Grazhdanskaya Oborona

In 1982 the 18-year-old poet and musician Yegor Letov formed the band Posev (The Sowing, named after the official NTS magazine) with his friend Konstantin "Kuzya UO"[4] Ryabinov.

The band was preparing to record an album, but their defiantly anti-authoritarian stance and overtly political lyrics made them an easy target for the KGB.

"The mother of our [second guitarist] Babenko, she was a sort of a party official, she listened to our records and went to the KGB and said, "Comrades, my son is involved in an anti-Soviet organization", Letov recalled.

It was lo-fi, straightforward garage punk rock/post-punk with slight reggae influences and exquisite, irrational lyrics, inspired mainly by Russian Futurist poetry.

[5] After all, he played a set with his friends Oleg and Evgeny Lischenko (from the local band Pik Klakson) under the deliberately provocative name Адольф Гитлер (Adolf Hitler), which would be released on CD in 2016.

He immediately left the city with his then-partner, the fellow Siberian songwriter Yanka Dyagileva, and spent the entire year in hiding, hitch-hiking across the country until the prosecution was stopped in December 1987 with the help of Letov's relatives.

Some songs (e.g. "Насекомые" (Insects) from Армагеддон-Попс, "Заговор" (Spell) from Здорово и вечно) also show his interest in Siberian folklore and pre-Christian beliefs.

In the same year Letov, Kuzya and Oleg "Manager" Sudakov started a conceptual, Sots Art-like side project Коммунизм (Communism), where they combined kitschy Soviet art and Stalinist poetry with noise experimentation.

In 1990, Grazhdanskaya Oborona broke up after playing their final concert in Tallinn: Letov stated he was afraid they would turn into a "commercial pseudo-counterculture project" and decided to put the band on hiatus.

In 1996, their entire discography was remastered and given an official cassette issue for the first time on the fledgling XOP label, which was a sublabel of Moroz Records used to release Letov-related material.

In 2004–05, the group released the critically acclaimed pair of albums Dolgaya Schastlivaya Zhizn' (Russian: Долгая Счастливая Жизнь, lit.

The following day, Letov posted a note on the official GrOb website, "Official statement from E. Letov and GrOb regarding the events at Ekaterinburg", stating the band were "patriots, but not Nazis", disavowing any neo-Nazis who claimed to be fans of the group, linking neo-Nazism to the communism the band had grown up with and telling "totalitarians on the left and right and of all colours and stripes" to "fuck off", saying "We kindly request you no longer associate your stink with our activities".

There are fewer songs with themes of tragedy, rage and turmoil on this album than in previous ones; there are no coarse words in it, and Letov's voice sounds natural and calm.

Letov was a big fan of 60s garage and psychedelic rock and named Arthur Lee's Love as his favourite band, along with The Seeds, The Monks and others.