In the summer of 2011 a letter of invitation to the session "POD TANKOM V6" ("Under the Tank at Six") was sent to the people of the Arkhangelsk rock scene. Its organisers are named as Alexey Bulygin and Igor Makarov; we do not give the contact details in the text. About the café itself and its history — in the article "Pod tankom": the café where Arkhangelsk rock gathered.
What was planned
On 6 August 2011 at the club "Koleso" (Arkhangelsk) a jam session was to take place with the "old-timers" of Arkhangelsk rock'n'roll. It was conceived as "a meeting of good old friends, musicians" with a chance "to play music together again for themselves and for the audience, and simply to talk". The reason is simple and sad: "we have started to see each other more and more at funerals and in other unhappy circumstances. And time goes by… So we wanted to gather everyone we could on a much brighter occasion, or rather simply WITHOUT one". It is "not a model show-concert of veterans from Arkhgorrok, no officialdom or pomp, everything must be easy".
The plan of the evening: a start at 18:00, an end at 2:00–3:00 at night; about eight bands "in one line-up or another", 45 minutes for each with a short sound check, 2–3 songs each. Musicians were offered, if they wished, to prepare one cover of Bogaev and "O.K." "in memory of a friend"; the "official part" was to end by midnight, with the rest of the time given to a jam. The preliminary list of participants was published on a leaflet (an attachment to the letter, which we do not have in our archive).
A letter written on that very day
The invitation should have gone out as early as 2 June, when preliminary consent had come from the musicians and the club. "But, unfortunately, life made terrible corrections — on that day we lost a friend and musician, Sergey Bogaev." About a week before his death the organisers had talked with him on the internet and invited him to take part; "Seryoga did not mind", but he planned to spend the summer on the Don — "to charge up for the next creative season, in which he dreamed of starting concert activity. He did not make it…" The tragedy "once more suggested that we must meet while we can, not putting it off till tomorrow, because tomorrow may not come".
The letter stresses that the evening is strictly charitable; the money from ticket sales was meant for the family of Sasha Sukhanov, for a gravestone. A special thanks at the end goes to Alexander Mezentsev for understanding, support and help. The event's name was already on the club's poster, and an official poster and pages on social networks were being prepared.
What "POD TANKOM V6" means
The letter ends with an "interpreter's dictionary":
- "Tank" — "a catering café with elements of a bar"; "in the last decade of the USSR a cult meeting place of young people of various creative and political views and movements (often persecuted)". The café stood on the corner of K. Marx street and P. Vinogradov avenue (since renamed) in the building of the restaurant "Polyarny" (now the shopping centre "Polyarny"). The unofficial name "Tank" came from the "trophy tank of the early 20th century" standing nearby on a pedestal.
- "Pod tankom" — a place for gathering, meeting, a date in this café or near it.
- "…v shest" (at six) — the time of meeting; it was due to the café's technical break from 17:00 to 18:00.
- "POD TANKOMV6" — "a beautiful set of Russian and foreign letters and numbers that became the unbelievably stylish logo of the gathering".
What came next for the memory of Bogaev is in the article "The memory sounds: evenings, tributes and covers"; about Autodafe — the line-up and a chronicle of concerts.
More about Autodafe: Autodafe: sworn brothers of Oblachny Kray, the V rock festival of 1987, Arkhangelsk rock around Oblachny Kray.
Where this comes from: the letter of invitation to the session "POD TANKOM V6" (2011) in the archive materials of the band Autodafe. Names and facts are as in the letter; contact addresses are omitted. This article does not examine the history of the tank itself: the letter calls it a "trophy tank of the early 20th century", the history is clarified by the article about the café.
