Who was Sergei Kuryokhin? The ‘Lenin Was a Mushroom’ hoaxer who electrified the Soviet underground and, at the very end, embraced fascism and occult politics.

July 9 marked 30 years since the death of Sergei Kuryokhin, one of the most important figures in the Soviet and Russian underground of the 1980s and 1990s. Few people defined that era more vividly. Kuryokhin, known by the nickname “the Captain,” moved effortlessly through every sphere of cultural life, winning over those he encountered and setting the tone wherever he went. He collaborated with the Soviet Union’s finest jazz musicians, recorded with the bands Kino, Aquarium, and Alisa, befriended Timur Novikov’s New Artists, and was regarded in the West as a dissident genius. His own project, Pop Mekhanika (“Pop Mechanics”), was a kind of total theater that fused performance art, ballet, opera, variety entertainment, circus, and fashion. To a wider public he was best known as the creator of the notorious hoax “Lenin Was a Mushroom.” Near the end of his life, Kuryokhin grew close to Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party and the philosopher Alexander Dugin, who would later become the ideologue of the “Russkiy mir” (“Russian world”) political doctrine. That turn in the Captain’s life looked grim at the time; it is more painful still to contemplate today. Meduza journalist Alexander Filimonov tells the story of Sergei Kuryokhin.

Sergei Kuryokhin is one of the subjects of Mikhail Zygar’s book Temnaya storona Zemli (“The Dark Side of the Earth”), a reconstruction of the Soviet Union’s final 30 years, from the height of the empire to its collapse. The book was released in Russian by Meduza’s publishing house. It can be purchased here.

What you’re about to read, if you dare

This story is roughly 19,000 words. For convenience, we have divided it into six chapters, along with four musical and video interludes so you can take a break from reading and watch some of Kuryokhin’s performances and interviews. Happy reading and viewing!

Who was Sergei Kuryokhin, really? Many labels fit, but none fits completely. Musician. Showman. Composer. Producer. Conductor. Public figure. Polemicist. Director. Political strategist. Screenwriter. Actor. Publisher. Television host. Writer. Philosopher.

What drove Kuryokhin across all those roles was a desire to provoke. That is hardly surprising — provocation is one of the defining principles of the avant-garde, which captivated and guided him throughout his life. Today he might be called an actionist or a prankster, but for a figure of his stature that would be reductive. He was more accurately a mystifier — or, as people often told him during his lifetime, a magician.

In the 1980s, the Captain’s wild antics regularly stunned audiences, like a textbook “slap in the face of public taste.” Yet he always got away with it, and his Pop Mekhanika shows grew more outrageous and grandiose with each outing, moving out of the underground and into prestigious concert halls, growing in scale, crowding out dreary Soviet officialdom.

Boredom is the key word. Kuryokhin spent his entire life fleeing it. He always wanted a celebration: things had to be funny, nothing could follow the rules, and new meanings had to be born from the chaos he provoked.

His mind seemed to run in permanent overdrive, ceaselessly conquering new territory, opening fresh fields, absorbing enormous quantities of knowledge — and sometimes not quite knowing where to apply it all. He brimmed with ideas; they poured out of him, and he improvised on the fly and didn’t much care if some particularly brilliant scheme never came to fruition and simply vanished. The moment just wasn’t right; another idea would take its place. “Never mind, posterity will figure it out,” he would say, and then race headlong forward.

In everything he did, the Captain cared far more about the process than the result. As long as something was being created, born spontaneously, flying off in some unknown direction on unbridled fantasy, it was alive and interesting. The moment you slowed down, thought about the end goal, and subordinated form to content, it was all over; art died.

Kuryokhin said he could not coexist for long with any creative milieu. “I would grasp the essentials, the core semantic structures of whatever environment I was in, and very quickly I would get bored,” he said.

One might consider such an approach superficial and its practitioner a dilettante. But Kuryokhin knew and understood music thoroughly, from classical to avant-garde. As a pianist and composer, he was a consummate craftsman and a genuine talent. He could reproduce any musical form on sight.

His eternal boredom and desire to break out of constraints led him, logically enough, to postmodernism — the ironic play with form, the synthesis of incompatible elements, the generation of absurdity, at which he had no equal.

The Captain’s postmodern game extended far beyond music and was not always immediately obvious to his contemporaries. His interviews with journalists, his television and radio appearances, even his everyday conversations with friends were shot through with it — sometimes as spontaneous jokes, sometimes as carefully prepared provocations like the “Lenin Was a Mushroom” program.

All of this was performed, as befits postmodernism, with a straight face. He could hold forth for hours on any topic, scattering pompous pseudo-scholarly pronouncements. He didn’t care what he talked about, as long as it was entertaining and people discussed it.

“The perfect interview is when I’m standing there in an American army uniform, rattling off incomprehensible phrases at breakneck speed, making sure to pack the monologue with as many names and quotes from famous scientists, philosophers, and phenomenologists as possible,” Kuryokhin said.

Basically, he was talking nonsense. But the Captain was so self-assured, so convincing in every role he played, that listeners fell under his charm. Even if they didn’t believe him outright, they listened, rapt, to his most improbable spiel.

With his perpetual sly, charming smile, Kuryokhin said he had no guiding concept, no plan, in life: “Everything I do, I do following my intuition. Even the most absurd things. But I am certain that my intuition is leading me in the right direction.”

Many of the facts in this piece come from biographies of Sergei Kuryokhin. One of them, Shkiper o Kapitane (“The Skipper on the Captain”), was written by his close friend, music critic Alexander Kan. The author of another, Bezumnaya mekhanika russkogo roka (“The Crazy Mechanics of Russian Rock”), is journalist and commentator Alexander Kushnir. We strongly recommend both if you want to learn more about Kuryokhin.

‘Musical Ring’

During the perestroika years, Muzykalny Ring (“Musical Ring”) was among the most popular programs on Leningrad Television. It gave previously banned rock bands — Aquarium, Bravo, Zvuki Mu, Sekret, and Tsentr — their first Soviet-wide broadcast, alongside pop performers Valery Leontyev, Viktor Saltykov, Viktor Reznikov, Mikhail Boyarsky, and the bard Alexander Rozenbaum.

On the show, musicians got the chance to perform their own songs live while censorship still reigned, as audience members in the hall — many of them planted — quizzed them and frequently criticized their work. Later, the program began airing live, staging face-offs between musicians, and viewers could call the studio during the broadcast and vote for their favorite performer.

In 1987, Sergei Kuryokhin caused a sensation on Soviet television when he brought the cream of the Leningrad underground onto Muzykalny Ring. On stage, under his direction, performers succeeded one another: avant-garde saxophonist Sergei Letov (the older brother of Yegor Letov), the full lineup of Kino, members of Strannye igry (“Strange Games”) and Auktyon, a chamber string ensemble led by Yuri Shalyt, models in extravagant outfits, people in welding masks and gas masks, and an industrial section led by Sergei “Afrika” Bugayev, who would later play the boy Bananan in Sergei Solovyov’s film Assa.

Among the various metal pipes on stage — the idea of playing them was evidently borrowed from the German experimentalists Einstürzende Neubauten — one instrument stood out: the utyugon, invented by the artist Timur Novikov. It was a tabletop with irons suspended on strings, or, as Kuryokhin explained, “the first Soviet synthesizer, which according to legend was assembled by Mayakovsky.”

The music ranged from free-jazz improvisations and heavy guitar riffs to parodies of throat singing, traditional rock and roll, and bebop. The audience watched with evident wariness, unsure how to react.

The first remark from the audience was a complaint that Pop Mekhanika’s music evoked unhealthy associations. “What kind of unhealthy associations are you having?” Kuryokhin shot back with his trademark smile, to laughter and applause from the crowd.

Then, continuing to deflect new attacks bashfully and justify his work, the Pop Mekhanika leader came close to a manifesto: “All our music is music of love.” It was not at all complicated, he continued, “because we don’t invent anything deliberately — we use previously known musical layers and try to perform them with maximum love and commitment.” Perhaps a new musical language would emerge from it, he said — one that would be understood tomorrow — or perhaps, on the contrary, it was a sign of a cultural crisis.

“I am a singer of a dying musical culture,” Kuryokhin concluded.

In a single hour of airtime, the Captain drove a giant steel nail into the coffin of Soviet censorship, according to Alexander Kushnir. “No one on domestic television had ever spoken so easily and naturally — not news anchors, not hosts of signature programs, not performers in the studio. Several months before the debut of Vzglyad (“View”), this was already a new and unprecedented degree of freedom,” he writes in his biography of Kuryokhin, Bezumnaya mekhanika russkogo roka.

Kuryokhin’s performances are hard to imagine today. Hardly anyone would tolerate such a freedom-loving figure now. Any Pop Mekhanika show would end in a denunciation and some kind of charges: “insulting the feelings of believers,” “inciting hatred or enmity,” spreading “fakes” and “discrediting” the army, or perhaps “propagandizing LGBTQ+ and Satanism,” “rehabilitating Nazism,” or “justifying terrorism.” And the Captain himself would almost certainly have been declared a “foreign agent” and an “extremist,” sent to prison, or driven out of the country.

In that sense, contemporary censorship has outdone even the 1980s.

~ End of the musical interlude ~

‘The Ways of Freedom’

Kuryokhin was a prodigy. From his early years in Moscow and Yevpatoria, his chief passions were the piano, books, and cacti. He read voraciously and indiscriminately, often leafing through books from the back — he wanted to know right away how things ended. His creative gifts — perfect pitch and a phenomenal memory — were already apparent in music school, where he also displayed a fantastically fast piano technique. As for the cacti, they filled every room of the Kuryokhin family’s apartment in Crimea. He possessed encyclopedic knowledge of the plants, which he later put to brilliant use in the “Lenin Was a Mushroom” hoax.

His parents raised him to be a genius. He himself would later say that even during his school years he was out of step with reality.

After finishing school, the 17-year-old Kuryokhin moved to Leningrad with his parents and set about conquering the city methodically. He acquired new friends and extensive connections with astonishing speed. Through the theater studio of his distant relative Erik Goroshevsky, he first crossed paths with the musicians of Aquarium. The poet Arkady Dragomoshchenko introduced him to literary bohemia. Saxophonist Vladimir Boluchevsky became one of his first and most enduring musical collaborators.

