Russian Punk Rock from the 1970s to Pussy Riot
Alexander Herbert
Photo Credit: Simon Goodacre
Simon Goodacre | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
In this episode of the Highlights Podcast, Alexander Herbert, a PhD candidate in the history department, discusses his book, What About Tomorrow?: An Oral History of Russian Punk from the Soviet Era to Pussy Riot.
Transcript
Simon:
Hello and welcome to the Highlights Podcast. I am Simon Goodacre, the Associate Director of Communications and Marketing for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis. Today I'll be speaking with Alexander Herbert, an expert on Russian punk and a PhD candidate in history. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for making time.
Alexander:
Thanks for having me.
Simon:
I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you first became interested in punk music, just generally, and what maybe some of your favorite bands are, and then we'll talk about how you became interested in Russian punk specifically.
Alexander:
It's a hard question, because I don't know exactly the moment that I became interested in punk. Sometime in my youth, much younger, like 12, 13, just looking for a community and some identity to belong to, and I discovered punk music at the time, bands like The Unseen and Anti-Flag. The Unseen were from Boston, so it was easy to go and see them, because I'm from Attleborough, in between Providence and Boston. And from there, it just kind of ballooned.
Simon:
That's interesting. One of the questions I was going to ask you later was about punk rock, the politics side versus the style of music and the fashion aspect of it as well. But it sounds like you were first sort of connected to the second really, and then moved into the first, would you say, or was the politics piece always important to you even when you were 13, 14?
Alexander:
I was always fascinated in politics. My grandfather was Polish and Irish, and his side of the family knew Polish, which is what got me into Slavic studies to begin with. I also started drumming when I was 13, and I think from age 14 to 18, I was the drummer for a punk band in the area too.
Simon:
And we're really here to talk about the book that you published recently, What About Tomorrow?: An Oral History of Russian Punk from the Soviet Era to Pussy Riot. I would like to start by just asking you how you first became interested, and I understand you started collecting some of the interviews for this in 2011. So could you tell me a little bit about how you first became interested in Russian punk?
Alexander:
Yeah. I've had a crazy experience with academia. I started off at Framingham State College at the time, and I knew that I wanted to focus on Russian or Eastern European history, but my advisor told me they didn't offer Russian language there and I didn't know Russian at the time and so he said, "You have to look into transferring, wink, wink," which isn't normal for an advisor to tell you to do that.
So I did. I found Wheaton College in Massachusetts, which has a small Russian department, and started studying Russian, and then my first year there I did a study abroad. That was 2011, and it was in a smaller provincial city. And it was there that living in the dormitory, somebody recognized somehow that I listened to punk rock. Could be I had tattoos at the time, I still do, but I was pretty young. And they invited me to a concert, a DIY concert that was at an abandoned factory building.
And so I went kind of really not knowing Russian at the time, but just putting myself out there, and I didn't really know anybody. I knew this one person that was bringing me and he didn't really like punk rock. He just knew the people that were involved. And so I went and it was crazy. Like I said, it was at an abandoned factory. The only power source was an extension cord that ran from the building next door into the factory, and then they just had the massive adapter linked to that where all the amps and PA and everything was plugged in. The rafters in the ceiling were hanging loose. There were nails all over the floor and the walls. It was the most dangerous venue, if you could call it that, that I had ever been in.
And when the band started, the crowd just erupted into excitement and frenzy. And for me, even as a 21 year old at the time, I recognized that whatever was going on in this room, A, was more dangerous than anything that I had seen in punk rock, even in Boston or in Providence, which there's some DIY venues and in those cities too, but for whatever reason it was more dangerous in Russia and it meant more to the kids there I think that I was seeing dance around and stuff.
And so being the aspiring academic historian that I wanted to be at the time, I just had the idea that somebody should be documenting this, what's going on, because when you start to learn the history of Russia or the Soviet union, you also couldn't fathom that punk rock even existed in the Soviet Union or even in contemporary Russia. You think that it's so far divorced from a lot of the culture that we have here, but I was seeing it firsthand that it's here, and the energy here is so young and youthful that this is worth documenting.
Simon:
And let's talk about the documentation. Even in the title of your book, you mentioned that this is an oral history. What does that mean and why is it significant for this project, do you think?
Alexander:
First of all, punk rock in general has a great tradition of oral histories, the idea being that you need to allow the actors to speak for themselves, which deviates in many ways from academic history where it's the historian's job to take, digest and then interpret your sources, whether it's an interview or whatever. But in the case of punk rock, because my idea for the book wasn't so academic, it was more to offer something to the global punk community, was to stay loyal to the oral history tradition. I didn't feel like I belonged in the role of telling these people's stories when most of them are still alive.
