Nautilus Pompilius performing "Last Letter" (Poslednee Pis'mo: Gudbai Amerika)

A televised performance of Nautilus Pompilius’s cult song “Last Letter,” initially titled “Goodbye Letter” (“Proshchal’noe pis’mo”), which first appeared on the band’s 1988 Prince of Silence (Kniaz’ Tishiny) album. The song popularized lead singer Viacheslav Butusov and his band, which originated in Soviet Sverdlovsk (present day Ekaterinburg, located in Russia’s Ural Mountain region), and became one of the more melancholy anthems of late Perestroika. Written by Viacheslav Butusov and Dmitrii Umetskii, the song’s lyrics lament the frustrated hopes of Perestroika-era Westernization years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, signifying that the cultural promise of what Alexei Yurchak has termed “the imaginary West” was viewed with suspicion long before the deterioration of US-Russian diplomatic relations that have come to define the Putin era. While musically an elegy, Butusov’s song frames the western world as a confining space for his generation’s historical trajectory, favoring instead a domestically focused approach to forging the next chapter Soviet history. In bidding farewell to the mythical “America,” which in good measure informed the Soviet Union’s rock music culture, the speaker of the song resists it in part to avoid what he perceives as its prescribed state of derivative unoriginality: “I have grown out of your worn jeans, / We have been taught for so long to love your forbidden fruit” (“mne stali slishkom maly tvoi tertye dzhinsy / nas tak dolgo uchili liubit’ tvoi zapretnye plody”), echoing instead the late-Soviet and post-Soviet impulse to construct a new national idea. “The Last Letter” has enjoyed an enduring cultural legacy and was further popularized by its prominent use in Aleksei Balabanov's popular gangster drama Brother 2 (#00151), inscribing it into the post-Soviet cultural and cinematic discourse as a sort of antidote to Viktor Tsoi's "Changes!" at the end of S. Solov'ev's ASSA (#00127). Ultimately, the song provides evidence of nationalist attitudes that began to take root in post-Soviet Russia and elucidates the pre-collapse origins of anti-American and anti-western sentiments in contemporary Russian culture.