Roentgenizdat: Soviet Era "X-Ray LPs" of Banned Western Recordings

From Weird Vibrations

October 12, 2009
Roentgenizdat: Sentimental Songs on X-Ray

In the 1950s, music enthusiasts in the Soviet Union made copies of banned Western records using sheets of x-ray film purchased from clinics and hospitals. Photographic film, like wax, acetate, or vinyl, is thick and firm enough to be used with commercially available music engraving machines. X-rays weren’t the ideal medium, being prone to warping, but they worked well enough, and were cheap to boot.

Comments on roentgenizdat have been floating around for a few years, and Princeton English professor Eduardo Cadava is writing a book on the subject, out soon.

Roentgenizdat are interesting, first, as a series of artifacts. Prefiguring picture disks, non-circular shapes, and other graphically novel record gimmicks, these albums feel like an early example of what few people got into until the 70s and 80s – experimentation with records as objects. Although dubbing onto x-ray was in this case a matter of political necessity rather than unprovoked aesthetic tinkering, the dubbers quite clearly paid attention to the images they chose, as well as the placement of the center holes.

.....
Read the entire post HERE.

Teaching African American Studies in Russia

Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog has some guest bloggers this week, and I have really enjoyed a couple of posts by Jelani Cobb (who has a blog HERE) on the experience of teaching African American history in Russia. Here are some excerpts:


From "A View From the East":

Jun 17 2010, 1:15 PM ET | Comment
[Jelani Cobb]

Some years back I made a resolution to ignore the second half of any sentence that began with the words "We are the only people who..." Almost always the next clause featured some shortcoming of the race and after years spent drenched in the backwaters of Afrocentrism (the patchouli era), I'd had my fill of black specificity.

"We are the only people," came to be an advance warning that I was talking to someone who probably didn't know much about any people other than (a small segment of) black ones. More subtly, an expression of the speaker's fixation on the values of a wider world they both rejected and envied.

I spent the past spring semester teaching African American history at Moscow State University. People tend to toward a common reaction when I mention this. "What was that like?" The inflection hinting that two decades after the end of the Cold War, Russia -- at least in the minds of Americans -- remains foreign in a way that few other places are. There's a lot I could say about that experience but the shorthand version is the we are not the only people.

.............

In the thirteen years I've been teaching African American history, the common theme has been the way in which the black experience has stood outside of, and therefore defined, American democracy. But from the first day in my classroom at Moscow State University, the unintentional theme was the common threads of the past and its weight in the present. Paul Robeson once said that of all the places he'd visited, Russians reminded him the most of Negroes. He had a point.

Russia's serfs were freed just two years before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
.....

During World War II somewhere between 20-25 million Soviet citizens were killed, meaning on its most basic terms, that they lost more people in four years than died in the entire course of the Transatlantic slave trade.
.........

I traveled 7000 miles and found myself immersed in a culture that was defined, but not destroyed by brutal history, whose people bore the mark of that past even as they took pride in the fact that other people might not have survived such trials. Familiar.

.......... I was reminded of that blues truth that suffering doesn't recede into the past, it gets handed down through history like an inheritance. What one chooses to do with that inheritance is ultimately the only thing that matters.

So no, we aren't the only people. And the only problem comes with needing to be.

It's great stuff, please read the full post HERE.


And a post "That Russian for 'Hope'":

Jun 18 2010, 12:41 PM ET | Comment
[Jelani Cobb]

If you are a black man teaching African American history in Russia in 2010 you will be asked about Barack Obama. A lot. I began my class by projecting an image of black slaves picking cotton on a plantation alongside a picture of the Obama inauguration and explained that my goal for the semester was to explain how we moved from the picture on the left to the picture on the right.

Yesterday the NYT ran a story on a Pew study of Obama's impact on foreign perceptions of the U.S. abroad. Given the previous administration's antagonism toward the UN and references to "old Europe" it's not exactly surprising that the country's popularity in Western Europe surged post-Bush.

