In my recent Uncut issue I read a story about the inflatable pig Roger Waters had donated to a family in Chile and how rock music was the soundtrack of resistance during the Pinochet era. Interestingly, where the Pink Floyd record Animals would be immediately associated with an antitotalitarian protest for its obvious connection with Orwell’s 1984, the other bands that the protagonist mentions as inspiration are not so obvious: Genesis and King Crimson were not best known for political themes.
In my Soviet youth, any Western music was perceived as anti-Soviet. Despite the exceptions of Uriah Heep and Elton John who were allowed to perform in USSR, most of the rock music was either banned directly or deemed undesirable. Buying and trading records was a high adrenaline adventure, depending on the time and place and those involved in those clandestine trade fairs risked not only losing their collections but a more painful follow up as either administrative or criminal prosecution. My dear friend Valery Syrov, a conservatoire professor and the author of a very academic study of progressive rock, told me how he once had been asked to trade A Day At The Races by The Queen and got caught with it in a police raid. I started going to the record bazar in late 80s and narrowly missed the thrill of being chased by the police but I have vivid memories of BBC Russian Service programmes being suppressed and uninspired articles in the press that exposed the ideological warfare in which music groups were nothing but an imperialist weapon.
30 years later, in 2025, Russia is a state conducting an undeclared war in Ukraine and fighting most of the world on the ideological front again. Would King Crimson and Pink Floyd or their modern day equivalents again provide inspiration to people in Russia who do not accept the current regime? In a country where organisations and individuals are liberally labelled as foreign agents and undesired, would foreign cultural phenomena provide inspiration to resist the aggressive ideology of mysterious traditional values seemingly rejected everywhere except in Russia? I think the answer is no.
The Russian regime that settled in 2000 and seized total and complete control by 2025 has successfully implemented a strategy invented by their ancestors, Bolsheviks, by throwing out the ideology that once failed them. Marxism and Leninism are of no use to anyone now, just as their ill-conceived and quite sickly bastard child, scientific atheism (a university discipline, no less). They have been replaced with nationalism, religion and complete absence of interest in learning anything new. Where Soviet people had a level of culture and education, the Russian people of 2025 have been successfully formatted into a simplified mass that is free in using profanity and prison jargon everywhere because even the mass media speak to them in this same language. My son sent me a link to watch a film Mr No One Against Putin and I was shocked. Not by the how children are brainwashed by the teachers but by how the teachers communicate between themselves and with the kids. If pedagogues cannot express themselves without the use of profanity, brainwashing is secondary.
King Crimson and Pink Floyd are no longer bands that created magic and made statements, they are products for consumption and there are easier and more satisfying products in the market right now. Police aren’t chasing sellers of Iron Maiden records, they are busy pulling books by Russian foreign agents off the shelves and making it impossible for artists who disagree with or protest against the Russian politics to perform or even exist in the country.
Garry Goldman Random Angle 