Yanka Dyagileva

The Russian poet and singer was an important figure in Russia's 1980s underground punk scene. She left her mark before dying aged 24.

In the month and the year that I was born, May 1991, the Siberian underground punk singer, Yanka, came to a still unclear end. Her death was echoed in the demise of the Soviet Union, a rapid disintegration from which the ripples are still being felt. Her career was brief, a mere five or six years, but she became justly famous after her death.

The country that Yanka Diaghileva was born into in 1966 was in a state of stagnation, recovering from the Bay of Pigs incident four years previously, and the incumbency of Khrushchev, which had seen little advancement (despite a greater openness). The music scene was dominated by VIAs (Vocal and Instrumental Ensembles), and by ‘bards’, whose songs were traditional, folkloric, and collective in all senses.[1] By the time of her death, ‘perestroika’ singers were seen as one of the factors contributing to the end of the USSR.[2] Having been outsiders and even classed as criminals in the previous decades, when Gorbachev came to power in 1985, these musicians were paraded and performed on national television. However, a great many musicians “had no discipline or desire to deal with mainstream Soviet social circles that they did not like”, and the partnership between the state and the former underground was uneasy. This was the scene that Yanka entered, performing from 1984 to 1991, but still at the fringes of the mainstream.

Her life is ripe for the sort of documentary that has become so popular in the past decade – female singer, considers herself unattractive, gets into drugs, has terrible boyfriend, kills herself, and is forever immortalised as somehow too flawed to live – cf. Amy, Janis: Little Girl Blue. Indeed, she is compared strongly to Janis Joplin in a biographical text.[3] The argument as to the ethics or emotional bias of these narratives is another argument for another time, but biographies have stressed both her familial tragedies (in 1986 her mother died of cancer) and her romantic disappointments (a troubled relationship with Yegor Letov, lead singer of Гражданской обороны (Civil Defence)). She was certainly also greatly affected by the untimely death in February 1988 of her close friend, the poet SashBash (Aleksandr Bashlachev), in perhaps another suicide. However, Yegor Letov himself, in an interview from 1999 (I cannot for the life of me find a translation of this anywhere) stressed her “joy”: “She was the most joyous person ever. More full of joy than all of us combined, don’t you get it?””.[4] It was also he who released Yanka’s music posthumously, the first album (Стыд И Срам) in 1991, the rest of which he remastered and handed to a producer before he died in 2008. However, one may very obviously argue that it benefitted Letov to present Yanka’s death as not a suicide, but as an accident, or even a murder – as some have claimed.

Yanka’s position would have been a familiar one to the few female punks who emerged from the largely male, more than slightly misogynistic scene in Britain in the later 1970s. She was a rare female presence, especially in a nation that had (and still very much has) a complicated attitude towards women in traditionally male positions. Yanka’s music from 1988 onwards frequently saw her writing from a male point of view.[5] One could argue that this was a reaction to the death of SashBash, or perhaps her merely conforming to the way that most songs were written at that time, but this shows a consciousness of her place within a scene that cannot have been easy for her to navigate, or for others to treat kindly. However, despite many narratives that stress her outsider status (another convenient parcelling off of a tragic life), she entered the establishment in the same way that many of her male contemporaries did. Yanka performed frequently at the Leningrad Rock Club, the first legal venue for rock music in the USSR, overseen by the KGB, and played at by many of the emergent legends of late Soviet rock – Victor Tsoi, Странные игры (Strange Games), and many others. Yanka was possessed of her own rock-star chutzpah: “At one such concert, dissatisfied with her amateurish band, she broke her guitar on the stage and walked off. It might not have been much of a statement in the west, but in Russia it was enough to earn her the moniker of "Lady Punk."”[6]

Her voice was sometimes described as hippie-ish, but the sentiments and the lyrics were brutal, violent, and sad. Her songs “gave vent to the desperation experienced by a fragile, living individual surrounded by a cold, cynical and emotionally corrupt reality that demands absolute conformity”.[7] They reflected the land that she came from, as she did – torn apart by the contradictions of folk culture, Communism, rebellion, and the cold, hard ground. Her songs are raw, На чёрный день (‘For a Black Day’) punctured with violent lyrics and recorded with a deep bass and jangling guitars, and softly deceptive, like Печаль моя светла (‘My Sorrow is Luminous’), where she sings “Nobody knows how fucking bad I feel now/And the TV is hanging from the ceiling/And no one knows how fucking bad I feel now/And I'm so goddamn sick and tired of it all”. When she drowned, it was in a Siberian river, near her birthtown of Novosibirsk, returning to the land, but with mystery, and a legacy that influenced perhaps Russia’s most famous female non-conformists, Pussy Riot. Hers is a story that has been told frequently and differently within Russia, and sometimes in the West, with a voice and a sound that fights to be heard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_the_Soviet_Union

[2] https://www.rbth.com/arts/2013/08/24/how_soviet_underground_music_rocked_perestroika_29179.html

[3] https://persona.rin.ru/eng/view/f/0/37799/diaghilev-jana-janka

[4] https://memoryidentity.wordpress.com/2013/07/07/yanka/

[5] https://www.allmusic.com/artist/yanka-dyagileva-mn0001718897/biography

[6] https://www.allmusic.com/artist/yanka-dyagileva-mn0001718897/biography

[7] Ivan Gololobov and Yngvar B. Steinholt, ‘The Evolution of Punk in Russia’ in Ivan Gololobov, Hilary Pilkington and Yngvar B. Steinholt (eds.) Punk in Russia: Cultural mutation from the ‘useless’ to the ‘moronic’, Routledge: 2014.