GALICH WAS THE PEN NAME used by Aleksandr Arkad’evich Ginzburg (1919–1977) throughout his unique literary career, and it is practically the only thing that all four phases of this career have in common.¹

Galich entered Soviet literature at an extraordinarily early age. He had spent his childhood in various towns in the south of Russia. His family eventually settled in Moscow in the mid-1920s. An uncle who taught at Moscow University provided a contact with the literary intelligentsia of the capital. Galich actually made his debut in print with a poem that was published in the newspaper of the Communist Party youth organization, Komsomol’skaya pravda, in 1935. His promise as a poet was endorsed by one of the most senior Soviet poets of the time, Eduard Bagritsky, and Galich seemed set to make his way into literature via the hierarchy of literary circles and youth organizations. But he was also stage-struck, and he was tom between writing and acting. Eventually he opted for acting. He was successful in a fiercely competitive audition for what became Stanislavsky’s last teaching venture, and studied under the great director for four years. When Stanislavsky died in 1938, his studio disintegrated, and Galich became a member of the Arbuzov-Pluchek troupe. This troupe was an experimental organization dedicated to the collective development of plays, and it succeeded in staging the remarkable “Komsomol drama” City of the Dawn; but its next effort was terminated by the German invasion in 1941. Galich volunteered for the army, but he was turned down on medical grounds. He spent the war traveling extensively as a forces entertainer. The first phase of his career thus contained a false start as a poet, then training and a blighted career as a professional actor, and finally an intensive spell of practical experience as an entertainer. In retrospect, the contribution to his guitar poetry made by these layers of experience can be seen to have been considerable. It was also significant that Galich added to his metropolitan upbringing the experience of years spent wandering in provincial Russia.

The second phase of Galich’s career began after the war and was the longest of the four; it lasted some twenty years, its final years overlapped by the third phase. During this period Galich was a Soviet writer, specializing in plays and film scripts. His success was built on a vaudeville that he cowrote in 1948, Taimyr’ Calling (Vas vyzyvaet Taimyr’). It stayed on the boards for many years and made Galich a reputation and a good deal of money. He continued to turn out dramas and screenplays into the mid-sixties, and became a trusted and wellrewarded member of the Soviet literary establishment. Throughout this period, Galich seems to have accepted the restrictions on creative freedom imposed by the extremely taxing controls under which the Soviet theater worked at the time. He even had some success as a writer of official mass songs. One of them was a “mommy song,” “Goodbye, Mommy, Don’t Be Sad” (“Do svidan’ya, mama, ne goryui”), and it had music by one of the most eminent Soviet composers, V. I. Solov’ev-Sedoi. Another had music by the absolute master of mass song tunes, Matvei Blanter; it was called “Oh, Northern Sea” (“Oi ty, sevemoe more”).

Galich’s career as an official Soviet writer was at its peak in the late 1950s. In the handbooks of the time he is treated, if not as an outstanding writer, then as a solid second-ranker. The 1961 Theatrical Encyclopedia lists his credits, and adds: “The central theme of G.’s work is the romance of the struggle and creative labor of Soviet youth.”² And the Concise Literary Encyclopedia states: “Galich’s comedies are characterized by romantic elevation, lyricism, and humor.”³ One of his friends described the Galich of the late 1950s as

. . . one of the top dozen Moscow scriptwriters and dramatists. . . . Sasha was a member of every possible union, society, committee, section. He had awards, diplomas, and so on. Sasha was enchanting, witty, and handsome; he loved elegant foreign-looking clothes; he used to travel abroad. He was a fine piano player, a king at billiards, and a firstrate preference and poker player. Sasha lived well, had no lack of money, and had a magnificent apartment in the writers’ building near Aeroflotovskaya underground station, and in it I saw quite a few antiques.⁴

In 1962 this respected and apparently well-adjusted Soviet writer began creating and performing songs that stood no chance of publication—as he must have known, given his extensive experience in dealing with the business of literature. The steps that led to his renunciation of his orthodox career cannot all be established. There was no single irrevocable decision to dissent, but an erratic progress from acceptance into rejection. The event about which we know most is the banning of Galich’s play Matrosskaya tishina (the title is the name of a Moscow street.)

The reason we know about this incident is that Galich constructed a book around it, a powerful and complex work that uses the text of the play as a basis for telling as much of the story of Galich’s life as he ever cared to reveal publicly. The play traces the history of a Russian Jewish family through three generations. Its message is that Jews in the USSR should integrate with the Russians and other nationalities in serving the supranational cause of Communism, particularly as manifested in the armed struggle against Fascism. Galich had written the play soon after the war, and then shelved it, obviously because of the virulent official anti-Semitism of Stalin’s later years. He took it out again in the more relaxed atmosphere of the late 1950s,

. . . after the XX Congress of the Party and Khrushchev’s unmasking of Stalin’s crimes. . . . Once more we started believing! Once more like sheep we bleated with joy and rushed out into the nice green grass—which turned out to be a stinking bog!⁵

The play went into production in the new Sovremennik Theater. It went through all the stages of preparation, right up to the dress rehearsal, but was then banned for public performance. Galich called his account of the process The Dress Rehearsal (General’naya repetitsiya). The reason for the ban, as Galich elicited when he was granted an interview at Party headquarters, was that it was not considered permissible to portray a Jew as a hero of the war. The Party functionary dealing with the case explained to Galich that although the Jews had perhaps suffered at the hands of the Fascists, they had not, like the Russians and others, distinguished themselves in fighting back.

