«Something Extraordinary»: How the 1970s Hid Out in Apartments

The Festival is a unique attempt to understand how the cultural life of Moscow and Leningrad developed, how they differed, and how those distinctions have influenced our contemporary lives. After the euphoria of the Thaw, cultural life suddenly began to fracture into numerous closed worlds. Poets no longer expected millions of print runs; artists, museum exhibitions; musicians, stadium concerts. Instead, the culture of apartment gatherings emerged, samizdat became more active, and the black market for magnetic tape recordings took hold.

The organizers posed the question: why, despite two capitals constantly exchanging people and ideas, did they create such radically different underground scenes? At the festival, dozens of participants will unpack this dichotomy—from writer Evgeny Vodolazkin to artist Pavel Pepperstein, from historian Lev Lurie to critic Irina Prokhorova. Vodolazkin will discuss Sasha Sokolov’s «School for Fools, ” Mikhail Sverdlov will talk about how the commuter train to Petushki revolutionized literature, and Yuri Saprykin and Prokhorova will debate Tsypkin’s novel, „Summer in Baden.“

The Garage Museum and curator Sasha Obukhova prepared a unique project specifically for the festival—at their request, Andrey Monastyrsky created «Slogan-2026, Hardly Discernible.» The work will be displayed along one of the central avenues of the Peredelkino Creative Center, continuing the famous «Trips to the Countryside» series that the group began back in the 1970s.

The festival will conclude with a concert—Vladimir Martynov will perform the famous «Wall Message» from his cycle «New Simplicity, ” followed by music in the evening that was often difficult and adventurous to find in the 1970s. There will even be a master class on denim sewing—because it was quite the ritual. And there will be a book fair, where you can find „scarce“ editions that were hunted like treasures back then.