But it was worth noting that Russia was one of the two countries that showed the largest increase in positive sentiment toward the United States since Obama's election.

...........

For it's own reasons, the Soviet Union highlighted the history of slavery, lynching, disfranchisement and Jim Crow. As a consequence, even now the Russian students had more base knowledge of African American history than many students I've taught in the United States.) That said, the election of a black president might have been farther outside their expectations than many other places.

The question I encountered most often was whether or not Obama was actually calling the shots. I initially took that as a matter of racial skepticism—surely the black guy was some sort of racial PR stunt. But at some point I realized that the question also had to be understood in context of who was asking it. Many of the Russians I talked to didn't believe their own president was calling the shots. It wasn't cynical, it was raw experience that made it reasonable to doubt whether Barack Obama was actually in charge.

Read the full post HERE.

Viral Video Russian Singer Eduard Khil and Remix

Okay, after resisting the weirdness that is this Eduard Khil video piece making the rounds (Ed-roll, it's the new Rick-roll), I finally give in, but also throw in my favorite (so far) remix.





The New York Daily News has a good background on him and the song HERE.

And, of course, there's a blog for him HERE (I haven't tried the link to download the song).

THE SANTERIA HOUSE OF MOSCOW

What a trip. A listing in the Moscow Times:

THE SANTERIA HOUSE OF MOSCOW (La Casa del Santo) is a nonsectarian social association of worshippers who are interested in Santeria (Afro-Cuban religion). We have several celebrations and spiritual activities related to our Orishas (gods). Our place is at Ul. Klimashkina Bldg. 22, M. Ulitsa 1905 Goda. Contact Carlos A. Reyes, e-mail: aoddun@yahoo.com. Phone: +7-963-616-3498.

Way cool hip-hop remix of Soviet dancing

"The Singing Revolution": How Estonians sang their way to freedom

CS Monitor
How Estonians sang their way to freedom
A new documentary tells story of how the national tradition of singing helped unite the masses against the Soviet occupation.
By Gloria Goodale | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 24, 2008 edition

Walk around the verdant green amphitheater known as the Lauluvaljak, or song ground, here on the outskirts of Tallin, Estonia, and it's easy to imagine the air alive with music, reverberating up the grassy slopes from the half-domed, vaulted stage at the bottom of this natural theatrical setting.

But to grasp what it feels like to be amid an audience 300,000-strong, singing in Von Trapp family-like harmony with sub rosa political purpose, you'll just have to pick up the DVD of "The Singing Revolution," a passion project by documentarians Jim and Maureen Tusty. Released this week, it is the story of how a tiny country (population: 1 million) with a 5,000-year-old culture, perched on the western edge of the Russian giant, used its tradition of song to finally free itself of foreign occupation, in this case the Soviet state, in 1991.

This tale of how peaceful crowds managed to fend off Soviet tanks as they attempted to take over the local television station is operatic in its drama, says the married couple. "This is the story of the power of nonviolent resistance to succeed where guns and rock-throwing would have resulted in death and more political oppression," says Jim Tusty. The nation was trying to throw off the Soviet yoke, which ensnared it in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin secretly signed a pact to divide up the Baltic countries. But, says Jim Tusty, it is also the story of a relationship between art and politics.

"We wanted to tell this remarkable story ... before the generation that lived it is no longer around," he says. He adds that a number of the older Estonians he interviewed say they are grateful to have the narrative preserved. They see that the next generation – a global, externally focused cohort in a nation that is now part of the European Union and NATO – has little awareness of the struggles of an earlier generation, he says.

The story began for the filmmakers when they taught a cinema class in Estonia during the summer of 1999 and began to hear about the song festival and the revolution it had inspired. In the festival, founded in 1869 and held every five years, choirs from all over the nation audition to be part of the 20,000 to 30,000-member chorus that takes the stage and leads the huge crowds that attend.

