The first time the culture of x-ray records and bone music was written about in the west was in the 1989 book ’Back in the USSR: The True Story of Russian Rock’. The author of that book was veteran Russian broadcaster, cultural commentator and journalist Artemyi Troitsky. Art appeared in our first book: The Strange Story of Soviet music on the Bone; and gave us a lot of help. So it was a great pleasure to have him join me for an episode of our Bureau of Lost Culture radio show.
We hear some entertaining, comical, tragic, moving and frankly strange stories including tales of the ‘Stilyagi' Soviet Hipsters, the first disco in Moscow, Che Guevara and Lenin as a mushroom. We ask if counterculture possible in the oppressive, repressive circumstances of the Soviet Union? And we hear how rock music evolved in secret before breaking into the light as perestroika transformed Soviet society.
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