Stalin's Houses on Lenin Street: Late Soviet Underground Rock in Patriotic Discourse (1981-1991)

Osipov Sergey PhD in History Associate professor, Department of History and Culture, Ulyanovsk State Technical University 432000, Russia, g. Ul'yanovsk, ul. Severnyi Venets, 32, of. 317 mail2mee@mail.ru Other publications by this author

1

Diverse studies of pop music have been conducted for many decades; the representativeness of this art form in the context of the study of culture, history, politics, society, etc. of a particular people, country is beyond doubt. Moreover, being by definition a synthetic phenomenon (a combination of music and text, later – a video sequence), pop music allows you to expand the study in different dimensions: textual, musical, visual, reading and interpreting the embedded (consciously and unconsciously) content, determining the sources of cultural, political, religious, etc. influences on this content. Since, by definition, a pop song (popular) is a product intended for the widest possible audience, the breadth of the perceiving audience, the duration and stability of perception, the reanimation of a pop song in the form of cover versions and remixes, the use and quoting in other media - all of the above can and should be investigated. Let's just mention here as an example that the scientific journal Popular Music has been published by Cambridge University Press since 1981, and the first monographs on rock music were published in the late 1960s.

Russian musicologists and culturologists initially operated with a fundamentally different conceptual framework: so, popular songs of the 1930s-1950s were defined as "Soviet mass song", later "pop song", "lyrical song", "household song" entered into circulation. Socio-political content, educational role, mass-ritual nature of performance, etc. were mentioned as defining characteristics of the "mass song". [See1-2] The "pop" or "lyrical" song implied a more entertaining, personalized nature of the content and performance; at the same time, all the named categories of songs had a standard verse-chorus structure, accessible texts and were addressed to the widest category of the Soviet listener, which brings the mentioned terminology closer to the concept of pop music.

It approximates, but does not equalize, because firstly, the Soviet mass song existed in a planned economy (in a market economy, popularity = a wide sales market, and song = a commodity), secondly, pop music in its boundless breadth of audience coverage is not fixed on any particular subculture or ideology ^[3-4], while the Soviet mass song before the period of the "thaw" was extremely ideological. Another thing is that this ideology was a kind of faith of the absolute majority of the inhabitants of the USSR, so it is possible (especially since the 1960s) to consider the communist ideology in the Soviet mass song not as a decisive characteristic of the audience, but as the cultural background of the audience's existence. At the end of the 1980s, the social and cultural life of the USSR was de-ideologized, the formation of a market economy began, that is, exhaustive conditions were created for the prosperity of pop music in its established meaning. In this regard, in relation to the late Soviet and post-Soviet song art, the term "mass song" ceased to be used, giving way to the generally accepted "pop music".

The correction of terminology that has taken place in recent decades has also been accompanied by a natural correction in terms of de-ideologization of approaches to the study of Soviet popular songs. The period of the "Soviet mass song" in its original meaning remains the most studied, that is, the 1930s-1950s [see 5-7], interdisciplinary studies, i.e. the consideration of popular music in a socio-historical context, seem promising [for example, 8-9].

This work is devoted to two interrelated aspects of the existence of a popular song in the late Soviet period. Firstly, we will try to prove that the development of a mass/popular song is directly dependent on the development of mass communication and access to it. The phenomenon of mass/popular song originated in the XX century as a result of breakthrough technological inventions in the field of sound recording and distribution. The Soviet song of the 1920s-1950s became truly mass as a result of the country's radioification and the development of cinematography, it will be shown below how song genres that were not initially mass, when gaining access to media channels, become such.

Secondly, we will demonstrate that the socio-political content in general and the patriotic theme in particular were not an attribute exclusively of the official Soviet song, but found their expression in the work of authors from the uncensored/underground song environment. The official Soviet popular song was undoubtedly the dominant segment of the cultural space (until the 1980s), but the Soviet popular uncensored song undoubtedly contributed to the formation of patriotic discourse; moreover, it made this discourse much more diverse, saturated, sharp, etc.

2

Before delving into the topic, we recall that the communist regime sought monopoly party control over all spheres of public life, education, culture, etc. This control, in particular, was implemented through the creation of so-called creative unions: the Union of Writers (1932), the Union of Artists (1931), the Union of Composers (1932), etc. The task of the Union of Soviet Composers, for example, was to "promote the creation of highly ideological artistic and significant works that affirm the principles of socialist realism and develop the best traditions of national cultures of the USSR to promote the creative growth and development of professional skills of composers and musicologists, to participate in the musical and aesthetic education of the people" ^[10]. In practice, these were departments for the implementation of state cultural policy in a particular field of culture and art, implementing mechanisms for the distribution of state orders in the field of culture, encouragement for their successful execution and punishment for unsuccessful execution or non-execution. Under the conditions of a totalitarian/authoritarian regime, only membership in these organizations provided the artist with more or less tolerable creative conditions, guaranteed orders and rewards, social benefits, etc. However, the price of this was the acceptance of the state ideology and the obligation to participate in its strengthening through artistic creativity; that is, the writer/composer/artist deliberately refused freedom of creativity and imposed on himself the duties of self-censorship (along with the nationwide multi-level censorship system that existed in the USSR until 1991).

 With regard to song culture, membership in the Union of Composers opened up opportunities for the mechanisms of distribution of song products (that is, the possibility of converting creativity into material income, public recognition, etc.). These mechanisms, firstly, were again controlled by the state, and secondly, in principle, they were quite limited compared to the capabilities of the current digital era; accordingly, it is difficult to exaggerate their value. Such mechanisms included:

- performing songs on the radio;

- inclusion of songs in films and theatrical productions;

- inclusion of songs in TV movies and other television content;

- musical editions;

- publication of songs on material media;

- concert activity.

The first three positions (i.e. radio, film production and film distribution, television and theaters) until the very beginning of the 1990s were monopolistically owned by the state, the entire stream of content was censored, the right of preferential access belonged to members of official creative unions. Publishing and printing (sheet music) also belonged to the state; here, of course, there was the possibility of manual recording of notes with their subsequent manual rewriting (something like musical samizdat), but its scale was negligible.

With the publication of songs on material media, everything was somewhat more complicated. Since pre–revolutionary times, the main form of such a carrier has been gramophone records (later simply gramophone records), that is, analog audio media obtained mainly by industrial stamping. In the USSR, various enterprises and recording studios were merged in 1933 into Gramplastrest, and later into the All–Union Record Company "Melody" (1964), which was part of the system of the USSR Ministry of Culture. There was no private production of records due to the complex technology of the production process itself and the inability to organize it outside the public sector. Nevertheless, there are known attempts to circumvent the state monopoly on recording: since the late 1940s, some enthusiasts in Moscow and Leningrad have used primitive equipment of the Soviet household service "sound writing" to record uncensored Western or emigrant music on a flexible medium. The primitiveness of the technology – the recording played on the player was copied "from the air", i.e. through a microphone, and recorded on low–quality improvised material (X-ray images) - was compensated by the uniqueness of the forbidden song material. People engaged in this type of activity risked falling under several articles of the Criminal Code at once, because they were engaged in illegal business activities and at the same time distributed ideologically alien music, undermining the foundations, etc. ^[11].

In parallel, the production of reel-to-reel tape recorders began in the USSR (since 1949), in the 1960s. they were already cheap enough to be purchased by an ordinary Soviet citizen, and at the same time high-quality, so that with the help of a tape recorder the same Soviet citizen could copy music from other sources (a record player, another tape recorder), and it was absolutely his private business what and where he copies from. It can be said that Soviet trade practically pushed a citizen who bought a tape recorder to start searching for uncensored material for copying, because ready-made reels / cassettes with recordings in the USSR (especially in the 1960s and 1970s) produced an insignificant amount. Since the late 1960s, cassette recorders have been produced, the presence of such household appliances has become a completely ordinary feature of everyday life, and thus in the USSR, through the efforts of the Soviet radio-electronic industry, a technical base appears for the distribution of uncensored music bypassing any state control.

