On a recent summer night, hundreds of young Russians assembled on St. Petersburg’s main street to hear songs that the government had banned. It was the latest gathering of the country’s musical underground, and anger at the Kremlin was on full, and loud, display.
A rock group named Stoptime played recent anti-war songs as well as an old anthem—originally by the Soviet-era band Kino—that has become a symbol of political resistance. “Changes! Our hearts demand changes,” the vocalist sang. “Changes! Our eyes demand changes!” A few bikers paused their deliveries to join the chorus.
Stoptime and many of its underground peers perform out in the open despite the threat of prison. Last month, the group played a song by the rapper Noize MC that imagines Russia’s future after President Vladimir Putin: “Somebody good will come to power. He will fix everything, unexpectedly; he will punish the bastards, nobody will get away.” A few days later, police detained members of the group. They were released and back performing again soon after.
Street concerts and underground gatherings offer a rare hint of hope for the many young Russians who have grown disheartened by Moscow’s prolonged war and deepening repression. Musicians have become influential activists and symbols of political resistance, just as they were in the final years of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin has repeatedly tried to suppress the music scene and punish its leaders, a sign that Putin seems to understand the danger they pose. But despite the persecutions, the underground is showing no sign of being silenced. In fact, it’s growing.
In addition to arresting musicians, Russian authorities have designated many of them as foreign agents, including Noize MC, who left Russia soon after the war broke out. “People don’t want to hear, think, or talk about the war. They push it out of their conscience,” the rapper, whose real name is Ivan Alekseyev, told me. “The tragedy,” he said, is the “indifference” and “apathy” that many Russians feel.
To call attention to the war and raise funds for Ukrainian victims, Alekseyev performed a series of international concerts with a fellow Russian superstar, Monetochka. Although some of Alekseyev’s music has been banned, millions of Russians still listen one way or another—singing it in the streets and in karaoke bars, or streaming cover versions online.
In May, a St. Petersburg court outlawed a song that Alekseyev described to me as his “most extremist hit so far.” Its name, “Cooperative Swan Lake,” plays off the Soviet Union’s decision to air the eponymous ballet on state TV whenever a state leader died. Today, Russians still know Swan Lake as a signal that a new chief is coming. “I want to watch the ballet,” he raps. “Let the swans dance!” Also encoded in the title is a reference to the Lake Cooperative, a plot of land in northwest Russia where Putin’s inner circle gathered for vacations. In one line, Alekseyev refers directly to Putin: “Let the old man shake in fear for his lake.”
Banning the song turned out to be useless; millions of people simply listened to it on YouTube. Indeed, many bans like these have backfired on the Kremlin. In the mid-1980s, when I was growing up in Russia, Moscow outlawed groups such as Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Kiss, the Sex Pistols, and Iron Maiden, along with dozens of underground bands. But that only made them more popular. All of the young people I knew made a point of listening to banned music.
Homegrown rock bands were especially beloved. In 1972, Boris Grebenshikov founded Aquarium, which would become one of Russia’s most popular groups. In 1984, the government banned Aquarium, but Grebenshikov and his band continued to perform in the city center. By the final years of the Soviet Union, Grebenshikov was the biggest star of the underground in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad).
During Soviet rule, the KGB routinely spied on young artists, including those in the emerging rock scene, which the regime tried to confine to a state-sanctioned venue called the Leningrad Rock Club. But by the mid-’80s, the city’s underground included more than 100 rock musicians. “When we were thousands,” Grebenshikov told me, the authorities “realized that they lost.”
The Federal Security Service, the KGB’s successor, is taking up a censorship campaign very much like the one that Moscow waged during Grebenshikov’s prime. “The risk to perform in the underground, in the streets, is much higher than even in the 1970s,” he told me. “None of us went to prison. Two policemen could show up at a street concert, tell us, ‘Hey, go home.’”
Putin’s regime is more aggressive. In August, FSB officers arrested the 37-year-old punk musician Vladimir Bolobolov, who has said that he was beaten and tortured. Authorities have accused him of storing explosives, but he insists that he was framed. Several weeks ago, law enforcement accused Aglaya Tarasova, a 31-year-old television and film star who has spoken out against the war, of smuggling 0.4 grams of hashish into Russia. A Moscow court has ruled that the actor can’t leave her home at night or use communication devices for more than a month.
Because of the Kremlin’s escalating repression, some musicians who still live in Russia keep a low profile. I recently heard a song written by an artist whose fans don’t publicize his music out of fear that the regime will imprison him; someone had to send it to me on Telegram, because it wasn’t available on YouTube. Russia’s war, he sings, has left Russians “as black as coal.”
Earlier this month, Alla Pugacheva, Russia’s most famous pop star, condemned the regime in a nearly four-hour interview with a popular Russian journalist. Pugacheva, who left the country in 2022, used the occasion to address Putin about the war: “Just end it.” More than 20 million people have watched it on YouTube. “To tell your homeland it is wrong, that is patriotism,” she said.
Yuriy Shevchuk, the now-68-year-old front man for a rock group the KGB banned in 1980, has been similarly outspoken. In the early days of the war, he told a stadium full of fans: “Motherland, my friends, is not the president’s ass that somebody has to constantly lick and kiss. It is a poor grandma selling potatoes at the railway station. That is your motherland.” He was fined 50,000 rubles (about $800 at the time) for “discrediting the army,” and some veterans called for the government to designate him as a foreign agent.
I spoke with Ivan Vyrypaev, a Russian-born theater director, about the frankness of musicians like Shevchuk. “Theater is much more careful than rock music,” he told me. “Even if a theater director just does not stage anything pro-war, pro-patriotism, and anti-Western, that is already brave; that is a statement people understand.” For his part, Vyrypaev, who now lives in Poland, has criticized the regime and the war in Ukraine. Last year, the government charged him with “spreading fake news” and sentenced him in absentia to more than seven years in prison. But he insists that musicians deserve the most credit for resisting the regime. “They demonstrate a new sincerity, a new honesty, that is a huge contrast against the awful cynicism of those in power.”
International stars have contributed too. In 2022, Grebenshikov recorded an anti-war song with Stevie Nicks, Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, and a Ukrainian artist named Serhii Babkin. “The one who is dead in his heart pulled the trigger,” Grebenshikov sings, “and instead of spring, we saw death. The day will come when the war ends and there is light in the sky again. But there, where my house used to be, there is nothing left.”
The Russia he once knew is gone, Grebenshikov told me. But he’s encouraged by the music scene in St. Petersburg, his hometown. “New people are coming,” he said. “The underground has not died.”
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