Together with his friend the journalist Alexander Kan, Kuryokhin helped found the Club of Contemporary Music at the Lensoviet House of Culture, which brought together lovers of progressive jazz. The ideological force behind the organization was Yefim Barban, the leading theorist and scholar of jazz in the Soviet Union and one of the founders of Leningrad’s first jazz clubs, D-58 and Kvadrat. Barban had an enormous influence on the young Kuryokhin, and the club became his first informal residency, giving him the opportunity to perform solo concerts regularly.

His attempts to continue his formal musical education came to nothing. Kuryokhin spent a year or two at the choral conducting faculty of the Leningrad Institute of Culture and at the variety department of the Mussorgsky Music College, and was expelled from both for chronic truancy. “Life is short enough as it is, so wasting it on nonsense like school that gives you nothing is completely pointless,” he said later.

What he did instead was begin performing with the most progressive jazz musicians in the Soviet Union. First among them was his teacher, saxophonist and clarinetist Anatoly Vapirov, the author of the cult jazz album Misteriya (“Mystery”), released on the state label Melodiya. Recognizing Kuryokhin’s talent, Vapirov immediately brought him into his ensemble, giving him the chance to tour the entire country and hone his performing skills to a brilliant edge.

The self-assured Captain, however, saw things differently. Vapirov was too conservative and not free-jazz enough for his tastes. One caustic remark of his is well known: at the most solemn moments of Vapirov’s concerts, he said, he felt a desperate urge to don a red clown’s nose right there on stage.

Kuryokhin then performed in a duo with saxophonist Vladimir Chekasin from the celebrated Vilnius jazz trio of Vyacheslav Ganelin (Ganelin-Tarasov-Chekasin). It was at Chekasin’s performances — which featured striking theatrical elements and uncontrolled musical improvisations — that the Captain first glimpsed the idea for what would become Pop Mekhanika.

It is widely assumed that the first Soviet underground musician to release an album in the West was Boris Grebenshchikov, who recorded the English-language Radio Silence in the United States in 1989. (The compilation Red Wave, featuring recordings by Aquarium, Kino, Alisa, and Strannye igry that Joanna Stingray smuggled out of the Soviet Union and released in the United States in 1986, doesn’t count.)

In fact, Grebenshchikov was not the first. Kuryokhin beat him to it back in 1981. What’s more, the record released in England, The Ways of Freedom, was also his debut solo work. But in fairness, the story behind The Ways of Freedom turned out to be even more remarkable than the music. Consider the gesture: an unrecognized Soviet virtuoso, secretly releasing a record in the West.

The idea came to Kuryokhin while he was listening to “enemy voices” on the radio — specifically a popular jazz program broadcast on the BBC’s Russian Service by a Soviet émigré named Leo Feigin, who used the cover name Alexei Leonidov. Feigin had also set up a small independent label, Leo Records, to promote Soviet jazz that was little known in the West.

Kuryokhin obtained Feigin’s home address in London and, with no concern whatsoever for secrecy (letters sent abroad could be opened and read by KGB officers), entered into a rich musicological correspondence with him. Before long, Feigin, impressed by his correspondent’s erudition and talent, sent a spare magnetic tape, borrowed from the BBC studio, to the Soviet Union — so that Kuryokhin could record a solo album on it. The channels for getting it there and back were entirely informal and fairly dangerous, involving friendly diplomats or chance tourists. No one was deterred.

When Kuryokhin sent back the finished album of his piano improvisations, he wrote candidly to Feigin that he remembered the music itself only vaguely and that the tracks on the record could therefore be arranged in any order — but that the titles on the sleeve had to appear in a strict conceptual sequence.

The tracklist of The Ways of Freedom made Feigin gasp:

1. Theory and Practice
2. The Wall
3. The Rules of the Game
4. Archipelago
5. No Exit
6. The Inner Fear
7. The Other Way
8. The Great Escape
9. Fresh Air
10. New Dawn

The title of the record — along with the entire dissident concept of escape from a prison into the free world, with its obligatory nods to The Gulag Archipelago — was devised and fed to the Captain by Yefim Barban. The publisher Feigin, alarmed for the safety of his label’s artist, decided to add a special note to the record sleeve: “Sergei Kuryokhin bears no responsibility for the publication of these recordings.”

With packaging like that, The Ways of Freedom predictably received substantial, if mixed, coverage in the West. Critics wrote about Kuryokhin in specialist jazz publications such as Down Beat and Coda, as well as in major newspapers including The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph. Reviewers compared his playing to Cecil Taylor and John Cage, to the work of Mauricio Kagel, Béla Bartók, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The American Down Beat called the recording culturally and politically important but said that mixing music and politics often just produces dull work. The New York Times concluded in its review that the playing was technically stunning with rapidly developing ideas, but with a gaping hole where the heart should be.

On top of that, some critics accused Kuryokhin of charlatanism, suspecting that the sound on the album had been artificially sped up. The recording does indeed contain unnaturally fast passages that sound as though played by a player piano. These flaws were attributed to the Racal Zonal magnetic tape that Feigin had sent Kuryokhin. In reality, that tape was of rather poor quality and intended strictly for recording speech, not music — a fact Feigin himself hadn’t known — hence the distortions.

The publisher himself never doubted Kuryokhin’s talent, considering him one of the fastest pianists on the planet. Kuryokhin, for his part, gave evasive and murky answers about the circumstances of the recording and called the critics idiots:

Barban later said, pointedly: “Seryozha is a person for whom it’s important to be above what he does.” Feigin would go on publishing Kuryokhin’s recordings for the rest of Kuryokhin’s life and even made a documentary film about him, Divine Madness, for the BBC.

Despite the stir in the West, the Soviet authorities did not react at all to the release of Kuryokhin’s record. He continued to exist on the periphery of their attention, since he was not part of the system: he had no professional degree, was not a member of the Composers’ Union, and held no official job.

In underground circles, however, he instantly became a legend.

‘Calling Captain Afrika’

Having had his fill of Vapirov and Chekasin and grown thoroughly tired of jazz — from that point on, in his characteristic manner, Kuryokhin would refer to Soviet jazzmen as freaks — the Captain plunged into the world of the Leningrad Rock Club. For most people who know anything about Kuryokhin, this is probably the period they associate with him first.

A virtuoso pianist and arranger, he was in high demand among the amateur rock bands of the day. Kuryokhin can be heard on Kino’s 1984 album Nachalnik Kamchatki (“Chief of Kamchatka”) — his keyboards appear in the songs “Kazhduyu noch’” (“Every Night”), “Trankvilizator” (“Tranquilizer”), “Syuzhet dlya novoy pesni” (“Plot for a New Song”), and “Gost’” (“The Guest”) — and on Alisa’s 1985 debut album Energiya (“Energy”), where he plays on “Doktor Bugi” (“Doctor Boogie”), “Sokovyzhimatel’” (“The Juicer”), and “Eksperimentator” (“The Experimenter”), for which there is a funny video clip featuring Kuryokhin.

The Captain co-wrote several songs with his close friend Joanna Stingray, a young American singer who had once come to the Soviet Union as a tourist and fallen in love with Soviet rock. Over several years she brought Leningrad rock musicians scarce musical instruments — she personally tracked down a Yamaha 100 synthesizer for Kuryokhin — and then, with the authors’ consent, smuggled recordings by Aquarium, Kino, Alisa, and Strannye igry out of the country and released them in the United States as the compilation Red Wave.

Stingray made a DIY video clip for each of those groups, and Kuryokhin appeared in all of them except the Kino clip. The video for Metamorfozy (“Metamorphoses”), in which the Captain clowns around in the cold with members of Strannye igry in the Mikhailovsky Garden, was largely conceived and directed by him.

The most significant and productive partnership was between Sergei Kuryokhin and Boris Grebenshchikov. This was not simply a case of opposite poles attracting — here two intellectuals met, both exceptionally well-read and equally deeply versed in music, both with a keen understanding of contemporary art and literature. For many years the two were nearly inseparable, and that friendship produced several of the most important albums in Russian rock of the 1980s.

(Much later, in the 1990s, speaking with Kushnir, Kuryokhin was dismissive about that period — claiming that Aquarium had been unimportant to him, a way to unwind in his free time from jazz work with Vapirov. But let’s not forget the remark about the “clown’s nose,” made in different circumstances. Which of these Captains to believe is for you to decide.)

Before Kuryokhin, Aquarium was something like an acoustic “ensemble of elves,” a group that had mainly become scandalously famous for a punk stunt at the Vesenniye ritmy-80 (“Spring Rhythms ’80”) festival in Tbilisi. With Kuryokhin’s arrival, the band began to sound like a proper rock group.

“The Captain took us out of amateur territory and into professional music, raising the quality bar considerably,” Grebenshchikov said in a conversation with the independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg in early 2026.

At that time Aquarium was recording underground at the legendary studio of Andrei Tropillo, which was disguised as a hobby club for children at the House of Young Technicians in the Okhta district. The two friends complemented each other naturally: if Grebenshchikov had a sense of what he wanted to do musically, Kuryokhin knew how to achieve it. “For me, doing something together with the Captain was pure pleasure — his constant wisecracking kept me from slipping into sentimentality,” Grebenshchikov said.

Kuryokhin’s inspired keyboard parts, played almost on the fly, can already be heard on the 1981 albums Elektrichestvo (“Electricity”) and Treugolnik (“Triangle”). The latter is an experimental, hilarious audio play, fused from absurdist verse by George Gunitsky, tape recordings played backward, surreal field recordings, solos on strange instruments like the kazoo, chorales, marches, waltzes, and what Grebenshchikov called a “musical circus.”

The kazoo in the song “Poruchik Ivanov” (“Lieutenant Ivanov”) and the piano in the famous “Mochalkin blyuz” (“Mochalkino Blues”), which later appeared in Sergei Solovyov’s film Assa, are Kuryokhin’s work.

The Captain made his most significant contribution on the next two Aquarium records — Tabu (“Taboo,” 1982) and Radio Afrika (1983).

“Our fairly timid stage of madness was amplified by his own madness, his sense of humor, and the combination turned out, from my point of view, to be perfectly explosive. In other words, we did things together that I don’t think either of us would have done alone — could never have done,” Boris Grebenshchikov said.

Tabu was a duel between guitarist Alexander Lyapin and keyboardist Sergei Kuryokhin. The former pulled the band toward hard rock that already seemed archaic at the time (“Igra navernyaka” / “Playing It Safe,” “Beregi svoy khoy” / “Guard Your Thing”), while the latter pushed for fashionable new wave (“Segodnya noch’yu kto-to” / “Someone Tonight,” “Synov’ya molchalivykh dney” / “Sons of Silent Days”). Each was determined to compose and layer as many solo parts as possible across all the tracks, leaving less room on the tape for the other. According to legend, during one such skirmish, Grebenshchikov couldn’t take it anymore and, fleeing to the balcony of Tropillo’s studio, wrote his programmatic piece “Rok-n-roll mertv” (“Rock and Roll Is Dead”).