As for concert activities, the organization of such events was again controlled by the state: the concert artist must be employed in a state organization (philharmonic), his concert program was approved by the Philharmonic Arts Council; in addition, upon arrival on tour in a particular city /region, the artist was subject to control by local party, trade union and Komsomol bodies. For clarity, let us explain that when Olga Voronets sings the song "I look into the blue lakes ..." in "Song-73", then we have an employee of the state Philharmonic performing a song written by a member of the State Union of Composers to the poems of a member of the State Union of Writers. When transmitting the recording to the radio, this song will undergo additional editorial (censorship) control, for the release of the record, the song will be considered by the artistic council of the Melody company, and when the singer is going to go on tour, her repertoire will again be listened to and checked. At the output, we get not just a Soviet pop song, but a repeatedly verified broadcast of the official position of the Communist Party and the government on this particular issue, rhymed and put to ideologically correct music.

With such a system, on the one hand, the task of protecting the state ideology from hostile attempts is certainly fulfilled, on the other hand, the field of a censored song turns out to be extremely emasculated and limited, which forces the listening public to look for content not exactly anti-state, but simply more diverse and new, because the genre of a pop song provides for the short-term nature of its appeal and, accordingly, the constant appearance of new content. Excessive censorship largely turned the Soviet mass song into a deliberately archaic, intrusive, but "correct" product.

Attempts to circumvent the state concert monopoly were also made, and the most energetic violators here were the administrators of the state philharmonic themselves, who tried to organize unaccounted concerts in order to obtain unaccounted profits. But at these concerts, the listener received the same pre-approved censored material. Any attempt to organize a concert by a non-philharmonic performer rested on the problem of premises and equipment, which again was a state monopoly, and therefore raised questions of approval of the repertoire and approval of the speaker's figure by the organization that provided the hall and equipment. There were possible options: masking the concert with a "creative meeting", an "oral issue of a magazine", a "meeting of graduates", personal contacts with the relatively liberal administration of some theater, research institute or institute, but the risks still persisted. Therefore, the radical way out of the situation was to transfer the concert to the territory of a personal home: to an apartment or to a dacha (both options still did not exclude the intervention of law enforcement agencies under the pretext of breaking the silence, etc.).

So, in the 1960s, the Soviet state monopoly on the distribution of song content was no longer so monolithic: the distribution of tape recorders created the technical possibility of high-quality copying of uncensored music, the situation with the organization of concerts was more complicated, but also not hopeless.

3

Setting up the production of tape recorders with the possibility of connecting to other devices, Soviet government officials probably assumed that citizens would thus copy particularly popular records of the company "Melody", record broadcasts of radio "Mayak" or even audio tracks of popular Central Television programs. Of course, there was such an application of these devices. However, we recall that all these translation mechanisms were essentially the same set of repetitive censored "correct" content, limited in genre, thematic and many other respects. It made much more sense to spend film and time copying content that is not in open legal access. Initially, the most obvious source of such content was imported records/cassettes that came to the USSR in small quantities through diplomatic/trade/tourist channels. Being quite an ordinary consumer commodity in the West, in the USSR they became a prestigious attribute, a way of accumulating capital, a "currency" in informal economic relations. Copying an imported record/cassette to another person could be a commercial act, could be regarded as a service for which mutual service was expected, could be an unconditional and gratuitous action "out of love for art." In any case, it was a massive uncontrolled distribution of uncensored Western music, comparable to modern social networks or torrent trackers in terms of the volume of people involved.

The imported product was already ready for copying: the record was printed, the cassette was recorded; it remained to connect the two devices and press the necessary buttons. It was more difficult with domestic uncensored content: as described above, it could not be on records or on cassettes.

First of all, we should refer to the national uncensored song, the so-called folklore, that is, folk song culture, which is born not by state order, but as a spontaneous artistic reaction to the surrounding life in all its diversity. Song folklore was not originally intended to be broadcast on some media channels, however, it is preserved in the people's memory and eventually fixed in literary or audio recordings. The Soviet state legalized some part of the song folklore and included it in a kind of canon of folk songs worthy of broadcasting on state media channels; however, most of them remained outside this canon because of their "lack of ideas", "immorality" and other dramatic discrepancies with socialist realism. For example, the state culture denied the right to exist to urban folklore of criminal themes (and stylizations for it). Nevertheless, the absence of these songs on radio, television, on records and cassettes did not make them less popular and beloved, they were performed by amateur and professional artists, as well as ordinary people, privately, in a narrow circle. When a technical opportunity appeared (probably not before the mid-1950s), these songs were immediately recorded on tape, since their certain musical primitivism did not require an abundance of instruments and sophisticated equipment, an acoustic guitar/accordion and voice were enough; all this was elementary recorded on a household tape recorder and then replicated. The most famous representative of the genre, Arkady Severny, made the first such recording on a household tape recorder "Dnepr" in 1963, having two bayans and a saxophone as accompaniment, and in the 1970s he was already accompanied by a full-fledged electric composition, which required amplifiers, a mixing console, etc. Nevertheless, with some effort, all this could be organized both in a private apartment and at night (after hours) in the state recording studio at the theater, institute, club, etc.

It is noteworthy that folk art is traditionally considered anonymous, without an author; the Soviet mass song had a clear author's attribution. At the same time, folklore songs had liveliness, spontaneity of intonation, a variety of plots and emotions; Soviet songs looked like a fairly homogeneous array, regardless of the authors and performers of a particular song. The Soviet singer/singer usually performed/performed a work written by other people, often written for some specific event, an official anniversary, in fulfillment of a state order; thus being not a creative person, but a transmission link in delivering a message from the Soviet government to the Soviet people through a song form. The same song could be simultaneously recorded/presented at concerts by several performers in identical arrangements, which led to depersonalization of the content.

Therefore, the concept of "author's song", which arose in the 1960s. in relation to the work of poets who accompanied themselves on an acoustic guitar, in fact meant: "not a Soviet song" or "not like the members of the Union of Composers", a song with an author's personality. It is generally believed that the author's song originated from the upper (intellectual) segment of urban folklore and took shape as an independent phenomenon by the early 1960s, again after the emergence of technical capabilities to record the songs of amateur authors on tape, and then replicate / exchange these recordings. The author's song was distinguished from the actual folklore content by the presence of an explicit author and the claims of this author to poetic consistency (one of the popular synonyms of the author's song is "bard's song", that is, the song of singing poets). In the phrase "author's song", the author's (as opposed to the faceless Soviet officialdom) was indisputable, "song", at least in the mass variety, implies the presence of a traditional verse/ chorus structure and pronounced melody, arrangement, etc.; neither one nor the other, as well as vocal data, the absolute majority of authors-performers of this genre they couldn't brag. Often their performances tended to melodic declamation under the rhythmic beating on the strings of an acoustic guitar, and nothing more.  However, this did not interfere with the huge popularity of the author's song at all, even on the contrary – acoustic minimalism was perceived as an adequate accompaniment to the "new sincerity" of the texts, contrasting the roar of official pop symphony orchestras. Amateur song clubs appear everywhere in the USSR, author's song festivals are held, etc.

As in the case of modern folklore, the authorities legalized part of the author's song movement, which was facilitated by the initial affiliation of a number of authors to the capital's artistic (Bulat Okudzhava, Yuri Vizbor, Matveev's Novella) and scientific and technical (Alexander Gorodnitsky, Sergey Nikitin) intelligentsia, that is, a well-known embeddedness in the system and understanding of the limits of what is permissible. At the same time, most of the songs written by Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich remained in the category of uncensored songs. Galich was eventually forced to leave the USSR, the first album with Vysotsky's songs was released on "Melodies" after his death, temporary restrictions were imposed on the concert activities of Yulia Kim (but at the same time both Vysotsky and Kim worked quite successfully in cinema and theater, that is, the state allowed them to work in a team, but not approved of individual creativity in the song format). It is indisputable that from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s Vysotsky's recordings occupied a leading position in the total volume of "magnitizdat", that is, the system of exchange of uncensored recordings.  The bulk of Vysotsky's Soviet recordings are concert recordings made at various "creative meetings", "author's evenings", etc.