The music is a mix of modern and traditional folk songs, many of which have what the team calls the kind of oral traditions that are full of hidden, deeply patriotic meaning that sustained Estonians through centuries of oppression. As they investigated the festival itself, they discovered the role that the traditional songs played during the critical years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, 1987 through 1991. Rather than engage the Soviets directly, as Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania did, all with disastrous results, the various political groups united in song.

"They never wanted to give the Soviets a reason to arrest or hurt anyone," says Maureen Tusty. Paraphrasing one of the Estonians who survived the brutal years of Soviet gulags, her husband adds, "Art used to be serious when real political participation was not possible," but now, with meaningful political activity allowed, the arts have become trivial and the next generation is not interested in the power of this culture to make a difference.

Beyond that, the filmmakers say the film has a role to play in a world that is getting increasingly violent, particularly a Russia with more aggressive foreign policies. They have assembled a three-disc educational DVD version (available at www.singingrevolution.com), complete with maps and historical data. But, Jim Tusty hastens to add, they are not advocacy filmmakers. "We just believe in this story, which has its own message."

• Los Angeles-based writer Gloria Goodale toured the Tallinn festival grounds in 2007.

Russian monastery anticipates the familiar toll of ancient bells

Christian Science Monitor
Russian monastery anticipates the familiar toll of ancient bells
After 78 years, a set of 18 iconic bells rescued from a Moscow monastery will return home.
By Amy Farnsworth | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 13, 2008 edition

Cambridge, Mass. - As the chiming of bells rang through Harvard University's campus among a field of caps and gowns last week, it was the final time they would be heard – the end of an era for the university, but also a new beginning.

For the past 78 years, the 18 bells have hung high above Harvard's buildings, chiming on Sunday afternoons and every year at commencement. This summer, the bells will return home to ring at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow from which they were rescued in 1930 at the height of the Stalinist era, at a time when antireligion campaigns sought to destroy monasteries and melt down their ironwork.

In a world where artifacts are often stolen and seldom returned, the story of the Danilov bells is rare.

It all began in 1929 when American philanthropist Charles Crane was prompted by his agent Thomas Whittemore to save the bells from destruction. He purchased them from the Soviet government, which "was apparently desperate for money and was selling off everything of value – imperial Bokhara rugs, artwork, and church property," says Luis Campos, a Harvard alumnus and history professor at Drew University in New Jersey who has been researching the bells. They were transported by train from Moscow to Leningrad, he says, and then shipped to the US.

Weighing in at 25 tons, the bells were installed in Harvard University's Lowell House residence hall and atop the Baker Library. Students embraced the art of bell ringing with the formation of the Lowell House Society of Russian Bell Ringers, later taking trips to Russia to experience the art firsthand.

"They really are the only four existing bell sets from the prerevolutionary times that weren't destroyed during the Stalinist era," says Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard and master of Lowell House.

For the Danilov Monastery, now the home of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the homecoming of the bells is a matter of spiritual significance. "[The bells] are described as singing icons – that they have voices and tongues that are singing to God as they are ringing," says Professor Campos. "There is no way to replace these bells. They are an organic set and they have their own history from the place they were hung. They were very much a part of the religious community."

Hierodeacon Roman, the chief bell ringer at the Danilov Monastery, had only seen and heard the bells on the Internet until he visited Harvard in 2004, where he had a chance to ring them for the first time. "We've been anticipating [this] for a long long time in our monastery," he said, describing the event as being of "miraculous" importance and praising Harvard's cooperation.

The first request for the return of the bells came in 2002 and picked up momentum as Harvard alumni and the monastery made a case. Last September, Harvard returned the bell from the Baker Library and replaced it with a new bell. This summer, the university will begin disassembling the other 17. A new set of bells created at a foundry in Russia will replace them – all financed by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg.

To commemorate the bells' return to Moscow, Harvard held a two-day event last week, inviting bell-ringing alumni and members of the monastery, among others, to recount the history, cite appreciation, and hear the bells for the last time on US soil.

