Are you afraid? I am not.

Russian rebel music from Aquarium to IC3PEAK

Ivan Bilibin - Vasilisa at the hut of Baba Yaga

It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key – W.S. Churchill



Back around 1990 I became obsessed with Russian history, after reading all the books I could find on the Russo-Japanese war, the Eastern front in the First World War, the Revolution, the Interventions and Civil War, the White Russian refugees (whose treatment in the Far East showed that the concept of “white privilege” didn’t apply to Russians, even in the 1920’s), the Great Patriotic War (the one where they beat the Nazis with a little help from our side), and of course The Gulag Archipelago. The bloodbath of ideas that was Soviet communism, the courage of those who defended it from invaders, the brutality of those who defended it from Russians, the desperation of those who escaped or opposed it, all this made for a delirious and shocking historical tapestry. As I write, the mercenaries of the Wagner group, who had been fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine, have turned against Putin and marched into Russia. Where else in the modern world can medieval history, not just in its cruelty but in its very structures of power, be replicated on such an industrial scale? And how brave do you need to be, to be an artist in such a place and oppose its unchecked power? Dostoyevsky faced the firing squad, Lermontov was exiled to the Caucasus. Olesha, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov were all censored and silenced one way or another. A cassette I played a lot in that time was Boris Grebeshnikov’s Radio Silence (1989). Grebenshikov was one of the USSR’s first generation of rock musicians and as wiki says “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union regime routinely suppressed experiments in non-standardized self-expression as a matter of policy”, so the first recordings of his band Aquarium were two-track recordings and samizdat releases. When the authorities attempted to gain some control over the new music by inviting Aquarium to play at an official concert in 1980, this caused a “near-riot”, whatever that means, and Grebenshikov lost his day job and party membership. All of which resembles a potentially-much-more-serious version of the story me and my friends were play-acting in New Zealand in the Muldoon years. Most of Aquarium’s music sounds like earnest masculine folk with an experimental edge, but I could be wrong. If they weren’t all that revolutionary, it only goes to show how fragile the Soviet music authorities were; as we already know from their strictures on modern classical music, they were retromaniacs out of Mark Fisher’s worst nightmares. Aquarium’s struggle attracted supporters in the West and when Perestroika allowed, Grebesnhikov recorded Radio Silence with help from Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde, Billy Mackenzie and Dave Stewart, who produced. The title track made #7 in the US Billboard charts. At a stagnant point in rock, it introduced the Russian mix of mystery and realism to an industry that didn’t make enough of it, though perhaps the improvement in U2’s output around this time, fetishizing Eastern Europe as it did, owed something to Radio Silence, a loving, original and well-crafted tribute to Western rock, which, at its best, e.g. “The Postcard” sounds like a collaboration between Talking Heads and John Cale.

The dismantling of the Soviet system didn’t cure Russian problems. The last few politburos had clung to power by endorsing the corruption of regional potentates, who became impossible to remove under their weaker pro-Western successors. Thus the rot at the core of Russian society, responsible for the growing inefficiency of Soviet life, spread out as more money was made from the looting of Soviet infrastructure and the application of capitalist production methods, and carried off to those Western banking centres friendliest to kleptocrats. The Russian people were stuck not only in poverty but also in a life stripped of the unifying meaning that the communist experiment used to supply despite its history of disasters. Alcoholism filled the gap, and male life expectancy fell by six years between 1991 and 1994, from an already-low 63.4 years to 57.4 years, while female life expectancy decreased by 3 years (from 74.2 to 71.1). In this climate, it wasn’t obvious what exactly to revolt against, and many young people were attracted to the National Bolshevist (Nazbol) Party, the NBP, founded by Eduard Limonov, who had hung out with the Ramones in New York as a young punk, and the self-taught philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. The NBP program was provocative and deliberately contradictory, combining appeals to communism and right-wing nationalism. Many punk, experimental and psych rock bands attached themselves to the NBP, similarly to how such groups have attached themselves to anarchist and socialist causes in the West; for a sense of belonging, a guaranteed audience, and a righteous pretext for causing trouble. And, as Andrei Rogatchevski and Yngvar B. Steinhol argued in a 2015 paper for Popular Music and Society, “Metal’s obsession with evil thoughts and deeds made the road to NBP membership short for a number of Russia’s metal music provocateurs.”¹
What follows is an account of several bands singing racist and antisemitic, pro-Gulag and pro-Nazi songs with confusing messages about exactly how serious they were. Which is not unlike an aspect of punk and post-punk in the UK, USA, and NZ we still tend to sweep under the carpet. If the unacceptability of these themes to the Russian authorities, mediocrities trying to appease the liberal West, made them attractive, so did the complete abandonment of ideological constraint. Soviet socialism had dictated every aspect of one’s life, including the music one was allowed to make or listen to; by embracing contradictory extremes, the NBP offered a revolutionary ideological freedom.


