Yegor Letov video

Yegor Letov was a leading figure on the Russian punk-rock scene. In the late 1980s his band, Grazhdanskaya Oborona (civil defence), was a loudly confrontational presence on the anti-establishment music scene, known for its abrasive sound, a repetitive beat hammered out in a mood of desolation reinforced by lyrics which ran from melancholy misanthropism to obscenity.

The band's name was usually abbreviated, with appropriately dark humour, to Grob, meaning coffin. While its output would not have sounded surprising to a western ear, in the Soviet Union the 1980s were the days of magnitizdat, when secretly recorded tapes of underground concerts were passed from hand to hand. Much of the music was officially banned because of its antitotalitarian, anti-Soviet lyrics and its western-influenced form.

Igor Fyodorovich “Yegor” Letov was born in 1964 in Omsk in Siberia. His father was in the military and his mother was a doctor; both were avid readers, and young Yegor grew up with a large home library. He loved reading, counting Dostoevsky, Sartre and the avant-garde poet Vvedensky among his favourite authors, and remembered his childhood fondly, despite his difficult, occasionally violent, relationship with his father.

At school Letov was an average student but he enjoyed and excelled in music. He learnt the guitar and as a teenager had already started composing songs. After school he started to work as a designer in a factory but soon gave it up to devote himself to music. Like many of his generation, born into the stagnation of the Brezhnev era, Letov sought in music not only an escape from state orthodoxy but also an arena where he and his contemporaries could express their fierce contempt of state rhetoric.

He formed his first group in Omsk in 1982. Its name, Posev, came from a dissident journal published by the NTS, a patriotic anti-communist organisation founded by émigrés in 1930 in Belgrade. The choice of name revealed much about Letov's personal and political philosophy at the time. His views would change in the course of his life, however: after starting out as anti-communist and anarchist, he later came to define himself as a real communist, and in his final years thought of himself as a “global Christian”. By 1985 Posev had changed its name to Grazhdanskaya Oborona, and with that a musical cult was born. Its lyrics were no less offensive to the establishment than its western-influenced form. Official taste did not run to rock music, and the band signally failed to supply one of the key requirements of the Soviet aesthetic: the positive hero.

Grazhdanskaya Oborona was not without antecedents. As the old Soviet artistic forms became sclerotic in the 1970s and 1970s, and in the absence of a state-sponsored alternative, new styles had developed organically and were seized on by a public hungry for change.

Such singer-songwriters as Okudzhava and Vysotsky were one of the initial developments in this direction. Vysotsky's abrasive vocal style came not from a lack of talent but from a conscious rejection of the polished Soviet vocal form. His lyrics reflected life's brutal, sordid details with biting wit, and infectious humour. He also brought the surreal, long a bugbear of the Soviet Union, to the public stage. That early generation helped to break the boundaries imposed on art by the Soviet elite and prefigured such groups as Grazhdanskaya Oborona.

The group's outspoken lyrics and challenging posture soon attracted official attention, and in what was one of the Soviet Union's last attacks on

“anti-Soviet” activity and elements, one band member was called up for military service, while Letov was sentenced to three months in a mental institution. While the band, like others on the underground music scene - notably Kureikhin, KINO, Mashina Vremeni and Yanka Diaghileva - clearly had no future in the Soviet Union, at the same time being defined by the state as dangerous only added to its reputation - at home and abroad.

Letov's lyrics took the clichés of Soviet rhetoric and subverted them with contemptuous cynicism. He started to record the songs on his first official album, Nasty Youth, in 1985, but it could not be released until 1999. Not only did he sing about such forbidden subjects as army deaths in Afghanistan, but he did so in a forbidden style - pessimistic nihilism.

In 1987 Grazhdanskaya Oborona made its mark on the music scene - taking part in the ground-breaking, illegal concert in Novosibirsk and then making a grand tour of Soviet Russia, to Sverdlovsk, the Baltic, Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad, and Barnaul. That Novosibirsk concert marked the birth of post-Soviet pop music, and the state knew there was little it could do to stem its growing popularity.

Although musically crude, Letov's early work had an urgency and sincerity that deserves recognition. His oeuvre - he produced more than 40 albums - divides critics, some accusing him of being merely a misanthropic poseur, others claiming his work as a crucial element in the social movements that lead to the collapse of the Soviet edifice.

Misanthropy was certainly present in his work - his response to official optimism was a visceral hatred of Soviet daily life - as were elements of surrealism and whimsicality, as in song titles like I Don't Feel Like I Am Wearing My Own Trousers, and KGB-Rock and such lyrics as “Life is like sour cream, life is like a feather bed”. One song, Comrade Gorbachev, combines the lyrics “You need a house to love, you need a house to die, you need a house to walk about with no trousers” with the statements “Gosplan forbids me to love, Gosstroi forbids me to love, punish them comrade Gorbachev, punish them, father of the nation”.

Letov retained a loyal following in Siberia, but by the 1990s Russian rock had begun to diversify as other styles emerged. Although he remained, with Grazhdanskaya Oborona, a respected figure on the music scene, his work had lost its urgency. His lyrics became more reliant on obscenities to shock the audience, and the music itself became cruder. His politics shifted towards the right as he became involved with the National Bolshevik party, an organisation whose name consciously echoed the National Socialist party.

Letov enjoyed a rock'n'roll lifestyle, and despite his later claims to spirituality, drugs, drink and loose women were priorities for most of his career. His second wife survives him.

Yegor Letov, pop musician, was born on September 10, 1964. He died of heart failure on February 19, 2008, aged 43