Rock music existed in the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s, almost entirely outside official channels. Bands recorded on cheap reel-to-reel and cassette equipment and passed copies hand to hand, a distribution network nicknamed magnitizdat, the musical cousin of samizdat’s underground literature. Performing publicly carried real risk; a band’s survival depended on staying just inside or just outside the state’s tolerance, depending on the city, the year, and who was watching.
Leningrad had the most organized scene, built around its officially sanctioned but closely monitored Rock Club, the training ground for bands like Aquarium, Kino, and Nautilus Pompilius, names that circulated on tape long before most of the West had heard of them. It’s where the novel sets one of its set pieces: the performance of Eton’s band, Krylia, at the city’s rock festival, played before a hall of musicians and fans who’d traveled in from Moscow and the Urals.
Some of what reached the West did so almost by accident. In 1986, an American singer named Joanna Stingray, who had moved to Moscow in early ‘80s, and befriended its underground rock scene, smuggled master tapes out of the country and released them as Red Wave. It was the first real exposure most American listeners got to Soviet rock at all. The novel’s own Joanna is loosely based on the real Joanna.
Some characters in this novel are inspired by or loosely based on real public figures. All their interactions with fictional characters are the author’s dramatization.