Simon:
The emergence of punk rock in Russia ... well, I mean, western punk was really making it in through the black market, through those channels. I was wondering if you could tell us little bit about how the situation went from the music being a western thing to being a Russian thing, and I understand that it first started happening in Leningrad. Is that correct?
Alexander:
Yeah, yeah. At least as far as I could trace it. My idea of getting ... I refer to it as a nesting doll of sources, because when you start, you meet people who tell you, "You absolutely have to interview this person," and then you keep going further and further until the furthest I could go back was Leningrad. First of all, it enters into Leningrad via the black market, as you said, but mostly the people who have access to these records, like the Sex Pistols or Public Image or even The Boom City Rats or anything like that, they have a lot of money.
So you have to understand people like Svin, who's considered the first Leningrad punk progenitor, his mother was a famous ballerina in Leningrad and his father lived in Israel and sent the family money all the time. So he had access to a lot of money. He had the best stereo system according to all of these guys who remember it now. They were kids at the time, but the people who are remembering it, they remember that Svin's stereo system was the best. So there is a lot of kind of, if you can consider it middle class origins to the entry of punk into Russia.
It changes and it becomes more Russian over time because you have to understand the history of punk in Russia as tied so tightly to the changing of politics in the past 40 years of Russia, 40 or 50 years of Russia. 1978 and '79 is when Svin starts getting exposed to this stuff. So to go from Brezhnev to perestroika to collapse or the disappearance of the Soviet Union to economic ruin of the '90s to the kind of rebirth of, I don't want to say power, but the rise of Putinism and the sort of national ideal, and all the way to today when by the time Pussy Riot does their protest in 2014, you have an entire generation growing up that have only seen one political ruler pretty much besides the brief Medvedev period, which is still Putin.
So it's so tied to politics that that's when it becomes Russian, because punk rock as being such a politically infused genre of music, it has to feed off of the environment that it's growing up in. So the best example that I can give from the book is what happens to punk rock in Russia in the 1990s. After the Soviet Union has disintegrated, Russia enters probably the worst economic state that it had been in maybe for its whole history, but for a long time. And at that point punk rock had been and continued to be pretty apolitical. So most of the lyrics that bands like Distemper and Tarakany and Naive are talking about are being dirty, flipping off the police or something like that, these really kind of comical, not so serious topics, drinking too much and doing anything that some miscreant that is really bored at the time would do.
And then because the Soviet Union had collapsed and there's this sort of ideological vacuum that opens up in Russia where communism stops becoming the dominant ideology and people are looking for some kind of ideology to affiliate with is when you get the rise of neo-Nazism and nationalism for the first time. So that transition from the '80s to the '90s, people start going to concerts and they start seeing their friends Sieg Heiling and wearing Nazi uniforms. So the late '90s is the first time when Russian punk bands have to say explicitly, "We don't endorse that ideology. You're not invited here."
Simon:
Why don't we talk about the current state of Russian punk? And then I'll ask you a couple of questions about Pussy Riot. What's the current situation?
Alexander:
I will say that Russian punk music is becoming more Russian in terms of the way that it sounds. And so in the '80s and the '90s and in some of the 2000s, a lot of Russian punk bands sang in English and a lot of their songs structure was the same as what we're familiar with, which is intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, and then kind of end the song.
Simon:
The extended chorus.
Alexander:
Yeah. Right. So it kind of all parroted that. And when you ask people, "Why do you sing in English?" And they don't speak English, they just write the lyrics in English and then memorize it that way, because punk rock has a lot of really easy tropes like scene unity and unite the punks and all that stuff, so it's easy to write songs. But they also told me that the English language is easier to write lyrics to because I guess its rhyming scheme is simpler.
Nowadays, I'm starting to see more Russian punk bands sing in Russia. And that also changes the structure of the songs a lot to the point where somebody might not even consider it punk rock and they might consider it more of like post-punk or something like that, which I think is a great development. A lot of people know bands like Gogol Bordello, who have come out of Ukraine, and they've infused punk music with different instruments that are associated with a Slavic sound like the accordion or the Balalaika. They're a phenomenon in of themselves and I appreciate them, but there have been a lot of punk bands in Russia from the middle of the 2000s who have been trying to incorporate those indigenous instruments, which I think is a great development.
Simon:
Let's talk about Pussy Riot. I suppose for people who are unfamiliar or just have a cursory knowledge of it, we should probably just describe what it ... because it's sort of a band and it's sort of a collective. Was it 2012 they became internationally famous?