The surge in the mass movement of the KSP and the wide popularity of individual authors-performers of the "bard song" spoke rather not about the merits of the genre, but about the problems of the Soviet mass song, against which the songs of Vizbor, Dolsky or Mityaev looked like an emotional or intellectual revelation. By and large, in ideological terms, the author's song was completely harmless to the Soviet regime (with the rare exception of some songs by Galich, Kim, Vysotsky), which is confirmed by the absence of such repressions against this genre that Soviet rock music was subjected to later. Regular mass festivals, records of the luminaries of the genre, the opportunity to work on television, theater and cinema, or even a job at the Philharmonic (Alexander Dolsky, Alexander Rosenbaum, Oleg Mityaev): all this was quite affordable.  In our opinion, the wider presence of the genre in the official field was hindered by the arrogant and cautious position of the Union of Composers and the Union of Writers, who saw amateur amateur authors as dangerous competitors capable of depriving honored figures of Soviet art of their usual income. 

The author's song, thus, was in the border zone between the official and the uncensored song.

Thirdly, finally, in the mid–1960s, the world saw the birth of the phenomenon of Soviet rock music. Unlike urban folklore and the author's song (which had domestic roots, and long-standing and strong)  rock music in the USSR originated as a mirror copy of someone else's culture, and what is unforgivable is the culture of the Anglo-American, that is, the countries of the notorious NATO bloc, capitalism, social inequality and human exploitation by man. Rock music appeared as a result of copying hostile mass culture, which excluded the possibility of fitting it into the legal Soviet media space. However, at first there was nothing to include, since the first Soviet rock bands were engaged in mirroring Western music, that is, they sang in English. The Soviet mass song allowed Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, but this, as a rule, was also the limit of linguistic tolerance, both on the part of the state and on the part of the general listening public.

 It is noteworthy that there is practically no material trace left of the Soviet rock bands of the first wave, that is, these very tape recordings. This was due to both technical difficulties (adequately recording an electric sound is not the same as recording a bard with a guitar from one microphone), and the lack of special meaning in recording and storing a bad copy of Western bands with access to the original recordings.

For the full-fledged entry of Soviet rock into the "magnitizdat" certain conditions were needed, and first of all, strange as it sounds, overcoming the language barrier, namely the transition from English (or pseudo-English) to Russian understandable to millions of listeners. Despite the fact that discussions about the possibility or impossibility of performing rock music in Russian were conducted until the mid-1980s, the first successful experiments in this direction were made by the early 1970s.

The second condition was adequacy, that is, the rejection of attempts to copy some complex musical forms of Western rock (such as psychedelic prog-rock), which in Soviet conditions looked ridiculous from the technical side, and at the same time could not interest a wide audience in any way. Rock bands had to mature before creating Russian-language rock music in an accessible song form, combining melodism, energy, dance rhythm, as well as the theme of the songs, departing from both the Soviet officialdom and the tedious romanticism of the author's song.  All this happened only at the end of the 1970s, and before that, despite the presence of recordings of various Soviet rock bands [for more details, see 12], they did not become a phenomenon of "magnitizdat".

The third condition was access to high-quality equipment and tape; in the USSR, all this was in short supply, and the formation of a material and technical base for a rock band was an expensive and long-lasting pleasure, requiring many semi-legal and completely illegal schemes.

The official position of the Soviet government in relation to rock music was still negative, but it was impossible to ignore the mass youth enthusiasm: this is how philharmonic VIA, that is, pseudo-rock bands, appeared. In their entourage and instrumentation, they resembled Western compositions (not the first freshness), but they performed mostly songs by the same Soviet composers. A certain undemanding part of the public really considered it fashionable music, for a musician, the transition from an amateur rock band to a philharmonic ensemble meant obtaining legal status, stable earnings, instruments, tours, recordings on radio and television; only creative freedom was lost.  Moving to VIA, the musician fell into the usual Soviet censorship and editorial field described above.

By the end of the 1970s, on the eve of the Moscow Olympics, the authorities took care of the formation of a cultural program that would show the guests of the USSR the unimpressed youth rock culture. This is how the Soviet philharmonic rock appeared: several amateur ensembles were accepted into state concert organizations, which retained the prefix "rock band" on official concert posters and most of their own repertoire ("Time Machine", "Dialogue", "Autograph", "Carnival", "Araks", etc.).- the group legalized their concert activities, but access to other media channels remained limited. The first albums of all the aforementioned rock bands were released on "Melodies" only in 1986-1987, that is, already at the beginning of perestroika; presence on radio and television was extremely rare. Naturally, the musicians, who sought to realize themselves as creative personalities, as authors of their own material, kept away from the philharmonic and accused, for example, the "Time Machine" (which was the leader of the Moscow underground rock scene until 1979) of "selling".

At the turn of the decades of Soviet uncensored rock finally entered a phase of maturity. The "golden age" of Soviet rock music began, which lasted until the end of the 1980s. The three above-mentioned conditions (Russification, reversal to an understandable song form, material and technical base) were formed, the number of groups turned into quality ("Aquarium", "Zoo", "Cinema", "Urfin Jus", "Resurrection", "DDT", "Center", "Bravo", "Crematorium", "Cloud Edge", "DC"), and all of them are constantly being recorded, and their magnetic albums are actively replicated, competing with the Western founding fathers and surpassing them in popularity.

The shift in mass tastes can be assessed by the dynamics of surveys of the most popular Moscow newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets: in 1978, the Philharmonic VIA completely occupied the category of "Best Ensemble", four years later, in 1982, nine out of ten positions were occupied by philharmonic rock groups ("Time Machine", "Cruise", "Dynamic" and etc.), and three of them have not released a single record: their fame rests solely on tape recordings and concerts. Four years later, in 1987, half of the list were old philharmonic rock bands, half came from the underground rock scene ("Aquarium", "Alice", "Nautilus Pompilius", etc.).

It is quite obvious that Soviet rock music attracted the interest of the mass listener only when it ceased to be a copy of the Western model and became a Soviet/Russian song genre based on both Anglo-American rock standards and domestic melodics, Russian literary poetic tradition; the influence of urban folklore, jazz, author's song as well took place.

The boom of Soviet uncensored rock provoked a response from the authorities: "black lists" appeared, dismissals and even arrests of members of the rock movement took place, but this did not stop the development of the genre. After 1985, the gradual legalization of Soviet rock music began, in parallel with this, censorship weakened within the framework of the glasnost policy, the limits of what is permissible in the media, literature and art expanded. Later, non-state concert organizations, non-state recording companies will be created, and one day it will turn out that almost everything is possible. The state border between censored and uncensored music will disappear.

4

So, we found three categories of Soviet uncensored songs that existed in parallel with the official mass song culture: urban folklore, author's song, rock music. Of the three of them, the author's song existed in a more comfortable position, but she also did not have the access to state media channels that the song officialdom had. Urban folklore and rock music were even more discriminated against in opportunities.

It is access to mass media that seems to us to be the decisive factor in turning a song into a mass song. As soon as the author's song, urban folklore and rock music get access to at least part of these communication channels, they become mass art, finding, forming and expanding their audience.

Let us recall the channels designated by us for broadcasting mass songs that existed in the USSR:

1) performing songs on the radio;

2) inclusion of songs in films and theatrical productions;

3) inclusion of songs in TV movies and other television content;

4) musical editions;

5) official publication of songs on material media (records);  6) unofficial publication of songs on material media (magnetoizdat));

7) concert activity (official philharmonic);

8) concert activities (semi-official and unofficial).

