Leningrad rock club

On March 8, 1981, the Leningrad rock club was founded in the “House of People's Creation” . It was the first such club in the Soviet Union and became the cradle of Russian-language rock music.

The rock club had a hall with around 200 seats and was not a venue in the western sense, but rather a mixture of culture house and musicians' association. The club at 13 Rubinstein Strasse had a “ Soviet ” and special rooms for the employees of the KGB , the CPSU and the Komsomol .

From 1983 the Leningrad Rock Club organized an annual festival; the first program was played by the groups Kino , Alissa , Televisor , Pop-Mechanika and other groups that are now classics of "Russky Rock".

It was later officially announced that the KGB had controlled the club in the early years. The state wanted to create a place where it could control youth culture. But inadvertently the nomenklatura created the headquarters of the approaching democratic revolution. Young, talented musicians from all over Russia came to the rock club, who are now stars like Yuri Shevchuk , Vyacheslav Butuzov and many others. The Leningrad rock club became the most important because it is the only official venue for groups such as DDT , Akwarium or Auktyon that are still popular today .

The "Russki Rock" received its decisive impulses not in Moscow, but in Leningrad. In contrast to Moscow, which, as the capital, had strictly monitored or censored civil liberties (e.g. bulldozer exhibition, purges for the 1980 Olympic Games), art in Leningrad was able to develop more freely. In the late 1980s, international bands like the Scorpions also played here for the first time .

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Leningrad rock club closed its doors because it could not hold its own against the emerging competition in the form of commercial rock clubs based on the western model.

literature

• Artemi Troitski and others: Rok-musyka w SSSR: opyt populjarnoi enziklopedii . Kniga, Moscow 1990, ISBN 5-212-00240-0 , pp. 183-192.