The exchange of the bells has led to an ongoing friendship between Harvard and the Danilov Monastery. Harvard students and faculty will visit Russia, and members of the monastery will visit Harvard to teach Russian bell-ringing classes. "It's not just about moving metal back and forth across the ocean," Campos says. "It's about forging relationships between people."

Igor Moiseyev, 101; Russian choreographer elevated folk dancing into a theatrical art

Igor Moiseyev, 101; Russian choreographer elevated folk dancing into a theatrical art
By Lewis Segal
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 3, 2007

Igor Moiseyev, the ballet-trained dancer and choreographer whose pioneering vision of theatricalized folk dance not only created an acclaimed Russian company but influenced artists and audiences around the world, has died. He was 101.

A proud, ambitious man who once said the aim in his work was "to give the public a spiritual portrait of a people," Moiseyev died Friday in a Moscow hospital. He had been in poor health in recent years and was rarely seen in public. Looking frail, he did appear at a Moscow performance celebrating his centennial last year. For the last three days, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported, he had been unconscious.

Moiseyev virtually invented folk dancing as a professional stage spectacle, insisting that he had both a right and a duty to change a participatory endeavor to a serious choreographic idiom worthy of standing beside classical ballet and modern dance.

"Folklore in the strictest sense is confining," he told Times music and dance critic Martin Bernheimer in 1970. "I never was interested in that. I merely take the folk dance and its related customs as a point of departure for fanciful interpretation.

"My dancers are classically trained at our own school," he said. "The choreography I give them would defeat the amateurs they are called upon to impersonate."

The Moiseyev company's success led to copycat ventures in Russia and abroad, troupes that filtered national idioms through the prism of ballet, modern dance or contemporary show-dancing, emerging with impressions of folk culture more than actual transcriptions or adaptations.

Few of them, however, matched Moiseyev's "Partisans," in which a smattering of folklore and an abundance of choreographic imagination produced a stirring tribute to the guerrilla fighters who defended his homeland during World War II.

But the same formula could also generate blatant kitsch, such as his "Yurochka," in which an indecisive womanizer wooed six finger-in-the-cheek village maids, or his "Night on Bald Mountain," which descended to coarse comic mime and then sank even further to pseudo-demonic dance-charades of no choreographic distinction.

Like many of his imitators, Moiseyev may have brought a new audience to folklore by harnessing it to existing theatrical dance traditions. But some of those traditions were artistically bankrupt long before he adopted them, and they gained no credibility from their new context.

Igor Aleksandrovich Moiseyev was born on Jan. 21, 1906, in Kiev, the capital of what is now Ukraine, to a lawyer father and a mother of French origins.

He lived in Paris from ages 4 to 6, then moved back to Russia, where he saw his first ballet at age 13 in Moscow. Either that year or the year before, he started ballet studies, first privately, then at the Bolshoi Ballet School, where he became a pupil of ballet reformer Alexander Gorsky. He also studied at the Moscow School of Choreography.

He graduated from the Bolshoi school in 1924, joined the company and danced leading roles in ballets such as "Joseph the Beautiful" (1925) and his own first major work, "Salammbo" (1932), to music by Andrei Arends that had previously been choreographed by Gorsky. He also formed a partnership with leading Bolshoi ballerina Ekaterina Geltser.

His choreographic association with the Bolshoi continued long after he left the company in 1939, most notably with a 1958 version of "Spartacus" to music by Aram Khachaturian (not the choreography the Bolshoi currently performs). But he felt restricted by that company's aesthetic throughout his career there. "I left without regret," he told Bernheimer. "The Bolshoi is very beautiful, but I have managed to survive quite adequately without 'Swan Lake.' "

In 1936, Moiseyev was asked to head the choreographic department of a new Theater of Folk Art in Moscow, and he soon helped organize a nationwide folk dance festival. At a program of works from all parts of the country, he formed the plan of creating a professional company dedicated to folk dancing, edited and adapted for the stage.

