Russian

U-Piter (Ю-Питер) is a Russian rock band formed in 2001 by Vyacheslav Butusov (Вячеслав Бутусов), who is best known for the popular Soviet rock band Nautilus Pompilius (Наутилус Помпилиус). The band usually writes their name in the Greek alphabet, to cement their connection to the god Jupiter (… who is Roman, but the point still […]

Vyacheslav Butusov (Вячеслав Бутусов) is a Russian rock singer who started during the Soviet period and has been known for many bands, among them the seminal Nautilus Pompilius (Наутилус Помпилиус), U-Piter (Ю-Питер), and his own solo work. Butusov was born in a village near Krasnoyarsk in 1961 and grew up in various cities all over […]

Katerina Golitsyna (originally Yakovleva; Катерина Голицына/Яковлева) is a Russian shanson singer. An ethnic Kuban Cossack, she was born in Omsk, a large Siberian city, but the family soon returned to their roots in the Russian Caucasus and then moved on again to Moscow. Golitsyna started playing music almost as soon as they got there, when […]

Mikhail Shufutinsky (Михаил Шуфутинский) is a Russian jazz and shanson legend. Growing up in postwar Moscow, he was drawn to music from his early childhood, learning to play the accordion—which was considered a “bourgeois” instrument in that Soviet era. He switched to the similar button accordion (баян), which he was able to learn at school […]

Venya D’rkin (Веня Д’ркин; originally Aleksandr Litvinov, Александр Литвинов) was a Ukrainian (Russian-speaking) poet, songwriter, musician, artist, and storyteller, and one of the later generation of bards. He had a much more informal, unpolished image than some other recent musicians, showing his truly countercultural ethos. D’rkin grew up in a small mining town near Luhansk. […]

Kirill Komarov (Кирилл Комаров) is a Russian rock and experimental musician, one of the stranger and more interesting of recent times. From St. Petersburg, he studied Turkish philology at the Eastern Department of Leningrad State University, after which he began translating Turkish poetry and also writing his own original verses. He started writing the songs […]

Troeraznykh (Троеразных; the name translates to “three different”) is a Kyrgyz rap collective most of whose songs are in Russian. They originally consisted of two beatmakers and one guitarist—or, as Boorsok, a Kyrgyz magazine, has put it, “three forms who don’t resemble one another even by a drop.” They aim to be a “human” group, […]

Saltanat Ashirova (Салтанат Аширова) is a Kyrgyz rock and pop singer known for her “crystal voice,” according to New Faces (Новые лица). She sings mostly in Russian. In addition to her solo career, she is known for her membership in the now-broken-up band Eles and in her new project, The M.A.P. She sings and plays […]