Long happy life

Alexander Chernykh about the classic collection of interviews with Yegor Letov

Various bootlegs play a large role in the creative heritage of Civil Defense: rough recordings on a home tape recorder, rare apartment records, unofficial concert albums. This tradition affects not only music: twenty years ago, unknown Moscow fans published the book “I Don’t Believe in Anarchy,” a collection of interviews with Yegor Letov and articles about him. Published in an edition of three thousand copies, it instantly became a rarity - it was snapped up by fans who wanted to understand the worldview of their idol. At the request of Gorky, Kommersant correspondent Alexander Chernykh re-read this collection.

A small book published on cheap paper with a poorly glued binding; the pages constantly fall out, but that’s not a big deal - after all, I keep it in the pocket of my guitar case, next to the notebook where I copy down the songs and chords I like. The notebook is colorfully decorated with anarchy icons and the inscriptions “Gr.Ob.”, “Alice”, “Aria” - in general, the entire set of audio cassettes “Legends of Russian Rock”. The cover of the crumbling book, on the contrary, is emphatically serious: a classic photograph with round glasses and barbed wire, and below in red letters the title - “I don’t believe in anarchy.” The first time it gave me a real shock: what were the publishers thinking, because Yegor Letov’s book simply cannot be called that! It’s as if the collection of the patriarch’s speeches was called “I Don’t Believe in God,” and then I would be less surprised.

The first article in the collection dates back to 1988, the last was published in 1997. The authors scrupulously collected any mention of the group, making no distinction between all-Union media such as Komsomolskaya Pravda, regional newspapers with the names Dzerzhinets and Leninskaya Smena, and scoured fan zines Urlayt, Peripheral Nervous System or Kher Bez Mosla " When I was 15–17 years old, I constantly carried this collection with me on the route from Arbat to Eglador, but then I finally abandoned the guitar, plunged headlong into a completely different life and put the book somewhere far away on the shelves. I haven’t picked it up for more than ten years, but then I started re-reading it - and it turned out that I still remember entire paragraphs by heart.

QUESTION: What is rock?
ANSWER: Rock in essence is not music or art, but some kind of religious action - like shamanism - that exists in order to establish a certain attitude. A person who studies fate comprehends life, but not through affirmation, but through destruction, through death.

This, of course, can blow your mind at fifteen; however, Yegor reasoned this way at twenty-five. The media is delighted: the phrase “rock is shamanism” will continue to wander from interview to interview, and it is more often found in leading questions from journalists. Everyone wants to personally receive confirmation from Letov - yes, he is not just playing a dirty punk, but conducting a religious mystery. In the same way, they will persistently ask about “attitudes towards suicide and drugs”: there was no Roskomnadzor then, and now it’s scary to quote honest answers, lest the entire site be blocked for propaganda. And, of course, questions about politics, but completely in passing, and it’s clear what the author of “The New 37th” and “Everything Goes According to Plan” thinks about what is happening. And he fully lives up to the expectations of the enlightened public.

“...Because as a result of recent not only speeches, but events, almost all social, political or even religious affairs have completely discredited themselves in general. That is, there is not only no trust, but simply cannot exist,” Letov said just a couple of years before the final collapse of the Union.

In general, almost the entire first part of the book consists of Letov’s verbose philosophical carts, conversations about Sartre and Dostoevsky, his simply encyclopedic stories about little-known Western music (in 1988!) and then there are stories about underground concerts and traveling illegally. There are, of course, opuses like “...It would be a deep mistake to consider E. Letov a troubadour of suicide. The topic of necrophilia also sounds ambiguous in him…”, but the overwhelming majority of publications are quite positive, one might say, admiring. “The group still does not appear on TV screens, does not sound on the radio, is not represented in the official press,” writes some quite official publication with sympathy. But everything changes in an instant.

In 1993, the first issue of Limonka published a huge interview with Letov about his political views. And this is a completely different person - not the one who spoke verbosely about Christ, drugs and Western music. Letov, who wrote “The Russian Field of Experiments” - the best text in Russian for many decades - suddenly spoke in the crumpled language of commissar propaganda: “These are the consequences of the monstrous defeat that we suffered in October 1993. We lost because of political myopia, criminal indecision and simply the cowardice of most of our leaders. When on the night from the 3rd to the 4th the government was shaken, it was necessary to use ALL means, ALL methods, without fear of the inevitable bloodshed, and take control of the situation - in order to once and for all stop the endless bloody spills that have been flooding our land all these years. the fault of the ruling occupation regime.” The interview ended with a call to “…tighten your belts, roll up your sleeves and grit your teeth to prepare for the coming GREAT NATIONAL REVOLUTION in the name of the generations that will inherit the RIGHTEOUS FUTURE.”

A couple more of these interviews - and the tone of publications even in punk zines changed to a bewildered “Egor, why did you get involved with the red-browns?” And after the first “Civil Defense” concert in a long time, everyone turned their backs on Letov except the newspapers “Zavtra”, “Den” and “Limonka”. Both professional journalists and punk zine authors indignantly described how Prokhanov and Dugin came to the press conference, how Letov gave interviews and said that he was ready to be president - and at the same time, riot police brutally beat teenage fans near the cultural center; a full concert never happened. An Izvestia correspondent wrote a phantasmagoric report from this event:

“Under the jacket of one of the rockers there was a swastika visible.
— How do you feel about fascism? - asked him.
“No way, I need it more than others,” he answered tearfully, smearing blood and tears across his grimy face.
It seems that the riot police noticed the swastika, and he suffered more than others. “If it were my will,” I heard from the riot police, “I would crush these fascists like cockroaches.”

But the fans were also disappointed. In one of the zines the text “Egor Letov is no more!” was published, its author wrote: “...Maybe we will even continue to love HIS songs. Songs He wrote when He was just like us. Because they already belong to Us, and not to him.”
But this did not stop Letov. All the following articles in the book are more like a history or political science textbook. Letov praises Limonov, Letov admires Ampilov, Letov admits cooperation with Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky, Letov admits his sympathy for Barkashov, Letov calls for a national revolution and a new world order. His speech is filled with the expressions “Yeltsinoids” and “ruling junta”; he talks about the lack of spirituality of Western culture and claims that rock music has Russian roots. And he constantly explains: no, Civil Defense was not an anti-Soviet group, it was the USSR authorities who were not real communists. “For me, a free Motherland is a Motherland free from the policies of foreign capital that dominate now,” Letov agrees to completely NOD slogans. “Egor and the Communicated,” punk zines sneer. “This is great! Creativity and revolution! You remind me of young Volodya Mayakovsky!” - the correspondent of the newspaper “Den” tells him. “I myself am the son of the working class, I started my career as a plasterer at a construction site,” he modestly emphasizes.

The book ends at the most interesting point - in the last interviews of 1997, Yegor begins to say that he was disappointed in Limonov, that he no longer believed in anyone, that he wanted to “live some more” and record music. For the next eleven years, this is exactly what he will do.

Reading this collection from twenty years ago, you clearly see how relative all the political disputes of today are. At first, favored by criticism, Zakhar Prilepin is now in an even worse position than Yegor Letov in 1996 - at least he did not call to kill anyone but himself. There is nothing to say about Eduard Limonov, a truly great Russian writer: his political journalism completely overshadowed literature. But Egor Letov was somehow able to change this situation - now almost no one seriously remembers his “red-brown period”. He was able to remain in Russian culture as a great poet and musician, discarding all the political husks - and I really want someone to re-release this collection of interviews, adding articles from 1997-2008. Maybe Prilepin and Limonov will find a clue in them.