Kuryokhin’s innovation on Tabu was the so-called prepared piano. This technique for altering the sound of a piano was invented by the Captain’s favorite composer, John Cage, who placed various objects between the strings. Kuryokhin inserted thumbtacks into the hammers of a Soviet “Krasny Oktyabr” (“Red October”) piano, giving the sound a strange, fashionable edge and an otherworldly depth. This is particularly striking in the composition “Pepel” (“Ashes”), where the Captain hammers out a sharp and infectious keyboard riff without stopping.

On Radio Afrika — possibly the finest Soviet album of the 1980s — Kuryokhin was already a full-fledged producer. His influence on Grebenshchikov had grown so strong that Kuryokhin could calmly replace some of the original Aquarium members with invited musicians who, in his view, were better suited to the studio tasks at hand. He recruited new bassists and drummers (always the Achilles’ heel of early Aquarium) and on one occasion brought into the studio a young saxophonist named Igor Butman — whose saxophone is heard on both Tabu and Radio Afrika — and wrote out all his parts in detail, note by note, for every song.

Radio Afrika, stitched together into a single suite with radio static, was a unique polystylistic work spanning a range from funk (“Kapitan Afrika” / “Captain Afrika”) and dub (“S utra shel sneg” / “It Snowed in the Morning”) to ragtime (“Malchik Evgraf” / “The Boy Evgraf”) and romance (“Tvoyey zvezde” / “To Your Star”), and it sounds impressively fresh to this day.

It is also one of the few Aquarium recordings on which Kuryokhin is officially credited as a composer. Most notable is the magnificent “Tibetskoye tango” (“Tibetan Tango”), with its sung mantra “Om, kho-khom. Ku-ku-kum, fi-fi.”

Also worth noting is Kuryokhin’s lead part in the composition “Moya al’ternativa” (“My Alternative”). It was recorded during the Radio Afrika sessions but did not make the final tracklist. In 1992 it was released on the third volume of Istoriya Akvariuma (“The History of Aquarium”).

In a sense, all of this polyphony and kaleidoscope of styles — constructed largely by the Captain — can be seen as yet another prototype of the coming Pop Mekhanika.

Yet, according to Grebenshchikov, Kuryokhin was dissatisfied and saddened by the final edit of Radio Afrika and did not appear at all for the recording of Aquarium’s next album, Den’ serebra (“Silver Day”), in 1984.

“He didn’t like straightforward music — he needed things to be funny,” Grebenshchikov said. Though the Captain’s disappearance may have a simpler explanation: by that time he was already fully absorbed in Pop Mekhanika.

A year later Kuryokhin returned to Aquarium for the recording of another classic album, Deti dekabrya (“Children of December”). There he filled out the sound with synthesizer parts on a Korg in such impressive compositions as “Sny o chem-to bol’shem” (“Dreams of Something Greater”), “Zhazhda” (“Thirst”), and “Tantsy na grani vesny” (“Dances on the Edge of Spring”) — while Grebenshchikov showed off his playing on a white Fender sent as a gift by David Bowie.

Yet the live program strangely never took off: audiences rejected the new direction. Alexander Kan, a journalist and close friend of the Captain’s, believes this was Kuryokhin’s last desperate attempt to claim the leader’s mantle for himself and once again radically change Aquarium’s lineup and style. At Kuryokhin’s instigation, for instance, guitarist Andrei Otryaskin from the art-rock group Dzhungli (“Jungle”) briefly joined the band, and Vladimir Chekasin played saxophone at the rock club festival.

In the end, Aquarium turned back toward a more traditional acoustic sound, and the Captain fell out with Grebenshchikov — taking potshots at him in the pages of the newspaper Leningradskaya Pravda — and broke off all contact with him for five years.

This passage, written by Kuryokhin, appeared in a Soviet newspaper in 1987. The rock scene was stunned. But the line about “Komsomol organizations” made clear that the Captain was up to his tricks again.

Kuryokhin later explained that he had needed “a scandal” at that moment, for two simple reasons: “an urgent need for a sharp change of image and wounded self-esteem.”

“It was entirely in keeping with his sardonic attitude toward life. So I didn’t attach any importance to it, and afterward we kept getting back together on any pretext — right up until his death,” Grebenshchikov said.

Asked about his favorite memories of Kuryokhin, he said:

‘Introduction to Pop Mekhanika’

Kuryokhin was a conceptualist who approached everything with a ready idea, staging every gesture and step with the utmost care. At a certain point he stopped playing the piano, declaring that the instrument was dead and that nothing new could be wrung from it. He was bored again. The Captain’s creative ambitions extended far beyond the piano, and beyond music itself. His next and defining concept was Pop Mekhanika.

For all its outward flash and strangeness, and for all the seeming paradoxes that could knock an unprepared observer off their feet, Pop Mekhanika is not that hard to explain. It was the perfectly logical and natural culmination of Sergei Kuryokhin’s creative development. As he himself put it, Pop Mekhanika was not a band but a way of thinking — the very substance of Kuryokhin himself, his organic nature.

In his ceaseless activity, the Captain moved steadily from the role of sideman — a supporting player in someone else’s orchestra — to the role of frontman, a leader who gathered around himself people from the most unpredictable, unrelated spheres and drew them in with his idea.

He studied the cultural layers he needed with meticulous care while his idée fixe was ripening, and when the right moment came, he gathered all that knowledge — those scattered pieces — and began to juggle them, each time assembling a new, fantastical pattern from a fixed set of elements. And in all of this, he insisted, there was absolutely no intuition — only a “clearly thought-through and mechanically executed act, formulated at the level of thought.”

What was his idea? The Captain usually explained it with evasive irony: “Pop Mekhanika is a ‘laboratory for studying the relationship between the individual and society.’” He would add, with a smile, that his “research” relied on “techniques of pure idiocy, sonic terror, verbal violence, and the dismemberment of spiritual values.”

His constant collaborator, the artist Sergei “Afrika” Bugayev, theorized and piled on even more fog: “Kuryokhin’s work was always grounded in a scientific understanding of the phenomenon of culture and art. The Captain’s function was to alter the status of the nuclear force that drives the subject of culture. This was an integral part of his concept of the total culturalization of space.”

Let us try to put it more simply, and perhaps more poetically: the goal of Pop Mekhanika was the triumph of madness and the joy of life, the final victory over boredom, a celebration of the unbearable lightness and absurdity of existence. What else could you set against the dreary Soviet grayness from inside your internal emigration? Only this! We shall not forget our calling — we bring laughter and joy to people!

In the article “Morfologiya ‘Populyarnoy mekhaniki’” (“Morphology of ‘Popular Mechanics’”), published in the magazine Om, Kuryokhin described his creative development and his experience with different musical milieus this way:

This might make it seem as though Kuryokhin was deliberately picking fights, but that again is just his wisecracking. Pop Mekhanika was above all the product of the Captain’s phenomenal organizational and communicative abilities. Only Kuryokhin could phone his entire address book in the course of a day and, the next day, assemble dozens of musicians, actors, poets, artists, and circus performers — animals included — on a single stage, hand each a personal assignment, and then brilliantly conduct all those acts within one spontaneous performance.

And it didn’t matter who happened to be available that day — the avant-gardist Sergei Letov, the romance singer Valentina Ponomareva, the Sologub brothers from the rock band Strannye igry, the People’s Artist of the USSR Nani Bregvadze, Anton Adasinsky (an actor with Litsedei (“Comedians”) and Avia), the English actress Vanessa Redgrave, the artist and drag queen Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, or the variety singer Eduard Khil. Each of them, charged by the Captain’s energy and charm, became a compliant cog in the Pop Mekhanika spectacle.

This was how a very open-ended structure came into being — whoever you managed to find and invite would be Pop Mekhanika that day. Of course, the question arose of how this constantly changing collective was supposed to rehearse and play together, but Kuryokhin simply didn’t overcomplicate the overall composition and invited musicians to improvise within boundaries they knew well.

He wrote out no sheet music for anyone; at most he would whistle or play a melody on the piano, draw a general plan of the event and the sequence of performances on a large sheet of paper, and hand musicians brief instructions in place of scores: “full free,” “Tchaikovsky,” “cabaret,” “Orthodoxy,” “elephants, but no sex.” And everyone understood perfectly.

“When I think about a particular concert, I start not from the music I want to perform but from the people I have at hand. I try to spotlight each of them, to show them at their best,” Kuryokhin said in an interview with Joanna Stingray in 1986.

This concept gave him maximum freedom to make creative decisions. “I want to be Mozart and Michael Jackson at the same time,” he proclaimed. There was no difference between high and low art, between refined style and excessive simplicity of material, between virtuoso performance and complete amateurism, between a pre-composed and an improvised fragment. Kuryokhin held that anything could be used: mixing all traditions and directions into one, as long as the result formed an organic whole.

Every act was also, for him, a particular symbol. The Captain operated not merely with sounds and images but with shared cultural meanings. It was from the sudden layering of one such element onto another that the required madness grew.

“Our music consists of a monstrous accumulation of tangos, waltzes, mini-structures, avant-garde, bel canto, pointillism, opera, dance, swing, popular songs, and so on. All of it is filtered through hyper-emotional ecstatics, but it’s psychologically structured and thought through,” Kuryokhin described the theory of “Pop Mechanics” in letters to friends. “We take a structure we’ve worked out in advance, and then we fill it with content. The content can be new every time. All of it is put through a charge of absurdity, since we push every phrase to the point of idiocy. That’s how form is born.”

This form was not new. Kuryokhin knew it well and recognized it in the techniques of the Fluxus movement and his favorite jazz and academic avant-gardists: composers John Cage and Mauricio Kagel; free-jazz pioneers Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman; Dutch saxophonist Willem Breuker; pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and double bassist Peter Kowald from the German Globe Unity Orchestra; the multigenre American saxophonist John Zorn; and Vladimir Chekasin, the founder of the Lithuanian school of jazz.

But music was only one component of Pop Mekhanika. It was above all a theatrical, live phenomenon, not designed for studio recording and not even particularly suited to ideal concert reproduction.

