Band History compiled by Jeremy Toomey, Discography by Jeremy Toomey and Pawel Malinowski

Grazhdanskaya Oborona ("Civil Defense") started in 1985 in Omsk, Siberia, after their previous band, Posev ("Sowing"), were forced to stop by the KBG. They were led by Yegor Letov, who's something of a living legend in Russia (a "punk messiah" so to speak), and were the most explicitly political band of their day. Of course, songs like "I Hate the Red Color", "Necrophilia" and "Good Tsar and the Familiar Stink" caused problems with the authorities, so stories could be told of Yegor's time spent in the state-run mental hospital, or having to go underground to avoid detection by the KGB. But musically, they released quite a few albums on cassette in the mid- to late-80's (which were later reissued on CD). Also, their last concert (recorded live in Tallinn, Estonia in April of 1990) has been issued as an album.

There are a few related bands in playing in different, yet similar styles: Egor I Opizdanevshiye ("Egor and the Fuckups", a short lived project with 2 2xLPs in 1990 and 1992, respectively titled Hop-Jump (Children's songs) and 100 Years of Solitude), Communism (bizzare, avant-garde music - it is satirical weirdness using communist songs and imagery), Great October (folkie stuff playing the songs of Yanka Dyagileva, Egor's common-law wife) and solo projects.

Here's the sad part: around 1993, Grazhdanskaya Oborona reformed and have now achieved commercial success as a virulent nationalist/right-wing/communist band. It's disgusting. It's pathetic. And now even the actual music sucks! Hmmm... I guess after the fall of communism, they sort of lost their reason to exist, and started to miss the system they always sang about hating...
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Yegor LetovAnti-establishment rock musician in his beloved Russia
Mark Yoffe The Guardian, Wednesday April 23 2008


Igor "Yegor" Letov, who has died of heart failure aged 43, was one of the leading artistic figures on the modern Russian cultural scene and a creator of Siberian punk rock. Even though he is mostly known as a musician, as leader of his band, Grazhdanskaia Oborona (Civil Defence), his influence spread into literature, performance art, politics, and all aspects of the counterculture. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became associated with dissident nationalist politics, again in opposition to the establishment, and a hero to disenfranchised youth.

Born in Omsk, Siberia, into an intellectual milieu, Letov was one of the first in Russia to realise that the rock idiom can become a vehicle for poetic and literary discourse. Grazhdanskaia Oborona was formed in Omsk in 1984. From the start, Letov found himself in opposition to Soviet ideology, and most of his works from this period reflect that. His criticism of the regime was biting and satirical. His innovative poetry harked back to the works of the 1920s absurdists, Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Harms. He borrowed popular sayings and proverbs but reworked them in a new, often shocking, way.

Musically, Grazhdanskaia Oborona were atrocious. Letov mixed English punk influences with the melancholy vocalisations of Russian folk songs. Despite the music's quality, it became a perfect tool for relating Letov's social and philosophical musings, his political discontent and his almost physical pain for his beloved Russia.

It was not surprising that in November 1985 the Soviet authorities accused the band members of being part of an underground terrorist organisation. Following that, Yegor spent three months in forced psychiatric confinement, without due process or trial.

With his anti-Soviet cultural rebel credentials, Letov became one of the leading representatives of youth counter-culture, while the band enjoyed cult status among Soviet youth, particularly those from the industrial suburbs, the shell-shocked Afghan war veterans, and the disaffected. Pain and shame for Russia was always the main subject of his angry, dark and often witty songs.

Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union came to an end, and Russia's counterculture found itself lost, as its main foe was finally slain. With this came probably the most dramatic and controversial period of Letov's creative life. In Boris Yeltsin's Russia of mafia-capitalism, Letov once again became part of the underground, and a leading voice of Russia's new anti-capitalist (and often anti-western) opposition.

In the winter of 1993, following Yeltsin's bombardment of the Russian parliament, Letov joined a new anti-capitalist, nationalist youth movement called Russia's Breakthrough. He announced that he always believed in real communism, not the travesty of the Soviet regime. In an act of typical buffoonery, he joined forces with the National Bolshevik party (NBP).

Because of the NBP's mercurial political platform of anti-western and pseudo-nationalist demagoguery, Letov was accused of being a rabid nationalist, and even antisemitic. Enormously popular among disenfranchised, and often nationalist-minded, youth, he himself always took the side of the underdog, including Jewish people.

In 2001, Letov announced that he was leaving active politics and concentrating on his music. His last album, in 2007, Zachem Sniatsia Sny (What Dreams Are Seen For) is a not very convincing attempt to introduce new sounds and ideas to the band. To a great degree, Letov exemplified all that is both bad and great in Russian rock culture. If for nothing else, he will be remembered for introducing, through his songs, millions of Russian youth to the treasures of the 1920s Russian poetic avant garde.

He is survived by his second wife, Natalya Chumakova, a bass guitarist in his band; his father; and his brother Sergey, one of Russia's leading avant-garde musicians.

· Igor "Yegor" Fyodorovich Letov, musician and songwriter, born September 10 1964; died February 19 2008

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