In 1937, the State Folk Dance Ensemble -- soon also known as the Moiseyev Dance Company -- was founded with the participation of 35 dancers, most of them amateurs. Moiseyev had to train them and also re-choreograph the Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Byelorussian, Armenian, Kazakh, Azerbaijani and Moldavian folk dances that were seen for the first time in Moscow's Hall of Columns. Other regional specialties were soon added.

At the time, his creative objectives included "perfecting" traditional ethnic dances using the aesthetic principles and technical disciplines he had gained from classical ballet.

His success in achieving this goal proved not only a major reason for the growing popularity of his company with audiences unfamiliar with his source-idioms but also, much later, for controversy over the extent to which he had adulterated them. "We are not a folklore collective," he always insisted. "We are a creative collective."

By 1941, the company had 70 professional dancers trained under Moiseyev's supervision at either the Bolshoi Theatre School or its National Dance Department. It continued to expand and began to tour internationally after World War II ended -- the first major Russian company to do so -- visiting England and France in 1955 and making its American debut three years later.

One of the chilliest junctures in the Cold War found Moiseyev playing goodwill ambassador, wooing the U.S. public in 1958 with his company's energy and professionalism but also with prime Americana -- the Virginia Reel -- danced as a finale year after year. "No folk ever danced like this," New York Times dance critic John Martin wrote admiringly after the company's debut, and he was right in more ways than one.

In 1966, Moiseyev founded a smaller company, the Concert Dance Ensemble, to develop talented young artists. Along the way, he picked up the Lenin Prize, the Stalin Prize and the State Prize and was officially named People's Artist of the USSR (1953) and Hero of Socialist Labor (1976).

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought him greater creative freedom but also new financial realities. "The government supports the company, pays monthly salaries and pays for our studios," he told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2002. "But it isn't enough to cover all our expenses." Another important upside: "Now we can decide what to do with the money we can earn from our performances."

More than once, Moiseyev attributed his longevity to staying busy and productive. "Follow a healthy routine with uninterrupted creative work," he advised in the same 2002 interview. "The most important thing in life is to do what you love."

Survivors include his second wife, Irina Alekseevna Chagadaeva. A funeral is planned for Wednesday in Moscow.

lewis.segal@latimes.com

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Dark Popularity of Russian Chanson

July 16, 2006
Music
Notes From a Russian Musical Underground: The Sound of Chanson
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY

Correction Appended

MOSCOW

IT’S another busy night at the noisy Casino de Paris here in the Russian capital, a grown-up post-Soviet Disneyland where burly men with expensive cellphones, their dolled-up companions and aging, wide-eyed foreigners play blackjack amid swirls of cigar smoke and snifters of cognac. But what makes the scene truly Russian is the musical entertainment. On a vintage-looking stage framed by red velour curtains, a group of musicians is livening up the proceedings with tunes inspired by an unlikely source: the gulag, the notorious system of forced labor camps of the Stalin era.

Mikhail Shufutinsky, a star of Russian chanson, in November 2005. The genre’s romantic take on crime has drawn comparisons to gangsta rap.



Some of the songs played by the band, Lesopoval — the word means timber-felling, after a brutal form of forced labor in the camps — are jaunty; others are plaintively romantic. Backed by accordion, synthesizer, guitar, drums and choreographed singers, Sergei Kuprik, the lead heartthrob, sings of the long train ride to the barracks, life in the barracks, love in the barracks, memories of the barracks. His lyrics are sprinkled with untranslatable prison slang but have the unmistakably epic sweep of this nation’s history.

This is Russian chanson, an amorphous genre (not to be confused with the French cabaret style made famous by Édith Piaf and Charles Aznavour) that has become the soundtrack of contemporary Russia. The dignitaries arriving for the Group of Eight meeting this weekend in St. Petersburg, its epicenter, may not hear much of it; it’s not the sort of thing one plays for out-of-town guests. But on any other day, in almost any other city, it booms from kiosks and cars and casinos and discos, with gritty songs of Russian life that appeal to pre-teenagers and little old ladies alike and contrast sharply with the bland vanilla pop of the payola-ridden state-controlled media.

