Punk in Russia

Cultural mutation from the “useless” to the “moronic”

Ivan Gololobov, Hilary Pilkington, Yngvar B Steinholt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317913092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Punk culture is currently having a revival worldwide and is poised to extend and mutate even more as youth unemployment and youth alienation increase in many countries of the world. In Russia, its power to have an impact and to shock is well illustrated by the state response to activist collective and punk band Pussy Riot. This book, based on extensive original research, examines the nature of punk culture in contemporary Russia. Drawing on interviews and observation, it explores the vibrant punk music scenes and the social relations underpinning them in three contrasting Russian cities. It relates punk to wider contemporary culture and uses the Russian example to discuss more generally what constitutes 'punk' today.

1 Punk, but not as we know it

Rethinking punk from a post-socialist perspective

Hilary Pilkington

Red Square, Moscow, Spring 1991. As part of an ethnographic study of Russian youth cultures I had been hanging out with a group of punk musicians. They wanted to go into the city centre, so I took my camera with me. They asked me to take a photo of them posing by an Italian designer clothes outlet. The shop was one of the first to appear in Moscow as perestroika opened the door to the global marketplace. I took the photo. They loved it. I was disappointed. It wasn’t punk; not punk as I knew it.

(Hilary Pilkington, Field diary, 1991)

I’ve got the answer to [the question] what is punk? And it is very simple. It isn’t.

(Penny Rimbaud, 2011¹)

A punk is someone who knows the whole truth but doesn’t tell anyone.

(Kirill,² Vorkuta, 14 October 2009)

This book starts from the premise that to ‘know punk’ is mission impossible. This is, as Penny Rimbaud so eloquently puts it (above), because the very quality of punk we seek to understand dies the moment it is so defined. This does not mean punk did, and does, not exist – it has expressions and consequences that can be traced – but recognises that central to the meaning and significance of punk is a denial of such – ‘a distrust of the punk moment itself’ (Marcus 1989: 81). This raises some fundamental epistemological dilemmas. For those embarking on a research project on ‘punk’, the most immediate of these is precisely what can the ‘object’ of research be if that object dissolves the moment it is identified? This is discussed below as the contours and evolution of the research upon which this book is based are outlined. The second concerns the need to account genuinely, rather than formally, for reflexivity in the interpretation of the world we encounter through our research subjects. As Marcus suggests, even the early punk movement was self-aware, constituting itself in ‘the will to say everything cut with the suspicion that to say everything may be worth nothing’ (ibid.). Two decades later, this is captured in the ironically astute statement (above) of Kirill, an 18-year-old punk musician from the Russian city of Vorkuta, that punk means ‘everything’ but, at the same time, since its truth is never articulated, nothing. These dilemmas are addressed in this chapter by considering how punk has been understood in academic literature to date, before setting out an alternative conceptual framework for understanding the meaning of contemporary punk as manifest across three different punk scenes. The approach follows Rimbaud’s logic of avoiding the reification of ‘punk’ but, recognising the reflexive engagement that contemporary scene members have with this thing called punk, falls short of viewing punk as only existing in its self-negation. The approach adopted suggests rather that punk ‘isn’t’ in that it does not consist in something – either aesthetic or political in nature – above or disembedded from the everyday. Punk ‘is’, however, in the sense that it is continually reconstituted individually and collectively as a product of the interaction between the economic, cultural, social, political and territorial contexts of specific locales (shaped as they are by both macro and micro structural factors) and the different modes of agency enacted in these contexts. Adopting this approach allows the tracing of commonalities as well as significant differences in the constitution of punk across the three urban Russian scenes studied. More significantly, it provides access to the experience of Russian punk in a way that challenges the dominant meanings attached to the movement in the West and provides an empirical base for rethinking punk at a theoretical level.

