Explore: Year » 1989

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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Kontr Kult Ur'a Music Journal (Samizdat) 1989-1991 (Draft)

Kontr Kult Ur'a was envisioned as an ideological reincarnation of Urlait, which was deemed by the new editorial board as "cult-like" and "radically positioned." The journal also was one of the first samizdat rock zines in Moscow and Leningrad to prominently feature and promote Siberian punk rock, including Egor Letov, Civil Defence, and Yanka.

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Anarkhia Music Journal (Samizdat) (Draft)

According to rock historican Alexander Kushnir, Tiumen's samizdat music zine Anarkhia served as "the Bible of western Siberian punk rock," standing in opposition to the other Soviet rock samizdat publications with its strict affinity to punk as its central aesthetic ideology.

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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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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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Leningrad Rock Club

A wall of graffiti in the courtyard of the Leningrad Rock Club (1981-1991) on 13 Rubinshteyna Street in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), which featured fan street art dedicated to USSR's most revered rock-music collectives. When the wall was painted over in 2010 by the bulding's new proprietor, this caused a public outcry from both rock fans and the many surviving musicians from that era, who sought to preserve the LRC's legacy and designmate the wall and the building a historical landmark.

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