of song lyrics, a voting process by the club council, and very often even an appointment at the local KGB office. Despite this, local groups were desperate enough for musical equipment and performance venues that many remained duly loyal to their rock club, and by the late 1980s analogous organizations were popping up in most major cities across the USSR. The two primary incentives for Soviet municipalities to establish rock clubs were the relative ease of surveillance of any ideological radicalism, and, perhaps more importantly, the ability to centrally profit from concert ticket sales. The organization, which was subject to stringent control by the authorities, who regularly raided the premises and called off performances, in the process arresting and/or questioning both the musicians and their fans, was an example of the late-socialist ambivalence towards rock music, a previously “undesirable” cultural phenomenon. The above survey demonstrates the ideological ambivalence within the “organizational” and “bureaucratic” dimension of the late-Soviet rock music underground. The very task of band members completing such documents displays the ritualistic and performative aspects of late-socialist life, where cultural and artistic activities were heavily regimented, while simultaneously reflecting the self-aware irony of the performers themselves. When Kuryokhin, for example, notes that the “KGB” is the most desirable organization with which LRC must maintain contact, he is utilizing the late-Soviet aesthetic of stiob, through which he is both acknowledging the club’s dependence on the Soviet-era secret police, and simultaneously satirizing the bureaucratic practice.