Explore: Year » 1988

"Sovetskii Ekran" with Tsoi on cover

The cover image from volume 13 (1988) depicts Viktor Tsoi of Kino and Petr Mamonov of the Moscow-based rockband Zvuki Mu. Both artists appeared in Rashid Nugmanov 1988 film The Needle (Igla, 1988), which cemented Tsoi’s rock stardom and firmly established Mamonov as a serious actor. He went on to star in Pavel Lungin’s drama Taxi Blues (Taksi Bliuz, 1990), which was released to international acclaim and became one of the classic examples of the perestroika-era chernukha aesthetic.

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Interview with Viktor Tsoi and Natalia Razlogova. Conducted by Sergei Sholokhov at the Golden Duke Film Festival in Odessa, 1988

This eight-minute interview, which took place on a cruise ship chartered for Odessa’s Golden Duke Film Festival in September 1988, depicts rock musician Viktor Tsoi and film critic Natalia Razlogova speaking to a journalist about the insurmountable generational tensions that inhabit the Soviet film industry. Tsoi was attending the festival to promote the film The Needle, where he played the lead role. The interview is significant highlighting the aesthetic and ideological crisis of the Soviet film industry in the last Soviet decade.

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Urlait Music Journal (Samizdat) 1985-1992 (Draft)

Moscow's samizdat music journal, which followed in the footsteps of Lenigrad's Roksi while forging a new journalistic style. The journal positioned itself to in many ways reject the Leningrad scene. Despite Moscow-based bands generally leaning towards a more avant-garde, art-rock aesthetic, Urlait made a point to promote so-called "national rock." According to Urlait's founder I. Smirnov, bands like DDT, DK, and Oblachnyi Krai (Yuri Loza) were said to be "oriented towards national problems, in opposition to estrada and the confluence of Western and domestic cultural traditions."

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Tusovka Music Journal (Samizdat) (Draft)

A central zine of the Siberian underground music community. One of Tusovka's central feats was duping the KGB into allowing the continuation of its publication and dissemination. Before the first issue went to print, the journal's founder Valerii Murzin took the bold step of delivering the pre-print manuscript of the journal to his local KGB office, in this way guaranteeing the publication's survival.

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Nautilus Pompilius performing "Last Letter" (Poslednee Pis'mo: Gudbai Amerika)

A televised performance of Nautilus Pomplius's cult song lamenting the frustrated hopes of Perestroika-era Westernization, which was further popularized by its prominent position in Aleksei Balabanov's popular gangster drama Brother 2 (2000), inscribing it into the post-Soviet cultural and cinematic discourse as a sort of antidote to Viktor Tsoi's "Changes!" at the end of S. Solov'ev's ASSA.

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Band Survey from the Leningrad Rock Club completed by Sergei Kuryokhin of Pop Mekhanika

An official rock club survey in which Sergei Kuryokhin utlilizes the late-Soviet aesthetic of stiob and performative socialism to underscore the club's dependence on the KGB

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