Chapter 1, Part 2: The Oblachny Krai of the Konstantin Kinchev Era. "A Detailed History of the Famous St. Petersburg Vetka from a First-Person Perspective".

Part Two
– "So what have you guys got in your backpacks?"

On the table in front of him stood all our half-empty bottles, which we had been carrying in the inside pockets of our jackets. I should say, however, that these bottles contained wine that was sold perfectly legally right nearby, at a wine shop... We had already played our gig and were taking modest sips; no one was stumbling around drunk. Yet all our jackets had already been searched, and everything had been pulled from our pockets—whatever people had on them: keys, guitar picks, condoms brought along just in case by some of our more prudent friends, and the half-empty bottles. All of this held little interest for the guy, who, in response to my question:

"So what exactly are we looking for?" replied:

"Don't play dumb with me, you know damn well. Spit it out. You know, we know, and everybody knows, damn it, that you've got the goods. So stop playing the innocent and hand it over nice and easy."

We all burst out laughing, because we realized he was talking about drugs, which we, a bunch of alcoholics from Arkhangelsk, had never even laid eyes on or taken any interest in. I said:

– "No, man, we don't have anything for you, unfortunately... We've got plenty of wine, but nothing else."

– "Oh no, my dear comrade. You, I understand, are the leader here, the feisty one. Come on, tell your eagles to dig up whatever they've got stashed and put it on the table." Our guys offered to strip down completely and display all their physical endowments so that the police officers and non-police present could be convinced that we didn't have what they were looking for. They were stopped, but then a young sergeant standing off to the side fixed his gaze on my army-issue boots, which I only took down from the top shelf for concerts, and was wearing on this occasion. The junior officer locked his shrewd, inquisitive stare on them. After a while, he looked up significantly at the senior man in plainclothes. The latter understood everything in his own way and ordered me to take off my boots. Nobody wears socks with boots like that; you're supposed to use foot wraps. And since putting them on back in Arkhangelsk, I hadn't taken them off, even sleeping in them on the train, so one could only imagine the consequences of removing them now.

– "Come on, pal, hop to it, take off your boots, and make it snappy..." the senior one barked, and I smirked in anticipation of the fun. All our guys started chuckling vindictively; everyone knew what was going to happen and what wasn't. And the cops just lost it:

– "Boots on the table, alive!"

Fine. Taking my time, I started taking off my boots and unwrapping my footcloths. Such a stench filled the tiny room... just lovely! "Bring them here," the boss in plainclothes growled, "put them on the desk!"

Without a word, I spread my footcloths out on his desk and, feeling a sense of vindictive satisfaction, placed the boots right in front of him. The boss nodded to the younger guy, who shoved his hand inside the boots and searched them thoroughly, naturally finding absolutely nothing. I was gleefully "sympathizing" with him as he turned my footcloths inside out and held them up to the light, and the smell...

Right then, suddenly—BAM!—the door flies open, shouting, chaos, commotion, holy mother... Konstantin Kintchev walks in and, without saying a word, hops right over the partition to us... and sits down. At this, the senior guy completely forgot about my boots:

– "And what the hell are you doing here? What the devil brought you here?" to which Konstantin very calmly replies:

– "These are my friends. They came at my invitation, and I vouch for them. I'd like to know what this is about, why you picked them up; seems like it's for absolutely nothing..." he said, nodding at my removed boots and unwrapped footcloths:

– "Everything is fine. You need to let them go, commander."

At this, the guy in plainclothes got extremely pissed off and started yelling. Usually, they're all pretty calm and composed on the job, but this time he completely blew his top:

– "Get the hell out of here! No one's going to talk to you at all, out!" But Kostya wasn't going anywhere. Meanwhile, the news that Kintchev was locked up in the clink swept through the entire LDM, and within moments, hundreds of Alisa's army found out that their idol was sitting in the slammer, and not alone, but with his friends from Arkhangelsk. The whole crowd marched up to the doors of that miserable police room, surrounding it in a tight ring. Everyone was making noise, yelling, demanding freedom, with shouts of: "Kostya! Kostya!" The fans caused such an uproar and ruckus that the cops themselves were already regretting it. There were six of us behind bars by then; our keyboard player, the youngest, Kolya Lyskovsky, started feeling sick and asked to be let out to the toilet. After being refused, he leaned over the partition and, figuratively speaking, "showed all the cops exactly what he thought of them," which provoked even more rage from them. He threw up practically right under the boss's desk. Well, what did they expect? He warned them, he asked to be let out, and he was denied—so now let him breathe it in... Suddenly, the door opens again, and there stands Dima, the vocalist of Autodafe and our drummer. His eyesight was poor; he sees badly. He burst onto the threshold, darting his eyes around, and even with his glasses on, he couldn't make heads or tails of the situation. The young sergeant perked up: "Oh, this is one of them! Maybe he's got something on him..." And we screamed at him: "Dima, run!!"

