Russian chanson

When the former prisoners returned from the gulags back to their homes in the 1950s, the songs that they had sung in the camps became popular with Soviet students and nonconformist intelligentsia.

[2] Then, in the second half of the 1960s, the more conservative Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin made a slight reversal to this process, albeit never reaching the tight, stringent controls experienced during the Stalin era.

This, combined with the influx of cheap and portable magnetic tape recorders led to an increase in the popularity and consumption of the criminal songs.

Since Soviet culture officials did not approve of the songs, many of the bards initially became popular playing at small, private student parties.

Modern artists affiliated with the Chanson genre often sing not in the traditional style used even by the Khrushchev-era performers, but more professionally, borrowing musical arrangements from pop, rock, and jazz.

Many politicians are fans of the genre, and one of the popular modern chanson singers, Alexander Rosenbaum, was a member of the Duma as part of the United Russia Party.

In 1968 Yuli Kim, a Russian language and literature teacher at a boarding school attached to Moscow State University, was dismissed for performing uncensored songs critical of the Soviet Union.

[13] During a meeting of 140 writers, artists and film workers in 1962, Leonid Ilyichev, chairman of the Ideological Commission of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, criticized the songs of Okudzhava.

Ilyichev called them "vulgar songs...designed to appeal to low and cheap tastes" and said they were "out of keeping with the entire structure of [Soviet] life".

[15] The newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia (Soviet Russia) attacked Vysotsky for offering "Philistinism, vulgarity, and immorality" under the "guise of art".

[22] They touched on subjects taboo in Soviet society, like antisemitism, the growing class divide and the power abuses of the political elite.

This often leads to confusion: for example, the bard Alexander Gorodnitsky reports being beaten up once after claiming authorship to one of his songs, which was attributed to a Gulag inmate living over 30 years earlier.

Romance songs are almost always divided into four-line rhymed couplets, rarely have a chorus, and follow a fairly consistent chord progression (Am, Dm, and E, sometimes with C and G added).