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

This is a televised performance of Nautilus Pompilius’s cult song “Last Letter,” initially titled “Farewell Letter” (Proshchal’noe pis’mo), which first appeared on the band’s album Prince of Silence (Kniaz’ Tishiny, 1988). The song brought to fame lead singer Vyacheslav Butusov (1961-) and his band, which originated in Soviet Sverdlovsk, a city in Russia’s Ural Mountain region today known as Ekaterinburg. Written by Butusov and bandmate Dmitry Umetsky (1961-), the song became a melancholy anthem of late perestroika.

Its lyrics lament the frustrated hopes of perestroika-era Westernization years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The cultural promise of what anthropologist Alexei Yurchak termed “the imaginary West,” it seems, was arousing suspicion long before diplomatic relations between the US and Russia deteriorated during the Putin era. Musically, the song is an elegy, with Butusov and Umetsky’s lyrics framing the Western world as too confined to accommodate their generation’s historical trajectory. In place of the West, the singers favor a domestically focused approach to forging the next chapter Soviet—and really, Russian—history.

The song’s speaker bids farewell to the mythical “America”—a place that, however imaginary in Yurchak’s sense, helped shape the Soviet rock music culture of which Nautilus Pompilius was a part. In resisting the temptations of America, the speaker seeks to avoid what he perceives as its prescribed state of derivative unoriginality. “I have outgrown 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), croons Butusov, giving voice to the late- 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 (1959-2013) sequel Brother 2 (2000), where it accompanied gangster Danila and prostitute Dasha’s gleeful homeward departure from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Butusov and Umetsky’s song is thus inscribed into post-Soviet cultural and cinematic discourse as a sort of antidote to Viktor Tsoi's (1962-1990) “Changes [Peremen]” at the end of Sergei Solovyov's (1944-2021) film Assa (1987), which expressed the younger generations’ longing for “change” in the face of late-Soviet hopelessness. In hindsight, “The Last Letter” suggests that nationalist attitudes took root so readily in post-Soviet Russia because anti-American and anti-Western sentiments were present in Russian culture even before the Soviet collapse.

Nautilus Pompilius perform “Last Letter (Good-bye America)” in 1988