Dates: 1950s-1990s

List of “magnitofonshchiki”. Leningrad, 1981. Organiser Kurchev Nikolai.

Luogo: Moscow, Leningrad

Description:
The clandestine circulation of magnetic tapes and music was widespread throughout the Soviet Union but was concentrated in circles revolving around the Klub samostoiatel’noi pesni (KSP) (Clubs of Independent Songs) and especially some collectors. Their exact number is difficult to establish, but some notable figures emerge from the groups of young music enthusiasts who contributed to the dissemination and, subsequently, the preservation of music from this time. These individuals had different backgrounds, interests and degrees of involvement in spreading audio materials through unofficial channels. Some were very active in the practice of samizdat, while others limited their activities to a particular genre or period of their lives.
In chronological order, one of the first protagonists was Edmond (Edik) Nikolaevich Dëmin (1929–1997) whose music collection was curated by Pëtr Trubetskoi (1958) from around 1998, making it one of the most important archives (fonoteka) still present in Russia. Dëmin was the director of the Moscow Municipal Section of Water Tourism, but he became better known among post-war youth for recording almost everything he heard from the early 1950s including music and songs performed on short-haul trains and at large gatherings (slët) outside towns and in territories on the periphery of the Soviet Union. Dëmin soon became the driving force behind the first magnitizdat, and many ‘song poetry’ enthusiasts—both authors and performers—gathered around him. In the early days, many songs could only be heard at his home. After his death, his wife Zaria Akeksandrovna and his daughter Mariia turned to Trubetskoi to help them conserve Dëmin’s archive. Trubetskoi decided to scan all his notebooks and digitalise the archive with the help of Dëmin’s friend, Viktor Vladimirovich Redin (1934), a curator of sound archives whom Dëmin introduced to the world of KSPs in 1962. Trubetskoi now edits the Redin archive of tape recorders and audio material.
In Leningrad, Vladimir Kovner (1937), a mechanical engineer and translator who emigrated to the United States in 1979, was active in both samizdat and magnitizdat. In 1960 and 1961, he established a relationship with fans of non-mass music, including Mikhail Chernikhovskii (1938–2001), described by Kovner in his memoir The Golden Century of the magnitizdat as “one of the most active speakers of the magnitizdat and samizdat in Piter” (Kovner 2004). In the atmosphere of relative freedom during the Thaw in the early 1960s, Chernikhovskii broadcast at lunch time, songs by Bulat Okudzhava, Aleksandr Vertinskii and many others recorded by Kovner at the local radio he worked for. The broadcasts eventually attracted the attention of the CPSU and were immediately shut down. A decade later, in 1973, Chernikhovskii edited a collection of songs by Aleksandr Galich, accompanied by several photos by the journalist and photographer Mikhail Baltsvinik (1931–1980), an active disseminator of samizdat material and collector of Vertinskii’s music.
Technology played a prominent role in the dynamics of circulating samizdat tracks, influencing the quality of the recorded material. In this regard, Boris Rakhlin’s contribution is important.  He managed to install cumbersome recording equipment in his one-room apartment in Leningrad where he lived with his wife and two children, which considerably improved the quality of recordings and boosted their circulation. In 1973, Rakhlin released an album entitled Criminals’ Songs (Blatnye Pesni),  a cycle of songs, in which Rakhlin imitated the voice of the famous singer Leonid Utësov. In a very short time, the album spread throughout the country as ‘Utësov’s tape’, despite the disapproval of the Russian singer who did not appreciate the tribute.
Gidalii (Gennadii) Moiseevich (1906–1967) promoted three meetings of great importance in the history of singers and songwriting in the 1960s. Once the director of the Union of Writers’ Shop on the Nevskii Prospekt, Moiseevich was condemned during the Leningradskoe delo. After serving a sentence in Stalin’s labour camps (1949–1956), he was ‘rehabilitated’ by the Soviet State and became director of a poetry shop next to the Marinskii Theatre, where a club of poetry lovers soon formed. In 1965, after a performance of Bertold Brecht’s The Good Person of Szezhwan, Iurii Liubimov, the director of the new Teatr na Taganke, along with some actors in the troupe, was invited to the home of Moiseevich and Liia Iakovlevna Rakhlin. Among the actors was Vladimir Vysotskii, whom Liubimov asked to sing. On 23 April 1967, the meeting was repeated, and a third took place on 9 May 1967. As Kovner points out, “these three home concerts by Vladimir Vysotskii and other Taganka actors at G.M. Rakhlin’s house were undoubtedly a significant event in the history of the development and dissemination of the bard’s songs” (ibid.).
From the mid-1960s onwards, the genre of ‘guitar poetry’ became increasingly linked to the name of Vladimir Frumkin (1929), a musicologist, writer, radio journalist, Russian language teacher, specialist in Dmitrii Shostakovich and one of the first theorists of songwriting. From 1964 to 1968, Frumkin presented the literary and musical evenings of the famous Vostok, the first club of guitar poetry founded within the House of Culture by food industry workers in Leningrad. Frumkin gained fame with his essay Music and Word (Muzyka i Slovo), read in May 1967 on the banks of the river Kliaz’ma, near Petushki (Vladimirskaia Oblast’) during the first National Seminar on the Problems of Independent Song attended by many songwriters from Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk and Minsk. Frumkin soon became friends with Okudzhava, Galich, Iulii Kim, Aleksandr Gorodnitskii and many others, and maintained strong relationships with them even after emigrating to the United States in 1974 to actively promote guitar poets on American soil. Kovner recalls that before departing, Frumkin and Mikhail Kryzhanovskii (1943–1994) prepared 12 cassettes of good-quality recordings of songs by various artists. Frumkin took with him songs by Okudzhava and Vysotskii, while he sent Galich’s songs through the US embassy. However, customs staff demagnetised all the tapes Frumkin tried to smuggle out of the Soviet Union, while the package with Galich’s tapes disappeared. In 1980 and 1986, Frumkin succeeded in publishing two collections of Okudzhava’s songs with musical scores, Russian and English lyrics and photographs (cf. Okudzhava 1980, 1986).
Engineer and physicist Mikhail Kryzhanovskii, a major activist in the Vostok during the 1970s, became one of the greatest collectors in Leningrad and the guardian of the songs of 104 writers. During perestroika in the late 1980s, the Soviet record company Melodiia turned to Kryzhanovskii to help them release discs of the complete collections of the greatest songwriters.
Figures who moved outside the borders of the Soviet Union also deserve a mention, particularly Aleksandr (Alik) Shtromas (1931–1999), a historian and publicist of Lithuanian origin, professor of political studies at various universities in the United States and United Kingdom and long-time friend of Kovner. In 1974, together with a third friend, they released the first album of Galich’s songs that Shtromas managed to produce abroad. Shtromas’s impressive archive is now preserved in his hometown of Kaunas, Lithuania.
In 1977, Vladimir Efimovich Alloi’s (1945–2001) monumental work The Songs of the Russian Bards (Pesni Russkikh Bardov) appeared in Paris. It included 40 cassettes presenting a vast panorama of guitar poetry, including lesser-known performers within and outside the borders of the Soviet Union. The collection was accompanied by four volumes with the song lyrics. Although the first edition had poor sound quality, and the volumes contained many errors and mistypes, it remains a milestone in the field of musical tamizdat (cf. Alloi 1997).
Rock music had spread (always unofficially) in the Soviet Union since the 1970s.  In the 1980s, outside the USSR, Joanna Stingray (born Joanna Fields, 1960) was a central figure in the diffusion of Russian-Soviet rock music in the West. After a trip to Leningrad when she met Boris Grebenshchikov (1953) and other protagonists of the Russian rock scene, she began to smuggle their music abroad. In 1983, she released the double album Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the Soviet Union (Big Time Records, Australia), which contained songs by Akvarium, Kino, Alisa, Strannye Igry and others. It was the West’s first contact with Soviet rock music (cf. Stingray 1986).

