Песни (Songs)

THE ALBUM

There is something quietly radical about a Soviet LP that sounds like it was recorded in someone's kitchen — not because it was rough, but because it felt true. Песни is a twelve-track collection of bard songs: acoustic guitar, a voice scraped raw by cigarettes and conviction, and lyrics that cut through Soviet doublespeak with the precision of a penknife. No studio gloss, no orchestral padding. The format is essentially confessional folk, rooted in the avtorskaya pesnya (author's song) tradition — a singer writing and performing their own material, unmediated, in the way that poetry readings were the only safe space for uncomfortable truths.

What made the record significant was not any single track in isolation but the accumulated weight of what it said and how: the tenderness of "Он Не Вернулся Из Боя" (He Didn't Come Back from the Battle), a war elegy so personal it renders the patriotic anthem genre almost obsolete by comparison; the absurdist wit of "Жираф" (Giraffe), which uses an African animal as a vehicle for bitter geopolitical commentary; the deceptively cheerful "Утренняя Гимнастика" (Morning Gymnastics), which turns a Soviet wellness routine into dark satire. Side A tilts toward mountains and comradeship — the Pamir and Caucasus climbing songs — while Side B broadens into love, philosophy, and the supernatural shimmer of "Песня О Переселении Душ" (Moving of Souls). Together they form not a concept album in the Western sense but something more like a portrait: one man's running argument with the world he lived in.

ARTIST & RECORDING CONTEXT

Vladimir Vysotsky wrote and performed almost exclusively for himself — no co-writers, no producers grooming the material, no label A&R. Born in Moscow in 1938, he became the defining voice of Soviet underground culture through the 1960s and 70s, circulating his songs almost entirely on magnetic tape via the magnitizdat network, home-to-home copies passed hand to hand without official sanction. He was also a celebrated actor at the Taganka Theatre and in Soviet film, but it was the songs that made him a phenomenon at a scale the authorities found difficult to contain and impossible to simply arrest away.

The recordings on this LP span different points in his output, drawing from the mountain songs he began writing around the time of the 1966 film Вертикаль (Vertical) — which gave "Песня О Друге" (Song of a Friend), "Прощание С Горами" (Farewell to Mountains), and "Вершина" (A Summit) their original public context — alongside later material. "Скалолазка" (A Cliffclamberer) is one of his lighter, more playful pieces, a love song disguised as an alpine metaphor. "Корабли" (Ships), which closes the record, has the feel of a genuine farewell, its imagery of departing vessels carrying more weight than the lyric's surface admits. Vysotsky accompanied himself on a seven-string Russian guitar, and the recordings preserve that immediacy — the pick attack, the breath before a verse, the occasional scrape of a string. No session musicians are credited; the voice and the guitar are the whole instrument.

THIS PRESSING

Vysotsky died on 25 July 1980, aged 42, during the Moscow Olympics — a fact the Soviet state initially tried to manage quietly. This Melodiya LP, catalogue number С 60—14761-2, appeared that same year: one of the first official Soviet pressings of his work to reach a mass domestic audience. For most of his lifetime, Melodiya had not issued a proper Vysotsky LP; the state label's relationship with him was complicated by his unofficial status and the subversive edge of his lyrics. The posthumous release of Песни was therefore not a routine catalogue addition but something closer to a political recalibration — an acknowledgment, through vinyl, of a cultural reality the system had spent years pretending didn't exist.

The pressing carries the С60 prefix, placing it in Melodiya's standard stereo LP series for domestic Soviet distribution. Multiple plant variants exist under this catalogue number — Discogs documents at least a red-label and a blue-label pressing, pressed at different Melodiya pressing plants (including ЛЗГ and РЗГ variants), with the 1980 original and subsequent represses through the mid-1980s sharing the same catalogue number. The sleeve uses bilingual titling — Cyrillic Песни alongside the romanised Songs — which also appeared on an export edition of the same catalogue number, suggesting this title was simultaneously targeted at both domestic buyers and foreign-market distribution.

COLLECTOR SIGNIFICANCE

This album arrived when demand for anything Vysotsky had said on record was essentially unlimited. Queues formed outside music shops in Moscow when Melodiya releases of his material appeared, and copies moved fast — not because the pressing run was small by Soviet standards, but because the audience for it was vast and had been waiting years. The combination of official state release and immediate public hunger meant that early pressings were grabbed quickly, and many copies went through heavy use. Finding one in genuinely good condition is harder than the pressing numbers alone would suggest.

For collectors today, the 1980 original pressings — rather than the mid-80s represses — carry the documentary weight of that specific biographical moment: the record appeared in the weeks and months after Vysotsky's death, when Soviet cultural gatekeepers were for the first time formally acknowledging what millions of citizens had always known. The export edition with romanised sleeve text is separately sought after. Among domestic variants, the red-label and blue-label plant differences attract close attention from Soviet-vinyl specialists, for whom the pressing-plant matrix is as legible as a date stamp. As the earliest major official statement on a body of work that had circulated underground for two decades, Песни occupies a specific and unrepeatable position in that catalogue.

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Track Highlights

• Он Не Вернулся Из Боя (He Didn't Come Back from the Battle) — Among the most devastating anti-war songs in the Russian language, framed entirely around one soldier's absence and told with no propaganda, only grief.
• Жираф (Giraffe) — A shaggy-dog story about an exotic animal that works as pointed commentary on Soviet insularity and the cost of knowing too much about the world outside.
• Песня О Переселении Душ (Moving of Souls) — Vysotsky at his most philosophically playful, spinning Buddhist reincarnation into a darkly comic moral fable.
• Утренняя Гимнастика (Morning Gymnastics) — Bright, almost cheerful in delivery, with lyrics that use the language of Soviet health culture to quietly devastating satirical effect.
• Корабли (Ships) — The record's quietly elegiac closing track, its departing ships heavy with the sense of something ending — unbearably so in light of when this pressing appeared.