Journalist Tero Heinänen compiled the history of entertainment music in the Soviet Union.
Nonfiction book
Tero Heinänen: Oh those times! The story of unforgettable Russian and Soviet songs. TA-Tieto oy. 268 pp.
Currently don't remember that our biggest friendship club in the 1970s and 80s was the Finland-Neuvostoliitto club with almost 200,000 members. The yya time of the neighbors is just a memory, the borders are closed, and state aid has been taken away from the friendship club. That's how the world and world situations change.
That's why it's important to read a music editor Tero Heinänen of the work he wrote Oh those were the days! Between 1983 and 1990, Heinänen hosted the program Sävelä from the Soviet Union, which became a popular program on Yleisradio with an audience of up to half a million.
In his book, Heinänen returns to this caravan of Soviet horror. More than his program, he tells the history of the Russian and Soviet music he presents, the birth of the songs and the interpreters at different times.
“The starting point is Russian music viewed from a cultural-historical point of view – as if from the inside, on its own terms,” he elaborates.
Russian entertainment the basis is in folk songs, romances that flourished at the end of the 19th century, and orchestral waltzes. Early favorites also took root in Finland, such as Black eyes, Two guitars, In the hills of Manchuria… There was a bass in Tsarist times by Fyodor Shalyapin like classical masters who performed and even recorded songs that were a bit more folk.
Bolshevik power created its own mainstreams, which Heinänen goes through expertly. There was the civil war's defiance and mourning marches, there were the NEP era's rabbles, until Stalin's the grip also tightened on music. The halo of moralism was drawn tighter.
In the 1930s, massive persecution mowed down artists as well. “Today you play the saxophone, tomorrow you betray your country”, was the shrill saying of the musicians. Still, among the genres of music, jazz and tango were tolerated to a surprising extent, Heinänen mentions the large record editions of dance music.
In 1938, such a freak as the Soviet state jazz orchestra appeared, led by kulu Aleksandr Tsfasmanand for which the players had to be brought all the way from the camps.
In prison camps, in the gulag, a lot of political songs were born, which did not officially exist but were known everywhere. There are only a few mentions of them in the book.
For a long time, one of the liveliest cities was Ukrainian Odessa, a multicultural hotbed of literature and music, where “original urban folklore, songs, jokes, jokes” were rampant. Later, Odessa dried up in importance.
Kajaht as war songs Holy war, Katyusha and A blue scarfand cultural censorship was not at its most petty.
Stalin's death in 1953 freed up entertainment – bit by bit. At the end of the 1950s, bards triumphant over grief appeared as singers in sheltered weather, perhaps the brightest Bulat Okudzhava. They often performed with poets, even for large audiences. It was more laborious, if not impossible, to publish a record.
At the same time, the art bureaucracy favored idle Soviet pop, which, according to Heinänen, came “very close to the Finnish iskelmähumpa of the 1960s”. It was produced in heaps by record companies, of which Melodija had almost a monopoly.
Alla Pugačova performing in 2016.
Two singers rose in the 1960s and 1970s, Below is Pugachova and Vladimir Vysotsky. They were immensely admired. Pugačova was the brightest stage name, unstoppable as a person, Vysotsky, on the other hand, wandered his own way in the brutal underground of criminals and intoxicants.
It is interesting that as an actor Vysotsky was allowed to do his visible work, but the songs circulated from hand to hand as recordings.
Vladimir Vysotsky was a singer and actor.
Oh those were the days! is a motivated piece of absolute knowledge. Artists and music are presented in abundance, the focus tends to be descriptive at the expense of analysis. But such a comprehensive overview would not have been offered in Western languages before.
Collected in one cover, you can also be surprised how much of Finland's song hits of the past decades are of Russian origin. Slavic longing, hopeful minor chord.
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