Filed Under: Audio > Music > "Vse idet po planu." Audio recording. By Grazhdanskaia Oborona

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

Written by lead singer Yegor Letov (1964-2008), the 16th track on Grazhdanskaya Oborona's self-titled 1988 punk-rock album is probably the band’s best-known composition, and has been performed and re-recorded many times. Its lyrics, especially the refrain, have entered common speech, becoming a catchphrase during the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The song’s content also signals Soviet punk’s rejection of Soviet pop rock’s generally apolitical or anti-ideological stance, commenting directly on the Soviet and communist system and challenging its fundamental facets and established figures. 
 
The ironic reference to “Grandpa” Vladimir Lenin as a “good leader,” while “the others were such shit” (Odin lish dedushka Lenin khoroshii byl vozhd’/ A vse drugie ostal’nye—takoe der’mo) ridicules the post-Stalin Soviet order, which re-canonized Lenin to distract from the darker chapters of early Soviet history. The song’s speaker goes on to suggest that the USSR and North Korea have similar (equally “good”) governmental 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 to zhe, chto u nas). Perhaps the most striking stanza in the song, however, is the one that Letov allegedly borrowed from an anecdote by thepersecuted early Soviet writer Andrei Platonov (1899-1951), who ahd spent time interviewing peasants in the Russian countryside shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. There, locals reportedly told him that communism had promised an ultimate triumph over death—and yet, after one elderly man died, the entire village realized something wasn’t right with this prophecy. In interviews, Letov has maintained that this story inspired the following stanza:
 
And in communism everything will be fucking 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’
 
Despite these seemingly unequivocal anti-Soviet jabs, the song remains ideologically ambiguous. Following the late-Soviet aesthetic of stiob, in which the line between irony and sincerity is deliberately blurred, the song can be read as both an admonishment to the Soviet system, and as an elegy for its ideological promise, then being actively dismantled by perestroika-era reforms. If nothing else, “Everything is Going According to Plan” cemented the musical and ideological influence of both Yegor Letov and his band, marking the punk genre’s departure from the established norm of avoiding politically charged lyrics.