What mattered most to the Captain was not what was being performed but who was performing it. “If Stravinsky worked with intervals when composing music, and Schnittke likewise worked with styles as though they were notes, then Kuryokhin composed Pop Mekhanika from specific people, with all the particularities of their improvisational gifts and their behavior on stage and in life,” the composer Sofia Gubaidulina said of him.

Sergei Letov shares this view. Along with Sergei “Afrika” Bugayev, Letov was the most faithful and regular participant in Pop Mekhanika, and he describes it as something closer to art actionism than to music — “Kuryokhin’s attempt to move beyond the instrument.”

The phrase “Populyarnaya mekhanika” (“Popular Mechanics”) itself — like the first solo record — was a gift to Kuryokhin from Yefim Barban. It is a calque of the name of the American popular science magazine Popular Mechanics. In slightly earlier versions, Kuryokhin called his collective the Crazy Music Orchestra or the Creative Music Orchestra.

Pop Mekhanika is officially considered to have been born at a concert at the Moskvorechye House of Culture in Moscow on April 14, 1984. Kuryokhin gave that performance the conceptual title “Populyarnaya mekhanika — 2” (“Popular Mechanics — 2”), even though no “Pop Mekhanika No. 1” had ever existed (and afterward they were never numbered in chronological order). The jazz contingent at Moskvorechye included Igor Butman, Sergei Letov, Vladimir Boluchevsky, Alexander “Fagot” Alexandrov from Aquarium, and Valentina Ponomareva; the rock contingent included the Sologub brothers, drummer Alexander Kondrashkin, and the future bassist of Zvuki Mu, Alexander Lipnitsky, for whom it was only his first or second time on a stage.

In Leningrad, Kuryokhin’s musical circus made its debut on November 19, 1984. The concert was titled “Pop Mekhanika No. 12” because it took place in the Twelve Collegiums building on the Vasilyevsky Island embankment, the oldest building of Leningrad State University. This performance marked the appearance of an expanded guitar section drawn from the members of Kino and Strannye igry — the so-called rock line, which became one of the defining features of Kuryokhin’s orchestra.

Pop Mekhanika No. 12 is also remembered for the contraband cameo of a heavily disguised Grebenshchikov, who had been strictly forbidden to enter the building after his expulsion from the university. As the concert progressed, an unidentified guitarist in a beret gradually removed his glasses, fake beard, and other disguise, until he was finally recognized by everyone — to the delight of the audience and the horror of the faculty members present.

Pop Mekhanika concerts grew more ambitious with each performance and attracted ever-larger audiences, while the Captain settled deeper into the role of conductor — a kind of éminence grise and arbiter of fates, a grandmaster playing a game with eternity in which everyone else was merely an obedient pawn.

Kuryokhin’s expressive conducting style is on full display in the film about Soviet jazz Dialogi (“Dialogues”), directed by Nikolai Obukhovich in 1986. It featured, among others, the indispensable Chekasin, composer David Goloshchekin, and singers Larisa Dolina and Tatevik Oganesyan — but the Captain effortlessly pulled all the attention onto himself.

Slightly earlier, Kuryokhin was also captured on film by BBC journalists in their documentary Comrades: All That Jazz. “I have come up with what seems to me the most adequate method of conducting. I focus everything on myself and have developed a certain system of gestures that my musicians know well. If I jump up with my left leg raised — we play Shostakovich; if my right leg — we play jazz,” the Captain told the British journalists without a trace of a smile.

How Kuryokhin commanded Pop Mekhanika is worth seeing: he tore around the stage like a hurricane, jumping, shouting, gesticulating furiously, climbing on and under the piano, falling, rolling and writhing on the floor, driving himself to a state of frenzy and exhaustion.

“I want the metaphysics of total unity, I want to approach the mystery. I adore mysteries, I adore the very spirit of that ancient ritual,” he said. Sometimes he achieved it.

Contemporaries assessed Pop Mekhanika’s performances in different ways. Some placed them in the category of progressive avant-garde art; others called them total theater; still others considered them a variety revue. Grebenshchikov believes it was “a mixture of all three elements plus two more for which human language has no words.”

Live mechanics

What did a typical Pop Mekhanika look like? Given how the shows were organized and performed — spontaneous, of the moment — not many high-quality video recordings survive. But even those that exist, together with the recollections of contemporaries, are highly entertaining and impressive.

By the late 1980s, riding the wave of perestroika, Pop Mekhanika’s pop-art shows were also finding success abroad. The Leningrad contingent, led by the Captain, toured Europe, staging grand shows in Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Of course, it was impossible to bring a full troupe, so Kuryokhin would ask the organizers to find performers locally. And that worked beautifully too.

Pop Mekhanika in Stockholm (August 1988)

Pop Mekhanika in Liverpool (January 1989)

Pop Mekhanika at the Sports and Concert Complex, Pre-Holiday Women’s Hallucinations (March 1989)

~ End of the musical interlude ~

The level of Pop Mekhanika madness kept rising, the performances grew to immoderate proportions, audiences continued to marvel on the edge of panic — but the Captain already understood that he was routinely repeating himself and had reached the limits of this form. He was bored again. He wanted to break new ground.

He admitted that the performances no longer brought him any joy and produced only a feeling of exhaustion. “The ideal audience for me would be someone who came to every Pop Mekhanika concert — they would be in a position to understand the internal dynamics. Since that is impossible, it is unclear why I am doing this,” he said with a sigh.

In March 1988, Kuryokhin combined a Pop Mekhanika concert with Leningrad’s first beauty contest — an event still considered taboo and immoral in Soviet society. Thirty contestants in colored swimsuits and high heels paraded across the stage of the BKZ Oktyabrsky. Planted among the competitors under the name Irena Belaya was an agent — a disguised Bugayev, who had successfully passed the preliminary round. The usual mayhem was provided by rockers and jazzmen, the Litsedei troupe and the New Artists, Pioneer buglers and Pioneer girl archers, Hare Krishnas, and fakirs with snakes.

The most visibly delighted person in the whole affair was the People’s Artist of the USSR Kola Beldy, who tore around the stage in a reindeer herder’s costume, delivering his old hit “A oleni luchshe!” (“But Reindeer Are Better!”) in a rapid-fire patter over the unbridled, wild, primitive accompaniment of Kuryokhin’s orchestra.

For the finale, the Captain brought a cow out on stage. It looked into the audience with indifference and turned its back to the crowd. Who won the beauty contest is probably impossible to determine now. “My friend Sergei Zharikov from the group DK said: ‘Look, Kuryokhin, what is art? You play the piano for 30 years, you do all these exquisitely subtle things. And what will people remember afterward? The cow!’” the Captain said later.

‘Lenin Was a Mushroom’

As one era gave way to the next and the Soviet Union moved at full speed toward its inevitable collapse, Kuryokhin decided to change his role. He now called himself a public and political figure — and moved his usual mystifications to television, with its access to a far larger audience. His partner was journalist Sergei Sholokhov, the host of the popular current-affairs program Pyatoye koleso (“The Fifth Wheel”) on Leningrad Television.

According to Kuryokhin’s wife, Anastasia, the idea for the media provocation was born when the Captain happened to see a television program about the death of Sergei Yesenin. In it, the author presented a conspiracy theory about the poet’s murder, based on completely absurd arguments. “You can prove anything this way,” Kuryokhin said, and immediately set about composing his own “television investigation.”

Soon a new segment debuted on Pyatoye koleso, called “Sensatsiya i gipoteza” (“Sensation and Hypothesis”). In it, the two Sergeis, following the spirit of Monty Python’s absurdist sketches, proclaimed “a completely new approach to well-known historical events” and in the very first episode promised to reveal nothing less than “the main secret of the October Revolution.”

For the next hour, Kuryokhin, with the deadly serious expression of a research scientist, laid out for Sholokhov a theory that Lenin had consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms for many years and had as a result turned into a mushroom himself — and also into a radio wave.

The starting point for this wild story was a photograph of the leader of the world proletariat at his desk, on which lay a strange round object. Kuryokhin declared that it was in fact a mycelium — and off they went. Everything imaginable was deployed as evidence that Lenin was a mushroom: quotations from Castaneda, Leskov, and Kharms; scientific facts about the narcotic properties of cacti (see the beginning of this text); a diagram of Lenin’s armored car, which allegedly resembled a fly agaric mycelium; haphazardly edited footage from television productions about Lenin; a conversation about mushrooms with the mycologist Alexander Kovalenko; and even an interview with military prosecutor Leonid Polokhov, who, in a relaxed domestic setting, stroking a cat without pause, reflected on the use of psychotropic weapons.

After about 40 minutes of this first-rate nonsense, both Sergeis could no longer hold it together and dissolved into hysterics while discussing how, in the original model of Mukhina’s sculpture, the worker and the kolkhoz woman held not a hammer and sickle but a mushroom and a knife. Kuryokhin pleaded through tears: “Seryozha, more seriously — are we laughing or working? The most important part is coming up now, I won’t make it through the rest!” Having laughed themselves out, they pulled themselves together and managed to bring the program to its triumphant conclusion with stone faces.

The program went off like a bomb. Not everyone caught the irony and provocation. As Sholokhov recounted, the day after the broadcast, a group of elderly Bolsheviks came to the director of the Leningrad Lenin Museum, Galina Barinova, with an anxious question: “Is it true that Lenin was a mushroom? They said so on television yesterday.” Barinova replied: “That is not true! Because a mammal cannot be a plant!”

A rebuttal had to be issued in the national press. Letters came to the journalist from viewers: “Thank you for revealing the truth to us. We always suspected that Lenin was not human.”

In the summer of 1991, following up on “Lenin Was a Mushroom,” the two Sergeis recorded another absurd segment, cruising by motorboat through the canals of Leningrad. In that interview, Kuryokhin confessed that he had worked for the CIA his entire life and that on the orders of American intelligence he had invented the KGB and perestroika, that Gorbachev was actually a dragonfly, and that Yeltsin was a badger. And so on!

‘Gospodin oformitel’ (‘Mr. Designer’)

The journalist and music critic Artemy Troitsky said that people like Kuryokhin are born once in a hundred years — “and St. Petersburg was very lucky that throughout the entire 1980s the Captain was pulling it forward like a little locomotive.”

Kuryokhin surely understood this himself, yet he always carried himself with the utmost modesty, even shyness. At the breakthrough Muzykalny Ring, the Captain self-deprecatingly said he could hardly be called a composer or, still less, a director in the traditional sense of those professions: “I don’t think I am ahead of anyone — I am more likely behind, since I use things that were discovered long ago and make no claim to inventing anything new. Everything I play has long been known and well established.”