Punk as aesthetic adventurism

Influential interpretations of first wave punk accorded primacy to punk ‘aesthetics’.³ Greil Marcus (1989) presents the classic (postmodern) cultural interpretation of punk as the outcome of engagements with avant-garde Dadaism, futurism, surrealism or expressionism and suggests that a utopian impulse carries through these various avant-gardist projects of the twentieth century culminating in The Sex Pistols. This approach is reflected also by Nehring (1993: 279–80) who claims that the ‘shock effect’ of punk (including the use of visual style to disrupt signification) is a classic example of ‘detournement’ of which Debord writes. The understanding of punk as largely an aesthetic phenomenon appears, on the surface, to fit the post-socialist context well. In contrast to the first accounts of rock music in socialist states, which envisaged rock bands as having ‘stormed every bastion of official resistance’ (Ryback 1990: 223), and as engaged in ‘an unequal fight against the system’ (Bright 1985: 126), later analyses emphasise the primacy of aesthetics over the establishment of economic, political and social alternatives in the Russian music underground. This interpretation can be found in narratives of late socialist rock communities (see, for example, Troitsky 1987), which posited rock music as ‘first and foremost, an aesthetic practice’ (Cushman 1995: 94) as well as among contemporary Russian punk musicians. At a public event in London in May 2011, for example, Petr Fomenko of the band The Zverstvo (Krasnodar, Russia) stated unequivocally, ‘We don’t understand punk from a social point of view but as part of culture and art.’⁴

Despite the surface ‘fit’, however, Marcus’s ‘secret history of the twentieth century’ remains spatially partial; the rousing chorus of the Internationale on Parisian avenues in 1968 was drowned out in Eastern Europe by the rumble of Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of Prague. The interaction between art and politics that Marcus perceives, exists within a parallel universe to that experienced by those growing up under state socialist regimes where conditions of consumer deficit and media control rendered the Situationists’ mission to make a ‘spectacle’ of the spectacle created by mass consumption and entertainment industries irrelevant. The Situationists understood modern capitalist society to be permeated by alienation such that ‘people are removed and alienated not only from the goods they produce and consume, but also from their own experiences, emotions, creativity, and desires’ (Plant 1992: 85). The ‘poverty of everyday life’ experienced amid the abundance of Western consumer society, they suggested, could be overcome by ‘rediscovering play’ (Reynolds 2005: 96). In Russia of the late 1970s and the 1980s, however, consumer society did not exist in anything like the form it took in Western advanced capitalist societies; producing, and even consuming, music required significant investment and struggle from individuals. Moreover, aesthetic ‘play’ often brought serious consequences; the aesthetic gesture of wearing a Mohican, or simply looking different, frequently brought a direct physical response from groups who felt morally authorised to ‘correct’ those who stood out from the ‘grey mass’(a practice carried over to the contemporary period in some cities, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5). Thus, in the absence of abundance, the ‘poverty of everyday life’ was experienced in a much more direct form; punk emerged in Russia not as an elevation from, but coated in, the ‘Russian dirt, the everyday kind’ (Seva, St Petersburg, 14 April 2010).

The punk aesthetic of irony and parody, in contrast, has real resonance with post-socialist inflections of it. Nehring (1993: 284) argues that punk, in its first incarnation, in the economically declining UK at the end of the 1970s, constituted ‘a parody of public representations of political emergency’. Punk, he says, ‘deliberately exaggerated and parodied this threat, mocking the rhetoric of the mass media and the state’ (ibid.). Those studying various contemporary scenes have also noted the continued importance of irony and parody in protesting against ‘constraints imposed by conventional norms’ (Leblanc 2006: 41) in particular spaces and times. Moore (2004: 307) suggests that the ‘self-reflexive irony’ embedded within punk performance might be seen as equally pertinent to contemporary young people as they ‘turn[ed] signs and spectacles against themselves, as a means of waging war on society’ in response to ‘a mass-mediated, consumer-driven environment’.

Irony has always been central to East European punk practices, not least, as Perasović (2012: 290) points out, because ironic declarations of the ‘positive’ aspects of state socialist reality was one way of negotiating its censorship systems. Russian punk also is perceived by scene members as having a particular tradition of ‘playing the fool’ [yurodnichestvo, durakovalyaniya] (Zhora, St Petersburg, 18 June 2010). In Soviet Russia, this extends a wider cultural tradition of ‘steb’; an ‘ironic aesthetic’ that differs from sarcasm or other forms of absurd humour in that it requires ‘such a degree of overidentification with the object, person, or idea at which this stiob⁵ was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two’ (Yurchak 2006: 249–50). In post-socialist Russia, scene members continue to extensively employ ironic communication and aesthetics; as one scene member put it, in punk ‘everything has to be self-ironic’ (Il’ya Alekseev of Ankylym and xOCAx⁶). While the post-Soviet Russian state clearly differs from its Soviet predecessor in terms of its political reach, ironic forms of expression in the form of steb retain their importance, according to Gabowitsch (2009: 8), because ‘the Russian political system makes it very difficult to express political dissent or social critique in straightforward, politically constructive ways’. And, while the culture of steb remains, it is difficult to divide aesthetic statements from political ones, and evaluate statements on politics in a straightforward way since they always contain the possibility that they represent ‘ironic overidentification with an object that is otherwise immune to critique’ (ibid.). In this context, the most radical gesture might indeed be posing outside a designer clothes outlet rather than smashing its windows.

