In Europe

simply so dull and shitty that there was nothing left for them to do. That same generation, by the way, also provided the country with a horde of unbelievable bureaucrats.’
    During the final years of the Soviet Empire, rock musicians and their followers were the real dissidents, more so than the country's writers. Their concerts were attended by thousands of young people, and their lyrics spoke of things not openly addressed anywhere else: the defeat in Afghanistan, corruption, the abuse of power. Viktor Tsoi, a kind of cross between James Dean and Bruce Lee, wrote:
    Changes.
    In our laughter, in our tears and in our veins.
    Changes.
    We're waiting for changes …
    The singer Boris Grebenshtshikov filled one stadium after another with lyrics that just made it past the censor:
    Sons of the days of silence
Look at other people's films
Play other people's roles
Knock on other people's doors.
Please, won't you give a sip of water
To the sons of the days of silence?
    A text by the rocker and poet Misha Borzykin:
    Throw off the yoke,
Sing what you feel inside,
We have a right to roar,
Break loose, we were born to be free,
Break loose, get away from here!
    The band received standing ovations, the communist officials went pale, and Borzykin succeeded in getting himself banned in Moscow even at the height of perestroika.
    Children of Glasnost
is the much-acclaimed book that Artemi Troitski wrote about them afterwards. After the Soviet Union fell apart in 1994, a Dutch colleague and I went to visit him. He told us about how he had recently come across a wedding photograph, taken in 1984. ‘There are about thirty people in that picture, all of them friends from the music and art scenes. When I picked it up and looked at it I suddenly realised that, even though it was only ten years ago, I was seeing a completely different world.’
    That picture was taken right after the Brezhnev era, a period Troitski says was marked by complete paralysis, by a comatose atmosphere in which no one believed in anything any more, and in which no one had any interest in the rest of the world. ‘At the time that picture was taken we talked about music, about friends, about sex and drugs and alcohol, but we never talked about the future. We weren't interested in the future. We thought nothing would ever change. The only thing left to salvage was our inner freedom.’
    Ten years later, in 1994, the idols of Soviet illegality were wildly popular everywhere. Troitski could name all of the thirty men and women in that picture, he counted off their lives on his fingers, that old club of friends, that band of dissidents. A number of them were not available for comment: they were dead. They had been killed in accidents or had fallen ill, with alcohol usually playing a key role in the story. Some of them had passionately yearned for a turnaround, but when that arrived they were unable to cope with the new, risky life it brought. Of the dozen girls in that photograph, almost half had left the country. One of the boys had become a movie star. A few others, active at the time in the Komsomol, had become successful businessmen. Others were bus drivers or teachers. But the one thing that applied to all of them was that, after 1984, none of them were ever the same. They had all experienced major rifts in their lives, for better or for worse. And none of them had an inkling of that at the moment the shutter clicked.
    Ten years later, Troitski was a famous journalist, he owned his own record label and had a regular talk show on TV. He was faced with only one major problem: there were no more good pop groups to write about. ‘The Russian underground was always fed by its resistance to the party, to the bosses and the KGB. It was us against them, and that was our main source of inspiration. The same went for the underground writers, poets, film-makers and artists. After perestroika, that game was suddenly over, and all the arts had to go looking for new forms.’
    After leaving Troitski, we went looking for a few of those old pop heroes. My colleague knew them all from the early days. We found Misha Borzykin and his former guitarist Sasha Belyayev in the cellar of an old theatre in St Petersburg which was now a squat. In 1987, their band Televizor had thrown half the Soviet Union into a panic with the lyric: ‘The fish is rotting around the head, they're all liars, the fish is rotting around the head.’ Now they were sitting at a darkened table, drinking vodka