A couple of years later, in an interview with Troitsky again for an English-language book about Russian rock called Tusovka, Kuryokhin reflected with resignation: “There are two types of artists, two types of art. The first is when a creator produces masterpieces that will pass through the centuries and outlive entire peoples. The other is when masterpieces live with the artist and die with him. I know that I will leave no masterpieces behind.”

In a certain sense these are the thoughts of a hostage to his own concept, subordinated to flashes of momentary form and faithful to the motto “the process matters, not the result.”

Because Kuryokhin cared so little about studio recording — about fixing his ideas on tape — it is difficult to compile a coherent discography from Pop Mekhanika recordings the way one can for Aquarium, for instance. Many of them are just as spontaneous and accidental, captured by outside observers, friends, and enthusiasts — for example, Vvedeniye v “Pop-mekhaniku” (“Introduction to Pop Mekhanika”), Polineziya: vvedeniye v istoriyu (“Polynesia: An Introduction to History”), Iblivy opposum (“The Mangy Opossum”), and Bezumnye solov’i russkogo lesa (“The Crazy Nightingales of the Russian Forest”).

And yet Kuryokhin left behind plenty of surviving work — inspired in execution and impressive in content alike. This includes his output as a film composer, a role he took on suddenly in the late 1980s, quickly finding himself in great demand.

Kuryokhin worked with Alexei Balabanov on a screen adaptation of Kafka’s novel The Castle, and with Sergei Solovyov on an adaptation of Chekhov’s play Three Sisters; he wrote soundtracks for the drama Nad tyomnoy vodoy (“Above Dark Water”) by Dmitry Meskhiyev, the horror film Gospodin oformitel’ (“Mr. Designer”) by Oleg Teptsov, the science-fiction thriller Nauchnaya sektsiya pilotov (“The Scientific Section of Pilots”) by Andrei I, and the absurdist short Perekhod tovarishcha Chkalova cherez Severny polyus (“Comrade Chkalov’s Crossing of the North Pole”) by Maxim Pezhemsky.

He appeared not only as a composer but as an actor in the crime thrillers Lokh — pobeditel’ vody (“The Sucker — Conqueror of Water”) by Arkady Tigai and Tragediya v stile rok (“Tragedy in Rock Style”) by Savva Kulish. And in the pseudo-historical absurdist comedies Dva kapitana 2 (“Two Captains 2”) and Kompleks nevmenyayemosti (“The Insanity Complex”) by Sergei Debizhev, he was a full co-author: responsible for both the screenplay and the music, and starring in the lead roles.

“When people ask me why I work with film directors — and with different ones, all quite unlike each other — I always say that for me directors are patients and I am like a doctor. Because the desire to make films is an unhealthy phenomenon,” the Captain said, with his characteristic mockery.

Here are a few albums and soundtracks well suited to a first encounter with Kuryokhin’s work.

‘Insect Culture’ (1987)

A collaborative work between the Captain and the electronic duo Novye kompozitory (“New Composers”) — Valery Alakhov and Igor Verichev. Sots-art in sound: an avant-garde mix woven from fragments of Soviet radio programs and television plays, dialogue from films, excerpts from folk and military ensemble performances, variety melodies, and other hallmarks of the era, further decorated with synthesizer passages by Sergei Kuryokhin and saxophone solos by Igor Butman. In the absence of proper technology, the recording was made by amateur methods: all the fragments were cut by hand from magnetic tape, then randomly spliced together and played back to hear what came out.

“A textbook of sampling at the dawn of gorbi-rock. As if a centipede had mastered a DJ controller, and Gregor Samsa, waking up, found that he was David Guetta. Samples like eggs and larvae, solos like chirping and buzzing, the drum machine like a flyswatter,” writes the author of the Telegram channel Mezhdu The Rolling Stones i Dostoyevskim (“Between The Rolling Stones and Dostoyevsky”), journalist Alexander Morsin.

The album was recorded back in 1985; two years later the English label Ark Records released it on vinyl. The Western press gave Nasekomaya kul’tura high marks, comparing it to recordings by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Residents, Art of Noise, and Cabaret Voltaire. As payment, the label sent Kuryokhin a Prophet 2000 sampler synthesizer — at the time, an instrument of that caliber was available in the Soviet Union only to the composer Eduard Artemyev, Tarkovsky’s collaborator.

‘Mr. Designer’ (1988)

The Captain’s film debut — and an outstanding one at that. In one playful stroke — an eight-hour studio session with the musicians of Kino — Kuryokhin wrote the music for a film by the novice director Oleg Teptsov.

The film — based on Alexander Grin’s mystical story Sery avtomobil’ (“The Gray Automobile”) and following a deranged designer (played by Viktor Avilov) and his living creation, a wax mannequin of a dead girl named Anna (Anna Demyanenko) — became one of the first Soviet horror films and acquired cult status. By general consensus, Kuryokhin’s music was crucial to the film’s meaning, lifting it to another level.

For the film’s climactic final scene, the Captain composed a grandiose new-wave aria, “Donna Anna,” featuring a powerful guitar solo by Yuri Kasparyan and an extremely demanding coloratura soprano part that he persuaded the Mariinsky Theatre prima donna Olga Kondina to perform.

“Donna Anna” outgrew the film itself. The musical theme became one of Kuryokhin’s calling cards and was later quoted in several of his other works, including Vorob’inaya oratoriya (“The Sparrow Oratorio”), Opera bogatykh (“Opera of the Rich”), and Capriccio.

“Kuryokhin was endowed with a unique melodic gift, on the level of Mozart. But at a certain point he moved on to other forms of musical thinking that began to move away from me. I am a fairly traditional person in that regard. For me the peak of his work is Gospodin oformitel’, where he created genuine musical worlds and thereby enormously enriched the film,” said his friend, television host and art critic Sergei Sholokhov.

‘Morning Exercises in the Nuthouse’ (1988)

An example of inspired piano improvisation — a kind of miniature Köln Concert for the Captain, born, like Keith Jarrett’s masterpiece, from a chain of accidents and in spite of the circumstances.

In the fall of 1988, Kuryokhin — by then a recognized Soviet avant-gardist — played several concerts in the United States. Shuttling between coasts, he unexpectedly found himself in the Arizona desert as a guest of the hippie flutist Dean Evenson, the owner of a small label called Soundings of the Planet that specialized in relaxing new-age music. Out of that Arizona trip came a hastily assembled cassette, Morning Exercises in the Nuthouse, containing a set of brilliant piano pieces performed by Kuryokhin.

“As if some kind angel had touched Sergei with his wing. Calm, inner harmony, a kind of paradisiacal music. In my view, the culmination of the piano trilogy The Ways of Freedom — Popular Zoological Elements — Morning Exercises… A masterpiece, pure and simple,” says Kuryokhin’s biographer Alexander Kushnir.

Kuryokhin did not talk about the circumstances of this recording (though, judging by the title, they could have been most unexpected) and in general seemed not to regard it as a proper album. In Russia, Zaryadka reached music lovers only after Kuryokhin’s death, and the cassette was initially reissued with the title mistranslated literally, as Utrenniye uprazhneniya v orekhovom domike (“Morning Exercises in the Walnut House”).

‘The Sparrow Oratorio’ (1993)

Eco-activism through the prism of classical art. At some point, someone told the ever-curious Kuryokhin about the problem of sparrows dying out in Scandinavia — in Norway, it turned out, the sparrow population had already fallen by two-thirds. He immediately signed on to an international project to save the sparrows.

First, the Captain developed his own theory of the New Atlantis: that St. Petersburg was sinking to the bottom and would soon perish, and that the sparrows disappearing from the city were to blame. He then composed an entire oratorio in an invented sparrow language, performed by the singer Marina Kapuro from the folk group Yabloko (“Apple”) — her style vaguely recalled Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, who loved to sing in her own birdlike language.

Compositionally, the Kuryokhin oratorio contained echoes of Tchaikovsky’s and Vivaldi’s Seasons, and the final composition, Vorob’inyye polya navsegda (“Sparrow Fields Forever”), was a direct nod to “Strawberry Fields Forever.” (Interestingly, the year before, Paul McCartney — whom the Captain loved to disparage publicly — had also released his first foray into the classical genre, the Liverpool Oratorio.)

In Afisha Daily’s ranking of the 100 best post-Soviet albums, Vorob’inaya oratoriya came in 16th place. “Vorob’inaya oratoriya gradually reveals itself as a monument to a life with its own particular rhythms and rhymes — not musical ones, but temporal ones, the way seasons succeed each other. It is a ‘cacophony of life’ where synthesizer machinery collides with birdsong. Vorob’inaya oratoriya is a model of either post- or proto-music. Languages and styles have merged and given birth to a new language and style that only one person knew how to speak,” wrote journalist Nikolai Ovchinnikov about the work.

Incidentally, the problem of sparrows disappearing from St. Petersburg continues to concern residents to this day.

‘Children’s Album’ (1998)

An album with a troubled history, unfinished during Kuryokhin’s lifetime and released posthumously. In 1991, the Captain and Grebenshchikov unexpectedly reconciled and immediately agreed to make a joint record. The roles were divided in the traditional way: Kuryokhin would handle the music, Grebenshchikov the words. At the insistence of Kuryokhin’s manager, they decided to write the songs in English, hoping to sell the album more profitably in the West.

The sessions stretched over several years; both were distracted by separate projects — one endlessly touring the country with the BG Band, the other torn between cinema and politics. In the studio the two partners no longer crossed paths, each adding his parts to the tracks separately.

In the end, Kuryokhin — who had never liked the idea of songs in English — threw up his hands and wrote Russian lyrics, frankly idiotic and in places poking fun at Grebenshchikov, then sang them himself. One track, a lively and straightforward dance-pop number called “Stepan ta divchyna” (“Stepan and the Girl”), he made in Ukrainian. Into another — an erotic dance-floor hit called “Kolosok-golosok” (“Little Stalk, Little Voice”) — he invited the actress Yelena Korikova to sing the lead (she would later record the hit “Plokhaya devochka” / “Bad Girl” together with the group Vintazh). All these versions were released by his widow, Anastasia, two years after Kuryokhin’s death. The title for the record was found in his notebooks.