Giulia De Florio
[30th June 2021]

Bibliography

  • Alloi V., Pesni russkikh bardov, YMCA Press, Parigi 1977.
  • Frumkin V., Muzyka i slovo, 22 December 1997, http://www.ksp-msk.ru/ page_42.html, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
  • Frumkin V., Pevtsy i vozhdi, Accent Graphics Communications, Ottawa 2017.
  • Kovner V., Zolotoi vek magnitizdata, “Vestnik”, 7, 31 March 2004, http://www.vestnik.com/issues/2004/0331/win/kovner.htm, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
  • Okudzhava B., 65 pesen, in V. Frumkin (ed.), Ann Arbor, vol. 1, Ardis, Michigan 1980.
  • Okudzhava B., 65 pesen, in V. Frumkin (ed.), Ann Arbor, vol. 2, Ardis, Michigan 1986.
  • Ronkin V., Magnitofonnyi samizdat, 2000, http://ronkinv.narod.ru/brd.htm, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
  • Stingray J. (ed.), Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the Soviet Union, Big Time Records, 1986.

To cite this article:
Giulia De Florio, Sound Archivists (magnitofonshchiki), in Voci libere in URSS. Letteratura, pensiero, arti indipendenti in Unione Sovietica e gli echi in Occidente (1953-1991), a cura di C. Pieralli, M. Sabbatini, Firenze University Press, Firenze 2021-, <vocilibereurss.fupress.net>.
eISBN 978-88-5518-463-2
© 2021 Author(s)
Content license: CC BY 4.0