Alexander:
I think it was 2014.
Simon:
Oh, was it 2014? Okay. Yeah. So maybe we should just run through that for folks who are not familiar. And then I wanted to ask you, I understand they almost didn't make the book at all, so I wanted to ask why.
Alexander:
Well, so you described them perfectly. They're an art collective first and then a band second, in my opinion, that have been known to do protests in Russia, particularly against the Putin regime and laws that the Putin regime has put in place. It's important to note that it is a collective, so that means that the people who are behind the masks can be different. It's not just the three or four that got arrested at the church, and a lot of people don't remember that or keep that in mind. It's important, because there's also men that are a part of Pussy Riot, too.
Yeah, they almost didn't make the book because of their ambiguous tie to punk rock, because like we just said, they're an art collective first and a band second. Everybody that I interviewed except for one person actually didn't consider them important for the history of the Russian punk rock scene, which was really interesting to me. So I had these series of standard questions that I would ask everybody at the end of their interview that was more catered towards them specifically. And one of those standard questions was always, "Rank the top 10 most influential bands in Russian punk history in your opinion.
Nobody listed Pussy Riot except for one person and he had good reason. He just said, "Even if it's not a punk group, even if they don't play punk music, what they did is still pretty punk rock and I wouldn't go to jail for the lyrics that I write." So I mean, this musician, it was Dmitry Spirin from Tarakany, was recognizing that what these women in Pussy Riot did is hugely important just for A, making Russian punk internationally recognized to a limited extent, but then also for demonstrating that Russians aren't just passively taking what's going on to them.
I have a whole chapter about Pussy Riot now, and part of the reason is because whether or not they belong here depends on your definition of punk rock. So all the people that I interviewed that were associated with the punk scene from the earliest times to today had never seen any of these women or any members of Pussy Riot at any of the concerts, never saw them at cafes or anywhere or any of these collective spaces that punk rockers tend to inhabit in the cities. And so they were just asking, "Where did these people come from and why are they claiming to be part of the scene?" But like we said, they're first and foremost activists. And also, of course, the interviewees didn't consider their music to be punk rock either.
And so for me, I just didn't know if they belonged in the history of the Russian punk scene. But then like I said, it depends on how you define punk rock because as you mentioned I think earlier in the interview, there's multiple aspects of punk rock. There's a sound, there's a political affiliation, there's a broader position vis-a-vis structures of power, whether it's patriarchal power or institutionalized power that punk rock deals with very intimately. And if Pussy Riot has transgressed or has challenged all of those aspects except for getting the musical side of it down, then I think that that could qualify them as being punk rock.
But again, the article isn't trying to convince anybody that Pussy Riot isn't punk or that they are punk. It's just merely saying there's some problems with considering them part of this history, but there's also some virtues, some really great things about considering them part of this history and one of those being the world probably wouldn't care about Russian punk if it weren't for them.
Simon:
Now, I wanted to ask you a little bit about what you're working on today, but is there anything else that you wish I'd asked about your book before we move on from that?
Alexander:
Yeah, if you're interested in it, you could pick it up at Microcosm Publishing. I went with an independent publisher because as I said, it wasn't supposed to be an academic work. It's very much trying to give something back to punk rock that has made me who I am and sort of the producer that I am, diligent worker that I am. And so yeah, you can find it at microcosmpublishing.com.
Simon:
Okay, so let's talk about what you're working on now. You gave me a few magazines that you're self-publishing before we sat down, so could you tell us a little bit about that project?
Alexander:
I'm working on a few things right now. The first is my dissertation, which is tangentially related to this book. The dissertation is on the rise of political ecology in the Soviet Union, politicized environmentalism from the late '70s to the '80s, so very much the same time period as this history. This is also the same time period when the Soviet Union starts producing horror movies. And so there's a lot of aspects of this period in the Soviet Union that haven't really been talked about much, punk rock being one of them, horror being one of them, political ecology being another one of them, that my work is very focused on trying to tease that out.
And then I also work on a zine. Zines are another really important aspect of punk rock culture in general, just kind of saying what I just said, that there's so many publishers who exclude great prolific writers. And so the other option is to self-publish. And so I print the zine and I distribute it to almost every state in the United States. A lot of the zines that people know about punk rock, like Maximum Rock and Roll or Razor Cake, are very band-focused. I mean, most of what they do or show reviews or scene reports, band interviews. And I've been reading those my entire life, those two zines, and reading those band interviews my entire life.