The Soviet censored mass song (where we include both the Union of Composers, and Philharmonic VIA, and Philharmonic Bards) had full access to positions 1-7, urban folklore had access partly to 2,3, completely to 6,8; the author's song partly to 1-5,7, completely to 6,8.; rock music partly to 2,3 completely to 6,8). We see that the Soviet censored mass song has no competitors in audience coverage, the author's song, as noted above, occupied a borderline position between officialdom and alternative, and rock music and urban folklore were this very alternative to officialdom, having limited access to the audience, but wide freedom of creativity.

The above scheme refers to the period before 1987/1988, then within the framework of the cultural policy of perestroika, the boundaries of what is permitted become more blurred.

5

Before proceeding to the consideration of specific examples of uncensored songs in the socio-cultural context of the late USSR, I would like to note the fundamental difference in the patriotic discourse of the official song and the uncensored song.

As mentioned above, the Soviet mass song was a repeatedly verified broadcast of the official position of the Communist Party and the government on a specific issue; in this case, the party and the government informed the Soviet citizen for what, why and in what form the Soviet citizen loves his Soviet Homeland. Moreover, this message was compiled, as a rule, in the most accessible form in order to exclude ambiguous interpretations. Memoir literature repeatedly describes the communication of Soviet artists with party officials and the "What if the people don't understand?" constantly arising during this communication, the Soviet patriotic song already declares by its name that it is Soviet and patriotic: "Native Land", "A song about a distant Homeland", "Where does the Motherland begin?", "I love you, Russia", "The Motherland hears", "My address is the Soviet Union"[see 25].

An uncensored song, on the contrary, appears as a result of the author's creative understanding of the surrounding world, and the author is not obliged to coordinate this understanding with anyone, chew, etc.; the author is an adult and sees the same adults as his audience. The author reflects, and he is often not sure of his feelings about the people around him, events, society, country, etc. The listener is given the opportunity to draw conclusions himself, and often these conclusions may not coincide with two different listeners, and they both do not coincide with the author's interpretation of a particular song. Let us also recall that rock music in the USSR developed in a fierce confrontation with state cultural policy, the Soviet official song and Soviet rock music mutually denied each other their viability, respectively, an uncensored rock song tried to be everything that the official Soviet song was not: if it taught a Soviet person to love the motherland, the party. Komsomol. Lenin and other approved staples, then the rock song moved away from global socio-political issues into the world of individual experiences. Thus, it is more difficult to formulate patriotic discourse by means of an uncensored song; it is not concentrated in programmatic unambiguous statements, but dispersed; it can consist of many indirect experiences, it can be disguised by irony/parody/ stylization, it can be decorated in ambiguous figurative rows, etc. 

The study of patriotic discourse on the material of an uncensored song is certainly more complicated, but more interesting and meaningful.

6

After the departure of the "Time Machine" to the Philharmonic, the status of the leaders of the Moscow underground scene passed to the Resurrection group, whose pessimistic songs "... were dedicated not to the abstractly wrong order of things in the Universe (meaning the creativity of the "Time Machine" - S.O.), but to the concrete confusion in the soul of almost every young person"^{[12, p. 92]}. The first big hit of "Resurrection" was called "Who is to blame" and contained the immortal lines: "And whose fault is it that you are alone/And life is one and so pale/And so boring, and you're still waiting/That you'll die someday." In 1981, the author of "Who's to Blame", 29-year-old Alexey Romanov, wrote a new song called "I've never been over the sea." Contrary to the title, the author does not complain at all about the strictness of the Soviet visa regime. In the most unexpected way, the Moscow hippie speaks out about the Jewish emigration that was gaining momentum throughout the 1970s.: "For what new benefits/Free - will, saved – paradise / Everyone is running, pretending to be tramps/Pilgrims to an unknown land?". Musically, this is a lyrical ballad in which the author, without denying the "pilgrims" the free choice of freedom of residence ("free will"), gives quite rational arguments against: "... There is the same blue sky/And the same complicated life/Maybe it's more fun and richer there/Brighter colors and warmer summers/Only they also cry from the pain there/They also give birth to children in agony."

For the lyrical hero, the departure of the "pilgrims" is not some kind of public affair, it is a personal drama, because friends and acquaintances are leaving, the hero loses them ("Maybe I don't quite understand/The obvious benefits of secret infidelity/For some reason, I lose more often/Having nothing in return"). In the course of the song, an escalation occurs, and the abandoned "betrayal" in relation to the hero turns into a more significant betrayal ("What is planned, done, passed/You will leave everything without grieving about anything / Only the Motherland ends somewhere/If you have a homeland"), because the hero feels part of something bigger, part of the country, and he is offended not only for himself, but also for the state. In the last verse, we suddenly realize that Romanov's song has a target, there is another song with which he polemizes: "Look back at goodbye, and here it is/There is a foreign land under your feet/Are the birds flying migratory/Either the rats are fleeing from the ship."

We are talking about the famous Soviet song by Blanter/Isakovsky "Migratory birds are Flying" (1948); its original meaning (the song was performed on behalf of a conscientious soldier who fulfilled his duty and returned home) was forgotten in the 1970s, and the mass Jewish emigration, which started in 1971, gave clear grounds for new associations. If the honored Soviet poet boasted "... I have seen a lot of countries...", then Romanov "has never been over the sea," and nevertheless he ends his song much tougher.

If desired, the metaphor with rats can be expanded: emigrants are rats, the country is a ship, rats usually flee from the ship when the ship sinks. A native of the Moscow hippies, that is, a counterculturist who has been in conflict with the state all his adult life in one way or another, Romanov throws harsh words to people who are fleeing from this state. If this song teaches us anything, it's that patriotism, like any emotion, is irrational.

In the eternal dispute about what is the Homeland at all (fields and plains? lakes and daisies? father's budenovka? coat of arms and flag?) Romanov's song also makes a quiet contribution: it's all "... what is conceived, done, passed", that is, the unity of material and spiritual, past and future.

7

The famous phrase A.Sinyavsky's "My differences with the Soviet government are purely stylistic" could have been uttered by Vasily Shumov from the Center group, whose strategy in the 1980s seemed to be to change faster than the public would have time to get used to and fall in love with the next incarnation of this "new wave" Moscow composition. The Center made full use of the opportunities of the underground tape industry, and in 10 years released 14 studio albums (not counting concert recordings) [for more details, see 13]. Even state pressure was used as an excuse to change the concert program and record a new album: in 1984, the supervisory authorities (the Presidium of the All-Russian Union of Composers) ordered amateur ensembles to focus on the performance of materials by members of the Union of Composers instead of their own dubious works. It should be noted that the Soviet state tried to manage amateur rock music in much the same way as heavy industry: with the over—centralized involvement of the forces of all interested ministries and departments: "The solution to this problem — the creation of highly artistic musical works - includes today the central bodies dealing with culture and art: The Ministry of Culture of the USSR and the Ministries of Culture of the Union Republics, their repertoire and editorial boards, concert organizations, methodological offices, the Union of Composers of the USSR and the Union of Composers of the RSFSR. Famous Soviet musicians and poets are involved in the creation of works for VIA"^[14].

The "Center" presented a program of Soviet mass songs of the 1960s, rearranged by the forces of a garage post-punk band, which gave painfully familiar words and melodies a completely new dimension. The contrast was enhanced by the use of fragments of the original recordings (mostly) of the 1960s with their naive sound as interruptions between the actual "center" cover versions. So, the lyrical "How beautiful is this world" (Tukhmanov/Kharitonov, 1972) turned into a hard minor blues, where the musical component calls into question the text; "Black Cat" (Saulsky/Tanich, 1963) became a gloomy drama, etc.

