"Sovetskii Ekran" with Konstantin Kinchev on the cover

The popularization of rock music in the USSR occurred in large part with collaboration from the cinema industry. Popular film magazines like Soviet Screen (Sovetskii Ekran), were therefore instrumental in establishing rock musicians as cultural icons. Volume 7 (1987) publication places Konstantin Kinchev, frontman of the Leningrad band Alisa, on the cover of its “youth issue” (molodezhnyi vypusk) in an effort to promote the Valerii Ogorodnikov’s film The Burglar (Vzlomshchik, 1987) in which Kinchev plays the lead role. The film is an example of a rock-music-themed Perestroika-era didactic youth film. Based on a screenplay by Valerii Priemykhov and set to be directed by Dinara Asanova, who died before film production could begin, The Burglar is an unironic exploration of the socioeconomic and cultural forces behind juvenile delinquency during the late-Soviet period. Its main protagonist is 14-year-old Semyon Laushkin, who lives in a communal apartment with his alcoholic father and rock musician older brother Kostya (portrayed Kinchev). Semyon and Kostya’s mother has died, and the broken family is searching for outlets for their grief. The father chooses alcohol; the elder son latches on to rock music and its bacchanalian gatherings, while Semyon attends a music-themed boarding school, which fails to meet his interpersonal and emotional needs. In an ill-planned attempt to help his older brother, Semyon becomes a juvenile criminal after stealing a synthesizer from a local club. Alisa’s live performances in The Burglar style the film as a documentary, with scenes of musical auditions, backstage footage, and social events. By way of a documentary aesthetic, Ogorodnikov creates an illusion of verisimilitude about the quotidian life of the rock music milieu. In contrast to other rock-music films of the period, The Burglar ultimately implicates rock music culture in Semyon’s moral misstep, adopting the conservative views of the Brezhnev period. Sovetskii Ekran’s journalistic tone also presents rock music as a novel and unusual cultural phenomenon, which is important to study insofar as it provides an unvarnished look at the preoccupations and social needs, and cultural attitudes of Perestroika-era youth. Customary to the conventions of the time, the term “rock music” is used sparingly (the band Alisa is referred to as an “ensemble”), and while the authors recognize that by 1987 rock has entered mainstream Soviet youth culture – “a huge audience listens to rock singers today, and most importantly, accepts them as their own,” (“proizvedeniia rok pevtsov segodnia slushaet – i glavnoe, prinimaet – ogromnaia auditoriia”) – the contradictory transitional tension between the official conventions of Soviet journalism and its inability to censor a rapidly growing subculture, reveals a need to shift the discursive code with which perestroika-era culture can be properly described.