"Vse idet po planu." Audio recording. By Grazhdanskaia Oborona

The 16th track on Grazhdanskaia Oborona's 1988 eponymous punk-rock album, written by lead singer Egor Letov. The song is widely accepted at the band’s best-known composition, which has been performed and rerecorded many times. The song’ lyrics, and especially its refrain has entered common speech, becoming a catchphrase of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet period. The song’s lyrical content is also indicative of the Soviet punk genre’s rejection of Soviet pop rock’s apolitical and largely anti-ideological stance, commenting directly on the Soviet and communist system and challenging its fundamental facets and established figures. Ironic references to Vladimir Lenin as a “good leader,” while “the others were such [expletive]” (“Odin lish dedushka Lenin khoroshii byl vozhd’ / A vse drugie ostal’nye – takoe der’mo”) overtly ridicules the Soviet regime while openly alluding to the more problematic aspects of Soviet history. The song’s speaker goes on to suggest that the USSR and North Korea have superior government models: “I bought the magazine “Korea,” – it’s good there, too / They have comrade Kim Il-sung / It’s the same as it is here” (“Ia kupil zhurnal Koreia. Tam tozhe khorosho. /Tam tovarishch Kim Ir Sen, tam tozhe chto u nas”), providing commentary on the geopolitics of communism in the twentieth century. Perhaps the most striking stanza in the song is one that Letov allegedly borrowed from an anecdote by Soviet dissident writer Andrei Platonov, who spent time interviewing peasants in the Russian countryside after the revolution. There he was told by some of the locals that communism promised an ultimate triumph over death, yet after an elderly man died, the entire village realized that something wasn’t right with this prophecy. In interviews Letov has maintained that it was this story that inspired the following stanza: And during communism everything will be [expletive] great, It will come soon, you just need to wait, Everything will be free, everything will be groovy, And quite possibly no one will even have to die. (A pri kommunizme vse budet zaebis’, On nastupit skoro, nado tol’ko zhdat’, Tam vse budet besplatno, tam vse budet v kaif, Tam navernoe voobshche ne nado budet umirat’) One of the major thematic details to note about the song is its interpretative ambiguity. Following the late-Soviet aesthetic of stiob, in which the line between irony and sincerity is deliberately blurred, the song has been interpreted as both an admonishment to the Soviet system and simultaneously an elegy for its ideological promise, that was being gradually dismantled by perestroika-era reforms. Moreover, the song cemented Egor Letov and his band’s major musical and ideological influence, marking the punk genre's departure from the established norm of largely avoiding politically-charged lyrical content in popular music.