Yekaterinburg, 1980

against elsewhere. The city became a place where smart outsiders could thrive. Even today, local residents often claim that they judge someone only by how hard he or she works. Imperial Yekaterinburg developed into the sort of melting pot of empire that promotes unrefined inter-ethnic, interconfessional, inter-professional and inter-class exchange. Many factors promoted a frontier-like sensibility of live and let live, among them being the fact that Yekaterinburg was not as large as it was economically important. The best and brightest throughout the Urals region focused their attention on how to get things done. Intellectual, ideological, political, artistic and even architectural fashions arrived somewhat later there than in the cosmopolitan artistic centers of European Russia; and when they arrived, they often became grounded in the realities of everyday life. During the Soviet period, Stalin’s Great Leap Forward, beginning with the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, stimulated further growth. The city became home to numerous heavy industrial plants, including the “largest machinery plant in a European economy,” the giant Uralmash works. The city exploded, with tens of thousands of new residents streaming in to fill the factories Yekaterinburg — which would become Russia’s fourth-largest city with nearly 1.5 million residents at the beginning of the twenty-first century — was established in 1723, late in the reign of Peter I (“the Great”). The settlement was created just on the Asian side of the Ural Mountains, somewhat more than 900 miles east of Moscow, in what is today Sverdlovsk Province. The city was named after Saint Catherine, to honor Tsar Peter’s wife, Ekaterina. It drew settlers from across the Russian Empire, growing slowly and achieving the status of a town only in 1796. It eventually emerged as a major mining and manufacturing center, prospering from the exploitation of rich mineral deposits throughout the Urals region, and enriching great industrial dynasties. The arrival of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the late nineteenth century secured Yekaterinburg’s status as one of Russia’s most important industrial centers. As one of the first cities in the world specifically created for industry, Yekaterinburg quickly attracted a diverse population of workers and specialists. Local mine and factory owners were less concerned with the details of imperial policies than they were with using engineering knowledge to make their businesses profitable. Consequently, they employed people who could do the job, no matter how much they were discriminated

that were springing up all around. Renamed Sverdlovsk after Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov, the new industrial city dominated all that had been there before.

Sverdlovsk escaped German occupation during World War II, becoming a major evacuation destination for important factories and educational and cultural institutions from cities further west, including Moscow and Leningrad. The postwar city grew to become home to slightly more than 1 million people, a focal point for Soviet military industrial production, which drew on both the city’s many factories and its numerous research facilities.

As home to the sorts of pragmatic intellectuals needed to produce giant machinery and weapons of mass destruction, the city generated a vibrant and innovative cultural life. Indeed, Brezhnev-era Sverdlovsk emerged as one of the Soviet Union’s most creative centers for rock ’n’ roll music, rivaled only by Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). It’s distinctive “Urals Rock” movement, led by such bands as Urfin Dzhyus, Chaif, Nautilus Pompilius, Nastya, Trek, Agata Kristi and Smyslovye Galliustinatsii, transformed late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian popular music.

During the late 1950s, as the harshest elements of the Stalinist police state began to recede following the Great Leader’s death in 1953, a distinctive Soviet youth culture at odds with official ideology began to emerge. Jazz dominated initially, though the early sounds of rock ’n’ roll soon reached the USSR. The first Soviet rock ’n’ roll bands appeared in Estonia and Latvia, and eventually in Moscow and Leningrad, during the early 1960s. The new music took off by mid-decade with the arrival of the Beatles over shortwave radios and, eventually, contraband cassette tape recordings. By the 1970s, Soviet rock bands had found their own worldview. The genre swept the country, with homegrown groups such as Mashina Vremini (Time Machine), Akvarium (Aquarium) and Zvuki Mu (the Sounds of Mu) grabbing large followings.

A quasi-underground Soviet rock scene thrived in the dark shadows of official institutions, such as those attached to the city’s massive factories — in restaurants and workers’ clubs, in palaces of culture, and on festival stages often controlled by Young Communist League (Komsomol), trade union and factory officials. Rock music and video salons became a meaningful source of income for official institutions as well as for their officers.

Ever more portable recording technologies allowed musicians to spread their sound across the Soviet Union so that, by the 1980s, a robust, complex and varied rock music culture had taken root, ranging from ubiquitous disco groups to punk and everything in between. Soviet rock survived a round of repression unleashed in 1984 by disgruntled cultural overlords who had taken advantage of the rapid turnover of Communist Party general secretaries following Brezhnev’s death in late 1982. Rock nonetheless became the driving force behind youth culture in

many large Soviet cities, especially so in Yekaterinburg.

Yekaterinburg’s rock scene remained distinctive in important ways. By the early 1980s, a number of talented and creative bands had emerged in the city, which combined a pop sound with sharp critiques of social problems. Vyacheslav Butusov’s Nautilius Pampilius in the 1980s and the Samoilov brothers’ Agata Kristi in the 1990s brought together the gloomy longings of a “lost generation” with songs of love and social protest. The group Chaif (from the local slang word for “pleasure,” derived from the Russian word for tea) — perhaps the longest-running group, dating back to the 1980s and still continuing on stage for a third of a century and more — proudly declared its connection to its native city, both in song and in charitable activities. These bands, and others like them, were the creations of the “technical intelligentsia” that dominated the city. Some band members were trained architects; others were conservatory graduates. Yulia Chicherina, a descendant of Lenin’s and Stalin’s commissar of foreign affairs, Georgii Chicherin, spent her childhood years as a serious music student and later formed the popular local band named Chicherina that continues to perform around Russia today. Bands like hers combined philosophical thought, social criticism, musical sophistication and a drive for a rollicking good time to create songs that distinguished the “Urals Rock” sound from other Russian rock styles. They have helped to define their city’s special sense of self.

View over the Iset River in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Photo: Andrijbulba. 2007. Flickr.com. CC License 2.0.