Imagine being so used to dealing with the guys who bark ‘wrongly formulated request’ to every question you ask that you are astonished when someone in a position of authority treats you with respect and consideration. I use the word ‘guys’ figuratively here, you understand, to refer both to men and women, for there was little difference between the sexes, either on the giving or the receiving end. And if I, Billie, were to meet myself the way I am now, all shaken up and enraged by the routine humiliation this guy dished out almost automatically and certainly without any special malice, I would smile to myself and think today’s Maria a complete foreigner. Just like you, Billie, today’s Maria comes from another planet. As I came out of this cockroach’s office, biting my lips and clenching my teeth, I thought for a moment that I finally understood the real reason why your grandparents left everything behind in their mid-forties and took the biggest leap of faith in our family’s history. Because you see, Billie, it was never, not for a second, about sausages and whitegoods. It was not about potholes in the street and shop assistants treating customers as burglars. It was not about living conditions and spending most of your life banging your head on the wall trying to get the simplest things done. Your grandfather and grandmother just wanted someone in our family, bearing our surname and our features, to be perfectly unhabituated to being screwed, to be genuinely surprised by not being shown respect. And this someone is you, Billie, you realise it, right? On some level, it is too late for me, because – I realise now – I could never think of freedom as a birthright however much I believe it intellectually. But you, your brother and your cousins are the first generation that does not know any other kind of freedom.
To ‘imagine what [Boris] Grebenshikov means to his fellow Russians’, Wired magazine said in 1998, ‘you have to imagine [Leonard] Cohen, complete with his alternative street cred and literary ambitions, somehow achieving the fame of Elvis and the political clout of Jesse Helms’. A decade earlier, the American press had greeted Grebenshikov’s American debut album Radio Silence by calling the thirty-six-year-old musician the ultimate cross-cultural artist, the Emissary of Rock, and comparing him not only to Cohen but to Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Van Morrison and Peter Gabriel. The album tanked. It was produced on the Columbia label by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, and all but two of its compositions were in English, but still it evidently did not translate. In hindsight (and even at the time) this failure did not matter all that much. For one, Grebenshikov’s attempt in 1989 at rock sans frontières was the stuff of history (we knew it). Secondly, at home, where he was the lead singer, writer and ideologue of a legendary band, Aquarium, their albums had already earned a permanent place in the library of unperishable cultural texts. Grebenshikov had by 1989 earned the right to be wrong, as well as the right to indulge, gods and circumstances willing, his own unmistakable cosmopolitan cravings.
As I was growing up, we called him by his initials ‘BG’. If you put an ‘O’ in between the two initials you get ‘BOG’ – the Russian word for ‘God’. I don’t think this was the main thing though. At some point, most adolescents will turn into overt or undercover idol worshippers, but referring to Grebenshikov as ‘BG’ was much more about how we wanted to define ourselves. Having long since separated wheat from chaff, faces from mugs, musicians from marching bands, we did not need anything spelt out for us. Writer and historian Kirill Kobrin, just a few years my senior, remembers his friends speaking to each other in quotes from Aquarium songs. This was more, I suspect, than just youth culture, more than ‘cool’, more than pointlessly arcane. All this quoting, abbreviating and encoding was the means by which members of the tribe recognised each other, for in our country most of us were undercover agents living in the shadow of the seemingly unbreachable gulf between what we thought and what we said and how we acted.
Grebenshikov was not alone; there were many other, largely underground, bands and musicians in the 1970s and 1980s – just as important, just as brilliant, just as brave. Viktor Tsoi, the lead singer of Kino, who died in an accident in 1990 when he was just twenty-eight and was bitterly and widely mourned, possessed artistic and personal honesty and purity not matched by anyone else in the Soviet or post-Soviet rock scene. Then there was Yuri Shevchuk and his band DDT, their music like a naked electrical current – explosive, convulsive, painful and purifying. There were others just as good, just as revolutionary. But when I go deep into the memories of our last year in Kharkov, past the docking point for the frequently retrieved stories of our departure, past the crust of memories thinned out to the state of virtually pure emotions, what I hear is Aquarium’s 1987 album Equinox:
I may be a self-proclaimed cultural bigamist, but even so I can’t really imagine how such lyrics sound to someone born and raised in the world where the pursuit of happiness, rather than the pursuit of freedom, has been a defining quest for long enough to seem completely natural. Perhaps it just sounds like your run-of-the-mill rock ‘n’ roll philosophising, peppered with a tinge of totalitarian persecution mania. Most likely it sounds like nothing special. But it was special, please believe me. It was revelatory and life-changing.
Many of us, the children raised in flats with books and music, by parents who had let us know without ever actually saying it that this place outside of our kitchen windows known as ‘the best of all possible worlds’ was anything but, have grown up idolising dissent; in awe of those who spoke up and spoke out. But there, suddenly, was BG singing about what gets forsaken in constant resistance and rarified non-conformism, what gets lost in defining yourself primarily in opposition to the status quo. And he was singing right at the time when that very status quo revealed itself to be in a state of acute and unstoppable disintegration. The previous lines, it occurs to me now, are the flip side of Jvanetsky’s defiant (and deeply ironic) exhortation to hold freedom in our teeth. Clearly, Grebenshikov was removing himself from the equation as a figurehead of oppositional culture, in fact dismantling the equation altogether. In Western terms, you might say he was doing a Dylan on us. How could we not be struck by his words, those of us who learned to read and to read between the lines at the same time? How could we remain at a polite distance from the way Grebenshikov removed all the glamour and higher purpose from the idea of lives spent on the run, of homes set up in the cracks of the established order, of literature written in codes and tongues? BG was singing about the freedom it takes to step out of the prefabricated moulds of destiny – out of the roles of the dissenter, the artist, the guru, the bureaucrat, the cog in the machine, the philistine or the man or woman in the street.
Blue was the blue of St Petersburg canals, and gold was the gold of the golden spires. Or it was the gold of golden leaves in autumn against the sky. Or the sun lost in the curls of one enchanted woman, whose proximity brings happiness, however fleeting. And the something else BG was talking about, was it beauty – the same beauty which Dostoyevsky believed would save the world? It is not for nothing that BG’s hometown of St Petersburg was considered by many, myself enthusiastically included, as one of the most beautiful cities on earth. Red over grey stood for a revolutionary, underground culture undermining the turgid, cynical mediocrity of officialdom, but blue, gold and green were the colours of the post-political world, the world that was not circumscribed by ideological positions, a transcendental world of inner freedom.