Burn a kiosk full of American shit,
Advertise a hard currency store with a flying brick,
Blow up a nice Chevrolet with a hand grenade,
Tag across a billboard the letters “fuck”!
Kill the Yankees
And those who like them!

Star-spangled banner’s flushed down the bog
There’s no future but Russian punk rock

 (Nepomniashchii, “Ubei Yanki”)

Nepomniashchii spares Jello Biafra, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Curt Cobain, genuine “Moscow-born Russians”, and “Ubei Yanki”’s final bars quote “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

I may be missing something but every Nepomniashchii track I can find on youtube sounds like folk-rock. A more truly avant-garde band associated with the NBP was Sergey Kuryokhin’s Pop Mechanics; check out the anarchic big-band metal jam at 41:50 in this documentary about them, rousing good stuff and familiar in the right way.

A Pop Mechanics performance in Leningrad in support of Aleksandr Dugin’s 1995 Duma (Russian parliamentary) campaign was described thus by critic Aleksandr Kushnir:

On stage there were burning crosses with stuntmen attached; and a giant rotating wheel, now with a Whore of Babylon performing a sultry dance, now with an executioner running about in a Ku Klux Klan glory suit. Petards exploded and midgets and Bedouins crawled under people’s feet, while female pensioners from the Lenfilm studios sang patriotic songs. ... Accompanied by Tibetan ritual music instruments, Dugin uttered magic incantations. Limonov and Kurekhin in unison sang the bard Bulat Okudzhava’s “All We Need Is Victory.” Grey-haired old ladies flew on the swings, Ephebes roamed about in leopard skins, and the Captain praised the spirit of the deceased Alesteir Crowley.

To be honest, this seems like a pretty good scene, if anyone cares to revive it. But NBP rhetoric also reminds me of the controversialists in Thomas Mann’s novels The Magic Mountain and Doktor Faustus, brilliantly and cynically undermining German faith in religion and reason, creating intoxicating vistas of free thinking, all the while tilling the intellectual soil in which the crybullying subjectivity of Pan-Germanism and National Socialism is going to flourish. Once Vladimir Putin started looking for votes and enforcers in the same outlaw populations the NBP bands sold tickets and T-shirts to, and suppressed the NBP itself, the party was over.

Founded in 2011 with 11 original members, Pussy Riot began performing guerilla performance art in public places and posting videos on the internet; they came to the world’s attention when they were arrested during their February 2012 performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ Saviour, a protest against the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for Putin and his repressive policies. Charged with hooliganism, two of the three members found responsible, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, served 21 months in prison and have been harassed ever since; when they protested at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 the group was attacked with whips and pepper spray by Cossack security guards.
Pussy Riot’s 2011 manifesto described their agenda in these terms:

Feminism; resistance to organs of social control; the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals; anti-Putinism and the radical decentralization of the organs of power; preservation of the Khimki forest; and the relocation of the Russian capital to Eastern Siberia.

The relocation of the capital to Siberia was a Nazbol policy. Pussy Riot also originally described themselves as an “Oi! punk band” – as Rogatchevski and Steinhol state, “Pussy Riot research has tended to avoid more controversial aspects of Russian culture, preferring instead to focus on the issues most easily recognized by Western-minded intellectuals, such as feminism, free speech, and human rights.”
After the Church protest, Eduard Limonov called Pussy Riot “stupid broads who turned Russia on itself”, and criticized the group for offending religious believers. Rogatchevski and Steinhol suggest that this is an example of the “punk” contrariness of NBP activism. Whatever, the language reads like the kind of performative misogyny we might expect from a hanger-on in the 70’s NY scene. Women didn’t figure much in the NBP days and now they’d grabbed the headlines with the ultimate provocation.

(The point here is not that Pussy Riot are a NBP band, but that we’re all influenced by the dodgy music of our early teenage years, its framing and stratagems, whether we know it or like it or not.)

Pussy Riot’s response to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, “Mama, Don’t Watch TV” is a stark antiwar chant, in punky synthesizer trap style: the musical equivalent of Picasso’s Guernica.