This cynical rejection really rankled with Galich. Apart from the ideological issues, his self-respect as a working Soviet author was involved; he had thought himself a master of the system, in tune with current developments. The setback with his play happened in 1958, during the relaxation—always precarious—that led up to the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in 1962. Galich decided that he must find a new medium of expression. And the medium he found was the guitar-accompanied song.

As we have seen, the period when Galich’s playwriting career foundered was precisely the time that Okudzhava was beginning to make a mark as the pioneer of guitar poetry. And Galich, as a member of the inner circle of the Moscow literary intelligentsia, could not possibly have avoided coming across Okudzhava’s songs when they first appeared. But Galich himself was no novice at guitar-accompanied song. As he tells us in one of the retrospective passages of The Dress Rehearsal, he had spent a good deal of time during the war entertaining the troops with guitar-accompanied songs and ballads, often making them up on the spot to refer to people in the audience. And he had a wealth of experience as a performer to call on. In this respect, the analogy between Galich and Vysotsky is very strong, and their professional polish as actors sets them apart from the marked amateurism of Okudzhava’s singing and playing.

It is reliably reported that Galich wrote his first song, and thereby began the third phase of his creative career, in the “Ivan Denisovich” year, 1962. One remarkable thing about Galich as a creative artist was that when he turned to song, he was reborn. For nothing that he wrote as an orthodox Soviet writer has any lasting merit. It is the most dismal hackwork. That is not generally true of other established Soviet writers who have become dissidents. They have usually been the authors of at least one outstanding literary work; Viktor Nekrasov and Vladimir Maksimov come to mind. In Galich’s case there is a startling discontinuity between the levels of his orthodox and his dissident work. It is obviously true that his years of experience in writing dialogue and developing characters in dramatic situations had a profound influence on his technical competence as a writer of songs. But the satirical core of the songs and the personal charge that lies behind it have no equivalent, nor could they have, in the work he had written for Soviet consumption.

The result of Galich’s turn to song was that in the course of a decade he lost everything he had acquired as a privileged official writer and became instead a persecuted dissident. The change was not abrupt. Until at least 1967 he was still getting work into the Soviet media. And, as we will see, the tensions of his double life were one of the most powerful stimuli behind his songs. On the one hand, he retained his perquisites as a Soviet writer in good standing; on the other, magnitizdat was ensuring that his songs became an ever more prominent component of the swelling tide of unofficial literature.

The pivotal year was 1968. The Sinyavsky/Daniel trial in 1966, the Six-Day War of 1967—whose effect on Galich as the author of Matrosskaya tishina was particularly strong—and finally, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; along with all Soviet intellectuals, Galich was racked by these events. His songs of the time seldom discuss them in a direct way, but they form one of the most powerful testimonies to the crisis of conscience that these events engendered. In 1968, before the invasion, Galich had his greatest triumph as a guitar poet. It came at the now-legendary “Festival of Bards,” which took place in March of that year before an audience of twenty-five hundred people. The location was the Siberian new city of Akademgorodok, which is populated almost entirely by research workers from the nearby scientific institutes. Galich later wrote:

As I now realize, it was my first and my last open concert, with tickets even being sold for it. I had just finished performing my “Pasternak in Memoriam,” and behold, after the final words, something improbable happened—the audience, . . . rose to its feet and for a whole moment stood in silence, before breaking out in tumultuous applause.⁶

In addition to the provocations of which this was the greatest, Galich’s work was beginning to be published abroad. A samizdat collection of his songs was pirated by the anti-Soviet publisher Posev in 1969. This book is simply entitled Pesni (Songs). It contains only about forty items, but they include most of the greatest songs Galich was to create. The evidence of these texts was more than enough to damn Galich not just as a Soviet writer but as a Soviet citizen, too. We do not know if Galich was given the usual opportunity to recant and publish a “confession” admitting his fault, condemning the foreign publication, and protesting his loyalty. As we have seen, Okudzhava took this opportunity when it was offered, albeit in oblique fashion, and survived. But for Galich, there was by the end of the 1960s no way back into Soviet literature.

The full panoply of Galich’s achievement as a writer of songs was enshrined in a volume published in West Germany while Galich was still in Moscow, but this time with the author’s consent and cooperation. It appeared in 1972 and is called Generation of the Doomed (Pokolenie obrechennykh). It contains about one hundred shorter pieces and two long composite poems, “Stalin” and “Kaddish.” The shorter songs, though, are themselves relatively long when compared with Okudzhava’s work; and Galich tended to increase their weight even more by combining them into groups or cycles on related themes. Roughly speaking, the shorter songs divide into two kinds. The first, and generally less impressive, kind consists of lyrical statements that express a first-person point of view. The second, the kind of song in which Galich is unsurpassed, consists of satirical “songs of everyday life” (bytovye pesni), which are dramatic and narrative in design. These songs have a strong element of the grotesque, and they are often conducted on more than one narrative plane at the same time. The feature that sets them off most strongly from the work of all the other guitar poets is their extensive presentation of character.

A characteristic example of the Galich “song of everyday life” is “In His Image and Likeness” (“Po obrazu i podobiyu”), which has a sardonic epigraph: “. . . or, as it said over the gates of Buchenwald, Jedem das Seine, ‘To Each his Own.’ ” The refrain of the song contains a characteristic play on words, juxtaposing the name “Bach” against the Russian word for “God,” Bog, which is pronounced with almost exactly the same terminal consonant as “Bach” and therefore differs from it only by a single vowel sound.

