On June 24, 1990, the Soviet post-punk band Kino performed their legendary “last concert” at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. The stage, bedecked with slipshod canvas banners bearing painted red suns — recalling their immensely popular song «Звезда по имени Солнце» (“A Star Called the Sun”) — and illuminated by the band’s name in marquee lights, holds aloft the four-man group fronted by the effortlessly cool Viktor Tsoi. Amongst the crowd of 70,000, red flags emblazoned with the band’s name fly like an old-fashioned Party rally, punctuated by glimpses of the flag of the as-yet embryonic Russian Federation. To rapturous applause, the concert closes with «Хочу перемен!» (“I Want Changes!”) and the Olympic flame is lit, the bright light of transgressive Russian youth culture made ceremonially legitimate.
The story of Kino’s vertiginous ascent into mainstream Soviet popular culture is a seemingly miraculous one. In a country known for its roentgenizdat practice of smuggling banned Western music on X-ray film, the lighting of the Olympic flame for a 28 year-old, leather jacket-wearing punk is a far-cry from the culture of tight state control. And yet, Kino and its frontman have been retroactively designated champions of the moribund Soviet empire, their music and cultural cachet as evidence of the triumph of expressive freedom behind the Iron Curtain.
Before the concert at Luzhniki Stadium (which can be seen in its entirety on YouTube), there were Assa (Асса, 1987, dir. Sergei Solovyov) and The Needle (Игла, 1988, dir. Rashid Nugmanov), two films featuring the music of Kino and the on-screen presence of Viktor Tsoi himself. Sanctioned under the auspices of Gorbachev’s perestroika policy of social, economic, and cultural rein-loosening, these two films catapulted the underground Soviet rock scene to national and international mainstream recognition, projecting the subversive pleasures of a generation of lost urban youth onto the state film industry and — eventually — onto theater and television screens across the Union. Their releases and the “Kinomania” they unleashed upon the nation serve as Sovietological benchmarks for the indelible decline of the USSR, the final death blows in its “sick-man” phase of imperial decay. Parallel to their roles in Kino’s fame, Assa and The Needle present a new vision of the Soviet Union from a purely adolescent perspective, demonstrating not only an awareness of a society in transition, but one beset upon by the reality of social ills that necessitated a new type of heroic culture for the young and dispossessed.
Assa: A punk proclamation.
Launching an unprecedented cultural and media event, the premiere of Assa in the spring of 1988 was accompanied by an “Art Rock Parade” at the Moscow Electric Lamp Plant, complete with Assa merch, an avant-garde art exhibition, and a performance by Kino themselves. It’s easy to see why the film’s hype preceded it so: blending generic elements of the crime thriller and the musical, Assa is a part-gangster film, part-music video renegade artwork seemingly constructed precisely for a mass youth audience.
The film’s conceit is rather simple: the curious and free-spirited Bananan (joyously brought to life by later-performance artist Sergei Bugaev, alias “Afrika”) encounters the cautious Alika (Tatyana Drubich) in the snowy port city of Yalta. They develop a relationship that, despite its ambiguity, reveals itself as a threat to Alika’s criminal kingpin boyfriend Krimov (Stanislav Govorukhin); Krimov thus befriends Bananan in an effort to liquidate him. The creeping, dramatic pathos aside, the film’s plot serves mostly as a foundation for its more boisterous experimentation and exhibition of contemporary adolescent trends. Bananan’s group plays entire songs by bands like Bravo and Akvarium, whose new wave sound was finding purchase among the urban youth underground in the 1980s. In sequences parallel to Krimov’s scheming, a book he reads about the assassination of Tsar Peter I comes to life, rendered gently in torchlit historical reenactment. Bananan falls victim to a number of strange dreams, illustrated by colorful abstractions flickering in a dense two-dimensional plane of paint and text. Slang terms are explained dictionary-style by roving intertitles, their leading asterisks blipping superimposed on the action to guide the less hip members of the audience through the film’s dialogue.
While aggressively declaring its unique voice through its renegade editing and elliptical plot development, Assa contextualizes itself within the cultural sea change at work in the Soviet Union through an awareness of transitional space and sound. The hall where Bananan’s band plays is the annex of a ritzy plein-air restaurant; an open door separates the stately neoclassical dining courtyard — befit with a fountain and tropical plants — from the dark performance space, whose walls are electrified by pulsing colored lights and a glittering stage set. Guests drift in between these two spaces, the threshold a porous membrane not quite separating the stuffy elite from the cool kids: at the restaurant, you don’t necessarily have to pick a side in the cultural collision.
The film’s music operates in just the same way, decrying a strict oppositional stance in favor of a spirit of change and boundless creativity. Songs by Kino and Bravo follow traditional theater pieces, French chanson is heard through a Walkman, and Bach’s “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” lovingly haunts the film in sweet harpsichord, recalling its use in Andrei Tarkovsky’s equally genre-bending Solaris (1972). In an early sequence, Bananan shows Alika how to use the drum machine; the two playfully exchange banter over a percussive loop as Bananan registers his vocals as a replayable instrument. Evoking a new type of sound characterized by unconventional meter and spontaneity, the music of Assa revels in novelty and the value inherent in the act of creation — a cultural language for a generation interested less in planning than in participation, experimentation, and the joy of process.