Well, Dima, I must say, has lightning-fast reflexes. Before the police officers could even half-rise and reach out for him, he was already plowing through the crowd by the doors like an icebreaker and dashing away. And floating right toward him was a "big, calm sun"—Boris Grebenshchikov. He had also been at the concert, was drawn by the commotion in the lobby, and walked toward the noise, literally taking our Dima head-on. Dima slammed into him at full speed and stared blankly, blinking his wide-open eyes, magnified by his thick prescription lenses. Then, just as swiftly, Dima vanished, while BG headed in our direction. Right then, out of nowhere, appeared Viktor Tsoi. He had been at the concert too, and when the senior plainclothes officer asked:

-"And what the hell do you want?" he replied with such Tsoi-esque poise and dignity, completely calm:

-"Well, I have some acquaintances staying at the hotel here, a delegation of French journalists. Like these guys, they were also invited by the city authorities. They want to film everything going on here and asked me to bring them inside." The plainclothes man told him:

-"I don't want a single foreigner breathing the air in here, get lost!" Viktor turned majestically and departed in silence, while the crowd kept shouting:

-"Kostya, Kostya!" And right then our guardians made a wise decision—to relocate us to a police station, far away from this raging mob, the journalists, and everyone else. A wise decision, of course, but they failed to consider one thing: in order to transport us to another location, they first had to get us out of this one. That turned out to be no easy task, as people kept arriving in droves. They called in a few more police squads, who formed a human corridor from the doors of the precinct to the service entrance, where a police car with flashing lights was waiting backward with its doors open. And so they led us along this human corridor, which was barely holding back the furious crowd. We walked in single file, one behind the other—me, Kintsev, Rautkin, and all the rest—down this human corridor, when someone suggested: "Hey, let's put our hands behind our heads..." We joked around and did it, and our Nikolai Lyskovsky turned out to be barefoot, having lost his shoes somewhere. Just picture the scene: a man walking barefoot through a gauntlet of police with his hands behind his head, and right at that very moment... camera flashes started going off. Viktor Tsoi had kept his promise! The guards scrambled to confiscate the cameras, but nothing doing. No way! These weren't our own citizens, whose cameras you could just snatch, smash against the tiled floor, and expose the film—these were French subjects, and officially invited ones at that...

They led us outside and shoved us into the vehicle. Alisa's army boys formed a tight ring around the truck, while Rautkin started singing our song about the young, active Komsomol member who hopelessly fell in love with a girl of easy virtue. Everyone knew this song; the crowd around us joined in, the police were yelling "shut up," and naturally, we weren't keeping quiet. The people were singing, making noise, shouting, camera flashes were going off—in short, complete chaos. Then the truck gave a threatening roar, starting to move straight through the crowd. Well, what can you do—you can't fight a sledgehammer. The crowd submitted to fate with shouts, parted, and they drove us off to God knows where—and honestly, none of us knew either. We drove around the narrow streets of Petrogradka for a long time before they brought us to some stuffy, tiny police station, apparently right on the very outskirts. They led us inside. Sitting there was a tired, pre-retirement lieutenant colonel; an older man. He lifted his eyes to us and asked languidly:

-"Well, what have you gone and done this time? What did they pick you up for?" We shrugged, and Kostya Kinchev replied with dignity:

-"Well... we play rock 'n' roll, pop... that's all."

-"Ah... it's clear what to expect from you lot..." he waved his hand. "In any case, I haven't received any orders regarding you yet. Go take a seat over there, behind the bars, and for God's sake, at least keep quiet while they figure out what to do with you up there."

