Sergey Bogaev was buried on 6 June 2011 at the Bogoslovskoe cemetery in St Petersburg. The place was decided three days earlier: the preparations were led by Andrey Tropillo, and among Petersburg musicians a voluntary collection of money for the funeral and a worthy monument was under way. The monument was put up on 29 May 2012; on the anniversary, 2 June, friends gathered at the cemetery from eleven to twelve and in the evening at a memorial concert in the club "Stoker" on Sadovaya. Fans were asked to bring to the grave a small stone from their own places — only no bricks and no lumps of set cement. This day has a note of its own.
The first evening was even earlier, on 28 December 2011, for the fiftieth birthday, at a rock café on Chkalovskaya: free entry, start at five. The band Skripsvay, as somebody in the hall wrote, "played atomically" — especially "Obezyana" from the first album, which "sounded simply tooth-shattering".
The tribute that did not happen
In December 2012 the Petersburg Gramzapis studio (the former Melodiya) was preparing a tribute record: the project was supervised by its director Igor Delgyado, Vladimir Nosyrev and the rock historian Andrey Burlaka. Musicians from St Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, Moscow, Yaroslavl answered: Pilot, Raznye Lyudi, Elektricheskie Partizany, Sergey Bolotnikov with Boloband, Na Grani, Skripsvay, Alexey Vishnya, Skomoroshy Bunt, the "Arkhangelsk team", Igor Plenov, Estremadura and others. The release had to be postponed to early 2013 because of the illness of several participants — and after that it never took place: in 2020 Vadim Kurylev stated that "the tribute itself never came out". But the recordings remained. The "Arkhangelsk team" — Valery Zhuravlyov, Vadim Bayov, Igor Patokin, Nikolai Nosyrev, Evan Patria, Anna Patokina, Dmitry Leontyev, Vladislav Belobokov and Vladimir Budnik — recorded "Arkhangelsky rok-n-roll" at the studio "ShiZvuk", and Bogaev's own "spoken word" is heard in the recording too.
ElectroPartizany and "Kostya Perestukin"
ElectroPartizany also recorded their song for the tribute: Vadim Kurylev (vocals, guitars, keyboards, bass) and Mikhail Nefyodov (drums); Nosyrev was the sound engineer, the recording was made in 2013 at the Gramzapis studio. When the tribute did not come out, a few years later they decided to release the song as a single — it appeared on 29 August 2020. Kurylev told the story of Oblachny Kray in his own words. He heard the band earlier than DDT: in the mid-1980s in Leningrad recordings of out-of-town bands were a rarity, but Oblachny Kray's were not — Tropillo recorded them. In 1987, when Kurylev was already playing in DDT, he went to the band's first concert at the Youth Palace: the sound was lousy, "but the drive was such that it covered all the minuses of the feeble equipment". He was friends with Andrey Lukin in Moscow in the early 1990s, and in the early 2000s Bogaev was a sound engineer at Tropillo's studio, where ElectroPartizany recorded "Ekvilibrium": "he knew how to make a rock sound".
From "Perestukin", which in his words preserves a sharply social satire on "informers" — a big and quite real problem for the informal scene — Kurylev and Nefyodov made a small experiment: over the ordinary drum rhythm they recorded a drum solo, and the result was "a squall of drums", the image of a whole army of Perestukins. They liked the trick so much that a couple of years later they repeated it in their own "Psychophonia" — "so, inexplicably, Oblachny Kray of 1985 influenced our song of 2015".
Arkhangelsk: Estremadura, Koleso, Otdelny Korpus
In Arkhangelsk in 2012 Dmitry Leontyev recorded covers of "Grustnaya istoriya" and "Sosi-posasyvay" with Estremadura, and on 22 December the club "Koleso" (19:00) hosted a tribute concert: Estremadura, Skripsvay from St Petersburg, Yota and Alligator Santy, supported by musicians of Autodafe. The tribute festival had been announced for 21–23 December, and on the twelfth, 12.12.12, Estremadura played a programme of its own — for "lovers of hard rock, and also veterans and invalids of rock and roll". "Otdelny Korpus" grew out of Estremadura: in 2015 it was presented as a special project based on Estremadura, a "subsidiary live enterprise" of Oblachny Kray — with covers of "northern heavy metal" and a few numbers by Autodafe.
Petersburg: "Manhattan" and "Velikaya Garmoniya"
On 20 December 2014 another concert in memory of Bogaev took place in St Petersburg. It was to be held at the club "Stoker", but "Stoker" burned down and the evening was moved to "Manhattan". The bands were "HohBand", "To Novy Prazdnik", "Otstoy!", "Na Grani", "Zoopark" (with Tropillo), Estremadura, "Zhivye Kamni" from Arkhangelsk and Skripsvay; among the possible guests were Alexey Vishnya and Konstantin Strelkov of Novaya Zemlya. The organiser was Andrey Tabakov, who in December 2021, for Bogaev's sixtieth birthday, reported that his "TabakovBand" was preparing five of Sergey's songs.
And on 29 March 2015 at the club "Phoenix" the first metal fest "Velikaya Garmoniya" in memory of Sergey Bogaev took place. Otdelny Korpus (Sergey Vlasov, Vyacheslav Bogdanov, Leontyev) played a whole programme of Oblachny Kray covers; Front performed with a programme of its own — the reissue of "Smertelnaya khirurgiya" of 1993 (with a bonus disc by the band Kruger of 1991) and the album "Pamyati druga" — and so did Skripsvay, led by Sergey Stankov nicknamed Pushkin, with its first studio album "Kazhdomu — svoyo", which was given away to anyone interested at the end of the concert. The festival was opened by Andrey Burlaka and set up by Alexander Tilipalov with friends; the sound was by Dmitry Tulin, the recording by Igor Plenov. Stankov, Bogaev's friend, died on 30 May 2016, three days before the fifth anniversary.
Radio, screen, DVD
In the summer of 2002 Leonid Makarovsky and his Australian partner aired "Podnimaysya, narod, na boy s idolishchem pogany!" in their metal programme "Nuclear Winter" on the Boston radio of MIT — next to Venom, Bolt Thrower, Grave Digger and Dimmu Borgir. On 14 October 2012 the DVD "Podolsk-87" was shown and presented at the shop "Dom Kultury" in Moscow; on 17 January 2012 Alexey Sheptunov's film "The Chief of Oblachny Kray" was shown at "Koleso" in Arkhangelsk (about it) — everyone who came was given a disc with two early albums, and "Ygyatta" was on sale. And on 4 March 2015 the special issue "Pioneers of Russian Rock" on the internet radio "Neformatnoe" played "Svobody zakhoteli?".
Fans meanwhile did their own thing: they posted tablatures (in 2013–2014 "Napadenie monstra", "Stremya i lyudi", "Tupaya" and others), the tuning of Bogaev's guitar for each album and thematic compilations, and in 2019–2022 the author "Inn Fo" wrote the "Vsyo putyom!" pages about the band. On 2 June 2026, on the fifteenth anniversary, Alexey Leontyev opened the renewed site of the band — the one you are reading now.
Where this comes from: the posts of the VKontakte community "Oblachny Kray" of 2011–2026 (by Alexey Leontyev, Vladimir Nosyrev, Sergey Supalov and others), Vadim Kurylev's statement for the ElectroPartizany single (29 August 2020), and the members' pages on this site.
