"Pod Tankom" ("Under the Tank") was the slang name of the officially nameless café under the restaurant "Polyarny" in Arkhangelsk, which in the 1980s became a gathering place of informal youth. The name came from the British "Mark" tank of the intervention and civil-war era that stood nearby. "Everything created in the informal scene — music, poems, all sorts of pictures, samizdat — was passed from hand to hand here," recalls one of the participants: this is where people learned the place and time of semi-legal concerts and arranged meetings.
The rock club and the festivals
Arkhangelsk was one of the notable strongholds of rock culture in the USSR. From the mid-1970s the city had a rock association ("Ritmy veka", later "Nord") that eventually grew into a rock club, and a samizdat magazine "Severok" came out. After a scandalous concert at the Technical School of Communications in 1984 the authorities increased the pressure; in 1985 friends organised an away "session" at Permilovo — with Autodafe and Svyataya Luiza — as an alternative to a banned festival. The turning point was the V rock festival, 28 February – 1 March 1987 (more): it took place at the Krasnaya Kuznitsa culture palace, where Oblachny Kray had its own studio.
"Podtankovskaya Gvardiya"
The people "from under the tank" are today united in the community "Podtankovskaya Gvardiya", which collects memories, photographs, archive recordings and articles about that time. A photograph of musicians near the café in May 1989 (?) was taken by Sergey Supalov: it shows Alexey Denisov, Alexey Samarin, Andrey Korelsky and Andrey Lukin; the musicians hold vinyl records borrowed for listening (Korelsky has Nazareth's Greatest Hits).
The "Pod Tankom v 6" reunions
In 2011 the first nostalgic reunion of the "Pod Tankom" crowd took place at the Koleso club, the second in 2013 and the third on 23 June 2018. The third featured: Gruppa Zdorovya (opened by Alexey Verevkin and Andrey Khabarov with young guitarist Yaroslav Varenik), Anfisa, Nina Neona (Dmitry Prasolov, Anastasia Belyaeva), Svyataya Luiza, the "Combined Orchestra of the Rear Tank Crew", the metal band TOR and Apocalypse. In the "Combined Orchestra" Alexey Bulygin and Igor Koshkin played guitars, Dmitry Prasolov, Sergey Kustikov (Autodafe's hit "Na beregu reki Agdam") and Andrey Korelsky played bass (the latter also sang "Mercedes-Benz"), Dmitry Leontyev sang, Alexander Bakhmatov played keyboards and Viktor Khabarov saxophone. The ticket money went to the families of departed musicians.
"Nostalgia is when 'old kamikazes sit and remember bygone days'," Igor Koshkin said after the concert, "but my friends and I are in constant touch."
Sources
- E. Bogucharsky. "They got their 1987 back: Arkhangelsk rock veterans gathered again 'Pod Tankom v 6'" (2018).
- A. Troitsky. "Rock in the USSR", the Arkhangelsk chapter.
- Materials of the community "Podtankovskaya Gvardiya" (the 1989 photo session, "Concert at Permilovo 1985").
