As I was doing research into breakdance's emergence in Russia in the late 70s to early 80s, I had stumbled upon an excerpt of the 1986 comedy film Courier based on the 1982 novel by Karen Shakhnazarov published in Yunost, which featured Soviet youth life and their activites, which included disco halls, breakdancing, and street scenes. According to the director from an interview conducted by student Vitaly Ievlev, the film was to show how the inevitable fate of the Soviet Union could be represented through the eyes of youth culture.
The online ethnographic, archival film project "Кинопутеводитель по Москве," although the website is named loook.city, features an entry on the film and the iconic location where "golden youth" and ordinary youth gathered during the heart of Perestroika up until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Moscow club called "At The Fountain" located in the Olympic Park built for the 1980s Summer Olympics, although colloquially named "Milk" due to the fact alcohol was banned from being sold due to Gorbachov's "dry law" and so all that was allowed was milk, milk products, and snacks, became the watering hole for a variety of Soviet subcultures. This led to some heightened tension between the "formals" and "informals," although such cultural integration turned out to be a positive thing, as the explosion of subcultural "tribes" that arose during the late 1980s to early 90s, in a way, helped free Soviet youth from the confines of Party policy. There was everything from club competitions and festivals (specifically Papuga-86, the first breakdancing festival in Russia), to a full-blown underground economy called "Fartsovka" ran by "blacksmiths" who supplied, at first, priviledged youth then ordinary youth, Western goods.
While the location was but one of a variety of places, as explained by Russian artist and subcultural researcher Misha Buster, these locations allowed a stable community of breakdancing youth, known commonly as "breakers," to grow in societal influence, eventually laying the foundations for the generation of rap in the early 90s when groups starting playing around with rapping. In 1989, the second rap track was released, the first being by Част Пик ["Rap"], this time being by the group Alisa named "Totalitarian Rap," sparking the first wave of Russian Hip-Hop, although that was from the rock direction. Simultaneously in 1989 on state-run television (Feyh, 2012: 187-188), from the breakdancing direction, the group Black and White, with breakdancers accompanying, performed a pop-meets-rap performance, setting yet another stone in the foundation of first-wave Russian Hip-Hop culture. It was this "third wave" of breakdance culture in the late 80s to early 90s where the rise of Russian Hip-Hop began, immediately in fact because in 1991 to 1992 the first rap performances and festivals began surfacing ["Peak-91", "White Nights"], along with some of the first groups and artists like Bad Balance, Bachelor Party, Mister Maloy, Bogdan Titmoir, and Dolphin, embracing the Russian language for rapping.
Enjoy these this clip and check out the dedicated project on "Courier" by student
Vitaly Ievlev, with Professorial guidance by Professor Anna Cuxhausen, along with the loook.city fragment, which documents many first-hand experiences from Milk.
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