Though both authors were clearly less than thrilled with the result and repeatedly itched to redo everything from scratch, within the broader pop canon of the 1990s Detsky al’bom (“Children’s Album”) sounds fresh and convincing — and above all, in true Kuryokhin fashion, ironic and hilarious. “With the passage of time, Detsky al’bom, like the quatrains of Nostradamus, is not hard to read as prophecy: about the death of Russian rock and the stagnation of the avant-garde; about the arrival of a new generation of musicians; about the general infantilization of culture; about the legalization of erotica and Russian profanity in pop lyrics,” wrote journalist Denis Boyarinov in a survey of the most important albums of 1998–2008 on the site Openspace.ru.

In late 2024, Grebenshchikov released an English-language mini-album called Pictures of You, which included two tracks from those demo recordings with the Captain, completed with the help of artificial intelligence 30 years later. “Years passed, and I decided that several songs in which a heart was beating deserved to be finished as best they could and shared with people,” he told Bereg.

For reference: Grebenshchikov’s resurrected song “Pictures of You” is, in Kuryokhin’s version on Detsky al’bom, the obscene “Slon i solovey” (“The Elephant and the Nightingale”), and “Talk with Me (Axios)” is the mockingly absurd “Moy surok” (“My Marmot”). You can compare them. The original unfinished demos can be found on the compilation Kuryokhin i Grebenshchikov priglashayut (“Kuryokhin and Grebenshchikov Invite”), released on CD in 2012.

‘Dva kapitana 2’ (1992)

His collaboration with director Sergei Debizhev stands apart within the Captain’s film work; the result turned out to be even more of a cult object than Gospodin oformitel’.

Initially, Debizhev — for whom Dva kapitana 2 was his first feature film — wanted to make an ordinary documentary about Aquarium, but then Kuryokhin abruptly inserted himself into the project and proposed making a narrative film with himself and Grebenshchikov in the lead roles. The concept was already clear and roughly sketched out — his soul demanded pseudo-historical absurdism in the spirit of “Lenin Was a Mushroom.”

Into the script went ravings about white Moroccan dwarfs, the orgasm of inanimate matter, squads of kamikaze guinea pigs serving the German army, and other such nonsense. For added plausibility, all of it was generously seasoned with skillfully edited archival footage and their own gags, filmed with the utmost seriousness.

The work proceeded in a mode of total improvisation and fun; according to eyewitnesses, “everyone was just goofing off.” For instance, Debizhev arranged a shoot on the cruiser Aurora: a formation of real sailors was brought out on deck, the Captain suddenly materialized before them in a uniform, began spinning nonsense about a critical situation on the ship — “a two-week blockade of the cruiser by sharks” — and firing off lines like “As the late Admiral Nakhimov used to say, better a faggot on the yardarm than a shark in the hold,” which entered popular circulation the moment the film came out.

Grebenshchikov participated only sporadically; he calls his appearances in Dva kapitana 2 “monstrously talentless” and Kuryokhin “the brilliant essence of this film.”

Here is what Kuryokhin himself said about the film in an interview with himself (he pulled stunts like that too): “The film is, in my opinion, a work of art. It tells the story of how Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek were Siamese twins — not Chinese, as had been believed until now. It begins with a scene from the concert ‘Rock Against Orgasm.’ The film’s goal is to prove that orgasm is inherent in both living and inanimate matter. That is practically everything I remember. I’m sorry, but I have to go dig now. Goodbye.”

The director recalls the extraordinary creative freedom that accompanied work on the film:

Yet the film’s lightness and psychedelia were the product of serious work, Debizhev says: the two men spent nights composing texts that turned out to be more than mere nonsense — like fake news from satirical websites that predicts the future and suddenly becomes reality.

“This absurdist collage keeps coming true to this day. Practically everything that was said there in that psychedelic form has found its expression, one way or another, in politics and reality. In a certain sense it turned out to be prophetic absurdism,” says Debizhev.

Debizhev and Kuryokhin followed it with the apotheosis of wildness and pseudo-science: the short film Kompleks nevmenyayemosti (“The Insanity Complex”), in which the Captain played the deranged Professor Gendelbach. He delivers a spectacular lecture on “the behavior of bromine when its molecules are attacked by chromium” and is awarded the “Nobel Peace Prize in Chemistry” for his work.

The film also features footage of scientific experiments in “chroming dogs,” a furious piano solo, some pre-revolutionary pornography, and concludes with Kuryokhin’s monologue on microphasia. What is that, you ask? Simply “the primary manifestation of the theory of quadrature, which arises in moments of interaction between semantic points and their expression in the external environment, where the human being acts as an intermediary between the emergence of apophatic states and ephotic conditions for the emergence of speech.”

No, Kuryokhin explained everything far more clearly and truthfully in “Lenin Was a Mushroom”!

‘418: Kuryokhin for Dugin’

For a creator like Kuryokhin, the change of historical eras should have been a catalyst releasing energy of tenfold force: now everything was possible — you only had to choose where to direct your uncontrollable mind and what to embody it in.

And in the 1990s the Captain went off the deep end. He announced the creation of an “Institute of Socialism-Communism” and called himself a fierce opponent of dismantling Lenin monuments. He then organized a Center for the Study of Space Problems, whose tasks included “preparing cosmonauts for launch into the inner spiritual world of man” and “creating inter-orbital spiritual stations, as well as permanent artificial and natural satellites of the soul” (no reports of its activities have survived).

He founded his own publishing house under the intriguing name Meduza, which managed to release only two books: Eros nevozmozhnogo (“Eros of the Impossible: A History of Psychoanalysis in Russia”) and a two-volume Antologiya gnozisa (“Anthology of Gnosis”).

More successful was the Captain’s music label, Kurizza Records. In addition to Pop Mekhanika releases, it put out Grebenshchikov’s Russky al’bom (“Russian Album”), Pesni Aleksandra Vertinskogo (“Songs of Alexander Vertinsky”) performed by Grebenshchikov, and the debut album of Korol’ i shut (“King and Jester”), Kamnem po golove (“A Stone to the Head”). Shortly before his death, he launched another label, Dlinnye ruki (“Long Arms”) — specializing in avant-garde, jazz, and classical music — together with the producer and founder of the cultural center Dom in Moscow, Nikolai Dmitriev.

Kuryokhin promoted the news agency Deputat Baltiki (“Deputy of the Baltic”), published columns in the progressive magazine Om, hosted a radio program called Vasha lyubimaya sobaka (“Your Favorite Dog”), served as the first producer of the pop duo Chay vdvoyom (“Tea for Two”), wrote an entertaining novella called Puteshestviye po Rossii (“Journey Through Russia”) in the spirit of early Pelevin, and composed a libretto for the phantasmagorical opera Pyat’ dney iz zhizni barona Vrangelya (“Five Days in the Life of Baron Wrangel”).

He grew close to the poet, artist, and founder of Moscow conceptualism Dmitry Prigov, who became his regular partner in performances — including the improvisational show Kolobok (“The Little Round Bun”). In collaboration with Sergei Debizhev, he created a literary screenplay of epic historical scope, Porok i svyatost’ (“Vice and Holiness”), that never came to fruition. He reached an agreement with Konstantin Ernst to launch his own Channel One program called Nemoy svidetel’ (“The Silent Witness”), on the musical history of the 20th century. And together with Sergei Solovyov he conceived a Bolshoi Theatre production of an operatic triptych based on Russian classical literature: Anna Karenina, The Seagull, Doctor Zhivago.

Alongside this inspired revelry, the Captain took an alarming turn. He became deeply interested in mysticism, in the teachings of the British occultist and Satanist Aleister Crowley, and in the work of groups from the London esoteric underground (Coil, Throbbing Gristle, Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Death in June). He also composed an occult history of St. Petersburg.

Kuryokhin then announced to his friends that music and cinema were complete nonsense and a thing of the past, and that the real show had to be made in politics — and joined the ultra-radical National Bolshevik Party, founded by the writer Eduard Limonov and the philosopher Alexander Dugin. The Captain’s old circle grew wary: he was reproached for his ties to imperialists and fringe figures and directly accused of promoting fascism.

As early as 1982, in his first major interview with his friend Alexander Kan, Kuryokhin had called himself a nationalist and a chauvinist. At the time, however, he was talking about musical traditions specific to various cultures — claiming, for instance, that “jazz is alien to the Russian understanding of art” — and the statement did not appear to be political.

Like many figures in the Soviet underground, Kuryokhin was in opposition to the regime: he could not stand the official ideology, maintained close contact with Western diplomats and tourists, voraciously absorbed culture from beyond the Iron Curtain — and the most progressive culture at that. But he was also a confirmed bibliophile, reading widely in pre-revolutionary philosophical and theological literature that was likewise banned and underground (Nikolai Berdyayev, Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky), and proclaiming himself a supporter of the Slavophile idea of Russia’s special path of development.

The Captain greeted perestroika with enthusiasm, rejoiced in the freedom and newly opened borders, traveled widely around the world, and even made a brief attempt to emigrate to Berlin. But he then became disillusioned with Russian democrats and sharply pivoted back toward the communists, taking a conservative and statist position.

Biographers continue to debate whether Kuryokhin’s political foray was a game — his characteristic creative method of stress-testing reality — or whether he was in fact driven to it by an established system of views that he applied logically and consistently to everything he did. Or perhaps it was both at once.

Kuryokhin was captivated by Alexander Dugin, finding in him (as he had once found in Grebenshchikov) an engaging conversation partner who shared his judgments and interests — and poured all his enthusiasm and authority into a political campaign to nominate Dugin as a candidate for the State Duma.

He rented a basement on Potyomkinskaya Street in St. Petersburg and organized a National Bolshevik campaign headquarters there. He began appearing regularly on television, introducing himself as a political commentator — there is, for instance, a surviving segment in which Kuryokhin interviews the Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.

In addition to the political program, Kuryokhin and Dugin composed a “Manifesto of the New Magicians.” Its theses ran roughly as follows: “There is a crisis of art and a crisis of politics. In both spheres, decline. An impulse must be sought from outside. That new sphere is magic. Only the direct and total replacement of art and politics with magic can save the situation.”

In one television program, Kuryokhin and Dugin put on Egyptian masks and, posing as the political analysts Ibis and Anubis, explained to viewers how to vote in the elections. They cut out two placards to be held up against various political concepts and parties: one bearing the letter “Kh” — meaning “khorosho” (“good”) — and the other bearing the letter “P” — meaning “plokho” (“bad”).

“Since people were reading only the first signal level, they didn’t know what to believe — their eyes or the words. A mismatch between form and content was occurring,” Dugin said about the meaning of the stunt.

In another campaign broadcast, titled “Tainoe stanet yavnym” (“The Secret Will Become Known”), Kuryokhin lamented that there was no democracy in Russia, that people’s rights were being trampled, and that on many issues he already agreed with the communists’ program — even with conservatives like Zyuganov.