The day’s beginning and the day’s business,

But this accursed mass hasn’t let me sleep,

I’ve a pain in my back, and my side aches,

The house stinks of endless laundry. . .

“Good morning, Bach,” says God,

“Good morning, God,” says Bach,

“Good morning!”

And over our heads, every single morning,

Like crows over a burnt-out place,

The loudspeakers rant, the loudspeakers rant,

“Good morning, get up, comrades!”

And then, still asleep, we ride the underground,

The train, the tram, and the bus,

And turning their guts inside out, the loudspeakers

Roar about victories and valor.

When I’m half asleep, there comes a time

When in a fit of despair I could

Smash those loudspeakers, strike them down,

And get to hear the beauty of silence. . .

With your wife nagging, be so good as to try

To write a modulation from C major into B minor.

From family squabbles, from debts and spats

There’s nowhere to go and things won’t work.

“Don’t be sad, Bach,” says God,

“I’ll try, God,” says Bach,

“I’ll try!”

Granny’s had a stroke, the wife’s ailing,

There isn’t enough of this, there isn’t enough of that,

We have to have medicine, we need the hospital,

Only who the hell knows when there’ll be a place,

And in my break I get called to the Party office,

The chief’s hopping about in there,

“Since that’s how things are, we’ll help you out,

We’ll make you a ten-ruble grant.”

The cashier spit-fingers the notes one by one,

And splits a bandit grin,

I’ll buy a half-liter, I’ll buy some validol,

200 grams of cheese, 200 grams of sausage. . .

That cutting wind is foretelling winter,

The doors of St. Thomas’s chapel let in drafts,

And the organ is singing that the sum of it all

Is eternal dream, decay, and dust!

“Don’t you blaspheme, Bach,” says God,

“But listen here, God,” says Bach,

“You listen here!”

That bitch next door’s really having a ball,

Girlies howling and jackals cackling,

I’ll open my half-liter, slice my cheese,

Give the wife some validol on a sugar lump,

I’ll pour my first, and then another,

And have a bite of cheese and sausage,

And about how I’m the most heroic hero

I’ll hear on the radio with pleasure.

And I’ll stoke up my war-trophy pipe,

Make fun of my mooing granny,

And pour another, and then another,

And pop in next door for some extra. . .

He takes off his camisole, pulls off his wig,

The kids in the nursery whisper—the old man’s back,

Well, he’s past forty, no little age,

There’s a blue tinge like dust round his lips.

“Goodnight, Bach,” says God,

“Goodnight, God,” says Bach,

“Goodnight!”

[KV, 238–40]⁷

Here we have a narrative told in a low, naturalistic style, with a good deal of direct speech and interior monologue. It is “a day in the life” of a lowly Soviet citizen. What this citizen does illustrates the central thrust of Galich’s satire. The people are engaged mind and body in a sordid struggle with byt, “the daily grind”. They are surrounded by the ghastly trumpetings of official propaganda, which has absolutely no connection with the reality of their lives. Meanwhile, in a double narrative plane that gives the song that element of the grotesque so often found in Galich, there are Johann Sebastian Bach, God, and the world of eighteenth-century art. Bach too is weighed down by the cares of the daily grind. But in his agony he communicates with the eternal, whereas the Soviet citizen just escapes into drunken oblivion.

The enormous range of characters in Galich’s songs has led Efim Etkind to speak of them as a “human comedy,” a “model of our society,” a small-scale but comparably wide-ranging parallel to Balzac’s panorama of nineteenth-century French life, and their inherent dramatism stimulated Andrei Sinyavsky’s reference to “Galich’s theater.”⁸ The songs do in fact range over the entire spectrum of Soviet society. What is particularly remarkable about them is that they pay just as much attention, if not more, to the controllers, the establishment, of this society as to the victims of it. A whole range of Party functionaries, from Stalin himself down to the retired hit men of the security organs, and the loyal chauffeur of a local Party official, tell their stories. There is an especially remarkable gallery of women characters; and although in the grand tradition of Russian literature they are cast mainly as victims of the sociosexual process, they do include such formidable creatures as Comrade Paramonova, a Party functionary of substantial rank.

The most memorable single character created by Galich is Klim Petrovich Kolomiitsev, “workshop foreman, holder of many decorations, member of the Bureau of the Party committee, and deputy of the town soviet.” Klim Petrovich is surely one of the most convincing proletarians ever to appear in Russian literature. He is portrayed in a total of six songs, several of them very long even for Galich. In all except one of them, Klim is the sole narrator. His language is for the most part the raw, pithy argot of the urban working class, grossly coarse and grotesquely interspersed with the parroted clichés Klim has acquired along with his Party responsibilities. But although he is used to expose and ridicule the hollowness of official propaganda, Klim is not himself entirely a figure of fun. He is an honest, if rather dim, specimen. He has a strong sense of his own worth, and he is a responsible foreman. He also has no illusions about the Soviet system. When he tries to get his whole section rewarded for its exemplary production, instead of simply reaping medals and material privileges for himself, he is fobbed off by the bureaucratic apparatus—because his factory manufactures barbed wire, and to announce record production in this area would damage the USSR’s international reputation. Klim Petrovich’s response to this appeal to his Party consciousness is a disgusted binge. He is made a fool of again by the bureaucrats when one day they pick him up on short notice to give a speech at a Party meeting “in defense of peace.” In routine fashion, he is handed the text of “his” speech in the car on the way to the meeting, and he proceeds to read it in his usual dogged way, until he is brought up short by the following heartfelt appeal to his audience:

“The Israeli warmongers,” said I—

“Are known the whole world over!