Punk as resistance to structural conditions

In sharp contrast to, and in direct debate with, Marcus’s focus on the aesthetics of punk, Stacy Thompson (2004) argues for a materialist investigation of punk economics and punk aesthetics. This emphasis on the structural conditions (capitalism) of the emergence of punk underpins the main alternative canon within punk studies to that discussed above.

Thompson conceptualises punk in terms of ‘desires’, specifically the attempt by capitalism to repress and contain desires into forms useful to capitalists and desires that break free and escape or resist these limits. The focus on capitalism as repressive regime limits the potential for his argument to be extended to post-socialist scenes where punk traditions are rooted in resisting dominant norms of collectivist society rather than the capitalist mode of production (Pilkington 1994: 229).

The most influential account within this canon, however, is Dick Hebdige’s (1979) understanding of punk as the creation of style. Punk style, he suggests, is created through ‘bricolage’ as a process of signifying underlying structural relations and disrupting dominant meanings. Hebdige (1979: 103) argued that subcultures are cultures of conspicuous consumption (even where certain types of consumption are conspicuously refused) but that it is how commodities are used in subcultural style practices that give them their alternative, resistive potential. It is interesting to note here that in the balancing act conducted by the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) between structuralism and culturalism, it is in the analysis of punk that the symbolic and cultural are most developed and the determinant role of structure least apparent. Thus while Hebdige asserts (although does not evidence) that subcultures such as the Teds, the skinheads, the punks, etc. ‘are all predominantly working class’ (101), he sees the relationship between punk, parent culture (workingclassness) and resistance as significantly different from other subcultural groups. Arguing that punks were disembedded from the parent culture, he suggests that, in contrast to the homologic relationship between style and values in other subcultures, the ‘unity’ between symbolic objects in punk style and the group’s relations and experience ‘expressed itself through rupture’ (122). Subcultural styles, writes Hebdige, are essentially communicative systems which qualify as art but ‘not as timeless objects, judged by the immutable criteria of traditional aesthetics, but as “appropriations”, “thefts”, subversive transformations, as movement’ (emphasis in original) (129).

The symbolic armoury of second and subsequent waves of punk is, of course, quite different from that with which Hebdige is concerned. Indeed, Wallach (2008: 99) suggests that today ‘punk’s appeal […] lies not in Hebdige’s indeterminate semiotic flux but rather punk’s formal stability’. Contemporary punks in Indonesia, he continues (ibid.), are less interested in punk’s avant-garde potential than in ‘conserving punk as a sort of living tradition’. O’Connor (2004: 188) also notes the tendency of punks on the ‘periphery’ (in this case in Mexico City) to maintain ‘dramatic punk style’ in contrast to Barcelona punks (especially of the older generation) who adopt ‘a messy or slightly faded look rather than full-scale punk style’. Scenes in Russia tend to repeat, internally, the core–periphery difference. Thus while style is almost universally dismissed as a marker of genuine punk practice (Steinholt 2012a: 275), spectacular punk styles were more likely to be encountered in the territorially and economically marginal city of Vorkuta than in the cultural capital of St Petersburg.

