Bard (Soviet Union)

• 1. Introduction

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  Bard is the Russian word that came into use in the early 1960s for singer-songwriters who wrote and performed outside the Soviet cultural establishment. For some listeners, simply owning a tape of Alexander Galich's songs could mean a prison term. Galich was one of many performers who carried that label, though the risks he faced were not shared equally by everyone who did. Why would a single movement include songs about camping trips, songs about war, and songs dangerous enough to draw the KGB's attention? What turned a small, half-mocking nickname into a name for an entire underground culture? The sections ahead follow bard song from its guitar-and-notebook beginnings into the very different worlds of tourists, dissidents, prisoners, and children.

• 2. Origins Of The Term

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  Because these singer-songwriters performed their own material, Russians also called the movement avtorskaya pesnya, author song, or bardovskaya pesnya, bard song. That naming reflected a real distinction: unlike mainstream pop performers, bards wrote both the words and the music themselves.

  Russian romances came first, sentimental songs about ordinary life that had been popular across every layer of Russian society from the late 19th into the early 20th century. These romances were usually written in a minor key and played on guitar, a template later bards would follow closely.

  Bard poetry itself splits roughly into two main genres, tourist song and political song, alongside recognized smaller strands such as outlaw song and pirate song. The label was first embraced only by fans of tourist song, and people outside those circles found the word slightly derisive at first. It caught on anyway, filling a real need to separate this style from the traditional mainstream pop song of the era. That derisive nickname would soon need to stretch to cover campfire singalongs, protest songs, prison ballads, and lullabies, each with its own rules.

• 3. Copied On Cassette

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  A single Russian guitar was usually all a bard needed, since they rarely performed alongside other musicians or singers. Most played for small groups of listeners, at least until they built enough of a following to draw a crowd.

  Once a bard grew popular, modest concerts became possible, though official recording studios remained largely closed to this kind of music. Because so many bard songs carried political messages, performers were rarely permitted to record them properly. Listeners compensated by copying amateur recordings made live at concerts, a practice known as magnitizdat, passing tapes from hand to hand.

  That underground circuit carried every kind of bard song forward, from campfire tunes to the most dangerous political material.

• 4. Tourist Song

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  During the Era of Stagnation, young Soviets threw themselves into camping and its more extreme cousins, alpinism, kayaking, canoeing, and canyoning. For many young Soviets, these activities felt like the last places where courage, friendship, risk, trust, cooperation, and mutual support still mattered. Tourist songs took exactly those virtues as their subject.

  Yuri Vizbor wrote many of the best tourist songs, having personally taken part in the very sports he sang about. Alexander Gorodnitsky brought a different kind of firsthand knowledge, having spent long stretches sailing the world on ships and scientific expeditions to the far North.

  Sea song became a notable branch of tourist song, aiming to capture people in hard physical and emotional conditions. Vladimir Vysotsky wrote several songs of this kind, since his style suited the subject perfectly. Many of Gorodnitsky's sea songs, meanwhile, drew directly on his own time at sea. Some of these songs were simply about sailors; others turned to pirates instead. Brigantine, written by Pavel Kogan, brought a romantic take on pirate song that still gets played at author song concerts today, and almost every bard recorded at least one song in this vein.

  The government generally tolerated tourist song, which carried on under the name author song, since it was sung by the authors themselves rather than professional singers. Professionals, though, often borrowed successful author songs for their own repertoires.

  Fans also called it amateur song, literally a do-it-yourself or self-made song. The name tied the genre to a wider Soviet practice called amateur performing arts, or khudozhestvennaya samodeyatelnost, a widespread and often heavily subsidized way for citizens to spend their free time. Nearly every major factory or kolkhoz kept a Palace of Culture, or at least a House of Culture, where amateur performers could practice and perform.

  Many of these venues, and many universities besides, ran Clubs of Amateur Song, or KSP, which in practice functioned as bard song clubs set apart from mainstream Soviet amateur culture. The Grushinsky festival traces its own roots to gatherings of tourist song fans, though it has since grown to include every genre of bard song. A similar tradition, tramping song, developed independently in the Czech Republic.