As a mother and a woman,” said I—

“I demand they be called to account!”

[KV, 380]

In horror, Klim realizes that he has been handed the wrong speech. However, there is no sign of any reaction from the audience, which as usual is taking no notice of the proceedings, so Klim finishes his assignment and is warmly congratulated by the Party boss.

In another song, Klim is sent on a trade union delegation to Algeria. The delegation makes the usual round of propaganda appearances. Klim gets fed up and exhausted, and he desires some real Russian food to put him back on his feet. But his wife has been able to pack him only some tins of fish in brine (salaka), all there was in the shops when he left. It leaves him gasping with thirst. Klim in his disgust utters the ultimate profanity:

I’m not baldy, do your mother! I’m not eternal,

I could drop dead from that there salaka!

[KV, 391]

A disrespectful reference to Lenin’s most salient physical characteristic is coupled with a typically semiliterate distortion of an official epithet (vechnyy, “eternal,” for bessmertnyy, “immortal”); and interposed is a euphemistic version of the most common Russian obscenity. Something of the shocking impact of this single line on a Soviet audience can be imagined if it is set in the context of the normal tone of public reference to Lenin, such as Oshanin’s “Lenin Is Always with Thee,” a song that was cited earlier. Anyway, Klim decides he has to have some real food, so he goes to the local shop and buys what he thinks the salesgirl tells him is a tin of meat, bitterly resenting having to dole out his precious foreign currency for this purpose. But the tin turns out to contain not only fish but that same Soviet salaka in brine that he had brought with him from Russia. His reaction is spluttering indignation:

We’re helping them, the vermin,

And it’s us who suffer for it!

All that foreign life of theirs is a mess!

It’s even worse (beg pardon!) than ours is!

[KV, 392]

The only Klim Petrovich song not narrated by the hero himself is called “The Lament of Darya Kolomiitseva concerning the Drunkenness of Her Husband, Klim Petrovich.” Mrs. Kolomiitsev gets disgusted with her husband’s extended drinking one hot summer, and resolves to reform him. So one Sunday, she sets out on the table the grandest feast she can assemble, including the dreaded bottle of vodka. But she substitutes kerosene for the vodka. Then she dotingly encourages Klim to take a big glassful.

He drank it down to the last drop,

And wiped his nose, that’s all.

Fished out a mushroom with his finger,

Gave me a bleary look,

Munched the mushroom, and said:

“No, I really don’t like boletus!”

[KV, 389]

The way Klim Petrovich combines this unreformed patriarchal outlook and lifestyle with his Party membership and his chauvinism is something that rang all too true with the Russian audience, who took Klim to their hearts.

In Galich’s songs, a good deal of attention is paid to the depiction of sexual relationships in Soviet society. Here we find an uncompromising antithesis of what the official song has to say on the subject. We have met the attitudes held by the narrator of “In His Image and Likeness” already. The Party official Comrade Paramonova, who was mentioned earlier, appears in Galich’s most famous husband-and-wife satire, “The Red Triangle.” While his wife is abroad on official business, Comrade Paramonova’s lowly husband, the anonymous narrator of the song, has an affair with a young girl. But someone sends his wife an anonymous tipoff, and when she gets back, she storms off indignantly and has him hauled up at a Party meeting to be censured for immoral conduct. The circumstances of the meeting take us into the very thick of Soviet society:

Well, all right, so I go to the meeting,

It was the first of the month, as I remember,

Of course, I made sure to get a sick note

And a statement from the clinic (they were nervous).

I see Paramonova in a nice new scarf,

When she saw me she turned all red,

The first business was “Freedom for Africa!”

I came later, under “A.O.B.”

During Ghana everyone went to the buffet for sausages,

I’d have got a kilo myself, only I was a bit short,

When they called me, I melted from bashfulness,

But they shouted from the hall, “Let’s have the details!”

Everything on the line!

Everything right on the line!

O dear, what is there to say, what is there to ask?

I stand here before you as if I was naked,

Yes, I did have fun with Auntie Pasha’s niece,

Took her to the Pekin Hotel and Sokolniki Park.

And in my moral profile, I said,

Is the rotten influence of the West,

But after all, I said, we don’t live on a cloud,

And it’s all really smoke without fire, I said.

I tried to milk their pity, tried to win them over,

Read my statement saying I’m a mental case.

Well, they congratulated me on my resurrection,

And hit me with a severe reprimand, entered in my Party card.

[KV, 174–75]

He then tries desperately to make up with Comrade Paramonova, but she will have nothing to do with him. The Trade Union intervenes and urges them to make up. The official persuasion softens Paramonova’s determination, and they leave the office together:

We set off arm in arm to the Pekin Hotel,

She drank wine and I drank vodka,

Toasting our exemplary Soviet family!

