Music of Dissent

The current Russian practice of samizdat (self-publishing) is well-known in the West. By samizdat, Russians endlessly retype and clandestinely circulate the work of such banned Russian writers as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. With the increasing availability of tape recorders, another practice, called magnitizdat (publishing by tape recorder), is becoming even more popular than samizdat. Through magnitizdat, artists record songs that are not acceptable for official release. The tapes are then passed from hand to hand with lightning rapidity as each person makes copies for his friends.

Unlike samizdat, which is forbidden, magnitizdat has not been declared illegal. "So far as we know, no one has yet been arrested for composing, performing, taping or playing the tapes in Russia," says Misha Allen, an emigre from Russia living in Toronto who has collected more than 700 modern Soviet songs. "Probably the state regards the songs as a safety valve for the rebellious. Besides, many are patriotic." Still, as Allen points out, the Soviet authorities are not exactly delighted about the trend. Recently, tapes acquired in Russia by a few Western tourists have been seized by Soviet customs. The government has also tried to divert the public's attention from the biting new ballads by reissuing old favorites on records, like pre-revolutionary gypsy tunes, that were officially denounced as decadent until recently.

Beating the Jews. The new lyrics, which range widely over Soviet life and politics, provide the Russians with an opportunity to tune out the monotonous propaganda and "socialist realist" songs that still blare from Soviet radios. A recent theme is the increase in traditional Russian antiSemitism, now being whipped up by a press campaign against Israel and by Soviet propaganda for the Arab cause. For example, the official radio broadcasts the song of a Soviet soldier who begs, "Oh, mother write me a letter to Egypt; we're going to be here for a while." But far different sentiments are circulating on tape. "Should I become a thief, a bandit, or maybe better, an anti-Semite?" asks a boy in one satiric song. "I know for a fact the Jews stole all last year's wheat harvest from the people," he says, repeating a characteristic fantasy of Soviet anti-Semites. Echoed in the song's last line is the slogan of the "Black Hundred" society that fomented pogroms some 70 years ago: "I'm beating the Jews and saving Russia."

Another of magnitizdat's themes is the contrast between the Soviet Union's technological advances and the wretched living and working conditions endured by many citizens, including the veritable army of shawled grannies who still sweep the street of today's Russia. Mikhail Nozhkin, a young movie actor turned balladeer, sings of Auntie Nyusha, the tireless, smiling cleaning woman who sweeps up the messes of others. She is avoided by an immaculate bureaucrat, who fears he would dirty his clean hands if he touched her. While others want pensions and vacations, she never stops working. "Reactors are roaring, rockets are flying and radar surrounds us," goes the song, "but Auntie Nyusha just keeps on sweeping, just keeps on dusting, just keeps on cleaning up--after high-ranking ministers, after plain workers--from morning till night."

Not all the songs are so somber. Many poke good-humored fun at life's petty annoyances--some universal, some strictly Soviet. In a young husband's complaint, Nozhkin sings in an easy, confidential tone of how he and his wife bought a summer dacha and an expensive German shepherd to guard it: "The dog doesn't sleep because it's guarding the dacha, and I don't sleep because I'm guarding the dog." "I work like a horse and get paid like a donkey," he adds. "All day long I run from the nursery, to the doctor, to the market. At night I dream of my bachelor days and don't want to wake up."

Hcmd-to-Hcmd Combat. Like America's Negro spirituals, many of Russia's ballads draw their inspiration from the experience of slavery. In the fearful days of Stalin, the bitter, poignant songs of prisoners, which wafted beyond the gates of the slave labor camps, were known and hummed by millions of Soviet citizens. Although the Stalinist terror has since subsided, the memories endure. In magnitizdat, Russians sing of their struggle to maintain integrity in a society that all too often has brutalized its citizens. The stanza of one famous song begins: "Our own war is a hand-to-hand combat between honor and evil--something people don't usually write songs about. We had our ribs broken many times and some of us were blinded. Yet for us honor means more than broken bones and sightless eyes, or even a piece of bread."

One of the most celebrated of the modern Russian songwriters, Alexander Galich, is himself a longtime veteran of prisons and camps--his admirers call him "the Solzhenitsyn of song." In his unmusical but strangely compelling bass voice, Galich sings of the complicity in Stalin's crimes of people who kept silent out of cowardice or self-interest. "We all know silence can be profitable," he sings, "It's golden, after all. It's easy to join the ranks of the rich. Very easy to join the leaders. So easy to join the executioners. Just keep quiet, keep quiet."

Under the rule of Brezhnev and Kosygin, a grim new strain has entered into the Russian ballad. Some recent songs describe the insane asylums where more and more dissenters, whose "crimes" do not qualify for prosecution under Soviet law, are imprisoned with genuinely sick people. For example, Vladimir Vysotsky, a popular balladeer, has composed a song called The Psychiatric Lyric. He sings of the silent, incurable lunatics who stare at the terrified political prisoner as he lies in the ward. "They are madmen of all kinds, quiet ones, dirty ones--starved and beaten as part of their cure. If only Dostoevsky, in his House of the Dead, could describe them as they stand, beating their heads against the wall." The song ends:

If only Gogol could learn of our life of grief.

Even Gogol would gaze on it

In utter disbelief.

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