[DrSiemer]

Kino's music is amazing. Even though I cannot understand most of it, I still feel it gives me a tiny glimpse of what life was like over there during those times.

Your second link is a remake for the movie Лето though. Not as good as the famous original, that you can still hear in any protest in or near Russia to this day:

https://youtu.be/NKC8UfJ6CSE

[strlen]

Thank you for the revised link! Good that you mention Leto (which was a beautiful movie, despite many historical inaccuracies): Leto is set in the early, pre-perestroika 80s. The first link I posted - Elektrichka - is also from that era: it is about a man who on an electric commuter train (think Caltrain, but electrified: People’s Democratic Republic of California is behind USSR in that respected) that is taking him to a wrong destination. It is a metaphor for the state: as a result, the song was banned.

Contrast the song with Перемен (Changes): the unofficial anthem of my birth country‘s democracy movement. While the song is explicitly non-political (it is about making internal changes), it is able to convey the sentiment in USSR in the late 80s and early 90s (the song was written in 1985. prior to Perestroika.) To put another way, a song about the “gentle Nietzschean”/Schopenhauerian thesis of artists changing the world through their work, highlights the elective affinities between the agents of cultural change and the agents of political change.

An important thing to note: Kino’s front man, Victor Tsoi is of Korean descent. h Soviet Koreans, aka Koryo-Saram (there is roughly 1mm of them today in former USSR) came to Russian Empire during the Koryo dynasty (mostly from mid 19th to early 20th century.) They played an important role in the early days of USSR, but we’re deported to Central Asia as Stalin as he suspected them of harboring pro-Japanese sympathies (this would be equivalent to suspecting Jews of harboring pro-Nazi sympathies, which he also did in the case of my paternal grandfather the minister of transportation for Soviet Belarus.) Over 10% of their population died during the deportation.

Their plight was largely unknown until glasnost. The Kazakh film maker Rashid Nugmanov of Игла (Needle) fame - movie about drug addiction, a topic rarely discussed for most of USSR’s existence - which starred Tsoi and featured his music - portrayed their story in his critically acclaimed historical fiction film Месть (Revenge.)

In a tangential note relevant to HN’s usually discussed topics, Russia’s richest woman - she created e-commerce site wildberries while on maternity leave - is also of Korean descent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatyana_Bakalchuk