Everything Goes As Planned
"Even in death, Letov doesn’t give them any peace,” quipped Mikhail Novitsky. Novitsky, who plays in the band SP Babai, was scheduled to perform at a memorial to the Russian punk legend in March when the police rushed the concert site and drove everyone out. Earlier the same day, 73 Letov fans were seized by the cops and thrown into the police bus as they attempted to hold a procession in his memory. The leader of Grazhdanskaya Oborona, who died at 43 in his hometown of Omsk, couldn’t have asked for a better sendoff.
Yegor Letov’s arrival in Leningrad, the cradle of the underground rock revolt of the late 1980s, was a triumph of good timing. Russian rock fans, fed a steady diet of poetic images, collegiate irony and proggy aspirations by bands such as Aquarium, were starved for something less precious. Letov’s earliest songs gave them just that: “Everything Goes as Planned,” Grazhdanskaya Oborona’s first signature hit, mocked the deterioration of Lenin’s embalmed corpse over the roar of terribly recorded buzzsaw guitar.
In real life, Letov looked and acted the opposite of his stage persona. A soft-spoken intellectual with a cozy Siberian accent, he introduced himself as Yegorka—a diminutive of the already down-home Yegor (though his first name was in fact a more Westernized Igor). While Aquarium would occasionally deign to flirt with punk imagery by borrowing from Iggy Pop, Letov obsessed over Napalm Death. To Western eyes, he looked more like a hippie than any kind of recognizable “punk.” He wore his hair long, later adding a full beard, and didn’t shy away from tie-dyes. In interviews to samizdat magazines, the bookish young man would frequently namedrop Dostoevsky, Tarkovsky, and philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. Letov’s early, intermittent attempts to shock came across as rather tame, like his repeated references to suicide as “the only way out for an honest man under the circumstances.”
In the early 1990s, Letov found himself spearheading Russian Breakthrough, a weird and ominous alliance of radical Communists and ultranationalists.
Like many Russian radicals at the end of the Soviet Union, though, Letov quickly sniffed out a far more effective outlet for his outré tendencies: extreme nationalism. When his Grazhdanskaya Oborona mocked the eponymous anti-Semitic organization in the song “Pamyat Society,” nobody—probably not even the singer—could foresee that, in a few years’ time, uniformed neo-Nazis would be distributing anti-Semitic pamphlets at his own concerts. In the early 1990s, Letov found himself spearheading Russian Breakthrough, a weird and ominous alliance of radical Communists and ultranationalists; he also helped form the early version of the National Bolshevik Party, then led by Eduard Limonov and Alexander Dugin, and boasted the party card No. 4. Grazhdanskaya Oborona did not even need to change the repertoire. Letov still sang “Everything Goes as Planned,” but what once was sarcastic turned literal: singing about “Grandpa Lenin” against the backdrop of flapping red flags, he now raised his right arm in an earnest salute. Some older fans turned away in disgust, but many new ones flocked to the cause. An impromptu press conference in 1997, which this journalist attended, found Letov’s new persona fully unfurled: the singer described himself as a “Soviet nationalist,” said he’d take up arms to fight alongside Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko if he were to make a bid for Russia, and hinted that a legion of well-armed allies were awaiting his own command somewhere in the wings.
Letov’s ardor cooled once the Putin era rolled around, and Russian national “renaissance” became the talk of mainstream TV and radio. Dugin became a pro-Kremlin ideologist; Limonov joined The Other Russia, a ragtag liberal coalition. Finally, Yegor himself gave up on politics, or his version thereof, calling it a “useless and foolish activity in this country” in Rolling Stone last year. His later years represented a slow career fadeout not usually afforded to hard-living icons—more Billy Idol than Sid Vicious. He still packed the clubs, with Grazhdanskaya Oborona or solo, playing mostly to unruly teenagers. (Letov also didn’t shrink from the occasional, lucrative Stateside tour, where he entertained the kind of Jewish émigré crowd his hometown fans would be happy to terrorize; Ilya Popenko’s photo of the singer, exclusive to RUSSIA!, was taken in Washington, D.C. during the last such sojourn.) His legacy remains one of brave and ultimately targetless rebellion—which, tie-dyed T-shirts notwithstanding, is as punk as it gets.
By Sergey Chernov