The Center has once again demonstrated album thinking here: "Favorite Songs" is not a set of songs, but a holistic artistic statement. "The Atomic Age" (Ostrovsky/Kashezheva, 1969), "Blue Cities" (Petrov/Kuklin, 1964), "OK" (Bronevitsky/Gurevich, 1964), "How beautiful this world is" in their original versions painted the Soviet utopia as a symbiosis of technological progress with spiritual harmony; the beautiful homeland of the future was embodied in new cities, electronic machines, flying rockets and, of course, beautiful people who sincerely love each other. The "Center" seemed to put these wonderful analog emotions and hopes into a bulky creaking/sparkling Soviet computer and got a completely different future at the output. By chance or not, but exactly in the middle of the album, a completely alien to the Soviet thaw dream "Song about the dead pilots" (Weinberg) is driven in like a nail/Sable, 1958) from the film "The Last Inch", better known as "What do I care about all of you". The anthem to deadly individualism is borrowed from a film about Western life, its triumphant refrain ("What do I care about all of you, and you care about me") like a crack in a wall; the crack is large, it is impossible not to notice it, and when we notice it, we notice smaller cracks: ironic intonations of vocalists, synthesizer passages, as if taken from science fiction films, a change of gender roles (among the original performers were Edita Piekha, Nina Brodskaya, etc.), etc. As a result, the romantic-optimistic message of Soviet songs of the 1960s was transformed into a retro-futuristic picture: a world that did not happen.

The gradual legalization of rock music and the notorious glasnost directed rock authors towards social criticism, but if for the most part angry rock bands were outraged by bureaucracy, lack of sausage in stores, local corruption, privileges of the party and economic elite and the like prose of life, then Shumov's claims were mostly introspective, that is, they were not presented I build as much as a person who is unable to become something significant in the conditions of this system. In 1986-1989 . Shumov recorded a series of albums that were underestimated then and almost forgotten today ("The Life of wonderful Men", "Russians in their Company", "Child", "Purification", "From bell to Bell"), masterpieces of the genre "intelligentsia in disharmony with the surrounding Soviet absurdity"), close in attitude to the late Soviet dramas/tragicomedies of Volodin/Vampilova/Melnikova/Danelia/Balayana (with a significant correction for the age of the lyrical hero).

While contemporaries blamed Stalin, Brezhnev, bureaucracy, generals and God knows who else for their unsettled state, Shumov stated otherwise: "A person is weak, and regardless of his social status." The dispassionate intonation with which the lyrical hero describes his interaction with the outside world is impressive. Hardly anyone in the song better described the daily life of an ordinary Soviet person (not a rebel, not a hero, but not an antisocial character) than Shumov in the "Commission" (1987): "I filled out the papers, collected the certificates /The formalities were observed /Nothing else depends on me/Commission/Everything is decided by the commission/Commission/Everything is decided by the commission/I was put on the queue/Put on the list/Total rewritten/They promised to call." Moreover, the lyrical hero does not oppose himself to the state evil (commission), this evil is habitual, and the hero even adapts to it, grows together with it: "We lived next door/We studied at the same school/Now we are secretly meeting/And secretly break up/Commission/She is a member of the commission/Commission/She is a member of the commission/And all my plans/My whole mission/Related to you/Oh, my commission!" The popular opinion that it is necessary to separate the people and the state does not work for Shumov, because he has an authoritarian state – these are the same people who studied with you in the same school.

As noted above, Shumov's claims to the Soviet system were stylistic in nature, being addressed in particular to the Soviet song culture. Emphatically impassive and even intonationally cold in the songs of this period, Shumov was clearly annoyed by the phrases "Soviet composer" or "Soviet song", not to mention the kind of culture with which these phrases were associated: "A useless song is a gloomy event/A useless song is a stop in development/ A useless song is a creative variety/A useless song is a spiritual disability." This is an attack on the Soviet song culture ("Useless Song" (1986)), whose mass character is interpreted here literally as vastness, heaviness: "It sounds loud/It sounds smooth/Its mass is huge/She lives a long time."

Having devoted enough time to painting concrete – and at the same time familiar – Soviet abominations, Shumov, the lyrical hero, according to his own recipe, remained an optimist, finding a way out in individual creativity ("You think in Russian / Lyrical optimist/In the morning you are at work / And in the evening the guitarist/… Evening Newspaper/Lemon and Harpsichord/They all adore men", "The Life of Wonderful Men", 1986) and samurai equanimity in accepting what you can't change ("Smile at your two-legged brother/Smile while getting paid/ Smile while lying under the tram/Smile, be a samurai", "Hello to you", 1988).

With a purely individualistic approach (both in the lyrics and when functioning within the semi–underground music industry), from a certain point on, Shumov demonstrates the lyrical hero's awareness of himself as a particle of the big – and certainly Russian, not Soviet - world. Ahead of the media discourse by a year or two, Shumov in 1987 recorded the album "Russians in their company", which contained the song "Alekseev", which together with "Turgenev women" (1986) and "Forever" (1988) constitute a kind of trilogy of patriotic self-identification of the author.

Starting from the image of classical Russian literature (a dreamy creature with a rich inner world), Shumov creates a whole gallery of laconic female images, acting, working, creating; a kind of anthem of emancipation ("Turgenev women read newspapers /Call on the phone, go to work/Have an education, go down in the subway/Standing in line, splitting the atom/Turgenev women discuss events / Understand artists, look for oil"). Having lined up women by occupation, Shumov then settles them all over the vast expanses of Russia: from Moscow and Kursk to Blagoveshchensk and Vladivostok.

 In "Alekseev" the same technique of "a specific song" is used, that is, building a long list of different men by the name of Alekseev with an indication of their occupation; but if "Turgenev women" were listed under the original melody with a memorable guitar part, then "Alekseev" is read under a slightly electronically distorted version of "Gypsy Girl", which gives the song is a well-known tragicomism. The inevitable associations of the melody with restaurant festivities give rise to the image of some incredibly extensive feast the size of a country, where they sit side by side: "Alekseev Nikolai Petrovich, engineer /Alekseev Fyodor Stepanovich agronomist /Alekseev Sergey Ivanovich, chauffeur /Alekseev Vladimir Pavlovich, programmer/Alekseev Ivan Kuzmich, teacher/Alekseyev Andrey Vasilyevich, locksmith/Alekseev Georgy Igorevich /Professor Alekseev Arkady Fedorovich, policeman...." The enumeration ends with the most universal of all Alekseevs – Alekseev Alexey Alekseevich, with his most universal of all occupations – a soldier, that is, the one who, if necessary, will become an engineer, agronomist, chauffeur, programmer, etc.; a list of names in this case it can be associated not only with a Plaque of Honor (opinion of E. Golovin), but also with inscriptions on tombstones (in February 1987, the war in Afghanistan was still going on). Bringing the text to its logical conclusion, Shumov addresses the listener directly: "Alekseev – you, Alekseev – we"; with the difference of names and patronymics, professions and incomes, we are all in the same boat, we are all one country with one common destiny.

Speaking earlier about the purely individualism of approaches, we also had this Shumovsky stage of "concrete songs", when the text is neither rhymed verses, nor a coherent set of words, much less a carrier of a clearly expressed socio-political message. A list of names or a list of nouns/verbs or fifteen variants of the inscription "one ruble" from a banknote, all this is a scattering of semantic triggers that can cause associative rows of the most unpredictable nature in the listener.  Russian Russian women and a song about Russian men, Shumov then wrote a song about what forever connects these men and women, making a list of Russian cultural markers.:"Matryoshka /Balalaika /Volga /Hut /Borscht / Samovar / Satellite / Pancakes /Forever, forever /Everything is ours forever /Pushkin /Yevtushenko /Ivanov /Petrova /Kurchatov /Kalashnikov /Vintikov /Shpuntikova /Forever, forever /Everything is ours forever."

The song triptych also works as a designer of new lists: Turgenev's atom–splitting woman from Irkutsk and Alekseyev Andrey Vasilyevich, a locksmith, are both ours, because for them borscht, pancakes and Kurchatov are forever. A wide socio–cultural space united by a set of eternal values is the motherland according to Shumov, and this Homeland is Russia, while the USSR is just a temporary company of Russians, well, or just the territory of the circulation of the "international currency", the Soviet ruble. Despite the fact that a lot of talented rock songs written in the 1980s are no longer perceived at all due to the changed realities, the Shumovskaya trilogy is relevant to exactly the same extent as 35 years ago.

