Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR

A split double album, recorded and produced by Joanna Stingray, which was the first release of Russian rock music in the west. The album, totaling 15,000 copies, features compositions from four Leningrad-based rock bands: Aquarium, Kino, Alisa, and Strange Games (Strannye Igry). Stingray hoped to popularize Soviet rock music in the West in a direct affront to existing Cold War policies.

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Kino’s last concert (Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow)

Footage of a live Kino concert at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium on June 24, 1990, roughly a month and half prior to frontman Viktor Tsoi's death in a car accident in rural Latvia. The footage shows the band at the very height of its popularity, as well as offering an unencumbered look at a country in transition: a heavy and conspicuous Soviet police detail is assigned to the event, while audience members wave both the Soviet flag and the Russian tricolor banner.

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Auktsyon’s performance at the 8th Leningrad Rock Club Festival

Live performance of the rock band Auktsyon at the Leningrad Rock Club. As an art-jazz-rock collective, Auktsyon was a genre-blending musical and performance phenomenon within the Leningrad underground, which distinguished itself from other bands with both its longevity and stylistic variation, gradually increasing antiestablishment content in its music throughout the post-Soviet period, while maintaining a layer of ideological ambiguity.

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

The 16th track on Grazhdanskaia Oborona's 1988 eponymous punk-rock album, whose refrain became a popular catchphrase of the late perestroika and post-Soviet period. The song cemented Egor Letov and his band as a major influence during Perestroika, marking the punk genre's departure from the established norm of largely avoiding politically-charged lyrical content.

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ASSA, motion picture

Scene of Viktor Tsoi performing his rock-anthem "Changes!" (“Peremen!”) during the last seven minutes of Sergei Solov’ev’s 1987 film Assa. Kino's cinematic performance became a defining mass-cultural event that legitimized Soviet rock music as a product of the official mainstream collaborating with the Soviet underground rock movement, crowning Tsoi as USSR's ultimate rock star, and promoting rock music as a legitimate artform for the late-Soviet audience.

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Yahha, documentary film

Rashid Nugmanov's course project for Sergei Solov'ev's workshop at VGIK, which included some of the first film footage of the everyday life of the Leningrad rock music scene.

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