The howls of Mariupol
Underneath the bright blue domed sky
A sacred throne is never left unfilled
And its power purchased long ago
The President Eraser rubs out everything in his path
"Z" means a swastika
The tanks for the holiday
A Russian classic
While the old people are decorated with ribbons
We are becoming "foreign agents"


The group’s most recent collection, Matriarchy Now (2022), is a 7-song EP of well-produced synthpop and trap, Nadya Tolokonnikova and guests singing and rapping (mostly) English lyrics in autotuned babydoll voices. Matriarchy Now is described as a “mixtape” and is executive-produced (meaning, I think, that the collaborators and producers were chosen) by Tove Lo, a Swedish singer of the kind of sexualized pop that wins Grammys for the major record labels, and it’s worth asking how an uncomplicated come-on like “HORNY” or the more explicit “SUGAR MOMMY” can serve the same political agenda as “Mama Don’t Watch TV”. Yet low-prestige, low-art genre forms - horror films, action movies, noir crime novels, fantasy, metal and trap – are the under-policed places where we’re still able to process knowledge that can’t be discussed in polite society.
A case in point being “HATEFUCK”, the most-streamed song off Matriarchy Now, which hits us with lyrics like

You make me sick, makes me sad
How do you fuck everything up so bad
It's so repulsive you even have a pulse
That I should put you up in a body bag
I loathe and detest you, utterly abhor you
Wish I'd been around to tell your mother to abort you

And much, much worse, and although the song is sung as an expression of desire, the sort of thing guest vocalist Slayyyter specializes in, it seems to me that this lyric is flipping back words that have been said to Pussy Riot, who have been irritating evil men for too long; words said to them, at best, on the internet, or on the phone, but all too likely in person, in police cells, in prison, on the street. Turning received death threats and rape threats, the usual reward for outspoken women, into a song lyric, and singing it without fear, as if it’s an expression of desire asks, ambiguously and uncomfortably, “how do you like it?”
As performance art first and foremost, Pussy Riot’s music often lacks the earworms that make the best work in the genres they use durable, and ideas that are still revolutionary in Russia can seem like woke opportunism in the West. A perceptive Pitchfork review (5.3/10) praises “HATEFUCK” but points out what’s dated and safe about much of Matriarchy Now. But in the words of another Pitchfork writer, Michael Idov, "judging Pussy Riot on artistic merit would be like chiding the Yippies because Pigasus the Immortal, the pig they ran for president in 1968, was not a viable candidate.”

Russia isn't a real country, it's a vast gothic theme park, the place monsters from cancelled fairy tales were sent to be forgotten, the land from whence Prigozhin and Putin stalk the earth like Pooh and Piglet in Blood and Honey. You can find a magnificent musical expression of this dark and supernatural side of Russia in the songs of IC3PEAK, the maximalist gothic electronica project of Nastya Kreslina and Nikolay Kostylev, who have fallen foul of the Russian authorities for giving their death metal themes an anti-war spin:

I come from a Russian horror fairy tale
It doesn’t matter where you come from
I do not play your games
Someday you will die
“Сказка” (“Fairytale”)

Nastya’s voice covers a fantastic range of expression, as do Nick’s electronic instruments; an IC3PEAK album (try 2022’s Kiss Of Death, with guests Grimes, Oli Sykes and Kim Dracula) is a horror theme park ride with enchanted backwaters and pummeling eruptions of fury and despair.

The political message is obvious – if you don’t like us singing about death, why do you support war, which causes mass death? If you don’t like us singing about the grave, why do you support repression, which makes a grave of everyday life? And also, a comforting fantasy for their fans, you cannot kill what does not live.

God is dead
I killed him
Death is a choice
And you will never catch me making it
(“Last Day”)

No, I don’t understand Russian (the lines above are sung by Grimes) but it’s enough that Nastya does most of the singing. Here's Sofie Lazarsfeld on the ethos of the ancient world’s matriarchal political and religious systems – “ in matriarchates the night was ranked higher than the day, which was said to have been born out of the womb of the night… the moon was held to be above the sun, the earth above the sea, the darkness of death and decay in nature above the light of its creativeness.”²
Death metal was invented by men, but women, exposed to the risks of childbirth and the duties of deathbed observance, were born closer to the next world (hence their greater ease with the occult in everyday life) and this makes all the difference.

Алгоритм говорит – Sham 69, “If The Kids Are United”

1. Andrei Rogatchevski & Yngvar B. Steinholt (2016) Pussy Riot’s Musical Precursors? The National Bolshevik Party Bands, 1994–2007, Popular Music and Society, 39:4, 448-464, DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2015.1088287

2. Lazarsfeld is paraphrasing Johann Jakob Bachofen’s 1861 Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur. (The mother right: an inquiry into the old world gynaecocracy according to its religious and legal nature), a book which influenced thinkers like Friederich Engels, Carl Jung, Robert Graves, Thomas Mann and Walter Benjamin as well as later generations of feminist theologians.