Aquarium was formed in 1972 by two friends: Boris Grebenshchikov, then a student of applied mathematics at Leningrad State University, and Anatoly (George) Gunitsky, a playwright and absurdist poet.

[5] In the 1970s and early 1980s, rock and roll was strictly regulated in the Soviet Union, and only a few artists managed to be approved and signed by the government record label Melodiya.

They followed this up in 1976 with their third album, S Toy Storony Zerkalnogo Stekla, or From the Other Side of a Mirror Glass (Russian: С той стороны зеркального стекла), named using a line from an Arseny Tarkovsky poem.

On March 10 Aquarium was a surprise guest at the Tallinn Festival of Popular Music, where they played a set of four acoustic songs and won the prize for the most interesting and varied program.

In 1979 the band met with two important figures of Soviet rock, critic Artemy Troitsky and next year start to work with Andrei Tropillo as a manager in whose studio Aquarium recorded its first 'historic' albums.

During the set, Grebenshchikov lay down on the stage and made provocative movements while playing the guitar, causing all the jury members to demonstratively leave the hall.

Aquarium was accused of promoting homosexuality (the guitar actions), incest (Grebenshchikov changed words while singing the song "Marina", though this may have been through poor technique) and indecency, and banned from the festival.

Until 1987, Aquarium recorded all of their albums in live concerts and in a self-assembled underground studio (several members had engineering education) disguised as a "Young Technicians Club".

In 1996, Aquarium co-headlined (along with DDT) the VladiROCKstok music festival in Vladivostok; at one memorable point, Grebenshchikov famously invited thousands of fans to stream out of their grandstand seats and into the area near the performance stage.

The band continued to release more albums and tour extensively over the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and places with Russian-speaking immigrant communities in Germany, Israel and the United States.

[7] Although often criticized for departure from their original style and constant line-up changes, which made the later incarnations of Aquarium essentially a Grebenshchikov solo project, the group still enjoyed considerable success in Russia with regular radio airplay of their old and new songs, popular albums, and frequent tours.

Aquarium's lineup in 2017 consisted of Boris Grebenshchikov, Andrey Surotdinov (violin), Alexey Zubarev (guitars), Alexander Titov (bass), Liam Bradley (drums) and Brian Finnegan (flute).