The in-depth exploration of the three scenes discussed in this book, moreover, leads the authors to take issue with Hebdige’s claim that punk was disembedded from both parent culture and own experience. The notion of the ‘working class’ as understood by Hebdige and other CCCS theorists (Cohen 2005) in relation to British society in the 1970s–80s cannot be transposed to late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia where notions of the primacy of the interests of the ‘proletariat’, if not realised, were embedded at least in Soviet ideology and rhetoric. Thus in subsequent chapters we take up Hebdige’s recognition of the importance of structural context in the emergence of punk but expand the notion of ‘parent culture’ beyond the understanding of ‘class location’ embedded in CCCS subcultural theory in order to properly account for the most important socio-structural factors shaping cultural life in Russia in the late and post-Soviet periods and to consider the difference in these structural constraints in the three very different sites of research. It is argued that, contrary to Hebdige’s claim, punk practices are not disembedded from, but steeped in, the experiences of ‘parent culture’. At the same time, ‘parent culture’ is understood to be rooted in complex socio-spatial, socio-economic and socio-cultural structures rather than in the realignment of class relations. Indeed, as is evident from the comparison of cases in this book, these structures may produce different relationships to the ‘working class’ within parent cultures. For example, in Vorkuta, individuals on the punk scene continue to have direct connection with the forces of industrial production and the city retains a strong culture of ‘hero workers’, which is transmitted intergenerationally and coloured with nostalgia for Soviet times in which the value of hard manual labour was recognised and rewarded (Pilkington and Sharifullina 2009). In this environment, as is explored in Chapter 5, punk practices such as ‘mutation’ remain deeply entrenched in embodied experiences of controls exerted over the working class, and the enactment of temporary freedoms from that subordination. In contrast, Chapter 4 demonstrates that, in Krasnodar, punk developed not in the search of a lost ‘workingclassness’, but rather in opposition to such ‘proletarians’, envisaged as the quintessential representation of the ‘grey mass’ (culturally conservative majority).

Punk and politics

Despite their quite different emphases on the aesthetic and the structural, both canons discussed above envisage the relationship between punk and politics or ruling regime in a similar way. Punk is posited as a movement with revolutionary, or perhaps more accurately, transformative, potential. This is often understood as containing two moments, which are either seen as running chronologically (Davies 1996) or as being two moments of the same phenomenon (Moore 2004). In the first case, first wave punk (exemplified by The Sex Pistols, and the early work of The Clash) is understood as a pure moment of rebellion or subversion being nihilistic, shocking and apocalyptic but vacant in terms of alternative political programme (Davies 1996: 9, 14) followed by a second wave (including the Tom Robinson Band, Gang of Four, Stiff Little Fingers and Crass) that became overtly politicised in terms of political themes in their lyrics as well as through participation in political campaigns such as ‘Rock against racism’, prisoners’ rights or pro-abortion groups (Davies 1996: 16). Of course, and because of the very importance of irony and ‘shock’ in the aesthetic armoury of punk, the substance of this political engagement was far from unambiguous. While punk has been associated primarily with the anti-fascist cause (as part of a wider left-wing tradition of dissent), recent research has suggested that punk’s engagement with anti-racism has been exaggerated and the movement’s political ambiguity, and elements of overt racism, left it open to exploitation by the extreme right (Sabin 1999: 199).

Contextualising punk within the wider political landscape of the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Worley (2012) charts the struggle by both Left (primarily the Socialist Workers’ Party through the Rock against Racism campaign and the Anti-Nazi League) and Right (particularly the National Front’s Rock against Communism campaign and the British Movement) to harness punk to their particular ideological struggle. The Left, Worley (16) suggests, saw music as a medium for protest against the inequities of capitalism, while the Right focused on gaining footholds in venues and localities, and control over particular bands, and thus often overlapped more traditional subcultural, football or territorial tensions and hostilities. Thus punk in the UK – as a musical form and a wider youth culture – was never incorporated fully into either left- or right-wing ideological frameworks but remained a contested site of political engagement, which often took a very physical form as punk gigs were disrupted by competing political factions (2). A similar political struggle for the mobilisation of punk is identified in Lahusen’s study of punk in the Basque region in the 1980s as a consequence of which punk was reformulated as ‘Basque radical rock’ and, in part, became allied with the Patriotic Nationalist Movement of the Basque country, although other strands of punk became closely linked with an array of left-wing social movements while a third maintained an undifferentiated opposition to all types of social order (Lahusen 1993).

Moore, however, suggests that these different engagements with politics reflect not so much chronologically consequent moments (waves) but punk’s dual response to p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on translation and transliteration
• 1 Punk, but not as we know it: rethinking punk from a post-socialist perspective
• 2 The evolution of punk in Russia
• 3 St Petersburg: big city – small scenes
• 4 Krasnodar: perpendicular culture in the biggest village on Earth
• 5 Vorkuta: a live scene in a ‘rotting city’
• 6 Conclusion
• References
• Index