TaMtAm Rock Club documentary by German television (1993)

The first and until 1994 the only Western-style rock club in Russia, which was founded in 1991 by cellist Vsevolod (Seva) Gakkel (from the Leningrad band Akvarium) after he visited the famous CBGB in New York City. The club specialized in punk rock specifically, providing the budding underground punk scene in Russia a much-needed performance venue and cultural legitimacy. Some have even accused Gakkel's establishment for breeding far-right nationalist sentiments among youth subcultures or at least providing them with a physical organizational platform in the early 1990s. The fact that a German television production company took interest in TaMtAm is in itself a testament to punk as a truly transnational movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the club is an example of the ways in which the live music industry changed following rapid post-Soviet privatization practices and a drastic shift to a free market economy. Evidence of rapid inflation in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, that in large part defined life in Russia in the early nineties is readily apparent in the documentary: club patrons can be seen paying for entry with 100 ruble bills, while alcohol is readily available for purchase, and the presence of bouncers, a function that was routinely performed by Soviet police just years prior - all point to specific ways in which the production and consumption of underground popular music was changing following the fall of Soviet rule. The film also features key figures from the underground punk scene in post-collapse Leningrad. In addition to Gakkel’, who is seen throughout the film, the footage includes Andrei “The Nose” Kuz’minov, the lead vocalist of the seminal punk band “Pupsy,” which managed to have a European tour in Britain in Germany in 1991, organized by the band’s guest vocalist Princess Katya Golitsyna, the London-born direct descendant of the Russian nobility, when she lived and studied in Russia. The Russian rock music historian Andrei Burlaka at one point peers into the camera frame, asking a performer if he is giving an interview. Much of the film is comprised of a prominent display of tattoos and body art modeled by TaMtAm performers and their fans. Late-Soviet punk rock fashion choices replete with mohawk and shaved hairstyles provide a visual testament of the changing self-presentation of post-Soviet youth. Meanwhile the linguistic and social makeup of club is also distinctly diversified with the club featuring an international line-up, Russian bands performing songs in English, Anglophone and Francophone patrons presented as club regulars, signifying the opening of borders and the rapid cultural obsolescence of the metaphorical “Iron Curtain” in a new westward-looking era of Russian history.