With its deeply, even brazenly romantic take on crime and punishment, it has often been compared to American gangsta rap (and, in its more soulful, renditions to country music), and it has similarly attracted an audience of people far beyond the actual criminal underworld. When Mikhail Krug, often called the king of Russian chanson, was murdered in 2002, hundreds of thousands attended his funeral. Fans still descend on his home and grave as if they were Graceland.

But even more than gangsta rap, Russian chanson has attracted the ire of politicians. In a widely broadcast denunciation, Vladimir Ustinov, who was then Russia’s prosecutor general, referred to a chanson competition in Russia’s prisons as “propaganda of the criminal subculture.” In Siberia, a public official recently announced that intercity bus drivers would be “banned from listening to chanson and other obscene music.”

In Russia, where radio and television are often subject to bribery and political influence, that official disfavor can have real consequences. And so chanson, despite its popularity, is relegated to sporadic broadcasts and late-night time slots.

“They’re afraid that people who listen to pop will suddenly hear chanson and they’ll like it,” Mr. Kuprik said. “Maybe there are other reasons. Maybe censorship. There’s an idea that Soviet people shouldn’t think, reflect.”

As a result, it enjoys a strange double identity, of a sort possible only in a country balancing the liberties of wild capitalism with the legacy of recent totalitarianism. It is a forbidden product that flourishes in the brightest spotlight, a phenomenon that is officially discouraged but tacitly indulged, a status symbol all the more powerful because it’s illicit.

“I like the phrase of one D.J.,” said Mikhail Medvedovsky of Radio Petrograd Russky Chanson, a St. Petersburg radio station that has thrived despite the strictures on its music — a paradox that is characteristic of the Russian media. “ ‘Russian chanson is like a pornographic magazine. Everyone reads it, everyone listens to it, but they’re afraid to admit it.’ ”

Some officials and bankers, he said, don’t hide it and ask for advance copies of the latest releases. In fact, some of the most popular performers earn their biggest paychecks at parties and weddings for Russia’s rich and famous. And Lesopoval recently played at the birthday of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist Russian politician.

THE deep roots of chanson stretch back to prerevolutionary Russia, to the songs of serfs and czarist political prisoners. (They may reach back even further: one of the highlights of Holy Week in the Russian Orthodox Church is a hymn called “The Wise Thief,” which Russians are known to race to church to hear.)

Some of these songs sound like Russian equivalents of chain-gang songs and have deep folkloric roots. The protest songs of future Bolshevik leaders held in czarist prisons are also part of the genre’s history. Meanwhile, blatnaya pesnya (literally translated as “criminal songs”) have a distinct underworld air.

The roots took hold in the early Soviet era, with its bloody period of civil war and nationalization, followed by the New Economic Policy, a brief, chaotic period of liberalization — and criminality — that many have compared to the current era. The port city of Odessa, an economic and ethnic crossroads, was one of the centers of that period, and it became the spiritual home to this kind of music. When a number of Russian musicians went to sing for their supper in Paris, the musical style got a name: chanson.

Stalin’s repression and camps added another layer of meaning, and the result was a vital new form: songs that told of the pain of life under the Soviet system while at the same time mocking it. Or at least tweaking it: these songs are sometimes referred to as blatnaya muzyka — criminal music, which is also the name of a guide to criminal slang used by agents of the NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor. (President Vladimir V. Putin has been known to slip into it when angry, irritated or speaking of Chechen terrorists.) As Anton Yakovlev, the chief editor of Russky Chanson radio, says, “The totalitarian system of Soviet power gave rise to a second culture in everything.”

During the Khrushchev era’s thaw and the “period of stagnation” during the Brezhnev years, the songs were sung at home and in closed concerts, and recorded in secret apartment studios. Recordings were distributed samizdat, passed hand to hand like carbon copies of Solzhenitsyn’s banned novels.

