ABSTRACT
As early as 1992, the Bulgarian popular music scholar Claire Levy warned that academic research on popular music beyond the Anglophone world tends to rely on reductionist narratives of generic mimesis (Levy 1992: 211-12). There is good reason to heed her warning even today, for this tendency is still very much alive. Fortunately for this book, the case of punk rock in Russia comes with a built-in resistance to such mimetic reductionism. At that time, rock music as such was struggling to establish itself in the major Russian cities and to fi nd a voice in the Russian language. Russian amateur rock musicians were still a long way from their goal of gaining acceptance for their music as a viable cultural form within Soviet society (Troitsky 1990 : 8; Cushman 1995 : 17-19; McMichael 2005 : 665). Where rock conventions had yet to be established, there was little need for punk’s musical revolt against them. This does not deny the fact that Russian rock music of the late 1970s shared certain traits with punk, such as the DIY ethics and lo-fi delity sound, even if this was more by circumstance than by choice (Troitsky 1981 ; Rybin and Startsev 2000 : 118ff.; Kan 2011 ). Nonetheless, punk aesthetics were still to fi nd a voice and a place in this cultural reservation.
