Yves Montand and The Bones of Bremen

A guest editorial by Stephen Coates, creator of the X-Ray Audio Project

 

Quelle: Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, FSO 01-137.

In the Cold War era of the Soviet Union between about 1946 and 1964, a unique and unusual underground recording culture existed. In a political context where all culture was censored, much music became forbidden.This included Western Jazz and rock ’n’ roll, Russian emigre songs and music in various styles that were considered undesirable. But much of this music was very popular and ingenious bootleggers devised a way to copy and distribute their own discs by using home-made recording machines to make vinyl type records. The medium they used was x-ray film.  The X-Ray audio project is an initiative to tell the story of these strange records and the people who made, played and traded them. It is currently  the subject of a major exhibition at GARAGE museum in Moscow.

We were very pleased to be contacted recently by the Research Centre for East European Studies with regard to various x-ray records in their archive.The records are part of the personal papers of the Polivanov-familiy and were donated by the philologist Anastasia Alexandrovna Baranovich-Polivanova (born 1932). They have an interesting Samizdat connection and musical history. Anastasia’s husband, the mathematician Michail Konstantinovich Polivanov, was active in samizdat circles and she is the daughter of Marina Kazimirovna Baranovich, a member of the underground Soviet Anthroposophical Movement, who helped to publish early samizdat works by authors such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Study of anthroposophy, a mystical philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner, was made illegal in the Soviet Union in 1923 and subsequently many Russian practitioners ended their lives in the gulag. The movement remained underground until the more open climate of the 1970s.