• 5. Political Song

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  Some of Bulat Okudzhava's songs pushed directly into protest territory, part of a genre that ranged from openly anti-Soviet material to witty satire in the tradition of Aesop's fables. Vladimir Vysotsky earned a reputation as a political songwriter too, even though he also moved comfortably within mainstream Soviet culture.

  Alexander Galich paid a steeper price for the same label, eventually forced into emigration after years of KGB persecution. Yuliy Kim, another bard, suffered similar persecution from the KGB. Evgeny Kliachkin and Aleksander Dolsky charted a middle course instead, balancing openly anti-Soviet material with plainer romantic songs.

  Bertolt Brecht supplied an unlikely source of protest material, since songs from his pro-Communist plays were officially praised for criticizing fascism and capitalist society. Soviet audiences and censors approved of them on the surface, yet bards found they could be read as protest songs in their own right. These borrowed pieces were nicknamed zongs, a Russian rendering of the German pronunciation of the word song, and they became popular in the very circles where a much darker, more dangerous form of bard song was taking shape.

• 6. Outlaw Songs

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  Blatnaya pesnya, as outlaw song is known in Russian, existed long before the bards themselves, with roots reaching back to the first decade of the 20th century. Stylistically it barely differed from other bard songs, but its content leaned toward something closer to modern rap, glorifying crime and the romance of city life. These songs captured the breakdown of the old Russian social order and its rules.

  The Gulag produced a new wave of outlaw songs starting in the 1930s, many written about innocent people swept into the labor camps rather than actual criminals. Some of these songs were composed inside the camps themselves. During the Khrushchev Thaw, many prisoners were released and brought their songs out with them, and bards who heard these once-anonymous songs began performing them for wider audiences. In this new context, the songs took on a more symbolic meaning as anthems of struggle against oppression.

  Alexander Rosenbaum took the genre somewhere lighter, writing humorous outlaw songs about the Jewish mafia of Odessa. He drew inspiration from writers like Isaac Babel, whose own stories of Odessa's criminal underworld had shaped how generations of Russians imagined that city long before any bard picked up a guitar.

• 7. City Streets And Wartime

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  Songs about ordinary life, most often set in the Soviet Union itself, were even more common than tourist songs, and nearly every bard wrote a significant number of them. The setting was usually urban, frequently one of the major cities, and Moscow's Arbat district came up again and again.

  Yuri Vizbor and Vladimir Vysotsky favored a direct approach to these everyday songs, using simple, honest language to describe life as it was. Bulat Okudzhava preferred a more symbolic route, reaching for extended metaphors to make the same kind of point.

  War song existed as its own tradition in Russia long before the bards arrived, and many of the most famous bards eventually wrote about the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet Union called the Second World War. Okudzhava had actually fought in that war, and his sad, emotional songs, including The Paper Soldier, Бумажный солдат, used that experience to portray the futility of war.

  Vysotsky, by contrast, never served in the military, yet veterans praised his war songs for how convincingly they portrayed combat. He was drawn to war as a setting because it demanded honour and emotional strength, conditions that revealed a person's true character. Vizbor took yet another angle, centering his war songs on the people involved rather than the war itself, often letting the fighting fade into the background while the song kept the nature imagery and emotional focus of a tourist song.

  That same instinct for turning a general subject into something personal would carry bards from the battlefield to their own front doors.

• 8. Hometowns And Children's Songs

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  Vladimir Vysotsky wrote about Moscow's Big Karetny, Большой Каретный, the neighborhood that shaped his own songs about the city. Alexander Rosenbaum did the same for Saint Petersburg's Ligovka, Лиговка, and Leonid Dukhovny wrote about Kyiv's Podol in a song called А Без Подола Киев Невозможен.

  Some bards also wrote children's songs for festivals and plays, composing them in the very same style as their other work rather than talking down to younger listeners. That choice gave the songs unexpected depth, not unlike Ivan Krylov's fables, so adults enjoyed them just as much as children did. Sergey Nikitin and Tatyana Nikitina, a husband-and-wife duo, became the most famous performers of this material, and the two are still counted among the bards today even though they are best known for setting great works of poetry to their own music.