“Why do I support Dugin? He is the greatest theorist, who has understood what the state is, what its essence is, how it develops and how it should develop. He is a person who understands the deep foundations of the monstrous crisis that has occurred. And I also want to address the young people. Dear friends, on the 17th everyone must come to the elections. If you don’t come — I’ll kill you all. Thank you very much! The secret will become known!” the Captain rattled off in that program.

The culmination of the election campaign was a concert at the Lensoviet House of Culture, billed on the posters as “Pop Mekhanika No. 418. Kuryokhin for Dugin. In Memory of A. Crowley.” The number 418 was a reference to the British occultist’s numerology. Kuryokhin even obtained a National Bolshevik Party membership card bearing that number. He said that 418 represented a kind of password for transition to a different state.

The performance at the Lensoviet House of Culture in September 1995 was the darkest in Pop Mekhanika’s history — and effectively its last. Limonov read from the stage a manifesto about cursed angels who had proclaimed their divinity (“Dekatrion, Lucifer, Satan, and the entire National Bolshevik Party”); Dugin pronounced ritual incantations from Crowley’s treatise in Russian and French; and Kuryokhin haltingly sang Bulat Okudzhava’s song “Nam nuzhna odna pobeda” (“We Need Just One Victory”) from the film Belorussky vokzal (“Belorussky Station”).

The party newspaper Limonka described the event as follows:

Pop Mekhanika no longer entertained — it inspired not laughter and joy but panic: the madness had passed from the divine to the clinical stage, and Mr. Designer, it seemed, had found his nuthouse. Backstage, the Captain proclaimed that Satanism was super-exciting.

As a political strategist, Kuryokhin failed completely. Dugin lost the State Duma election badly, finishing in second-to-last place — 16th in his district — with less than 1 percent of the vote. A few years later he would leave the National Bolshevik Party and distance himself from Limonov.

Years later, in interviews for Kan’s book, Dugin would claim that for both himself and Kuryokhin, the 1995 campaign and the alliance with the National Bolshevik Party had been an intellectual game — yes, played for very high stakes — but not serious politics at all.

In 2001, in his Kniga mertvykh (“Book of the Dead”), Limonov wrote about Kuryokhin:

Many of his old friends from St. Petersburg’s music world are convinced that it was precisely his association with the National Bolshevik Party that destroyed the Captain.

“Limonov once said to me literally the following: ‘Tell your friend Seryozha not to joke with us, because to our left is death and to our right is death.’ From these words it is clear that that whole crowd didn’t trust Sergei — they sensed that he was mocking them. Shortly after that, Sergei died,” Grebenshchikov told Bereg.

‘Rush Hour’

In March 1996, Kuryokhin appeared as a guest on the popular talk show Chas pik (“Rush Hour”), hosted by Andrei Razbash, one of the founders of the television company VID. Shortly afterward, the Captain was hospitalized with heart trouble. He was never discharged. The interview aired on July 8, 1996. The next day, Kuryokhin died.

In that program, the Captain — still playing the ironist, sly smile in place — seemed to articulate several important thoughts on the fundamental themes that preoccupied him (or perhaps they only seem that way in retrospect, given the context).

The conversation begins with a question about truth. Razbash immediately calls the Captain to account for all his provocations at once. “Sergei, why do you lie all the time, why do you fool people?” the journalist asks. “You shout ‘Down with idiots’ and breed them around yourself.”

“The thing is, I never lie. Everything I say is the pure truth. I simply build my logic according to somewhat different laws. I intuitively feel that it is correct,” Kuryokhin replies gently.

He then laments the crisis of contemporary art, which “has reached the maximum point of degeneration, has lost its foundation, and has long been running on inertia.”

“What has disappeared from art is the most important thing: the sense of flight, and with it the happiness of creating something absolutely new, something that never existed before.” At the start of perestroika there was a sense that art had gained complete freedom and would now finally soar, but “the little artists went on painting their little pictures and the little musicians went on playing their little instruments,” and it all came to nothing.

In Russia, he reflects, there has never been a desire to create, to see things through to the end. “In this country, the desire to partake of some cultural value matters far more than actually creating such values.”

Kuryokhin also rejects the ironic attitude toward history that viewers might have read into his projects like Dva kapitana 2. History can be treated only with the deepest respect, because it is our memory, he says.

Then politics enters the picture. He calls himself a supporter of the Russian idea. The state must be an empire. Contemporary politicians are terrible idiots. The people are an inert substance. Music has disappeared from politics. Spirituality has disappeared from money. One must strive for the happiness of one’s state and people.

Razbash reminds him of the last Pop Mekhanika, number 418, which Kuryokhin staged in support of Dugin and after which he was accused of fascism.

There will be no 419th Pop Mekhanika, Kuryokhin replies. Because the count stops at 418. It is Aleister Crowley’s favorite number, and also a password for transition from one state to another. “A person pronounces this password and transitions to a different state” — this phrase of the Captain’s sounds like an ominous hint.

Near the end, the theme of truth resurfaces — the one the conversation began with. “They say you have a very dual nature. What are you really like?” asks a viewer calling in to the studio.

“As I already said, I am a very dishonest person,” Kuryokhin replies, casually inverting his original thought. “But it depends on how you understand that dishonesty. For myself I am a sincere person, and for those around me — a dishonest one. So it depends on how people perceive me. But for myself I am a completely whole person and have felt no duality within myself for about 20 years.”

‘I was always a free man’

The most important thing in a person is the heart, the Captain used to say. For all the sharpness and rationality of his mind, much of what he did in life he did at the prompting of his heart — his most tender and vulnerable element. Unfortunately, it was also what let him down.

Kuryokhin had a heart defect from childhood, and the life he led was, in many ways, ill-advised for a man in his condition. Once, he had a heart attack in the middle of a performance with Vapirov — he had given himself so completely to the music and entered such an improvisational frenzy that he suddenly turned pale and, barely making it offstage, collapsed unconscious. Some people thought he was drunk. But Vapirov quickly understood what was happening and called an ambulance — at the hospital, the Captain was revived.

Another time he felt ill from the heat and whiskey at a social reception at the American consulate, where diplomats periodically invited underground intellectuals to various cultural events. The situation could have turned into an international scandal, but Kuryokhin managed to come to his senses before the doctors arrived.

Sergei Letov recalled that in the mid-1980s Pop Mekhanika had a program called “Novye seksual’nye igry s vodoy” (“New Sexual Games with Water”), in which the Captain devised the following stunt: he would play a rapid passage on the piano, as if the keyboard weren’t enough for him, and then fall — as if he had had a heart attack. “I remember how he asked me and Afrika to convince the administrator of the Leningrad House of Composers that he had heart attacks and that it would be wonderful if an ambulance were called during the concert, or at least if someone unbuttoned his shirt and splashed water on him. It turns out that he, like Venedikt Yerofeyev, like Andrei Bely, like many others, foresaw his own death in his work,” Letov said.

“He always believed he would die young, he always talked about it, but somehow I didn’t pay attention, I always made jokes about it and didn’t take it seriously,” Kuryokhin’s wife, Anastasia, said. “Even when he proposed to me, he said: ‘Just bear in mind, I’ll live about 10 years.’”

Despite all these hints, Kuryokhin never gave the impression of a weak or sick man — on the contrary, he radiated beauty and health, and overflowed with energy. That made his sudden, rare illness all the more strange and unexpected for everyone around him. “When he was sick, he didn’t have the feeling that he was going to die — it came as a complete surprise,” Anastasia Kuryokhina said. The Captain faded away in the hospital in just two months.

“In the early 1990s, such powerful energy flows opened up in Kuryokhin that he felt his own strength, and that strength was so enormous it could move mountains,” Sergei Debizhev recalled. “Kuryokhin was the only one among all of us who declared his real intentions in full voice. He genuinely wanted to change something, and that something was not entirely abstract. In essence, his entire being was directed at making this life — wretched, castrated, and absurd — creative, vivid, and magnificent.”

Like many great creators and thinkers, Kuryokhin was particularly preoccupied with the problem of the end of the millennium. In the summer of 1993, he met with the eminent Soviet philologist and cultural scholar Dmitry Likhachev. That warm conversation was recorded on video. Kuryokhin asked what the 21st century would be like. Likhachev explained that history has its established rhythms, in which the human alternates with the anti-human. Likhachev predicted that the coming century would be “human on an ever-expanding scale.”

Through his own reflections — evidently shaped by Dugin — the Captain arrived at the idea that with the change of millennia, an entire epoch in human history would come to an end.

Kuryokhin had already passed through and experienced within himself the crisis of culture (from bold avant-garde to the poster-like showiness of Pop Mekhanika), the crisis of ideology (from communism to democracy and back), and the crisis of truth (if people believe that “Lenin was a mushroom,” any alternative history can be sold to them) — he had been disillusioned with all of it more than once and was waiting for something absolutely new to appear.

“I have the feeling that a battle of the gods is now taking place, that a different civilization must appear, on fundamentally different foundations than those that have existed throughout recent times. The pillars of our civilization — Shakespeare, Dante, Homer — will cease to be reference points. A different civilization is coming, one that will name different names and be based on them,” he said in an interview with the magazine Medved’ (“Bear”) in 1995. “This will be a grandiose change of culture, civilization, and thought.”

Yet it seemed as though the Captain himself preferred to remain a detached observer of the battle — and was not at all ready for the change of eras. It is telling how flustered he became when, at the end of Chas pik, Razbash asked him what “project of the century” he had conceived for the approaching millennium. “I don’t know, I don’t think about the future — I think only about what has just begun for me,” was all the embarrassed Kuryokhin could manage. Did he understand at that moment that for him everything was already over?

* * *

Sergei Letov drew attention to a mystical chain of deaths that followed the Captain’s passing. In January 1997, the former Pop Mekhanika cellist Boris Raiskin organized a 10-day musical marathon in New York called the International Interdisciplinary Festival in Memory of Sergei Kuryokhin (SKIF, from the Russian name). Shortly after the festival, he took his own life. In October 1998, Kuryokhin’s daughter Elizaveta died by suicide at the age of 15. On the third anniversary of Kuryokhin’s death, his close friend and regular Pop Mekhanika participant, the finest drummer of the Leningrad Rock Club, Alexander Kondrashkin, also died. He too was 42.