By 1980 the music had become so popular that the death of Vladimir Vysotsky, a gravelly-voiced bard who is the genre’s godfather, nearly shut down Moscow. But the music also developed on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain.

In the 1970’s, Little Odessa — New York’s Brighton Beach — became the Western cradle for chanson. On the émigré circuit, these uncensored evocations of Soviet life gave audiences bittersweet memories of home. But the recordings also made their way back to Russia, sneaked in by sailors and diplomats, many of the same people who were bringing in banned books.

Some songs might even have made their way in with direct American assistance. The C.I.A. used various means to disseminate anti-Soviet literature. It might have done the same with music, said Aleksandr Abramov, producer of a chanson group named after a prison break from Butyrka (the Russian equivalent of Alcatraz). “As far as I know, American structures enabled these recordings to get to Russia,” he explained. “When this wave of émigrés came, this probably enabled its development most of all. In the 1980’s, namely the American government enabled the development of chanson in Russia. It was ideological warfare. The collapse of the Soviet Union. America helped.”

And when that collapse occurred, the music flourished openly. “Now you can say the word Russian chanson,” said Mikhail Shufutinsky, one of the genre’s émigré stars. “Before, this was a word that sat behind bars. Now it’s been allowed to go free, and it’s turned into song.”

Aficionados say it has become the ultimate crossover genre, with Johnny Cash-type singing about sin and redemption, a Spice Girls-style girl-group singing about girlish antics, and a remarkable number of very tough-looking, thick-necked middle-aged men in gold chains singing about a mother’s love. (The genre’s popularity has even spurred an indie backlash, including “Gulag Tunes,” a version of Stalin-era prison songs set to surf music and produced by a music critic who derides Russian chanson as the déclassé music of “drivers and security guards.”)

A strong strain of political protest runs throughout. “That’s one of the themes,” said Dmitry Andreyev, the executive director of Russky Chanson, a Moscow recording label that trademarked the term in the 90’s, “the injustice of the system, which is characteristic, if you draw parallels, for rap and chanson.” One of the biggest stars, Sergei Trofimov, recently filled a Moscow concert hall playing “Generation Pepsi,” which expresses disappointment with the post-Soviet experience. And Lesopoval recorded a song that honors soldiers fallen in Chechnya, a subject usually swept under that carpet.

But as diverse as the style and delivery may be, the lyrics almost inevitably return to “blatnaya pesnya.”

Chanson’s popularity is undeniable, but it is hard to quantify. Piracy accounts for such a vast and uncounted portion of all music sales that concerts do not so much support record releases as make up for them. “There is no doubt,” Mr. Andreyev said, “that pirates produce millions of our discs.”

Whatever the numbers, with its simple, hummable melodies and resonant subject matter, chanson “can be defined as songs about life, from the soul,” suggested Mr. Kuprik, the singer from Lesopoval.

SONGS about Russian life, Soviet or post-Soviet, necessarily involve an ambivalent relationship to the government. And when it comes to chanson, the feeling is apparently mutual.

For all the official condemnations of the genre, Radio Chanson, an easy-listening version based in Moscow, is No. 3 in the market, and no less than the choir of the MVD, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, performed the station’s theme song at a recent awards show.

In St. Petersburg, the imperial city that is the music’s unofficial capital, Aleksandr Rozenbaum is one of the biggest stars. “It’s an oppressive city formed by czarist power,” he said. “You feel it most near the State Department. If you’re here, you feel it near the Kremlin, near the Winter Palace.” But Mr. Rozenbaum embodies the paradox of chanson’s forbidden-but-cherished status: onstage, he sings of lone wolves and bandits in the night, packing halls across the country. Offstage, he has a seat in the Russian Parliament as a member of the pro-Putin United Russia Party.

Though he is not a fan of the term chanson, he openly mocks the former prosecutor general’s fear of it. “It’s better that prisoners are in a song contest than a knife-making contest,” he suggested.

