Коммунизм | en

Коммунизм (Kommunizm, Communism) is a Russian (Soviet) conceptual art project founded in January 1988 by poets, musicians and artists Yegor Letov, Oleg "Manager" Sudakov and Konstantin "Kuzya Uo" Ryabinov. It can be seen as a side-project of legendary Siberian psychedelic punk band Гражданская Оборона (Grazhdanskaya Oborona). The project recorded diverse compositions and sound collages mocking soviet reality, making heavy use of sampling, found sounds and industrial/electronic experimentation. As project hadn't certain music context, variety of different music was recorded under Communism brand: noise/noise rock, more or less "traditional" punk and post-punk, freak folk, acoustic ballads, a capella compositions, tape music, industrial, electroacoustic music, etc. There also was a significant amount of parody plunderphonic collages (for example, track "Моя страна" (Moya strana, "My country"), in which Letov sings Soviet patriotic song with PIL's Socialist used as phonogram) and spoken word tracks with either fragments from various books or magazines and original poetry by Letov-Sudakov-Ryabinov.

At some point Yegor Letov & Co. realized, that "There is no other way to express absurdity, horror and idiocy of reality more adequate and stronger, than by using the products of this reality, its objects and phenomenons - musique concrete, products of both folklore and official culture, propaganda...". This was the start of Communism - project, in which original content was mixed with already existed one.

Communism cannot be called a band as such, because the project existed only within the walls of the GrOb-studio, where the albums were recorded; the band never performed live. The participants of the project created and recorded objects of so-called “communism-art”; in addition to the original contributions of Letov, Sudakov and Ryabinov, the project appropriated elements from the works of Lev Oshanin, Yevgeni Yevtushenko, Suleyman Stalski, Fyodor Dostoevski, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Sergei Mikhalkov, Lenin, Brezhnev, Ho Chi Minh, J.S. Bach, Public Image Ltd, the Ramones, Killing Joke, the Buzzcocks, the orchestra of F. Goya and many others whose texts and recordings were sampled as fragments, which often was of very sarcastic and mocking, absurdist nature.

After the first five albums were recorded Oleg Sudakov quit the band. At different times members of other groups also participated in Communism’s creative activity: members of the band “Флирт” (Oleg Sur, Valeri Rozhkov), Yanka Dyagileva, Igor Zhevtun. .