[KV, 176]

The penultimate line of this stanza may be cited as a tiny example of what gives Galich’s songs their limpet grip on Soviet reality. In Russian, the line is: “Ona vypila ‘dyurso’, a ya ‘pertsovuyu’.” The two nouns in it are not generic, as they were in the translation just offered; they are highly specific. Comrade Paramonova chooses dyurso, highquality Soviet wine she feels to be rather refined but not pretentious and foreign (the name derives from the place of manufacture, a town near Novorossiisk.) Her husband needs his jolt, and as a Russian male is bound to choose vodka, but on this occasion he adds a little spice by having pertsovka, “pepper vodka.” Galich uses the adjectival form pertsovaya, “peppered,” the word on the label of the bottle. It is this word that rhymes with the last one in the main part of the song, obraztsovuyu, “exemplary.” It is details such as these, which thickly stud the texts of Galich’s songs, that make their full meaning evade a non-Soviet audience, even a Russian one. It goes without saying that they make Galich impossible to translate without either extensive annotation or much watering-down with paraphrase, which always has to be in the direction of the general, thereby losing that specificity which is the leading stylistic feature of the songs. And we recall from our discussion of the official song that this specificity is directly antithetical to the misty vagueness in which official songs shroud the unacceptable face of Soviet reality.

The pattern set in “The Red Triangle” of a weak, cringing man and a formidable, powerful woman is common in Galich’s love stories. None of them have any conventional idealism, none are uplifting. There are several examples of sexual exploitation for social advancement, another feature of Soviet society that is an official un-subject. The most outspoken one of this kind is “Tonechka.” It is narrated by a man who takes up with Tonechka, the daughter of a highly placed, privileged official. His former girlfriend makes no secret of her contempt for his opportunism. He moves in with Tonechka and proceeds to enjoy the sweet delights of Soviet high life:

Even my trousers have zippers on now,

And there’s as much wine as you can drink,

And we have an eight-by-ten toilet . . .

Daddy comes home about midnight,

All the minions stand to attention!

I serve him a shot of vodka,

And tell him a joke about the Yids . . .

[KV, 180–81]

But his former girl is unrepentant; she now works as a ticket girl in a suburban cinema. She has neither sold out nor forgiven, remaining scornfully defiant. Her opposite is the heroine of the ghoulishly ironic “A Jolly Conversation” (“Veselyi razgovor”), who works as a cashier in a shop. The supervisor, Zvantsev, makes a pass at her, but she refuses him. She waits until Mr. Right comes along in the person of Alesha, who “although he’s bald and a Jew, he’s a decent sort.” He goes off to the war and is killed, leaving her still working behind her cash register, raising their daughter alone. Zvantsev renews his advances, and when she refuses him again, he frames her; she is sentenced for embezzlement and does time in labor camp. Her daughter turns twenty. She is often in the shop, and when Zvantsev turns his attention to her, she accepts it and they get married. Soon her mother is a grandmother, and still working behind her cash register. This tale of a blighted life is a classic Galich. The contrast with the official “mommy song” is patent; and as we remember, Galich had first-hand knowledge of the official variety.

Another classic female victim is the eponymous heroine of “The General’s Daughter.” Born in Leningrad, she is now stuck in the back of beyond, in Karaganda, the chief coal-mining area of the GULag, where she has been exiled along with her formerly privileged parents when they fell from grace. Every month, when his wife is having her period, her “cavalier” comes to visit, and she cooks and cleans for him. He works as a pirate taxi driver, and the general’s daughter took up with him because he had a picture postcard of Leningrad on his dashboard. While she chops onion for his vodka as he sleeps (in a detail of appalling cruelty, Galich has him take his wallet with him when he goes to the toilet), she reflects on her life:

At least he has pity on me,

At least he comes here, at least he breathes!

[KV, 115]

Her horizons and her hopes are limited to the mass of practical things she has to get through the next day. She has heard there is to be a delivery of sardines to the depot, and “people say they’re from Leningrad.” She will make sure she gets some, and she will even give a few to her rival, the wife, “so she won’t think I’m greedy.” The song, as so frequently in Galich’s work, has a refrain, which recurs with slight variations after every third stanza:

Oh, Karaganda, you Karaganda!

If a woman’s proud here, she’s good for nothing!

O Lord, give us this day our daily bread,

Think what Russia’s like, it’s no worse here!

Ka-ra-gan-da!

[KV, 116]

This sordid state of oppression is not only woman’s lot, though. In “Guignol Farce,” a man is driven to suicide by the pressure of providing for his six children. He has applied for a loan from the “Mutual Help,” but has been refused because “every ruble is needed to catch up with America.” The refrain of this song is also plaintive:

There’s this to buy, and there’s that to buy,

You can only drink water on this money,

As for cheese for your tea, or a bit of sausage,

It’s twenty kopecks here and twenty there,

And where can you get them?

[KV, 242]

The oppressive, gloomy tone of “The General’s Daughter,” “Guignol Farce,” and others like them among the genre songs is alleviated by the humor of the great satirical songs. “The Red Triangle” is one of them; its sordid story is narrated by the two-timing husband with a comic mixture of self-pity and abject terror before his wife, the dreadful Comrade Paramonova. Rivaling “The Red Triangle” is another worm’s-eye view of Soviet society, with a similarly petty hero, “The Ballad of Surplus Value.” A Soviet citizen is left a fortune by his auntie in capitalist “Fingalia.” He goes on an almighty farewell binge, borrowing freely from his friends and insulting his bosses. But there is a revolution in Fingalia, and all private property is nationalized. The solemn broadcast congratulations of the Soviet government are followed in the song by the would-be millionaire’s spluttering curses at the untimely operation of “Karl Marx’s party tricks.”

