Transylvania is Bothering You (On Radio 101 FM)

Transilvania bespokoit (Transylvania speaking), advertised as “the only radio program whose host doesn’t have a shadow,” aired weeknights during the second half of the 1990s on Radio 101 FM. It was the brainchild of host Garik (Georgy) Osipov (1961-), a singer, musician, archivist, and collector with an encyclopedic knowledge of both niche and mainstream music and film. Osipov, who played the part of Count Khortitsa or Count Dracula—with a deep, hypnotic voice, a spooky laugh, and a malevolent demeanor to match—presented in a unique style that involved delirious digressions on pop music and alternative rock, politics, horror movies and spy stories, counterculture, Satanism, occultism, mysticism, and conspiracy theories.

The show’s musical selections reflected the eclectic, idiosyncratic tastes of its creator and included alternative and hard rock, heavy metal, funk, and psychedelic music, as well as lesser-known or forgotten genres and performers—primarily melodic and variety old-time music and the lyrical-comical songs of the criminal underworld from Russia, Italy, France, and the former Soviet bloc. Osipov’s commentaries and explanations constructed an alternative musical canon in which the songs of Osipov’s own Soviet youth were invariably framed as “better” than their Western or American counterparts, while the Western countercultures of the 1960s were revealed as confirming and reinforcing the neoliberal world order. In addition, Osipov celebrated the most musically and politically extreme, violent, uncompromising, and anti-system musicians and performers, from Charles Manson to Motörhead to GG Allin.

The result was a dissonant mix of melodic and romantic (if not sappy and commercial) songs with aggressive hard rock and heavy metal pieces about drugs, violence, sex, terrorism, death, and decay. The only element unifying these disparate musical stylings was Count Khortitsa’s unique and charismatic narrative style. In terms of politics, Osipov was decisively on the far right, treating listeners to frequent invectives against the New World Order and the “Zionist Occupation Government,” political correctness, tolerance and egalitarianism, consumerism, and post-Soviet Russia’s material and cultural decline after the fall of its “Empire”—as well as barely veiled references to Nazism. Most importantly, through his program, he produced a counterpublic of listeners, or, as he addressed them on the show, “Children of Eurasia.” Osipov described these young marginals, barely surviving the post-Soviet mayhem but largely defined by it, as perceiving the gray, bleak reality of post-Soviet life through heroin-induced dreams; buried beneath the sheets in their tiny rooms; and surrounded by the squalor of the city slums. In Osipov’s nightmarish, apocalyptic descriptions of post-Soviet reality—intermingled with fantastic stories about vampires, werewolves, and the living dead—the recurring image of the “Empire of Evil”—as in, the United States and the neoliberal world order—was superimposed on the “Empire of Evil” as post-Soviet Russia itself, the locus of ultimate late-capitalist decadence.