How Kaliningrad's "wonderful 90s" were made
The Kaliningrad music crowd always differed radically from the Moscow "imperial" style. Moscow had its own "outsiders", but they were not fabulous at all (as they were styled in this city) – on the contrary, they were embittered against the whole world. Bookish boys left out in the cold during the new carve-up of property quickly found idols they could relate to. In music: The Clash, The Stranglers, Joy Division, and for the cleverer ones even Death in June and other representatives of the "sacred opposition of the globe". In politics they liked radicals of every stripe, often ideologically quite incompatible. The main thing was that they were against the "modern world": from the radical German leftists of the RAF to the opposition wing of the NSDAP that was crushed during the Night of the Long Knives. In Russian politics this most visible part of the capital's underground firmly associated itself with the defenders of the Supreme Soviet, shelled in 1993, and other "red-browns". The apogee of this movement was the series of "Russian Breakthrough" concerts in support of presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov, and a truly misanthropic anthem by some of the leading heroes of this underground – the band Banda Chetyryokh (Gang of Four) – under the telling title "Moscow Needs More Blood". The song contains no explicit calls to extremism whatsoever, but the lines "Hatred is born in our neighbourhoods. Hatred has already been born" spoke for themselves.
In Kaliningrad's neighbourhoods, at roughly the same time, it was not hatred being born at all, but quite the opposite.
A social class still strange and incomprehensible to the rest of the country, for whom the British Union Jack probably meant as much as the national tricolour. The Clash were loved here too. But no such literal and far-reaching conclusions were drawn here from the authors of "White Riot" and "Guns of Brixton" as in the capital. Menacing Dr. Martens boots were worn here to identify more clearly with British culture, and not at all to smash each other's skulls at football stadiums, as English working-class youth did.
Still, the starting point should be the band Gitary Stereo – the chief ideologists and founding fathers of what might be called the "Britpop revolution". With a flick of the wrist the band turned Kaliningrad's 1990s – which, as everyone knows, were "wild" throughout the country – into "wonderful" ones, and generally did everything possible to make provincial Kaliningrad one of the most interesting places in the country, a place at which even the capital sometimes glanced with envy.
The band's leader, Gleb Ilyusha, was born in Zvyozdny Gorodok near the Plesetsk cosmodrome. This, of course, gave him plenty of excuses for jokes along the lines of not having been born at all but dropped off by some stray UFO. And, it seems, the jokes were not entirely groundless. Judging by their lyrics, Gitary Stereo really did live not quite on this planet and not quite in this country (or else they simply cared very little about what was happening in the real world in those days). At any rate, in these tracks it is hard to find any landmarks by which one could unmistakably recognise the "classic" 90s everyone knows from post-perestroika films. That is, no all-consuming "chernukha" gloom, no Shevchuk-style "weeping sky underfoot" and none of the other attempts by Russian rockers to squeeze something out of the poetic legacy of the Silver Age. Instead there are starships, stars, guys with electric guitars, and the skies here are "blue as Levi's".
If the archetypal post-perestroika anthem that caught the general mood of the country was Chaif's desperate, melancholy moaning into the void, "Nobody Will Hear", whose lyrical hero is literally howling into emptiness from loneliness because the people on television have "had it up to here" with him, then Kaliningrad had its own answer to these cries.
Even that feeling of universal melancholy was served up here far more ironically and painted in completely different colours: "Frozen right through, but no complaints, no tears," sang Gitary Stereo in the song "21:55".
To someone from "Greater Russia", the lyrics of Gitary Stereo must truly have been surprising in their escapism, which was constructed almost in the manner of Hoffmann. Across the country people were dividing up property, power, money, offices and ministerial portfolios, tanks were firing at the windows of the Supreme Soviet, and federal troops were entering Chechnya to restore constitutional order. Meanwhile, in a small town on the country's westernmost edge, people were trying to invent a completely different culture, a different music, trying not to join any of the warring camps. And not because the locals could not see a single force or party under whose banners one could stand without serious damage to one's reputation. But because in the world of Kaliningrad's "wonderful 90s" this "Game of Thrones" simply did not exist.
Kaliningrad music's Moscow venture
With such an approach, it was no surprise that not a single Kaliningrad band ever really found happy creative fortune on a national scale. Some time in the late 1990s Gitary Stereo set off to conquer the capital. There they quickly came under the wing of Yevgeny Khavtan of the band Bravo. In a sense, he played a fateful role in the band's destiny. As the musicians themselves recall, after the Bravo leader tried to interfere in the creative process, nothing got recorded the way they themselves would have liked. Then came the 1998 default, and the band effectively disbanded itself. After that the "Gitary" still had the occasional one-off reunion, new songs and gigs, but the main story of the band is considered to have ended at that point.
The other Kaliningrad bands had much the same fate. Even the most Russophile band Kaliningrad has ever produced – Mir Ognya – got nowhere in the capital. There were a few broadcasts on Nashe Radio (the band fitted the station's format perfectly), a few concerts and even an album released on a Moscow label, but it all ended in a break-up.