This shameless send-up of official teaching is matched by certain songs in which Galich takes the subjects of official mass songs and completely stands them on their heads. One outstanding example of such a song is “The Mistake.” It uses exactly the same metrical structure and the same system of repetitions as Konstantin Vanshenkin’s song “Alesha” (1967), about “a Russian soldier in Bulgaria.” He is a statue on a monument, standing immovable above a foreign city in all kinds of weather, on eternal guard.⁹ In Galich’s song, which was probably written as an immediate response to Vanshenkin’s, a platoon of Russian infantry, killed in action near Narva in 1943 and lying in their frozen graves “two by two, just as we marched,” hears a bugle call. They get up ready for action, for they know that if Russia is calling her dead, the situation is desperate and they must respond. But they discover that it is a false alarm. The call was a hunting horn, merrily sounding as the sportsmen pursue their pleasure across the place the infantrymen are buried. The song is said to refer to an incident during Fidel Castro’s visit to the USSR at the invitation of Nikita Khrushchev in 1962. Galich’s “The Mistake” is a perfect example of the underground song as a negation of the official mass song, in this case of the song on the theme of World War II, which, as we have seen, is one of its staple subjects. Galich’s exposure of the cynical exploitation of the people by the Soviet authorities, and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for what they think is a noble Russian cause, make “The Mistake” one of his most powerful songs, received in magnitizdat recitals with heart-searching silence.

Galich is also the author of one song on the GULag theme that instantly became a classic of underground folklore, “Clouds.” For a number of years, nobody would believe that its author could possibly be anyone but a returned veteran of the camps:

The clouds float by, the clouds,

Without hurrying, like in a film.

I’m eating chicken tabaka,

And I’ve sunk a load of cognac.

The clouds float off to Abakan,

Unhurried they float.

They’re warm, I bet, those clouds,

But I’ve been frozen through forever!

Like a horseshoe I froze into the sleigh tracks,

Into the ice I was chipping with my pick!

After all, not for nothing

I blew away twenty years in those camps.

I still have that snow crust before my eyes!

I still have the din of frisking in my ears!

Hey, bring me a pineapple

And another 200 g. of cognac!

The clouds float by, the clouds,

Floating to Kolyma, that dear old place,

And they don’t need a lawyer,

An amnesty’s neither here nor there.

Me too, I live a first-rate life!

Twenty years I swapped for one day!

And I sit in this bar like a lord,

I’ve even got some teeth left!

The clouds float off to the east,

They’ve no pension, no worries. . .

Me, on the 4th I get a money order,

And another on the 23rd.

And on those days, just like me,

Half the country sits in the bars!

And in our memory off to those places

Float the clouds, the clouds. . .

[KV, 80]

Meanwhile, in another corner of Galich’s world, the former custodians of these victims are also living out their lives. They too are enjoying their pensions. They are quite unrepentant, and even frankly nostalgic for the old days of Stalin’s terror, when things were much more clear-cut than they have become since. The song called “Incantation” (“Zaklinanie”), which belongs to the same cycle as “Clouds,” relates the thoughts of one of “Stalin’s eagles” as he whiles away his time by the Black Sea:

He picked up his personal pension,

Popped into the “Float” for a bit,

It smelled of shellfish and mold,

And the ceiling was stained with urine,

The shashlyk made him belch like a candle flame,

And the sulguni stank of cod. . .

He’d much rather sit by a nice little river

Than over this vasty deep.

O you sea, sea, sea, Black Sea,

What a twisty-twiny thing you are!

You don’t abide by the rules,

First you’re Cain and then you’re Abel!

Lord, have mercy upon me, have mercy!

And along the beach, where couples should go at evening,

He wandered alone, thoughtful and glum.

This black, trashy, villainous thing

Permits itself far too much!

The waves roll in, the infernal rogues,

They’d rather not understand the regime!

If he weren’t in retirement now

He’d certainly show them what’s what!

Oh you sea, sea, sea, Black Sea,

Pity you’re not under investigation or convicted,

I’d have you charged and off to Inta,

You’d not be black, you’d turn white!

Lord, have mercy upon me, have mercy!

And in his hotel, a strange and terrible

Dream he dreamed as he dozed,

Where the Black Sea under escort

Was driven by stages to Inta.

And blessed among the blessed in Christ,

As he smoked his “Lighthouse”-brand fag,

He watched his brave army guard lads

Herd the natural element into a camp hut.

O you sea, sea, sea, Black Sea,

Now I’ve got you tamed and under law!

We’ve been taught this kind of chemistry—

How to deal with natural elements!

Lord, have mercy upon me, have mercy!

So he lay there with a beatific smile,

The smile even parted his cheekbones. . .

But it must have been the final clue

For Death, that smile.

And he got up neither next day nor next evening;

The floorman went for the doctor,

And the floormaid lit a candle for the Lord

Over the happy hitman. . .

And there sounded the sea, sea, sea, Black Sea,

That free sea, tamed by no-one,

And it behaved not according to the rules,

It was Cain and Abel, too!

Lord, have mercy upon me, one last time!

[KV, 96–97]

(Sulguni or suluguni is a Caucasian delicacy, deep-fried cheese; Inta is one of the main centers of the GULag archipelago.) The juxtaposition of linguistic registers in this song recalls what we saw in “In His Image and Likeness.” The sadistic spite of the retired goon’s mental processes, expressed in subliterary colloquialisms, is interspersed with the Church Slavonic of the Orthodox liturgy. The contrast between the two was emphasized in Galich’s performance of the song; the liturgical line was a mixture of sigh and prayer, as if the author-performer were asking forgiveness for his own song, while the goon’s thoughts were delivered in a menacing side-of-mouth hiss.

