Music

Like the Kremlin's bloodthirsty dictator, he was born in St. Petersburg (then still called Leningrad). Born in 1953, he's a year younger than Putin. And their identical birthplace is the only thing they have in common!

Although he was never as virulent as his ten-year younger brother Viktor Tsoï, who was also born in turbulent Leningrad, BG (as he's easily nicknamed) was never a champion of Communist power either.

At a time when rock vinyls, often brought by rare foreign visitors, circulated under the cloak, Boris became infatuated with the Beatles like many others. In his early twenties, he formed his first band, Aquarium, in 1972. Two years later, with the scarce technical means available, he managed to record a debut album “Искушение святого Аквариума” (which could be translated as “The Temptation of Saint Aquarium”). At the time, very few people heard these tapes, but it was nevertheless the first wedge driven into the sclerotic, statist Communist culture. And it was frowned upon. Founding a music magazine (Roxy) or appearing on the bill of a rock festival in Tbilisi (Georgia) in 1980 certainly brought him a little notoriety, but... he lost his job in the process.

Even if Aquarium's music remained relatively restrained, a folk-rock with a social edge, it didn't please the authorities. The man often referred to as the Russian Bob Dylan has never been one to kick up a fuss, but before the fall of the Wall, simply talking about people's realities (even poetically) was considered a crime of lèse-majesté. In 1989, thanks to Perestroika and a few months before the fall of the Wall, he released “BG” for the mulltinational CBS. One of his most rocking records.

“I've always been in the crosshairs of the authorities, with my name on a blacklist,” he recently told the BBC on the release of his latest half-album, ‘Songs Of Clear Light’. In a country where teenagers who dare to oppose Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine are sent to prison, Boris Grebenshikov is on the list of “foreign agents”. Like many other artists and like all independent journalists. Having emigrated to London many years ago, the 71-year-old singer regards this supposedly infamous label as a medal to be proudly worn.

His much rockier younger brother, Yuri Shevchuk, has long maintained that he would never leave Russia. Despite the wrath of the law, he was one of the few to write songs about the war in Ukraine and perform them on stage in his homeland: “Motherland Come Back Home” and “The Burial Of War”. In May 2022, The Moscow Times reported on some of the things he said on stage: “The fatherland, my friends, is not the president's ass that you have to kiss all the time,” he stated bluntly. “The fatherland is a poor old woman at the station who sells potatoes to survive”. Two years on, however, one of the only forms of protest still possible is silence. For the moment, silence about the Russian special operation is not yet punishable by the Siberian gulags. But for how long?

(MH with AK - © Etienne Tordoir)
Photo: Boris Grebenshikov at the Astoria Hotel in Brussels (Belgium) in June 1989 to promote his English-language album “BG”.