The guest appearance on Nashe Radio of the ironic and cheeky electro-major band Lavanda turned out indecently short. The band made it into the station's then hit parade, "Chartova Dyuzhina", with the song "Japanese Synthesiser". But of course a band styled as brash 80s pop music, singing about the kings of holiday camps, badminton and Commissario Cattani, could never reach the top positions in a chart dominated by Aria and Korol i Shut. After the first broadcast Mikhail Kozyrev could only throw up his hands, wondering how anyone could feel nostalgic for that strange era of black-market dealers and the first discos.
Evidently, Kaliningrad's game of postmodernism remained beyond his comprehension.
Another band iconic for the city, LondonParis, also failed to break through into "Greater Russia". In essence, their romantic synth-pop could well have made the band members, if not first-magnitude stars, then confident fighters in the second or third echelon of Russian pop-rock. The band's leader, Yevgeny Lebedev, now recalls with a smile that the band turned out to be too eclectic for the capital. Nashe Radio decided that LP sounded too "poppy", while stations specialising in the pop format, on the contrary, saw them as representatives of the rock'n'roll camp. It really is a funny story: a band considered mainstream in Kaliningrad was unexpectedly pushed into the underground in the capital.
Mind you, this whole history of the local stars' failures was always one more reason for pride in Kaliningrad. Whenever the latest heroes capitulated again without conquering the capital, the old Kaliningrad legend came into play: Moscow had once again proved too thick-headed and conservative to understand the progressive trends coming from Kaliningrad. In matters of culture it was always customary to treat the capital with mild contempt. After all, the leader of Gitary Stereo did not speak very flatteringly even of the ideologically kindred Ilya Lagutenko. In some ways this legend of "misunderstood Kaliningrad" has a ring of truth. Already in the 2000s a whole generation of bands would appear in the country whose sound differed radically from traditional Russian rock. What would link them with Kaliningrad's "Gitary" was their assiduously flaunted Anglophilia. By then, however, Gitary Stereo, having been ahead of fashion by at least 5–10 years, would already be in honourable "retirement".
"The end of a beautiful era"
Every era eventually comes to its logical end. The unruly nineties would give way to the 2000s. The country would gradually be brought to a common denominator. In 2005, for the first time, a governor would take office in the region who had not been elected by its residents but appointed from above. Owing to changes in federal legislation, the Baltic Republican Party would cease to exist (indeed, thanks to that law, all parties that might have claimed regional status would cease their activities).
None of these metamorphoses actually affected the creative sphere. But they made it clear that the old era was over and a new one had begun.
"Forever '99 and the last DJ", Gitary Stereo would sing on their new single, as if trying to stay forever in their "wonderful 90s" – but it would be too late.
In 2012 another band important to the city, LondonParis, would release a new studio album called "Krasota" ("Beauty"). At first glance it is a fairly typical album for LP. In sound it still looks to new wave and fairly harmless synth-pop. The lyrics are once again threaded through with all that naive eighties romanticism multiplied by the Kaliningrad context: "all roads lead to the sea" and other elements of the Kaliningrad landscape that have long since taken up residence in the band's lyrics. In the video for the song "Morskoye" ("Of the Sea"), the owner of Vagonka, Andrey Levchenko, is driving somewhere in a convertible surrounded by girls. He is stopped by an unshaven traffic policeman who is in fact not a traffic policeman but Yevgeny Grishkovets. And since this is not a policeman but Grishkovets, the story ends more than happily: he and the girls are whisked off somewhere in an unknown direction.
It might seem like yet another attempt by a Kaliningrad band to hide from the surrounding reality in that same cosy world "where all roads lead to the sea". But it is precisely on "Krasota" that a certain sobering-up sets in. The cosy haze dissipates, and beauty and love – the constant themes of LondonParis lyrics – suddenly turn into something utterly infernal and hostile to the hero. "We're all alone… All alone amid this beauty… Such a beautiful world", the musicians sing in the chorus, while in the background we hear a snippet of Vladimir Putin's speech with his famous call to "whack them in the outhouse" and the impassive voice of an announcer reading out that 334 people were killed in a terrorist attack, 186 of them children. The nineties are over, a completely different era surrounds LP, and it is no longer possible to ignore it by hiding in one's lethargic dreams.
The track "Moskva lyubit tebya" ("Moscow Loves You") brings this anxious mood to its logical climax. Yes, the word "love" and its various forms are what one stumbles across most often in the song. But the lines "Putin loves you, and Channel One, and the terrorists, and Petrosyan" do not inspire much optimism. In other words, it is the kind of love you want to hide from. In their last recorded single, "Baikonur", LP would put it even more radically. There they sing in so many words about needing somehow to survive in this brave new world of "total love".
Kaliningrad music did manage to survive in the world of "total love". But whereas it was once possible to create one's own "wonderful 90s" and live in them as in a ghetto, paying no attention to anyone, now that refuge has collapsed.
Now the story of the rises and falls of Kaliningrad bands is simply part of the mythology of a provincial city, something that is sometimes pleasant and sometimes a little embarrassing to remember. This story exists, it will never disappear anywhere, but it has long since ceased to be a tool with which one could teach Moscow a lesson and prove to it that it is not cool.
Photo: Vitaly Nevar
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
