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Sergey Kuryokhin / Сергей Курёхин

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Wikipedia:

Sergey Kuryokhin (Russian: Серге́й Анато́льевич Курёхин, akas include: Sergei Kuriokhin, Sergei Kurekhin, Sergueï Kouriokhine, Sergey Kuriokhin, etc.; 16 June 1954 – 9 July 1996) was a Russian film actor, film composer, pianist, music director, experimental artist and writer, based in St. Petersburg, Russia.

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Biography

Kuryokhin began his acting career as a piano and keyboard player with a school band in Leningrad. After playing with professional jazz-bands as well as popular rock musicians, Kuryokhin went through several stages in his career, and eventually became one of the most recognisable names and faces in Russia during the 1980s and 1990s.

By the end of his life, he had emerged as an avant-garde film composer, performance artist and film actor. Outside Russia he is primarily known as a jazz and experimental musician, through his works released since 1981 on UK's Leo Records, as well as his concert tours with Ensemble Pop-Mekhanika and his happening show also titled Pop Mekhanika. He also made a significant contribution to several albums (in particular: Triangle, Taboo and Radio Africa) of the famous Russian rock band Aquarium.

His memorable film works include starring in (and composing music for) Two Captains II (Два капитана II), a comedic pseudo-documentary about World War I; the soundtrack to the neo-noir Russian horror film, The Designer (Russian: Господин Оформитель), and the lead role of the combative nerd taking on the local mob, in Lokh pobeditel vody.

Kuryokhin shot to fame after creating one of the first popular media viruses in the Russian media. It was one of his semi-improvised acts of performance art, broadcast live on Russian television in May 1991. As a guest on the popular talk show Fifth Wheel, Kuryokhin provided "proof" that Lenin was a mushroom.[2] During the 1990s, Kuryokhin was a board member of the St. Petersburg City Council for Culture and Tourism. In 1995 Kuryokhin joined the National Bolshevik Party.

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Death

Wikipedia:

Lenin was a mushroom (Russian: Ленин — гриб) was a televised hoax by musician Sergey Kuryokhin and reporter Sergey Sholokhov. It was first broadcast on 17 May 1991 on Leningrad Television. The hoax had the form of an interview.

In the interview Kuryokhin was telling about his findings that Vladimir Lenin used to consume a lot of psychedelic mushrooms and eventually turned into a mushroom himself. This absurd idea wasn't presented all at once; instead there was a resemblance of logical chain of reasoning, facts and quotations from various sources. An aura of plausibility was created using manipulation of facts, pseudo-scientific style and loose storytelling.

The timing of the hoax played a large role in its success. It was shown on TV in the Glasnost period when many censorship barriers fell and there were many revelations and publication of previously concealed facts from USSR history, often with sensational flavor. Additionally, Soviet TV had been very official and prim before. As a result, approximately 11,250,000 audience members took the hoax seriously, even despite the totally absurd claims. According to S. Sholokhov himself, in response to inquiries about the truth of the claims, the person responsible for ideology in a Regional Committee of the Communist Party stated that they were false, as "a mammal can not be a plant."

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Joanna Stingray (L) in 1984, the year she first met Boris Grebenshchikov (R) of Akvarium. Photo: FOR SPT / For The St. Petersburg Times

From a 2004 interview with Joanna Stingray:

"I remember when I heard [Grebenshchikov's] music, it just sounded so spiritual and beautiful that it definitely moved me," she said. "I remember being just overwhelmed by his music even if I didn't understand the lyrics. For some reason the music and songs were just very powerful."

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"Moscow was the period when I had my career, when I had made a couple of TV programs and when I had my albums out," she said. Despite her unlikely success, Stingray felt uncomfortable in post-Soviet Moscow.

"It just seemed that everybody was trying to figure out the capitalism and they were all obsessed with trying to figure out how to make money. I left for another reason but I also had to deal with the mafia who came to me and wanted some money. They thought that since my videos were on TV a lot that I must be paying to have them aired. So I met with them and explain that I didn't pay to have my videos on - I gave the stations other Western videos, and then they played my videos.

"But it was just a time in my life where I was ready to come home and I was ready to focus not on myself, but to focus on somebody else. So it was right at the time that I got pregnant and it all worked out. It was a good time to move home."

Back in Los Angeles, Stingray became a full-time mother to her daughter Maddie. She is now the executive director of the Beverly Hills High School Alumni association and has a part-time job in a real estate business. After almost nine years away, Stingray returned to Russia last month to perform the anniversary concert at B2 in Moscow and have a lunch with old friends at Platforma in St. Petersburg. While today's Moscow seemed to her "very Las Vegas," she said she felt an immediate link with St. Petersburg.

"I was only in St. Petersburg for six hours, but I really felt this deep connection," she said.

"And even though there are lot of western stores and restaurants, the city seemed very similar. So to me St. Petersburg has changed a lot less than Moscow has." Stingray said she is ready to continue her career as a singer.

"A couple of weeks before I came to Russia, I all of a sudden started having all this emotion, remembering my time in Russia, and I got very excited. I went to a studio and started to record some stuff.

"I recorded some acoustic versions of some of my hits, and then I recorded a couple of my new songs. And one song that [summed up] my whole feeling about coming back to Russia, how much it meant to me, is a version we did of [the Soviet children's song] 'Pust Vsegda Budet Solntse, Pust Vsegda Budet Nebo' (Let There Always Be the Sun, Let There Always Be Skies). We sing this song in kind of a disco dance version, and I'm so happy with it.

A really good, basic overview of rock in Russia 1960-1980 and how it went from underground to the mainstream. The English language is a little choppy but the writing is clear enough to follow.

"The material for his first book - "Golden Underground," published in 1994 - came from his time in underground journalism in the Soviet period, as co-editor of the fanzine KontrKultUr'a, one of the most respected samizdat ("self-published") publications among the scores that popped up all over the country to cover rock music.

"In the Soviet Union, fanzines began to be published in [1980]," he said. "Articles about rock'n'roll in the official media were unthinkable until the late 1980s, so it was all underground...  The magazine wrote about anything but the mainstream - underground rock, indie rock, as well as avant-garde art and poetry."

Band: Кино / Kino

September 1986 / 51 mins

Alla Pugacheva performing the first big concert in Chernobyl after the catastrophic accident that occurred in April 1986. The audience was primarily made up of the workers put to the task of cleaning up and containing the contamination.

I found some mentions of possible health issues that she had as a result of the trip (possibly to her thyroid or reproductive organs) but haven't seen anything concrete at this point.

May 30th, 1986

New Straits Times, Oct 11, 1988 -- full article

Excerpt from New Straits Times, Oct 11, 1988