After all, it’s in the music that Assa takes its chief pleasures; the epilogue of the film features — finally! — the magnetic Viktor Tsoi, come to stand in for Bananan as the restaurant band’s frontman. He steps up to the stage and the restaurant melts away, replaced by a crowd of thousands swaying their lighters to «Хочу перемен!» (“I Want Changes!”), the very same song that was to close out the famed concert at Luzhniki Stadium. In these final minutes of Assa, the floodgates for a wave of cultural dynamism and political rebellion expressed in youth music were opened, carrying Viktor Tsoi and his disaffected punk sensibilities to the heights of stardom.
The Needle: Decay in the (social) blood.
If the finale of Assa showed the state film industry anything, it’s that the people wanted Viktor Tsoi. And Viktor Tsoi they would get; the year after Assa saw the release of Kazak New Wave auteur Rashid Nugmanov’s The Needle, with Tsoi in the starring role. The film reads today as significantly less playful than its counterpart; following the defiant Moro (Tsoi) through his return to his ancestral Alma-Ata, the film wrestles depictions of addiction, debt, gang violence, and environmental disintegration into a social issue drama for the necrotic Soviet empire. What’s more, The Needle is no longer really about the music: while Tsoi’s slinking presence grants a certain coolness to the film’s atmosphere, the tracks of Bravo, Akvarium, and Kino’s other contemporaries are nowhere to be found. Just a few by Kino themselves grace the soundtrack, notably “A Star Called the Sun,” which Tsoi wrote during filming. Here, Tsoi is cultural product number one; outfitted in his characteristic all-black, he plays the role of part-gangster, part-martial artist like a punk Jackie Chan anti-hero. In this respect, The Needle can be seen as a consequence of Assa’s epilogue: a portrait of the rocker gained mainstream stardom, made complete with a titillating shower moment for his fans to swoon over.
Like Assa, The Needle depicts a society in transition, but shines its light on the much uglier elements left in the wake of Brezhnevian stagnation. The film’s plot revolves around Moro’s attempt to rescue his ex-girlfriend Dina (Marina Smirnova) from a morphine addiction somewhat forcibly supplied by her sneering coworker, the surgeon Artur (Pyotr Mamonov). As Moro hatches a plan to decapitate Artur’s narcotic enterprise, he collides with a Kazakh criminal underworld fueled by the quickened blood of debtors; several sequences abound of Tsoi bashing heads and firing off roundhouse kicks in seedy bars and snowy alleyways. Even the film’s most tender episode — that of Dina’s successful cold-turkey cutoff of her morphine habit — is haunted by Soviet decay: the pair spend two weeks detoxifying at the dusty former banks of the Aral Sea, which has all but dried up thanks to reckless state irrigation projects.
Thus prefiguring post-Soviet grime-thrillers like 1997’s Brother, The Needle’s depiction of society in transition reflects the ills rather than the triumphs; where Assa celebrates the vivacity of youth in rebellion, The Needle writhes in the muck of social infirmity. The result is a youth culture characterized by alienation: Moro rarely expresses a single impassioned emotion, while Dina is capable of opening up to him only from behind the filtered light of a partition, her voice modulated as if to conceal her identity. Ultimately, what brief attempts at interpersonal connection there are end unsuccessfully, Dina relapsing into addiction and Moro finding himself with a bloody knife wound dripping onto the snowy streets of Alma-Ata. The crisis of the Soviet twilight years is thus expressed in isolation, dependence, and death, a representation almost antithetical to the power-to-the-people vibrance of the closing moments of Assa.
This alienation, however, is not without its own creative power; The Needle gives rise to a new type of popular hero in the form of Tsoi’s individualist outcast. Challenging what historian Oksana Sarkisova calls the “obligatory collectivism of mainstream cinema” in her book Filming a Liveable Past, the synergy of Tsoi’s star power and Moro’s rugged laxity recalls the Western hero beloved by Hollywood producers and NATO-aligned publics alike. The Needle thus communicates a more potent cultural insubordination, depicting the Union’s vicious underbelly as an insurmountable challenge for the nonetheless heroic rebel-with-a-cause.
You want changes? You got ‘em.
As life imitates art, so too does the history reflect the medium: two years after The Needle and a mere two months after the concert at Luzhniki, Tsoi was killed in a car crash in modern-day Latvia. One year later, the Soviet Union itself followed him to the grave, its dissolution marking the end — and, as some Sovietologists may argue, the goal — of the perestroika age that gave mainstream legitimacy to the Soviet rock scene.
Did Tsoi, Assa, and The Needle bring down the Soviet Union? Of course not: that was a far longer and more painstaking process than the release of two films could have put into motion. But the explosion of rebellious youth energy and individualistic spirit unleashed by Tsoi and his screen appearances grant the Soviet twilight years a certain romanticism. As both symptoms and consequences of the Union’s slide into disintegration, the punk films of perestroika give voice to a generation dispossessed while foreshadowing the horror of the Russian neoliberal austerity that loomed in the approaching ‘90s. Under the patina of joyous liberation and new wave coolness, a gaping maw of socioeconomic decay was ushering in a terrifyingly unknown future. The USSR may not have gone out in a triumphant blaze of glory, but in Viktor Tsoi’s effervescence and the singular voices of Assa and The Needle, it will always have its swan song.