And after working on this project on Russian punk and taking my own interviews and learning the interview process, it kind of made me a little bit bored of interviews. I wanted something else because I recognized that there's so many aspects of punk rock culture globally that have made huge impacts where they are, one of them being vegetarianism and veganism.
Simon:
Yes. I saw one of your scenes is about that.
Alexander:
It's about veganism and punk.
Simon:
The eggplant eaters edition.
Alexander:
I was trying to get that alliteration, but I couldn't do elderberry because it doesn't have the same ring, so it was eggplant. That's just an example of something that I've seen in Russia and in Germany and in the United States, these elements of punk culture that are making a huge impact in these places, veganism coming from radical animal liberation and liberal rights movements that many of the members of the ALF, the Animal Liberation Front, or the ELF, Earth Liberation Front, are tied to punk rock and the music in some way. The issue before that is about women in punk rock.
The issue that is coming out this month is very close to my heart and it's looking like it's going to be the best one yet. It's about drug use, recovery and outreach. So I have friends, including myself, who volunteer for outreach programs, feeding the homeless, doing clean usage or needle exchanges and stuff like that, and so the next issue of the zine is completely devoted to all those aspects of punk rock, which are again, hugely important. I think most people like me who have grown up listening to punk rock and my friends have experienced a death at least once before the age of 25 due to substance abuse in some way. So I mean, the point is to get the conversation going about these things so that punks aren't just talking about bands and scene reports, but we're actually talking about these very important aspects of what it means to belong to a punk rock scene.
Simon:
Where can folks find the zine if they're interested?
Alexander:
So the zine is called Punks Around. I have a website, it's punksaround.com, and on that website there's a link to a big cartel page where you can find all the issues. The next issue, the drugs issue, I printed tee shirts because the idea ... There's four or five outreach organizations that are involved with it, and so if you buy a zine and a tee shirt, then the money goes to whichever organization you want to. So there's an organization from Ohio, so if you're from the Midwest, you might want to support the Ohio outreach program. There's two from Oakland, California. There's one from Providence, Rhode Island, so I tried to cover the bases as much as I could. That's also why it's called Punks Around, because I try to get as much of a reach as I can.
Simon:
Let me ask you a little bit about your Brandeis experience. You came here a little bit of a Securitas route, I understand. You actually started your PhD at another university. Is that correct?
Alexander:
Yeah. I started at the University of Chicago and I liked the University of Chicago. I think it's a fine institution. I still have friends there, but there was a lot ... First of all, it's far away from where I grew up, and I have a daughter, and it was hard to be so far away with a newborn. And there was also this realization I had about my own work.
And so originally I started at the University of Chicago researching the history of Imperial Russia, the history of the Russian Navy. It was still environmentally focused, but it was Naval and maritime history. And I went to Russia. I was doing interviews for this, but I was also using the Naval archives in St. Petersburg. And I had this kind of crisis of relevance for me that as much as the topic of maritime history of Russia fascinated me, I couldn't tie it to anything that was important to me today on a fundamentally personal level, but environmentalism, environmental history, environmental politics, because I have a daughter, because I'm frightened of climate change, that meant something more to me.
And because I was working on this book that starts off Russia, the Soviet Union in the '70s and '80s, and I started seeing connections between the rise of environmentalism and punk rock in terms of activism, I just had this idea of of switching to write a dissertation about something that was more relevant and I felt important to the world today. I was of course familiar with Greg Freeze's work, so I reached out to him and it just seemed like a great fit. I think his and I personality matches pretty well and so yeah, I started here, and I love it here. It's great. There's a lot more people that I feel like I can relate to and that's been fun.
Simon:
And final question, if we happen to have any prospective students listening, particularly in history, what advice would you have for them?
Alexander:
When it comes to picking a grad school, I would say don't focus so much on the big name schools because those might not be the best pair. When I was at the University of Chicago, I was very proud of being at the University of Chicago because it's prestige and it focuses on theory more than anything else, and I do enjoy knowing more theory than I should at some times, but it's more important that you work with an advisor in a department that pays attention to you. That attention is so important for graduate studies.
Alexander:
And this doesn't apply to everyone, but it definitely applies to me. Make sure that there is some kind of longterm relevance between your work and your life because otherwise, if you're spending six or seven years writing a 200 page document about a topic that isn't related to you in any way, you could get really bored and you can potentially not finish what you have to do, but if it's relevant and it's important to you, then it'll work.
Simon:
Well, thank you so much for making time for the podcast today. Again, the book is, What About Tomorrow? An Oral History of Russian Punk from the Soviet Era to Pussy Riot. Alexander Herbert. Thank you so much.
Alexander:
Thanks. I'll see you around.