That said, he doesn’t think it’s appropriate for the airwaves. “Can you imagine an amateur night from Sing-Sing being broadcast on television in America?” said Mr. Rozenbaum, who has performed in the United States dozens of times since the early 1990’s. He also used his position in Parliament to wage a war against lip-synching, the bane of the Russian pop scene. Chanson is performed live, if occasionally out of tune.

Mr. Rozenbaum appears regularly in televised, state-controlled holiday concerts, leading to complaints of favoritism. On the other hand, a televised documentary about the contract killing of a crime boss referred to a close friendship between the two men. Mr. Rozenbaum, it was noted, named an album “A Slow Schizophrenia,” after the diagnosis given to the underworld figure.

Even Mr. Putin may have given chanson a boost.

In 1999, the weekly Argumenty i Fakty reported that one of his pastimes as a student at the KGB’s foreign intelligence school in Moscow was making copies of recordings by Mikhail Shufutinsky and Villi Tokarev, both of whom left flourishing mainstream careers in Russia for the United States in the 70’s.

Mr. Tokarev drove a New York City cab and plowed his earnings into recordings that made him a star all over again, in Brighton Beach and across the entire Soviet Union. But this time around he wasn’t performing pop; he was singing songs about émigré life that sound as if they’re set to Balkan turbo-rock.

Now 72, he still performs them with unfathomable energy for any age. He drew the largest crowd ever to the Lubavitcher-run, oligarch-financed Moscow Jewish Community Center in May. Concert organizers credited him with helping to raise the Iron Curtain, and despite his Kuban Cossack origin, there are plans to nominate him as the Jewish community’s man of the year.

In an interview after the concert, he said that chanson’s “main mission is to convey what happens to people.”

“These are very truthful songs,” said Mr. Tokarev, who has a handlebar mustache and performed in a canary-yellow suit. “There can’t be any lies or hypocrisy in them. Such songs would immediately betray themselves.”

As for Mr. Shufutinsky, he now has a home in Los Angeles; both his sons attended Beverly Hills High School, and one serves in the American military. Mr. Shufutinsky has even played keyboard on some tracks for Run-D.M.C. But he, too, spends much of his time in Russia, performing with Hollywood production values and with model-beautiful backup singers and dancers who look as if they walked in off an MTV video. Sitting behind his Mac in his corner office in the Hotel Pekin, he said of his time in America, “I could have been imprisoned here for what I sang there.” A few years ago he performed songs written by a fan who spent 18 years in Soviet camps.

Though the threat of imprisonment is no longer so pressing, he says prison culture is still every bit as relevant as it was in Soviet times.

Speaking of the prison markings that are the subject of one of his most popular songs, performed recently to great success at Moscow’s Polynesian-themed Tropikana nightclub, he said: “Everyone here is ‘in tattoos,’ the whole country, because there’s not a single person who might not by accident end up in prison tomorrow, because they continue to imprison whoever ends up in their hands, while sometimes they continue not to imprison those who should be imprisoned. In that respect little has changed.”

“What’s different today,” he continued, “I’m amazed by it myself, is that I can sit in this office, in this place, which is, as any office could be, bugged, and completely freely speak these words. This is a huge change in this country.”

Mikhail Tanich, Lesopoval’s octogenarian inspiration and author of all its lyrics, who suffered six years in the camps for praising German roadways after he returned from the World War II front, has his own deeply felt understanding of Russian chanson. “For Russia,” he said, “this genre is especially organic because we have such a chanson life.”

“We have a saying: ‘Don’t rule out prison or poverty,’ ” he added. “In other words, in this country, it can always happen to you. Maybe that’s why these songs first appeared there, on that side of the barbed wire. They blossomed wildly in Soviet times when the entire country was in camps, when these zones, barbed wire, guard towers with guards and machine guns, were everywhere. What kind of songs do you sing there? Not Prince Igor’s aria, that’s for sure.”

Correction: July 16, 2006

A front page Arts & Leisure article today about Russian chanson music, a popular but banned genre, incorrectly translates the last word of a proverb. It is “Don’t rule out prison or poverty,” not insanity.