8

The Leningrad group "Aquarium", like all Soviet uncensored rock, made a qualitative leap towards the mass audience at the turn of the 1970s/1980s, in 1983 scandalously appearing in the list of the best Soviet bands according to the survey of the "Moskovsky Komsomolets" (without having a single record, no official concert, no broadcast on the All-Union Radio). In 1986, not without the light hand of Andrei Voznesensky (among other circumstances), the Aquarium was not just legalized, but became a symbol of the previously discriminated layer of Soviet culture, which blossomed in riotous color under the conditions of perestroika and glasnost. The "Musical Ring" at the Central Television Station, the film "Acca", the sensational contract of the leader of the "Aquarium" Boris Grebenshchikov with the American company CBS – these are the stages of a long journey of a very non-Soviet group in spirit to the heights of all-Union glory.

It was noted above that the uncensored rock song tried to be everything that the official Soviet song was not, moving away from global socio-political issues into the world of individual experiences. "Aquarium" in this respect was distinguished by the depth of immersion and the density of foreign cultural associations, so that the first reactions of an unspoiled Soviet listener to Grebenshchikov's songs were often reduced to "very beautiful, but very incomprehensible", which actually also attracted the performer, because with a standard Soviet mass song everything was clear even before the first one sounded note.

In the same way, the Aquarium kept aloof from the rabid socialism/"blackness" that many rock bands of that period sinned against (the sweet air of relative freedom of the late 1980s played a bad joke on them). Thus, it was extremely unlikely to wait for Grebenshchikov to make a clear statement on a patriotic topic, but in 1988 the song "Train on Fire (Colonel Vasin)" appeared, a rather transparently encrypted statement about the fatherland and the current state of affairs in it. Accompanied by a video clip, "Train on Fire" became a phenomenally popular song, in fact, the second after the "Golden City" folk hit of a group that never aspired to become a folk.

The central image, the "Train on Fire", which has nowhere else to go, is the undoubted socialist fatherland, which is driven by persistent pursuit of the socialist dream into a dead–end branch of development: "This train is on fire/And we have nothing more to press/This train is on fire/And we have nowhere else to run/This land was ours/Before we get bogged down in the fight/She will die if she is a draw/It's time to reclaim this land for yourself." A spirit-lifting folk ballad (with accordion and violin), calling for saving the Motherland and thereby saving oneself, was included in the top ten songs of 1988 according to the version of Moskovsky Komsomolets.

In later interviews, tired of the popularity of his not-so-successful song, Grebenshchikov claimed that everything here is much more meaningful, and that the text does not just follow the spirit of the perestroika mass media, but draws from Bob Dylan; the very image of a train on fire was born as a result of a night trip past the burning torches of the oil fields of the Caspian shelf. It seems that the author is lying, knowing full well that he has descended in the "Train ..." to an unusual level for him. It is no coincidence that in a couple of years Grebenshchikov will stop performing this song, accompanying the moratorium with the following comment: It made sense to sing "Vasina" when there could be trouble for him, and when he became the Komsomol anthem printed in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, it was already absurd to sing it. Let Malinin sing"^[15]. The author's references to Dylan are questionable: Bob Dylan's song This Wheel's on Fire (literally translated "This wheel is on fire") does not contain any railway associations;  according to the established opinion, the song refers to a motorcycle accident that almost cost Dylan his life; deeper searches lead to biblical and Shakespearean images of the "fiery wheel" as a symbol of human life, but all this is terribly far from the content of Grebenshchikov's "Train..." No Dylan and no Baku torches can explain these lines: "Colonel Vasin arrived at the front/With his young wife/Colonel Vasin gathered his regiment / And told them — let's go home/We have been at war for seventy years/We thought life was a fight/But according to new intelligence data/We were at war with ourselves."

A commander who announces to his subordinates that the last seventy years have been a mistake, and even making this announcement in the presence of a young wife, is undoubtedly Mikhail Gorbachev, and when Grebenshchikov sings "We have been at war for seventy years/We thought that life is a fight," he thereby admits that Gorbachev opened his eyes to him and the group, which is clearly an excessive compliment. In addition to curtsies to the political leadership, the song contains standard anti-Stalinist rhetoric of the 1987-1988 model ("... And the people who shot at our fathers/Making plans for our children/We were born to the sounds of marches/We were scared of prison..."), a standard statement of a spiritual crisis ("And the earth lies in rust / Churches mixed with ashes/If we want to have somewhere to go back to/It's time to go home") and a call to stop chasing ideological chimeras, and do more prosaic things, that is, get off the burning train ("This land was ours/Before we get bogged down in the fight/She will die if she is a draw/It's time to reclaim this land for yourself").

The overwhelming popularity of the song indicated that the author hit the spot, coincided with public sentiment, but for Grebenshchikov, who had previously purposefully "stood too proudly" aside from the common cause (no matter whether it was communist or anti-communist), writing a song of this kind was something akin to failure. Russian Russian Russian Russian Album (1992), "Having taken place as a socio-political statement, the "Train..." in the artistic sense is a symptom of an impending creative crisis, which will later be overcome in the most patriotic way: by returning from Radio Silence and Radio London to the origins: Russian life, Russian culture, Russian faith ("Russian Album" (1992), "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album", "The Russian Album",Kostroma mon Amur" (1994), etc.).

Grebenshchikov's contribution to the post-Soviet patriotic song discourse also deserves attention; let's note at least "Moscow October" (1993), a contemptuous attack on those whose idea of the motherland and its ways differs from Grebenshchikov's ("Forward, forward, bald herds/Children of the regiment and grandchildren of the sarcophagus/Let's rally proudly around the native flag/And let the leaked water boil").

9

The rapidity of the transformation of cultural outcasts/ideological saboteurs into television stars/opinion leaders was impressive. In May 1986, the first official rock festival "Rock Panorama-86" was held in Moscow for many years, in the autumn the satirical program "Funny Guys" with criticism of state policy in the field of youth culture was shown at the Central Television Station, at the same time the "Melodies" artistic council accepted the first record of "Aquarium", and in November "Ogonek"the panegyric of Voznesensky Grebenshchikov was printed in a million copies ("The new musical culture, fighting its way through, opposes both the deaf conservatives and the overflowing sea of mechanical pop hackwork"^[17]). "Related parties" from other spheres of unofficial culture could only throw up their hands, looking at how yesterday's underground workers were embedded in perestroika and glasnost. Probably, envy, skepticism and irony mixed in equal proportions moved the Moscow conceptual artists who decided in 1986 to play in a rock band. The one-time campaign was a wide success in narrow circles, and the project gained relative stability of incarnations under the name "Central Russian Upland". The main author of the group, Sven Gundlach, described his brainchild as a "cooperative for the production of songs from the waste of Soviet music"; in practice, this meant the performance by determined amateurs (there were only a couple of professional musicians in the composition) of songs whose melodies seemed to be borrowed from everywhere at once; a real "encyclopedia of mockery" ^[18].  Despite the short existence of the band (1986-1989), the original concept of "simulation rock" has already undergone changes, so the set of songs recorded in concert and studio recordings is by no means reduced to parodies and imitations.

According to one version, the name "Central Russian Upland" meant not a toponym, but a "medium-elevated" state of mind of a Soviet person, who can be introduced into ecstasy by a meaningless set of words put on the right rhythm ("Galya, walk"). When considering the corpus of texts, it is obvious that the state of mind declared in the songs says a lot about the country of residence of the simulated individual.

"The Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna" (the title song of the band's only album) is a summary of the national history of the XX century according to the perestroika press sample of 1987: "... We used to live at the bottom, And now we live in a dream/ In the fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna/ What to do? Who is to blame?/Chernyshevsky is to blame, and Khrushchev is to blame/Both Stalin and Brezhnev are to blame/You and I are to blame, the whole nation is to blame/ What we dream about today, as before / Vera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream". The rhythm of the optimistic march implies that the lyrical hero, realizing his civic duty, immediately went to correct the mistakes of party leaders, contributing to the cause of perestroika.

