“Who was Leonid Brezhnev?”
“A politician during the era of Alla Pugacheva.”
Anyone who had grown up in Brezhnev’s Russia, even with a little interest to the Western pop-music, could not have missed the articles squeezed into the back pages of the Soviet official youth magazines and papers. Bits and pieces of the pop-music news, short reviews of the bands and artists from the parallel universe had tremendous effect on us, the readers in our teen years. In fact I asked my parents to pay for a yearlong subscription to one of these magazines only to be able to catch up on what was going on in the music world beyond iron curtain.
Now, after receiving the Back in the USSR as a gift, first of all I looked at the year of publishing. 1989. Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still legitimate and in power. Soviet people were enjoying first free National election. Michail Gorbachov was about to become first Soviet President. The book therefore covered the very beginning of what was then the Soviet Rock Music.
Troitsky traveled extensively between Moscow, Leningrad, Tallin and Riga becoming not only the observer, but the active participant of the rock music movement back in 80's. And he tells the stories of the first "festivals" and "contests", anecdotes about the modern icons who were making first steps in music back then.
First part of the book covers young Moscowite's trends in fashion, music and dance, as a preamble to what had happened next. But the rest is a compressed history of the very start of the Russian pop-scene, embracing the names of Pugacheva, Makarevich, Grbenschikov, Tsoy and Naumenko. I don't know what happened between Makarevich (Mashina Vremeni) and Artemy Troitsky (the author), but everything in regards to the former seems a bit biased. Although it does not seem to take away too much from the big picture.
And although "Sverdlovsky Rock" had started as a stand alone phenomenon before 1989, Troitsky omits the topic almost entirely, except for the mentioning of the band named Sonans and led by Alexander Pantykin. Other than that, the book offers great coverage of the few years of promising time, when musicians played mostly for fun and made the best of it.
Troitsky has since become a guru and respected music critic, moving towards front pages and on TV. Would I recommend the book? Definitely yes.
Amazon: Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia
