This is basically not about music any more but about politics which we are not really supposed to discuss here. But as you have brought it up, let me just say that what you see as a disaster and betrayal opened the gates to freedom and democracy for millions of people and let them escape from the brutal Soviet rule they were subjugated to against their will. And judging by the readiness whole nations opted out when given a chance, it was a most welcome and waited for opportunity for them, and yes, the "Changes" song was in fact voicing of a popular demand across the whole Soviet block. That Russians themselves were not able to benefit from the process... well, they have just their own politicians to blame. Holding it up against rock musicians of the 1980s is most peculiar to me. And yes, like it or not, Tsoy was a part of the underground scene of St Petersburg, known as Leningrad then.
And yes, I know who Boris Grebenshchikov is. Yes, he lives in London now, in a self-imposed exile from today's Russia where he was announced a "foreign agent" by Putin's government.
He was close friends with Tsoy BTW.
You know, there is no point arguing about it. Usually people who didn't experience something think they know way more about it than those who actually experienced it, and it is usually no point trying to explain things to them. But let's not pretend people wanted some of those changes and that you don't understand what actually happened. I see as a disaster or rather a tragedy pervasive lack of objective evaluation of historic events. Disaster is short, tragedy is eternal. Nowadays I wouldn't go as far as making generalized claims about any country without actually having lived in there for an extended time. From what I hear my (and Tsoy's) hometown is suddenly full of Tsoy posters. Like I said, sooner or later someone will try to dig him up for some cause, I just didn't expect it so soon, and I don't understand what the cause is, my social circle is far from caring about it. OK, whatever, let Tsoy be underground. He was born in 1962 and in 1985 perestroika began, he was 23 y.o. How much of that underground did he actually see? This way you can call any garage band underground. The underground movement began in the late 1960s, lasted through the 1970s and early 1980s. Many of those artists who "protested" against the regime were not disadvantaged or repressed minorities, they were white Russian males who led marginal lifestyle. Do you think people are too blind to see it? They say underground bloomed in the 1980s, but I think something that has become mainstream hardly has the right to be called "underground" any more. It died away pretty quickly too with the freedom of speech. If people wanted it so much, why is it not still alive and kicking? Partly I think the reason is it came from the west and sounded inherently foreign. It sounds very different from Russian folk music and it's not very singable, maybe some of these things are in people's genes and culture that took centuries to form, you can't change it in a couple of decades.
Anyway, let's stay to the topic, which is music in this thread. It's impossible to deny that the regime prioritized creation of intelligible good quality national music for wide audiences, whether it was doable or not it made sense. Best people were involved and supported to do it. It's funny that under a repressive regime they created masterpiece after masterpiece. They could live on government dachas all summer and write string quartet after string quartet, symphony after symphony, which then people like Mravinsky and Beethoven quartet performed and recorded. They were well paid for it, as long as they wrote a little bit of that abominable movie music, which people actually liked. Who doesn't like movie music. They had a few hours of teaching per week during the rest of the year, let's compare it with Tchaikovsky's 36 hours per week of teaching composition at Moscow conservatoire until von Meck paid his debts and took his and his wife's expenses upon herself so he could leave the job he hated and focus on composing, or Berlioz's wring critics in 4 newspapers to make ends meet and paying to venues and musicians to have his works performed and earning nothing for the trouble. Or Rachmaninov going on concert tours as a pianist to survive and struggling with the lack of productivity. Have you heard any of those 14 string quartets, or any of those 15 symphonies that Schostakovich composed? Early ones reek of Mahler, who was BTW out of favour not only in USSR. One word to describe them is depressing. Mahler is not depressing. Why was the person depressed, we can only guess, but you can find something in correspondence and diaries of other people about him, his personality, his love of soccer, and his fears, including the fear of death and the feeling that he's lived too long and incorrectly, and lost inspiration. This is what is typically represented in the west as the fear of Stalin. How do you think it is possible that a person who is an official top state composer and an established authority is also a symbol of opposition, yet anathematizing another symbol of opposition? How is it possible that those symphonies that are allegedly suppressed were at the same time promoted? I think it is impossible to understand without understanding the undercurrents, and it's not like the players shout about them at every corner. On day-to-day levels there were tons of people who were educated and paid by the government to produce music, books, movies, cartoons, like everywhere there were constraints and are only so many masterpieces, but a lot of it is actually good. What people abroad know of those times is not even a tip of an iceberg. Even censure approved pop-music that was officially on TV in USSR, was much higher quality than anything that has been produced in Russia since. Composers like Sviridov could write cantatas and choir church music, it was performed, and they were paid for it. Setting poetry to music and singing it to guitar was a popular culture, music was simple but poetry was not, it was important in this subculture, which kinda speaks to the cultural level of wide audiences. Some of it was published, and none of it was, you know, repressed. A lot of it made its way into movies, some into Melodia recordings, people still remember it. I once witnessed old people rise when they heard it in a concert. There were other currents, the underground and samizdat were certainly not that repressed, if you wanted them you'd find them, much of it was not worth reading anyway. It's the same as everywhere. Most people didn't care that much for underground, and do you know why? Music is poor quality, texts are incomprehensible with a pretence of being deep. Maybe they were... too deep. It's decadence. It almost feels like it wanted to be misunderstood and needed the aura of being underground, it loses appeal otherwise. But if you knew and wanted it, you'd find it. But there were great productions of music and literature on the radio, it happened even in my lifetime, I remember listening to broadcasts coming back from school as a kid. Anything of importance from abroad was translated, copyrights were ignored, it was not the point of the regime to make things unavailable, quite the opposite. But for people who created this content it was the main profession, for which they were paid and received money prizes from the government. This is what people at large miss: radio broadcasts in the kitchen, they may not have the time to read or a concert hall nearby, but they do have the time to listen while they cook and eat and they do have cultural needs. Whole institutes worked on satisfying those needs. A lot of it is now on youtube and social media, and if you read the comments, people say they are happy that this stuff wasn't lost and they are able to find it. Let's see who can do these things now. Nowadays you can post any kind of music you create on the web, even produce it on TV actually. Mostly it's a flood of crap, some of it is good, but it's easy for masterpieces to get drowned in the flood. People pay out of pocket to publish. People watch new year's productions with the reaction of either "who is this and why can't they sing" or "wow, he/she is still alive". There are game rules everywhere. If you can exist under the rules, you are OK, and reality is most people have to. Do you often listen to 20th century classics BTW? I do, but I can only stand so much of it, then I go back in time. This is what 20th century produced. Almost anything that is harmonically, rhythmically and melodically pleasing was created either before the 20th century or is pop or neo-classics, which is also based on the pre-20th century achievements and a little bit on the 20th century.
