The samizdat magazine "Zombi", published in Moscow, belonged to the same circle that, together with "Urlait", organised the "Podolsk-87" festival where Oblachny Kray played in September 1987. Issue no. 10 (1988) carried a page about "Oblachny Kray, Arkhangelsk": a collage of the musicians' photographs and a typescript interview with Sergey Bogaev. Below are the scans sent to us by a reader of the site and a summary of what can be read on them.
What kind of text it is
The text mixes the language of newspaper criticism with Bogaev's own words: the author attributes the title "Scum from the kitchen of anti-Sovietism" to the newspaper "Severny Komsomolets" (1986), and the description of Bogaev is in the tone of official criticism ("with steely unkind eyes and the square chin"). Introducing the band, he names three founders: Oleg Rautkin (vocalist, a student of an institute of physical culture), Nikolai Lyskovsky (keyboards) and Sergey Bogaev — the band's leader, author of lyrics and music, guitarist and "a grade-IV electrician". The interviewer's signature on the scan is illegible.
Bogaev's words
- About school: he quarrelled with the social-studies teacher when he "wrote the truth" in an essay and got a "two". "They lied to me all my life. They covered the lie with something sacred."
- About concerts: "We had only five concerts in the whole existence of the band." In 1982, when the band had only just settled at the culture palace of Krasnaya Kuznitsa, it was sent without an audition to a festival in the Solombala district; the name "Oblachny Kray" was invented on the spot ("so that it is ours, native, northern and can be announced"), they played a song to words by Konstantin Simonov and did not play "Malinovka", which others performed seven times in a row. After that the band was "banned".
- About 1987: the festival in Arkhangelsk where the band received the "audience sympathy prize" (the typescript says "1 April 1987"; other sources date the festival to 28 February – 1 March, so it is probably a slip), then two concerts in Leningrad at the LDM (Leningrad Palace of Youth), "a call from Moscow" and a chance detention by the militia in Leningrad, where the Arkhangelsk band Autodafe was with them.
The text ends with a "squeeze" of newspaper criticism ("hideously unprofessional music and openly alien lyrics are the ordinary scum that accompanies the great cause of cultural perestroika") and Bogaev's words: "We are Russian. The text is very important. Rock music in our country is a social phenomenon. I don't know how it is abroad, maybe it is just music, nothing more. We have our own rock. However they try to convince us that it is 'a carefully planned ideological diversion'."
How to read this source
The scan is a photocopy of a typescript; the right edge of the pages is cut off and some lines are illegible. We did not reconstruct the missing words and give only what is visible. The quotations are Bogaev's own words. The story of the festival and of the Leningrad concerts is supplemented by these articles on this site: The V rock festival in Arkhangelsk, Moscow, 25 April 1987 and Bogaev in Pravda Severa.
Source
"Zombi" no. 10 (Moscow, 1988), interview with S. Bogaev ("Scum from the kitchen of anti-Sovietism"), p. 48 ff.; scans from the archive of a reader of the site.
