I’m writing this opinion piece in response to the Ex-USSR Political punk scene report by Sharapov, published in PE # 42. While comprehensive and informative, the report, in my opinion, lacks insight and conclusions, failing to answer a crucial question of how well Western punk politics fit into the post-Soviet punk scene. The issue of extrapolating Western punk philosophies to non-Western societies is important, as these concepts have been quite widely spread to former Eastern block countries and other parts of the world since the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In Russia, as Sharapov more or less clearly states in his report, the current political punk movement surged in the mid-1990s, as soon as Western anarcho-punk music and zines, including PE, were established among rather small punk-rock fan groups, primarily based in Moscow and St. Petersburg – the country’s most developed cities, which contributed to better access to information, including the Internet etc. However, this generation of anarcho-punk activists, including Sharapov himself, seems to totally overlook the events of a decade before, when Russia’s first major political punk band, Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense), came into being, preaching and practicing truly Western DIY punk behavior with a strong anti-authorities political edge, which got the band’s leader, Yegor Letov, into trouble with the KGB in the Soviet Union’s agony period. Later controversial political stances by Letov all but made him an untouchable within the anarcho-punk movement of the 1990s, although some activists, Sharapov including, admit Oborona’s strong influence on a number of bands, such as Kazakhstan’s Adaptation – arguably, the former Soviet Union’s best punk band, Adaptation, which, incidentally, is not associated with anarcho-punk or any other political movements.
Meanwhile, Russia’s current political punk scene has failed to produce any band remotely comparable to Civil Defense in terms of its impact and ideological significance. The problem is – as it may also be in other non-Western societies trying to embrace the West’s countercultural agenda – that most activists of the anarcho-punk scene simply copy Western punk philosophies, as if using Craig O’Hara’s Philosophy of Punk Rock as a textbook, and putting little thought into the Western punk concepts. Some opponents of vegetarianism, veganism, pacifism, animal rights protection and similar concepts may argue that these concepts are not inherent to punk rock at all and were adopted by the independent Western punk scene only in the late 1980s, but this is beyond this piece’s subject. More importantly, the adoption of ideologies traditionally associated with punk to non-Western societies, particularly to Russia, is a difficult process, and so far there has been little success in that direction. True, there are about three independent punk labels in Russia that regularly put out tapes by domestic and foreign punk artists, but the circulation rarely hits a 500-copy mark, often remaining at a mere 100 or 200. True, propaganda materials and zines are being distributed, but, again, the circulation is small and copies rarely target people outside the political punk circle. Meanwhile, general public is likely to either be repulsed by ideas like animal rights protection in a country where human rights are hardly protected or just stay totally indifferent to such ideas. Teenagers getting into punk rock here have many other things to be concerned about, and if they don’t get answers to their questions, they’re most likely to turn into a crowd of idiots who show up at punk shows just to get pissed drunk and slam dance. There will be this kind of punk audiences anyway, but the proportion could be lowered if punk activists start thinking about real people who may have something in common with punk rock, rather than care only about the purity of punk ideology.
If political punk activists here want to have an impact at least on punk-orientated audiences – not mentioning general public – they will have to dramatically re-think their political agenda, “localizing” it as much as possible and getting it understandable to a regular teenager who’s just getting into punk rock. At the same time, specific ideological concepts that come along with punk rock should not obscure punk’s general message, which is about always making your own decisions and not letting yourself be fooled by any political or ideological concepts.