The most profound songs by Galich about the victors and victims of the Stalin years are those in which the two categories of citizen are shown interacting. A poignant song of this kind is the long, typically multilinear “Fame Is the Spur” (“Zhelanie slavy”). It juxtaposes in a cancer ward two pensioners, one of whom was earlier guarded by the other in a labor camp. They pass the time together, and find themselves locked in mutual dependence:

The warder and the former “number so-and-so,”

Now we can’t make it without each other.

We’d like to die at the same time.

The hospital’s asleep; silence, all in order.

Then he said, rising on his elbow:

“Pity I didn’t finish you off in Vyatka, you bitch,

Real sly bastards, you prisoners . . .”

He fell back, made funny gurgling noises,

And then the warder passed away,

And his hospital cot sailed off

Into those seas that have no end or beginning!

I covered him up with his sheet . . .

The snow keeps on falling over Moscow,

And my dear son, over that same snow,

Takes the warder’s daughter for a walk . . .

[KV, 101]

This situation is one of several in Galich’s songs about Soviet society that embody one of the central points he has to make about the Stalin period. He sees the essence of the phenomenon as a process of mutual connivance in oppression. He asserts that the Soviet people is responsible for its own history and in fact supported Stalinism. This interpretation, of course, runs directly counter to the message of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” which portrayed Stalinism as a perversion of Party authority that led to the slaughter of innocent citizens, especially regrettable being the victims who were Party members. It also runs directly counter to the mainstream of dissident political thought, which is inclined to see Stalinism as the mature expression of Lenin’s policies, but imposed on an innocent population. For Galich of the 1960s, the official theory is simply an easy way out, a facile justification for the continuation of the Party’s self-assumed right to control the political process. And in his song “The Night Watch” (“Nochnoi dozor”), Galich gave one of the most graphic warnings that nothing had essentially changed, and that the return of Stalinism is therefore an everpresent danger. It is conveyed through a nightmare vision in which the thousands of discarded statues of “The Genius of All Times and Peoples” come to life and make a moonlit march on Red Square, there to review a parade of monsters. Then morning comes, and

The bronze statues go back where they came from,

But the alabaster ones lie hidden away.

Maybe they’re crippled for the time being,

But even their dust retains its shape,

These alabaster ones just need some human flesh,

And once more they’ll acquire their greatness!

And the drums will beat!

The drums will beat,

Beat, beat, beat!

[KV, 44]

Typically, the last line, which recurs throughout the song, echoes one of Stalin’s most famous slogans, proclaiming that the security organs would “beat, beat, and beat again” the class enemy.

Galich’s “Poem about Stalin” (“Poema o Staline”) is his most complex single work. The complete text has six “chapters,” some of which Galich occasionally sang as independent songs in their own right. The first chapter contains the most grotesque juxtaposition of any that Galich conceived, when he makes Stalin appear at the Nativity and turn its events into a saturnalia reminiscent of the Soviet 1930s. The leader stands over the crib and turns his pock-marked face toward the Infant:

“So this is the one, that same

Pathetic orphan of the earth

Who will vie with me

In blood and hosannas . . .”

[KV, 270]

The second chapter consists entirely of Stalin’s imprecation against the Jews and against Christ; its culmination is chilling:

You are not the son of God, but the son of man,

If You could exclaim “Thou shalt not kill!”

Fisher of men, You went out in the morning

With a pitiful net of easy words,

And after two thousand years,

Show me how rich Your haul has been!

Weak-hearted and a bit simple,

You trusted both God and Caesar,

I won’t repeat Your mistakes,

Not a single one will I repeat!

Not one blasphemer will be found in the world

Who would lift a lance against me!

If I should die—which might happen—

My kingdom will be eternal!

[KV, 272]

But when we next see Stalin, he has his reign of terror behind him, and he has eliminated all opposition—including those imaginary opponents who were his closest friends and associates. He is utterly alone. He cannot sleep. He is tormented by incipient remorse, and by the ghosts of his victims, but he is still dementedly convinced that his suspicions were well founded. Suddenly, church bells ring out, and he is struck down by a revelation; he tries to remember the Lord’s Prayer, but cannot. And he dies, pleading with the Christian God for remission and forgiveness. His voice trails away on the word forgive.

After this threefold portrayal of Stalin, in his primal determination, his full unmitigated evil, and his imagined pathetic end, he does not appear again in person. Instead, the fourth chapter switches to his victims, and we have the dissolute “Conversation at Night in a Restaurant Car,” stylistically one of the most overt examples of the use of gypsy song in guitar poetry. Here, a survivor of the camps drunkenly relates how one day his camp commandant, “The Godfather” (kum), addressed the massed convicts:

“There’s been,” he said, “the main congress

Of our famous Party.

About China and Laos

There were discussions.

Then arose the special problem

Of the Father and Genius.”

The Godfather ate up his cucumber

And concluded, in torment:

“It turns out that the Father

Wasn’t a father, but a bastard . . .”

[KV, 276]

The convicts hew down a massive statue of Stalin. An amnesty is promulgated. But the survivor’s tale falls away into disjointed exclamations as delirium tremens takes hold. He imagines himself attacked by demons that fly in through the carriage window. This picture of the degeneration resulting from the leader’s policies, and the confusion and disorientation that followed Khrushchev’s revision of them, is one of the most striking that Galich ever created.