We sat and waited, understanding that sooner or later they would let everyone go anyway; no one was pressing charges anymore. One by one, he called each of us in—first name, patronymic, where do you work, where do you live—and then back behind bars again. He was sitting there reading a newspaper when suddenly he got nervous, turning his head as he listened closely. We could hear it too—a rumbling sound was coming from the street, a rumble and the stomping of feet, growing steadily louder and louder, anxiously approaching. Then we realized that Alisa's clever army boys had somehow tracked down our location, alerted all their people, and within a couple of hours, that exact same crowd from the LDM was already here, surrounding our miserable little police station, right outside the window of the equally miserable, aging officer. The crowd started chanting, snowballs flew at the windows, and threats began to fly about storming the station. The lieutenant colonel turned purple and growled:

-"Get your mutts the hell out of here!"—to which Kostya said:

– "And how are we supposed to do that? It's impossible. They'll only leave if we leave with them."

-"Nobody's holding you here!" the officer yelled. "It's these outsiders we're after! Get your banderlogs out of here and clear out yourself!"

- "No way," Kostya replied, "I'm not going anywhere from here, and I'm only leaving with my friends."

The crowd outside was screaming and chanting, the atmosphere was heating up. Riot police didn't exist yet back then, so the lieutenant colonel called someone, yelling and swearing, while the person on the other end yelled back. We just sat there while the people outside went wild, thoroughly riled up, outraged by the injustice, fueled by port wine and vodka. Around three in the morning, the older officer hung up the phone, wiped the sweat from his brow, and said literally:

- "Alright, that's it, fucked up situation, we've been ordered to let you all go. Get the fuck out of here and make sure that in one minute neither you nor those assholes under the windows are here, or we'll gather up the whole fucking city police duty shift and beat the shit out of you, and it won't be pretty."

- "Oh no, come on," we said, "you're letting us go, no hard feelings, we're heading out." We went outside, Kostya addressed the crowd, saying something like, "Guys, thank you so much, thanks to your efforts we've been set free!" Amid shouts of "Hurrah!" we walked down the steps. The people surrounded us, handing us bottles of drinks; overall, it felt like we were heroes returning from outer space or something. Everyone around was joyous and fired up, and suddenly we heard some terrible rhythmic crashing and a hysterical scream coming from the police station window at the same time. We turned around... damn! It was our bassist, the late Andrei Lukin, who, along with his friend Andryukha Shatalin, had climbed on top of a car in their joy—a car that exactly belonged to the lieutenant colonel who had just released us—and started hugging each other and dancing right there on the roof, to the cheers of the heated and excited crowd. The colonel, with plenty of "motherfuckers," fired a warning shot into the air, and Kostya and I, as the artistic directors of our respective bands, pulled our guitarists down by their pant legs from the now half-caved-in roof of the car and disappeared around the corner with the entire crowd. Behind our backs, as we walked away, the colonel's desperate cursing gradually faded out.

Kostya thanked everyone once more, and people started heading home. I felt terribly embarrassed in front of the old officer who had let us go; I silently cursed our overachievers. However, the feeling of exhaustion quickly negated all complexes, and we trudged down the long road into the distance, to a place where our eyes no longer looked and simply closed on their own. The metro wasn't running, and we had no money, nor were there any cars. Someone suggested going to someone's empty apartment in Kupchino. The transportation question arose—it was clear where, but unclear how. Walking was impossible, almost 25 kilometers to the other end of the city. And then, like some kind of sign! An empty Ikarus bus drives by. Kostya Kinchev gathered us on the sidewalk, stepped out onto the road, and—just like Nikita Mikhalkov as the locomotive in the film *At Home Among Strangers...*—Kostya stopped the bus with his body. The driver peeked out, cursing violently, to which Kostya pulled out a wad of the cash given to him after the concert, boarded the bus, and... struck a deal! We joyfully piled into the warm, clean Ikarus.

After the stinking cop shop—to get such service! We had a sea of booze, because everyone who bailed us out tried to slip us a quarter or half a bottle, and there we were, sitting and driving away, bottles sticking out of every pocket, in our hands, under our arms, speeding through the night city to our crash pad. We made it, unloaded, and spent the rest of the night there. We sang songs, reminisced about the past concert day and all the accompanying events, wondered why this had been necessary and for whom, since everything could have been calm and peaceful—we play, we go our separate ways. Apparently, the Arkhangelsk KGB guys, sick of us, had sent a signal to the Leningrad branch: the worst of our punks are heading your way, get ready, they're bound to be bringing something (...from Arkhangelsk, you know...)

That day we celebrated a victory. For the first time, we played in Leningrad, at a great venue with our favorite band. Our photos appeared in European political magazines; in certain circles, this fact caused quite a stir, and from then on, the militsiya behaved more appropriately at rock concerts.

Recorded by Alexei Vishnya
For Spetsialnoe Radio