Filed Under: Lyube performing "Atas" during a televised concert on January 1, 1990

Lyube performing "Atas" during a televised concert on January 1, 1990

In this clip the Russian rock band Lyube, which Vladimir Putin would later count as among his "favorites," performing one of their first hits “Atas” in a televised concert at the peak of their newfound popularity. In contrast to the many amateur underground rock bands mentioned in this collection, Lyube was one of the first professionally produced rock-music collectives in the USSR. In 1986 the composer and songwriter Igor’ Matvienko, who was the head of the Soviet recording studio “Rekord,” conceived the idea of forming a rock-music ensemble, which would merge Russian folklore with the rock music genre to record patriotically oriented, war-themed songs. Lyube was formed on January 14, 1989 when Matvienko invited his long-time collaborator Nikolai Rastorguev to serve as the band’s lead singer, while songwriters Aleksandr Shaganov and Mikhail Andreev were responsible for composing song lyrics for the band. Lyube’s concept and overall military aesthetic is can roughly be described as one, which promotes nationalism, glorifies, and romanticizes war, often presenting it as an inherent part of Russian identity, and attempts to perform a patriotic folkloric masculinity, which is designed as a countermodel for the majority of Soviet and Russian rock. In the early 90s, Lyube quickly rose in popularity, even becoming the unofficial band of a nationalistically inclined youth subculture called Lyubery (named after the town of Lyubertsy), which engaged in cultural rivalry with the rock, punk, metalhead, and hippie youth subcultures in the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet period. The Lyubery distinguished themselves from the so-called neformaly (a loose definition for music-inspired countercultural nonconformism), with a patriotic, hypermasculine glorification of health, fitness, and bodybuilding – providing Nikolai Rastorguev with his trademark stage image. Rastorguev, who has never served in the Russian army, despite the existence of obligatory military service for all men under the age 28, often appears on stage and in music videos wearing a military uniform and/or combat fatigues and often performs with military choirs or uses back-up singers dressed as soldiers, as you can see in the above clip. The band’s popularity has endured the entirety of the post-Soviet period with Rastorguev often performing celebrations of the Russian military, earning the title of the people’s artist of Russia in 2002, becoming a member of Putin’s political party United Russia, and becoming a deputy of the Russian Duma in 2006.