Long... Letov...

I first learned about Letov in the school toilet. And I'm not the only one. The mysterious abbreviations that flaunted on the walls of the toilet - "G.O." and "Gr.Ob" - multiplied exponentially in the late 80s. In this sense, the Civil Defense group even surpassed the official rock stars - Alisa, Kino, DDT, etc. But unlike them, G.O. no one has seen it live. Until 1994, Yegor Letov was an absolutely virtual character (although no one knew the word "virtual" then). Several E-60 or E-90 audio cassettes played to holes, a couple of badges with the face of Yegor in black glasses, several photos of terrible quality in the self-made magazine Counterculture, which went around at that time, and at the same time no concerts, clips, interviews ... In general, we did not know anything about Letov, but at the same time, any of us, if we woke him up in the middle of the night, would sing the song “Everything is going according to plan” from and to. “Lenin decomposed into mold and linden honey” - who else could say that then? We ourselves came up with the idea that Letov is the main fighter for our freedom. Moreover, for freedom not just from the communist regime, but from everything that disgusts a normal teenager - from school, cops, parents. We almost canonized him, gave him completely non-existent features and, as a result, promoted him to the level of a megastar. Letov became a cult. We made up new legends about him, just as the generation of our parents made up legends about Vysotsky. “Our” Letov was “killed” several times, tortured in the dungeons, put in a dungeon, but he fought and did not break. Each of us at least once met him by chance and drank - either at the Kursk railway station, or at Yaroslavl. But the main thing, of course, was that Letov wheezed from our tape recorders, “I will always be against it!”. Or “The rifle is a holiday, everything flies in the f*ck!”. We so loved to put it on full volume so that one of the adults would come running, but there was nothing they could do with us. It later turned out that Letov, in general, is an ordinary Siberian man, drinks beer, smokes weed, picks mushrooms and loves football.

We abandoned Letov back in the mid-90s, when he first appeared on television, in the “A” program. Instead of the “anarchy” sign, a huge red flag with a hammer and sickle in a white circle flaunted behind him - the flag of the National Bolsheviks. Times are bizarrely changing: then this flag was actually equated with the fascist one, but now it is almost the banner of the struggle for human rights! But then we abandoned Letov. We thought he betrayed us...

Now Letov is dead. We have been working in large companies for a long time, we measure salaries in thousands of dollars, we have families, children. We do not go to vote, because “everything is clear”, we do not protest against wars and murders, because “nothing depends on us anyway”. But for some reason, the heart skipped a beat from the news that Letov was no more. The current court rockers say: "A great musician has left." Nonsense! A healthy person will not talk about Letov as a musical phenomenon. This is noise, screaming, screeching, sometimes a bard song, but not Music at all. He couldn't even play the instrument. Eduard Limonov says: "A prominent political figure, our combat ally, has left us." Rave! Three years ago, a friend of mine went to see Letov in Omsk and, of course, tried to talk to him about his strange political tossings. "Let's talk about football, shall we? Yegor said. - I really like the English championship ... ”On his last disc with the symbolic title“ Why do you have dreams? (Letov died in his sleep) there is not a single social song - almost for the first time in all his work. He had not cooperated with anyone for a long time - neither with the NBP, nor with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, nor with the devil, nor with God. We just lost the last truly free-spirited rocker - that's why it sank. No one else will go over the ears of adults, including ourselves. No one.