The "Central Russian Upland" itself had to contribute to the cause of perestroika, because rock music was made synonymous with anti-bureaucratic, anti-Stalinist, etc. protest, respectively, conditionally progressive figures of cinema and theater tried their best to expose the cursed past to fashionable music. The musical accompaniment of the documentary "Double Helix" (about Nikolai Vavilov) fell to the share of Gundlach and the company. "Stalin's Houses" came out not as a parody, but as a stylization of a Soviet lyrical song of the 1930s-1950s (of course with anti-Soviet text): "The earth lies quietly/West of the Kremlin/Shining lights/They sail by ships/Stalin 's houses/Stalin 's houses/ Drive me crazy/Think for days, dream at night/Only a bag and a prison." The song stands apart in Gundlach's work also because of a clearly spelled out, literally literary, plot: in Filevsky Park, in the evening, an elderly chauffeur and elevator operator recall the past, the Soviet elite who lived in Stalin's houses, and the different destinies of this elite: "You drove them for orders / Envied their fate / And I missed them to him at night/The MGB Operatryad". Gundlach wouldn't have been himself if he hadn't added a bit of piquant realism in the last verse:"You rolled them along the avenues/And to the whores, and to the wife/I was escorted on carriages / Straight to the Kremlin wall."

The image of Stalin's houses as ships sailing through time, leaving both the MGB and their victims in the past, again, is not a parody or imitation; however, the impulse to create a song, it seems, was still external, not internal. Just as Grebenshchikov refused to play "Train on Fire", Gundlach quickly cooled down to "Stalin's Houses", explaining to the concert audience: "We are tired of singing it already... We don't really want to. That's it already, in! That's how "Stalin's Houses", together with Stalin, with all these things ..." In "Stalin's Houses, the group came closest to a dangerous frontier, where the parodying turns into an object of parody, that is, a normal Soviet rock band with songs on socio-political themes.

The song , which is later in time of writing , already refers to the history of Russian culture: "Heroes (Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Repin)" start with such proudly patriotic intonations that it's time to remember Joseph Kobzon or Yuri Gulyaev: "The years are passing by with a quiet rustle/The sun isn't shining like that anymore/You can never do better / Than Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Repin." However, the anthem to the golden age of Russian culture is immediately leveled by a silly saxophone quote from The Caucasian Captive: there's about three wives, here about three heroes, what's the difference in principle? In the second verse, we understand that we are not facing a hymn, but a complaint: the postmodern artist Gundlach, who lost to traditional culture, reports that "Pure gold has nowhere to go/ Hungry children are crying/There is nothing to do when there is already / Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Repin". In the third verse, the lyrical hero realizes his mistakes and "gets in line": tears about his own inferiority in comparison with the classics are nothing compared to the presence of such a powerful "soft power" in his native country: "Get up early and wipe away the tears/It's not rockets flying/These are not tanks, but heroes / Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Repin". In the finale, Zatsepin's melody enters into an unequal battle with Tchaikovsky's First Concert, dissolves into it and dies.

In 1988, years before Yuri Shevchuk and decades before Oleg Gazmanov, Ligalayz, etc., Gundlach self-identified himself as "Born in the USSR". In his performance, it was not and could not be a nostalgic statement, it is different: "Do you think I have been given a wolf ticket/But I'm only 28 years old/ I accept out of a thousand faiths / Only one/I was born in the USSR." Gundlach's patriotism turns out to be an act of faith, which he accepts, however, without much hope for a bright future.: "What will happen tomorrow/With you and me/Don't answer in a hurry / Only those know/Who is sitting behind the wall / Made of red brick."

A completely unexpected set of images contains a "Two-headed bird" ("Anthem of the Central Russian Upland"). At the time of its writing (1987), no medium could have predicted that six years later the double-headed eagle would again become the national anthem of Russia, but Gundlach identifies his habitat with this symbol: "Between morning and evening/On a clear afternoon we stand without a shadow/Between south and north/We speak in our native language /A two-headed bird / of the Central Russian Upland /A golden egg / bring it to my Christ's day!". The song message is unusual both in the chronology of its appearance and in context: most of Gundlach's songs are somehow parodic, either textually or musically; here, in all seriousness, the staples of "us" inhabiting the Central Russian Upland are listed: intercivilizationality ("between morning and evening....between the south and the north"), Orthodoxy, language.

In the finale, a lyrical tango reminiscent of Isabella Yurieva's "If you can, I'm sorry" suddenly turns into an attacking hard rock, against which Gundlach with a desperate roar transforms the Soviet slogan "Peace to the World!" into the Orthodox–monarchical "Rome to Rome!", explaining to an uneducated audience: "Two Romans have fallen, the Third it's worth it, but the fourth one won't happen! Rome – Rome – Rome, And the fourth – will not happen!"

If the perestroika historical and patriotic discourse of that time mainly consisted in attempts to determine exactly when, by whom and to what extent the socialist path of development was distorted, then Gundlach, tired of Vera Pavlovna's dreams and Stalin's executioners, goes beyond these limits, and quite radically.

10

A well-known statement by Yuri Shevchuk ("DDT") on a patriotic theme is "Motherland", written in 1989, however, this concentrated statement was preceded by numerous songs, where a rather bleak picture of the surrounding world was formed from a variety of images, stories, etc. ("Lifeless Land", "Starless Night", "I live in an annoying world", "Periphery", "Road", "Church without crosses", etc.). The lyrical hero reflected not about the country as a whole, but about what the country consists of: people, urban habitat, roads, socio-economic relations between the center and the province, etc.  Most of these songs were written by Shevchuk during the period of persecution, wanderings and similar trials that befell the talented Ufa rock author in the pre-perestroika years. Shevchuk of the late 1980s is the leader of a super–successful rock band that gathers stadiums all over the USSR ^[24]. Perestroika and glasnost brought the consciousness of the Soviet man into an extremely excited state, and Shevchuk was no exception: he writes a series of songs with screaming headlines ("Revolution", "Terrorist", "Premonition of civil war", etc.) in the current genre "cursed past/ vague present/ incomprehensible future".

"Motherland" in this context is a conditionally patriotic song (and one of the most popular with DDT so far), Shevchuk sings not so much about the country as about himself and his feelings for the country, but first of all about himself. "God, how many years have I been walking, but I haven't taken a step/God, how many days have I been looking for something that is forever with me/How many years have I been chewing raw love instead of bread/How much life is spitting in my temple with a blued trunk / The long-awaited distance!" Unable to refrain from cursing Stalin's executioners on duty, the lyrical hero declares himself the next incarnation of many rebels who laid down their heads in the old days. The song is rocking all this time, picking up the pace to finally burst out with all its might with the chorus: "Motherland! I'm going to my homeland/Let them shout – ugly/ And we like her / Although she is not beautiful / She is gullible to the bastards / well, but to us - tra-la-la-la ..." What exactly the lyrical hero likes the motherland is not explained, but the list of past and present horrors continues; the lyrical hero is afraid of both the return of Stalin's executioners and black Hundred pogroms, false good kings, etc.  Emotionally, the song is like a "roller coaster": in each verse, the lyrical hero's complaints to God reach a pre-hysterical intensity, so that in the chorus they break into a lightened statement "Motherland! I'm going to my homeland," leveling the horrors of the verse that just sounded. The lyrical hero hates the past, is afraid of the future, but at least he is at home, at home.

Two years later, in August 1991, Shevchuk would record his ambiguous feelings about the coup and its failure in the song "Born in the USSR". If in the hectic and nervous "Homeland" it was heard "at least I'm at home, at Home", then in the new song Shevchuk realizes the ephemerality of the very concept of "Homeland" at the end of 1991. In the first two verses, the lyrical hero predictably celebrates the victory over the communist regime: the enemies tried to resurrect in the old cemetery (Red Square), but "... today is victory / understand and forgive."  As born in the USSR, that is, brought up in the belief in the immortality of Soviet power, the hero is pleasantly surprised. The cursed past seems to have disappeared forever, but what next? "The further you go, the cooler you get/You're almost sunset/Hello, ancient Russia/I'm your nervous brother/What will hope give us back/What will beauty save/You were the master of the empire yesterday/And now an orphan."

