#araks

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Do you recognize this person?

This is Yuri Andropov, once-chairman of the KGB, later General Secretary of the Soviet Union. He wasn't around for very long, but the context of this week and last week's posts falls under his policies, and so he merits a mention here. Andropov took over the position in late 1982 and died in early 1984. In that brief period of time he hunted dissidents (though he did this all his life), tightened up the economy (for a little while, at least), and suppressed music groups within the Soviet Union.

This was not because he thought music was bad, particularly. Officially he was fighting corruption. After eighteen years of Brezhnev, it was felt among the authorities that society had become - loose. Overly complacent, even lazy, and the early eighties of the USSR were spent on renewing social/moral discipline. And when you want the whole of society to play by the rules, you ideally want your policies to have the widest reach possible.

What better targets are there than tackling journalism, general entertainment, and the arts?

Last week I wrote about Круг (Krug), and briefly, about a mass disbandment order they were caught up in in 1982. If you speak Russian and took the time to read the multipart article linked in that post (🤪), you would've seen that the article was about a completely different group altogether. That band is today's band - Аракс (Araks) - and I mention them in tandem to Круг because the case against them was what brought about the latter's suppression at the same time. It's hard to understand what was at stake for Круг without knowing what happened to Аракс, and furthermore why this was happening to music groups around the country in the first place. The years between 1982-1985 were not a stable time to be a musician in the USSR, even if you were officially approved, even if you were ideologically compliant.

Аракс has a long history. They came into being in the early 1970s, having begun as a student circle in the Moscow State University Economics Department, and went through several line-ups until being forcibly disbanded in 1982. The band's official website describes the event as thus: in the autumn of 1982, after the Ministry of Culture of the USSR issued an order banning Аракс's concert activities, the band broke up. No further explanation. The actual details are scattered around various ВИА archival sites and old articles.

Legally, the band was disbanded because their director (Valery Andreyev) was charged with embezzlement. Pragmatically - and this is the hardest thing to explain, because nobody in Аракс was criminally accused of nor disadvantaged specifically under suspicion of dissidence - it seems the authorities did that to make an example of them. I will try to explain what I mean.

Earlier in Week 6 I wrote up an introduction to ВИАs. The state-approved ensembles, the sanctioned music they performed, alongside an initial defense of their sound.

Now we dive deeper into the dark side. The thing about making musicians a legal category like this is that if you did not belong in this category, you could and often were automatically deemed illegal, criminal, or dissident. And the state could make you not belong in this category at any time of their choosing. There were two legal types of musical groups in the USSR, ВИАs and philharmonics (e.g. orchestras): since their existences were state-approved, the state was fully in charge of the music they performed, when and where they performed it, and how much they earned for it. The authorities could change up their demands at any time, and if you did not follow their rules, they could bring the hammer down on you right away.

Harsh, yes. Strictly speaking, not illogical, though this level of control would be unpalatable to most in the modern day. Where this structure starts becoming illogical is that between 1982-1985, 'their rules' appear to have had little basis on the musicians' conduct and more to do with shaping society to their wants. Consider the lyrics of 'С чего бы?' and last week's 'Ни слова о любви'. They are very typical examples of the respective bands' styles. We could ask ourselves the usual questions:

Are the lyrics lewd?

Are the lyrics violent?

Do the lyrics speak about love in a family-friendly sense?

Is there inappropriate language?

Is there anti-authoritarian sentiment?

The answer to all those would be no, save for number 3... which was exactly what was demanded of a legal music group of the time. Аракс performed with the Moscow Regional Philharmonic, Круг was a ВИА. They were legally-established entities and did not perform objectionable content, so it could not be under ideological reasons that they were ordered to disband.

And yet they must be disbanded, if not all at least some. As previously stated, the higher-ups during this period were concerned with renewing social discipline, and they were becoming increasingly unsettled with the popularity of those bands. They were drawing large crowds, more than what would be deemed controllable; more and more of them were freely acknowledging Western influences, or adopting sounds well beyond what the stagnant establishment would put up with. It didn't help that the years 1982-1985 saw the Soviet Union change leadership four times, from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev, and political unease was at an all-time high.

Аракс, in the midst of this chaos, had the misfortune of falling afoul of some complicated rules governing the payment of musical groups. The authorities jumped on that like a hyena, because as you know, fighting corruption... but, again, the charges brought against Аракс's director were so disproportionate that it can only be read as a deliberate attempt to give a widespread warning. The bandmates were dragged through a hostile and unfair trial, and at one point the prosecutor demanded that Andreyev serve ten years in prison. Ten years! You spent less time in prison for holding illegal concerts at home! A few months at most, maybe, not ten years! 😩

It wasn't until 1987 the case was resolved. Everyone was acquitted and all the charges dropped, but that meant for five years Аракс was left in the dust, its members unable to perform under or use the name Аракс to promote themselves. Again, from a purely legalist sense, it's logical that one can't use the name of an entity caught up in a legal battle. But because the bandmates couldn't get work as Аракс, work another role in the Philharmonic, or be recommended to keep working together, they were pretty much scattered to the winds and had to drift around in smaller ensembles until the matter was resolved. Аракс reformed themselves in the last years of the USSR, but their popularity was never the same after that incident - and I believe, to a large extent, that that was exactly what the authorities wanted. That was what they were going for with Круг, and that (and worse) was what they did to groups like Круиз, ДДТ, Гражданская оборона and more, and now that's a whole goddamn other series of posts I should make another time. 🙃 Круг and Аракс got off pretty lightly, all things considered, and maybe that's the most sobering aspect of this whole business.

Actually, Круг was never forcibly or permanently disbanded, despite the order. Just prevented from performing together for a few months. They could've suffered worse, but they were saved because the deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper Советская культура (Sovetskaya Kultura, nowadays just Культура) Tatyana Kvardakova advocated for them personally. Rumour has it that she was too enamoured by their song 'Karakum' to let them be disbanded, but I don't know the details of this. Who else was this Tatyana Kvardakova?