Бег Иноходца (The Pacer's Run)

THE ALBUM

There is something almost paradoxical about a live concert record that became the primary way millions of Soviet citizens heard music they had already been humming for years. Бег Иноходца — "The Pacer's Run" — is the ninth volume in Melodiya's На концертах Владимира Высоцкого series, a sprawling anthology of live concert recordings released across the late 1980s as the USSR finally committed to officially documenting one of its most awkward cultural phenomena. It is a mono LP drawn from a 1972 concert recording, presenting Vysotsky exactly as his audiences knew him: alone, with his seven-string guitar, in a room, telling stories. There is no studio gloss, no orchestration. The sound is raw by design, and the rawness is the point.

As a format, the "На концертах" volumes are bard recordings in the oldest Russian sense — poetry set to guitar, performed live for real audiences — but Vysotsky's particular version of the form is harder, more theatrical, and more darkly comic than anything the genre label might suggest. The title track, Бег иноходца, is a caustic allegory about a racehorse that runs differently from the herd and is punished for it — the kind of song that works simultaneously as sporting drama and political parable, depending entirely on how carefully you listen. The record also features songs like Разведка боем, Встреча в ресторане, О переселении душ, and Сыт я по горло, each one a compressed short story, alternately sardonic and furious and tender. Together they form something close to a variety programme — Vysotsky moves between gangsters, soldiers, philosophers, and ordinary Muscovites within the space of a single side — and the audience laughter and applause, audible throughout, roots everything in the moment of performance. This is not a curated studio statement; it is a document of a room, in 1972, listening.

ARTIST & RECORDING CONTEXT

Vladimir Vysotsky was an actor at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow and the author, composer, and performer of his own songs — a position that existed outside every official Soviet creative category, which is precisely why he was difficult to manage. He was not a dissident in any formal sense, not a samizdat writer, not an émigré. He was simply too popular and too sharp to silence, and too technically outside the state-approved musical apparatus to be easily promoted either. The recordings that became the Na Kontsertakh series were made at apartment concerts, theatrical performances, and informal gatherings across his career; the sessions captured here date to 1972, a period when his live activity was prolific and the concert recordings circulating on magnetic tape (magnitizdat) numbered in the hundreds. This pressing draws on фонограммы — source recordings — from the collection of M. Kryzhanovskiy, the archivist whose tape holdings underpinned much of the official Melodiya anthology.

The performances are solo by nature: Vysotsky, guitar, voice. No producer in any conventional sense shaped these tracks in the studio; the editorial work was in the selection and sequencing of tapes. Бег иноходца itself had long circulated in tape form before 1989, familiar enough that audiences would have known the words before the record pressed them into vinyl. Разведка боем ("Reconnaissance by Fire") and О переселении душ ("On the Transmigration of Souls") — a sardonic meditation on reincarnation delivered at high speed — show the tonal range Vysotsky commanded in a single set: from military satire to philosophical black comedy, with no gear change announced.

THIS PRESSING

This is the Soviet Melodiya pressing of Бег иноходца issued in 1989, catalogue number М60 48943 009, the ninth volume in the На концертах Владимира Высоцкого ("At Vladimir Vysotsky's Concerts") series — a numbered sequence of mono LPs that Melodiya released over several years beginning in the late 1980s, finally bringing Vysotsky's concert recordings into official Soviet distribution at scale. The recording date on the sleeve is given as 1972; the pressing itself emerged from two Melodiya plants, with variants documented from both the Aprelyevka (Апрелевский) and Leningrad (Ленинградский) factories, with pressing runs of 130,000 and 150,000 copies respectively across variants — significant numbers that reflect the enormous official appetite for the material once the political calculus shifted under glasnost. The label configuration varied by pressing plant: white label variants from Aprelyevka and red label variants from Leningrad are both documented for this volume. The format is a standard 33 rpm mono LP, priced at 2 rubles 50 kopecks — the standard Soviet retail price for a full-length Melodiya release of the period.

COLLECTOR SIGNIFICANCE

Бег иноходца landed at a specific cultural inflection point: by 1989, Vysotsky had been dead for nine years, his official rehabilitation was underway, and the state was retroactively normalising music that had previously been allowed to exist only at the margins. This volume, like others in the series, was not a discovery for Soviet listeners — the songs were already deeply embedded in popular memory through a decade of tape circulation — but its official release carried a different kind of weight. Holding a Melodiya LP of Vysotsky in 1989 meant something that holding a bootleg cassette did not: it was the state finally acknowledging, in the most Soviet of formats, that this music belonged to the culture.

Among collectors today, the individual volumes of the На концертах series are most sought in their earliest pressings, and volume nine is no exception. The white label Aprelyevka variants and the red label Leningrad pressings are distinct enough to attract dedicated completists working through the full series. The large pressing numbers mean copies are not scarce by the standards of Soviet vinyl, but condition varies sharply — these were consumer records sold at mass-market prices, played on whatever equipment was to hand — and clean, unplayed examples with intact sleeves are noticeably harder to find than the raw numbers suggest. For collectors focused specifically on Soviet-era bard music or on the official rehabilitation of previously suppressed material, this volume carries particular weight: the title track is among Vysotsky's most resonant allegories, and having it pressed in black vinyl by the same state apparatus that once looked the other way makes the object itself a small piece of Soviet cultural history.

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Track Highlights

• Бег иноходца — A driving, percussive account of a racehorse that refuses to run like the others, operating simultaneously as sporting narrative and unmistakable political allegory.
• О переселении душ — A rapid-fire comic meditation on reincarnation, delivered with the velocity and timing of a stand-up monologue.
• Разведка боем — Military satire pitched with just enough ambiguity to make the target unclear to those who weren't looking for it.
• Сыт я по горло — A bitter, cumulative lament that builds through repetition into something close to a shout, Vysotsky's live delivery giving it a physical urgency that no studio version could replicate.