Thus, further in the fog: there is either the entry into the fraternal family of European nations (sunset = west), or the Russian renaissance, and only the last two lines state the indisputable truth: the former country, the former Homeland, which until recently gave comfort to the "nervous brother", is no more. There is an alarming uncertainty ahead, into which 150 million people born in the USSR are preparing to enter together with the lyrical hero.

11

At about the same time, another Leningrad rock author Fyodor Chistyakov also decided to clarify relations with the fatherland, recording with his band "Zero" an entire album "Song of unrequited Love for the Motherland" (1991). As in the case of Shevchuk, these are songs of a not quite mentally healthy person, to which Chistyakov is aware and asks the listener: "What do you want from a sick mind?"

Chistyakov is 10 years younger than Shevchuk, in 1991 he was only 24, but he is quite a rock star with experience of club European tours (glasnost and perestroika!). Chistyakov's negative experience of the survival of a creative personality in the conditions of the Soviet state was more modest than that of Shevchuk or Gundlach, but quite sufficient. The first albums of "Zero" recorded the local horrors of Leningrad communal apartments, the immoral tendencies of local youth and similar social sketches from nature. Armed, unlike classical rockers, not with a guitar, but with an accordion, Chistyakov looked like a borderline figure – both the new generation of the famous Leningrad rock club and the youth version of urban grassroots folklore. "The Song of unrequited love for the Motherland" (1991) is considered the creative peak of Chistyakov and his group: the stage of maturity has already been reached, the mental state has not yet been ruined by prohibited substances. Actually, the title "Song ..." is just a forty-second minor instrumental composition that leaves room for interpretation; in the songs, Chistyakov paints a picture of a rather depressing picture of the surrounding world: "The day has already ended, and I just got up/And I just got up and I'm already tired/God has given me my share to get tired of life / And I, as it should be, get tired."

Chistyakov pours out the unrequited love for the Motherland promised in the album title in the melancholic confessional "Lenin Street", where the image of the endless and inevitable Lenin Street is the personification of the Soviet Motherland. If Shevchuk twirled a carousel of historical associations around his homeland, then Chistyakov acts in the genre of existential crying for his ruined life, and, of course, "Lenin Street" destroyed his life: "You will ask me why sometimes I am silent/Why don't I laugh and smile/Or on the contrary I'm gloomily joking/And just as grimly and terribly grimacing/I just live on Lenin Street/And I get hacked from time to time." Chistyakov equates living in the USSR (that is, "on Lenin Street)" to an innate psychological trauma, which only intensifies over the years: "What do you want from a sick mind?/As a child, kind people drove nails into my head / At school they put an enema in my ears and in my mouth/Here I have received useful, necessary knowledge." In the third verse, the sarcastic Chistyakov declares patriotism of a very specific kind: "As I hate, so I love my Homeland / And there is really nothing to be surprised at here, comrades/She's such a deaf, blind freak/Well, I have nothing more to love."

It is noteworthy that "Lenin Street" begins with a quote from the Soviet song "Where does the Motherland begin?" by Basner/Matusovsky. Chistyakov gives his own answers to these questions, as well as provokes a comparison of two images of the Motherland: the sacred Soviet fatherland, which the heroes of Basner's song are sent to defend/Matusovsky, and a sad place of total unfreedom.  By confessing an unrequited and inevitable love for the latter, the lyrical hero thereby recognizes either the unobvious multidimensionality of the Soviet fatherland, or his own inferiority in matters of love.

12

Patriotic discourse in the uncensored Soviet rock song is not limited to the examples discussed above, the song legacy of Alexander Bashlachev, Yanka Diaghilev, Egor Letov ("Civil Defense") and Roman Neumoev ("Survival Instructions") remains outside our text; each of the listed authors seems to be such a fundamental figure for Russian rock poetry, what deserves a separate analysis in larger forms (there are quite deep philological studies of their work, anti-totalitarian discourse, etc.). We also do not consider that segment of rock culture that does not fall under the definition of a mass/ popular song, i.e. rock with claims to elitism, complexity of content or formalism (for example, "Nicolaus Copernicus" with the album "Homeland" (1987)).

It seems promising to us to consider patriotic discourse in the works of Russian-speaking authors from the Union republics (Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Kazakhstan) or to address the topic of local patriotism using the examples of Mikhail Naumenko (Leningrad), Chaif (Sverdlovsk), Vasily Shumov (Moscow), etc.

Even the limited set of song material that we have considered in this text allows us to speak about the variability of the approaches of late Soviet rock authors to patriotic themes. First of all, this is the variability of the creative impulse (under the influence of external events or without them), then the variability in addressing patriotic themes (this is a cross-cutting theme for the author or extremely rare), the variability of genres (lyrical ballad, stylization, rock standard)  the variability is meaningful (patriotism is emotional, rationally motivated, personalized, alarmist, etc.).

To identify the duration and stability of the existence of the considered interpretations of patriotic discourse, we turned to the Youtube service (recall that the latest in time of writing of the considered songs dates back to 1991, that is, has more than 30 years of history).

We see here, on the one hand, that none of the authors are ignored by the modern listener, all are represented in the modern global media service. On the other hand, the representation is not the same, there is a huge gap between the "Homeland" of DDT and all the other songs; "Central Russian Upland" does not have two of the four songs we have reviewed on Youtube. Naturally, the number of views is significantly affected by the media status of the performer these days. According to this logic, our list should be divided into three parts:

1. "DDT" and "Aquarium" (which had great popularity back in the era of magnitizdat, became rock stars during the years of perestroika and continued an active musical career for all subsequent years, steadily releasing new material, participating in major festivals, creating media occasions, etc.);

2. "Resurrection", "Center", "Zero" (initially having less popularity, later continuing their musical career intermittently, unstable, experimenting with genres and thereby moving away from the sound/ image that initially brought them success;

3. "Central Russian Upland" (initially a short-term and local career, which then had no continuation).

In reality, we see that this logic works with respect to the leader and the outsider ("DDT" and "Central Russian Upland"), as well as the "golden mean" ("Resurrection", "Center"). At the same time, Grebenshchikov/"Aquarium" fall down from the first group, and "Zero" breaks out of the second group up, both collectives form a kind of intermediate level 1.5. At the same time, the media status of "Zero"" as of 2022 does not go into any comparison (and never has) with the status of Boris Grebenshchikov. Consequently, another factor begins to act here, namely, the quality of the material.  We have already noted that "Train on Fire" is not Grebenshchikov's best song, while "Lenin Street" is among the indisputable successes of Chistyakov.

The phenomenal leadership of the patriotic statement "DDT" has, in our opinion, several explanations. Firstly, as already mentioned, it is an actively functioning rock band that regularly performs, is published on material media, is present on the web, etc. Secondly, "DDT" more than anyone from our list corresponds to the concept of "Russian rock", a genre/trademark cultivated since the late 1990s by "Our Radio" through, among other things, the "Invasion" festivals; thus, new generations of listeners were accustomed to a certain conservative standard of Russian-language rock-music. Thirdly, "DDT" was originally characterized by democracy as an appeal to the maximum audience in accessible forms; therefore, the song about the Motherland, which is called "Motherland", has a not particularly clear, but thoughtful text, acquires a memorable and simple melody in the chorus, and is simply a long-term concert rock hit, I couldn't lose this correspondence competition.

As for the semantic load, we note that Youtube users use "Train on Fire" and "Homeland" (more the second than the first) to create new content, superimposing audio tracks on a self-selected and mounted documentary video series related to the current socio-political agenda: the crisis of the 1990s, economic problems, Chechnya, the Ukrainian crisis, etc. Thus, users are attracted by the alarmist aspect of the patriotic song discourse, with the help of which the current problems of our time are highlighted, because the train still burns from time to time, and the Motherland is just as trusting to the wrong people.