In 1999, the SKIF festival moved from New York to St. Petersburg, where it has been held annually ever since. In 2004, Anastasia Kuryokhina founded the Sergei Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art. It was based on Vasilyevsky Island, in the former Priboy (“Surf”) cinema, but had spent the previous decade under renovation. In late 2025, the Kuryokhin Center reopened to visitors.

The center’s artistic director, Anastasia Kuryokhina, thanked the St. Petersburg city government for its help with the renovation and promised that the new venue would “in time become one of the main hubs of contemporary culture in our city.” The lobby of the building now features portraits not only of Kuryokhin but also of Vladimir Putin and Alexander Beglov. The center’s website embeds widgets with surveys from Gosuslugi (Russia’s state services portal) and the Ministry of Culture, links to registration in the state-run messenger app Max, and a banner urging visitors to sign a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense and go fight in Ukraine.

“Leningraders say that as the priest is, so is the mechanics [a play on ‘Pop’ Mekhanika and the proverb ‘like priest, like parish’]: the toxicity of the widow has put her at odds with many people, so it fell short of being the opening of the year. But there is also a clear sense here that the avant-garde, which is supposed to oppose gray mediocrity, has absorbed all the age-old disorder of Soviet life,” the author of the Telegram channel Psycho Daily wrote, describing his impressions of a visit to the Kuryokhin Center.

The center’s schedule lists concerts by the groups Bond s knopkoy (“Bond with a Button”), Ansambl’ Rossii (“Ensemble of Russia”), Yeley (“Holy Oil”), and the orchestra Simfonicheskiye zveri (“Symphonic Beasts”). The same stage hosts numerous productions by Kuryokhin’s son, the young writer and director Fyodor Kuryokhin.

The center holds themed festivals called Elektro-Mekhanika (“Electro-Mechanics”), Etno-Mekhanika (“Ethno-Mechanics”), Art-Mekhanika (“Art-Mechanics”), and Videoforma (“Video Form”), and since 2009 has awarded its own Kuryokhin Prize in the field of contemporary art. In various years, its laureates have included projects and people entirely at odds with Putin’s Russia: the Ukrainian ethno-group DakhaBrakha and the Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova; the Russian artists Andrei Bartenev, Yekaterina Bochavar, and Timofei Radya; the art groups AES+F and Provmyza; the theater AXE; the collectives Yolochnyye igrushki (“Christmas Tree Ornaments”), Shortparis, Rada i ternovnik (“Rada and the Thorns”), and many others.

Sergei Letov continues to make avant-garde music and give musicological lectures. He openly supports the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Bugayev built a career as an actor and artist. He became a national star playing the nonconformist counterculture figure Bananan in Sergei Solovyov’s film Assa. Bugayev exhibited at the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, and in the West — with works that draw on sots-art aesthetics and contain references to Kuryokhin. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Bugayev was one of Putin’s official campaign representatives.

The National Bolshevik Party was never officially registered as a political party. A court declared it an extremist organization and banned its activities. Limonov served time in the early 2000s on charges of weapons possession and creating illegal armed formations (the latter charge was later dropped). He remained in opposition, participating in the Other Russia coalition and the Dissenters’ March street protests. In 2014, Limonov welcomed the annexation of Crimea. He died in March 2020 from complications of cancer.

Dugin, as a lecturer, philosopher, and political scientist, continues to promote his imperial vision of a Eurasian Union — in effect, restoring the Soviet Union. His concept of the “Russian world” has moved from a fringe idea into official doctrine and helped drive Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Western governments have imposed sanctions on Dugin. In August 2022, his 29-year-old daughter Darya Dugina was killed when her car was blown up outside Moscow. Dugin himself was also supposed to be in that car but switched to a different vehicle at the last moment. The FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, said the attack was organized by Ukrainian intelligence services.

Joanna Stingray regularly publishes books devoted to the history of Russian rock, which always include chapters about Kuryokhin. On her YouTube channel she posts videos for songs she wrote in the 1980s with musicians from the Leningrad Rock Club. Among them are many tracks co-written with Kuryokhin — for instance, this touching archival video “To Fly,” released to mark the 70th anniversary of the Captain’s birth. In 2026, Stingray plans to release a documentary film featuring an archival interview with Kuryokhin and recordings of Pop Mekhanika performances.

Kino guitarist Yuri Kasparyan regularly pays tribute to the Captain by performing the Pop Mekhanika composition “Tselotonko” at concerts of his project Simfonicheskoye Kino (“Symphonic Kino”).

Boris Grebenshchikov played his last concert in Russia on February 23, 2022, at the St. Petersburg club A2. He now lives and works in London. Grebenshchikov performs concerts around the world, except Russia, where the authorities have declared him a “foreign agent” for his antiwar position.

Debizhev became a pro-government filmmaker who nonetheless carefully preserves and champions the legacy of his friends Grebenshchikov and Kuryokhin. In 2021, he made a film about them called Rok za gran’yu (“Rock Beyond the Edge”). In 2022, he received a prize at the Moscow Film Festival for the documentary Svyatoy Arkhipelag (“The Holy Archipelago”) about the Solovetsky Islands. Among his other recent works are a documentary on religious themes called Krest (“The Cross”), Khleb, “Sever” i kobalt (“Bread, ‘Sever,’ and Cobalt”) about the Siege of Leningrad, and Krym: terra incognita (“Crimea: Terra Incognita”), made on commission from the Russian Geographical Society, which is headed by the former defense minister and current secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Sergei Shoigu.

Debizhev now calls Grebenshchikov “a bit unhinged in a geopolitical sense” but wishes that he “live to see the victory.” As for Kuryokhin, Debizhev is convinced that had the Captain lived to the present day, Kuryokhin would have been “incredibly inspired by the events taking place.” Dugin has likewise claimed that Kuryokhin would certainly have supported the annexation of Crimea, the “Novorossiya” project, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Speculating about which side of history a person who died long ago would be on today is a pointless exercise. The philosopher Mikhail Kurtov, who devised a metasimulator about Kuryokhin’s second life, believes the Captain would have sided with neither the authorities nor the opposition.

“Kuryokhin is our eternal ‘third path,’ the path of unthinkable freedom,” he said in an interview with the publication Colta in 2016. “What was Russian anarchism if not a third path — an alternative to both conservatism and liberalism? Kuryokhin certainly did not call himself an anarchist, but genetically he belonged to that political culture.”

But if we set aside politics and return to art, what do Kuryokhin’s friends and contemporaries think of his significance for Russian culture?

(The Captain himself, incidentally, located his place in his native culture with perfect precision. “It is 15 meters to the left of the Kremlin and a little higher up,” he said in an interview with American media, barely suppressing his laughter.)

Artemy Troitsky says he was fortunate to have been close friends with two “unquestionable and certified geniuses” — Alexander Bashlachev and Sergei Kuryokhin.

“Unfortunately, Kuryokhin has vanished. He is well remembered as long as the people who knew him personally and attended his performances are alive — and their numbers keep dwindling. Kuryokhin was a creator of the ‘here and now’ variety. That is why almost no good recordings of him survive,” Troitsky told the YouTube channel I gryanul Grem (“And Thunder Crashed”). “His most extreme creation — the orchestra, the performance, something altogether indefinable, a completely unique thing in world culture called Pop Mekhanika — is essentially gone. Because all of it was improvised, prepared in a day or two, and each Pop Mekhanika performance passed without a trace. Unfortunately, 95 percent of it is gone. That is terribly sad. What remains is Kuryokhin as a legendary figure, not as the author of priceless recordings that people will listen to and re-listen to. Unfortunately, there is almost nothing left to listen to.”

Boris Grebenshchikov told Bereg that he was not prepared to discuss the Captain’s contribution to Russian culture: “For me, there are no places or pedestals in culture. Culture is what makes people human. And Seryozha set an example for all of us of how one can be a magnificent professional — and at the same time have a sense of humor and be able to laugh at everything, starting with oneself.”

“Sergei is the most vivid representative of the team that Assa gave me — the most complex, the most cunning in the highest sense of that word, the most capable of self-preservation among all of them, and consequently of preserving culture. Immoral, without a tsar in his head, without ostentatious conscientiousness, a cynic who squandered himself on trifles, a dissolute child — and yet, for all that, one of the most profound and most serious people I have ever met in this life,” wrote director Sergei Solovyov about the Captain.

The composer Vladimir Martynov put it this way: “Kuryokhin is a myth. There is nothing good or bad about that. A myth is a myth. He was engaged not so much in music as in myth-making. And in that he is simply a titan. He created such a story that we, miserable musicians, can only envy. There can be no competition here whatsoever. As for how he played — well, never mind that. But the fact that he could mythologize all of this, and in the Soviet Union of all places — that makes him a person of the Andy Warhol type.”

“I believe that the conservative element served Kuryokhin purely for shock value. He was a carrier of total freedom, and total freedom presupposes the violation of any established conventions. Total freedom presupposes the dismantling of dogma, wherever it may come from,” said Alexander Dugin.

And here is what the music critic, former editor-in-chief of Afisha and Polka, Yuri Saprykin, wrote: “Kuryokhin demonstrated what Freedom looks like in its most practical embodiment — he created worlds in which everything is possible, everything is funny, everything is frightening, and everything is easy.”

And these too are his words: “Kuryokhin spent his whole life searching for the absolute by cheerfully smashing the hell out of everything in his path. And in the end he arrived at a completely occult new seriousness. Pop Mekhanika for Dugin is the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life. There is nothing funny about it — it is simply a grim ancient ritual. He reached certain energies that were truly not to be trifled with. And he arrived there by a logical path. When a country has a person of that level of genius — it is a serious test, and not everyone passes it.”

* * *

In 1994, on the program Astrologiya lyubvi (“Astrology of Love”), Kuryokhin revealed how, even as a child, he had found his own ways of freedom: “I was always a free man — I understood that from the moment I understood anything at all about life. I simply decided whether I needed it or not, from a practical standpoint. I thought about it and concluded that, in general, I did need freedom. A pure act of will. I could just as easily have decided that I didn’t need it. And then I could have existed much more calmly and comfortably.”

He confessed that he had “consciously changed his own horoscope,” challenging predetermination: “If a person cannot climb out of what nature has given him, what God has given him from the start — whatever you want to call it — then everything else is pointless, it means he is not free from the very beginning.”

So what is freedom for? For Kuryokhin, it was for cultivating the innermost self. “If I have the intimate, then I have freedom, in which I find within myself strength and confidence. It is my inner temple. I cannot let you in there. Every person must have something sacred,” he said.

And finally, he spoke of his most cherished dream: