The Post-Soviet Public Sphere: Multimedia Sourcebook of the Russian 1990s

Profanity Without Electricity (Mat bez elektrichestva) is the second studio album by the legendary St. Petersburg ska-punk-rock band—and conceptual media project—Leningrad, in which frontman Sergei “Shnur” Shnurov (1973-) makes his debut as the band’s lead singer after Igor Vdovin (1974-) left the group in 1998. The acoustic album, which relies on wind instruments like trumpet, tuba, saxophone, and trombone to establish Leningrad’s trademark sound, stood out from other releases of the late 1990s with its pronounced—and unapologetic—use of profanity. With this choice, Leningrad helped pioneer a new and influential direction in post-Soviet rock music, where explicit language gradually became normalized before it was officially outlawed in Russian media in 2014.

Shnurov’s own career and his use of profanity in both lyrics and live performance remained largely unchanged in the wake of the new law, which the band publicly opposed. As Russia’s first official “profanity album,” Mat bez elektrichestva also solidified Shnurov’s stage image and lyrical persona of stereotypical post-Soviet working-class masculinity. Marked by self-deprecating brashness, swearing, misogyny, and economic struggles, this persona was, at the same time, nostalgic for the bygone music landscape of the late-Soviet years. Mat’s fifth track, “Wild Man” (Dikii muzhchina), contributes to this image through a list of the lyrical speaker’s most essential qualities: “balls, tobacco, drunken stink, and stubble” (iaitsa, tabak, peregar, i shchetina).

The album is also one of the last major rock releases of the post-Soviet, pre-Putin era. As the Russian music scene became increasingly market-driven, musicians relied on live performance ticket sales and the competitive production values of their records. Leningrad and Shnurov remain active to this day, despite numerous aesthetic and conceptual transformations, not to mention significant turnover among band members. Shnurov himself is arguably one of the most prominent rock stars and media personalities of the Putin era, maintaining an active social media profile and digital footprint. He has also embarked on a political career as a member of Russia’s center-right political party Partiia rosta (“The Party of Growth”) and as the general producer of the international Russian-language television channel RTVI.

Leningrad’s “Profanity without Electricity,” 1999