"Kill the State in Yourself": The Totalitarianisms of Egor Letov
Location
PANEL: The Ethics and Politics of Entertainment
Wilder Hall 112
Document Type
Presentation - Open Access
Start Date
5-13-2022 2:00 PM
End Date
5-13-2022 3:00 PM
Abstract
The Siberian punk movement of the 1980s is often regarded as the Soviet Union’s most genuine rock underground due to its aesthetic and political iconoclasm. Amidst the numerous bands the scene produced, none has matched the notoriety of Grazhdanskaia Oborona (Civil Defense) and its leader Egor Letov. At first glance, Letov’s songs declaring hatred for the “totalitarian” Soviet Union and its destruction of the individual evoke associations with the previous generation of Soviet dissidents, who used the term “totalitarianism” to contrast the Soviet system with the Western democracy they admired. Yet Letov, who rejected democratic reforms and after the collapse of the USSR became an ardent communist, defined totalitarianism not as a form of government but as an inborn state of being. Accordingly, resistance toward the Soviet state became a facade for the struggle against human nature. Totalitarianism thus serves as a lens through which to examine the role of politics in Grazhdanskaia Oborona: a representation of existential rebellion. By analyzing his interviews and musical output in the mid- to late-1980s, I argue that Letov manipulates listeners’ understandings of what it meant to be “against” in the Soviet Union by drawing from existing rhetoric of political protest, replacing the image of the liberal dissident with that of the existential rebel. I demonstrate Letov’s conception of totalitarianism both as a line of continuity between his “anti-Soviet” and “pro-communist” years as well as a subversion of conventions of political defiance traditionally employed by Western scholars of the Soviet Union.
Keywords:
Soviet Union, Punk rock, Totalitarianism, Rebellion
Recommended Citation
Frevert, Kate, ""Kill the State in Yourself": The Totalitarianisms of Egor Letov" (2022). Research Symposium. 27.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/researchsymp/2022/presentations/27
Project Mentor(s)
Vladimir Ivantsov, Russian and East European Studies
2022
"Kill the State in Yourself": The Totalitarianisms of Egor Letov
PANEL: The Ethics and Politics of Entertainment
Wilder Hall 112
The Siberian punk movement of the 1980s is often regarded as the Soviet Union’s most genuine rock underground due to its aesthetic and political iconoclasm. Amidst the numerous bands the scene produced, none has matched the notoriety of Grazhdanskaia Oborona (Civil Defense) and its leader Egor Letov. At first glance, Letov’s songs declaring hatred for the “totalitarian” Soviet Union and its destruction of the individual evoke associations with the previous generation of Soviet dissidents, who used the term “totalitarianism” to contrast the Soviet system with the Western democracy they admired. Yet Letov, who rejected democratic reforms and after the collapse of the USSR became an ardent communist, defined totalitarianism not as a form of government but as an inborn state of being. Accordingly, resistance toward the Soviet state became a facade for the struggle against human nature. Totalitarianism thus serves as a lens through which to examine the role of politics in Grazhdanskaia Oborona: a representation of existential rebellion. By analyzing his interviews and musical output in the mid- to late-1980s, I argue that Letov manipulates listeners’ understandings of what it meant to be “against” in the Soviet Union by drawing from existing rhetoric of political protest, replacing the image of the liberal dissident with that of the existential rebel. I demonstrate Letov’s conception of totalitarianism both as a line of continuity between his “anti-Soviet” and “pro-communist” years as well as a subversion of conventions of political defiance traditionally employed by Western scholars of the Soviet Union.