The author himself appears, and the element of drunkenness is continued from the preceding chapter, in the fifth part, called “A Chapter Written While Heavily under the Influence, and Being an Authorial Digression.” It contains a good deal of the self-deprecation that permeates Galich’s first-person songs. But it also repeats a message that forms, as we shall see, the central thesis of Galich’s active conclusions from the Stalin experience:

There’s no need to be afraid, fellows!

It’s a delusion: “No thoroughfare”

And “No entry without written permission.”

The only thing you need to fear

Is the person who says “I know what’s necessary!”

Drive him away! Don’t trust him!

He’s telling stories! He doesn’t know what’s necessary!

[KV, 280]

The breast-beating tone of the fifth chapter, which had been alleviated by the laconic and highly colloquial formulations that the author’s supposed drunkenness causes, appears without any mitigation in the sixth and final chapter of “Stalin.” It is the chapter that Galich most frequently detached from the main body of the poem and performed as an independent song. It brings the work full circle by going back to the biblical setting of the first chapter and again intercutting it with Stalin’s Russia. The modern parts concern an interrogation. It drags on and on; the victim grows a beard like a prophet as the interrogator, himself with a heart condition and with no appetite for his work, grimly goes on with his assignment. Eventually, there is the inevitable confession and sentence to exile, and the interrogator is rewarded with a month’s holiday.

Later, all sorts of crapinations happened.

The frowning interrogator draws his pension in Moscow,

And a note with a seal confirming rehabilitation

Was dispatched to the prophet’s widow in Kalinin.

[KV, 281]

But the modern story is dominated by the biblical, which presents the most extreme image Galich ever found to project his guilt at the suffering of women. The Virgin Mary is seen, as in Catholic mythology, as the cynosure of all human suffering, and she bears her burden with dignified, silent forbearance:

The Madonna walked through Judea,

Ever lighter, thinner, more delicate,

Grew her body with every step . . .

And around her Judea made its noise

Not wishing to remember its dead.

But shadows were laid on that clay,

And shadows lurked in every step,

The shadows of all butyrkas and treblinkas,

Of all betrayals, treasons, and crucifixions . . .

Ave Maria!

[KV, 281]

It is quite clear, in this long song, that the power of Galich’s art diminishes as its focus moves away from his own society and his own times. Equally, it diminishes as he moves away from the dramatic presentation of character in the character’s own words—as is the case here with Stalin—toward his own subjective, external description of it, as is the case with the Madonna. The vitality of the language, the sureness and economy of the style, are at their most powerful when Galich puts thoughts and words into the heads and mouths of his compatriots and contemporaries.

The “Poem about Stalin” is rivaled only by Galich’s own “Kaddish” in the whole of Russian guitar poetry as an extended, multipart work. Despite the attempts Galich makes to bring together the six parts, he is by no means completely successful. The poem contains examples of both the best and the worst features of his earlier work. Among the triumphs are his most daring exercise in the grotesque—the juxtaposition of Stalin and the infant Christ. The restaurant car monologue is one of Galich’s most convincing portrayals of a rank-and-file victim of the Stalin system. And the second chapter, consisting entirely of Stalin’s own words, is the most powerful presentation in Russian literature so far of the vaunting evil of the dictator’s personality.

The world of Galich’s songs about Soviet society, as we have seen, is populated by a “doomed generation” whose members have experienced the hell on earth of the Stalin years. They cannot get the results out of their systems. What is more, they are either oblivious to their true condition or they actually prefer it to a condition of conscious responsibility. Within Galich’s world, in direct contradiction to official socialist myth, the individual is alone, pitted against his fellows in a wolflike struggle. There is cynical exploitation of one person by another. Society is divided into an elite, who have possessions and influence, and an oppressed mass, which has only its misery. Both sides are sordid. And there is no escape from this world, except perhaps through suicide (as in “Guignol Farce”), alcohol (a constant palliative for the male characters), and a few refuges glimpsed in dreams.

In all of Galich’s work, the only woman to escape is the heroine of his very first song. Lenochka Potapova is a sergeant in the Moscow police force. She is on traffic duty one day, and she has the temerity to halt a column of official cars coming from the airport. In the leading car, a “handsome Ethiopian” rises on his “cream-colored cushion” and throws her a chrysanthemum. The next day she is summoned to the unholy of unholies, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The committee members are giving a reception for the Ethiopian. He is bored stiff while the dignitaries pay court to him as a potential ally for Soviet colonial expansion, but he comes to life when:

All in tulle and velvet

Lenochka entered the hall,

Everyone gasped out loud

When she entered.

And the handsome royal himself,

Achmet Ali-Pasha,

Exclaimed: “Well, hello!”

When she came in.

And soon our Lenochka

Was known by the whole wide world.

This lass from Ostankino

Was known by the whole wide world.

When Prince Achmet did his dad in

And became Shah himself,

Sharina L. Potapova

Was known by the whole wide world.

[KV, 186]

Galich never returned to the light-hearted tone of this fantasy tribute to all the Russian girls who have discovered that “abroad” is the only way out. More typical is the resigned pessimism of the refuge glimpsed in a first-person song:

They say there are some islands somewhere,

Where on the shore grows the grass of oblivion,

It cures pride, and grief, and baseness, and sickness,

That’s the kind of islands there are on earth!

. . .

They say there are some islands somewhere,

Where twice two doesn’t always make four,

Count as much as you like, it’s all a mist,

Only what suits your heart is right, that alone.

That’s the kind of islands there are on earth!

They say there are some islands,

Where untruth is not truth,

Where there’s no idleness, no poverty,

And no pale of settlement, nor ever was.

That’s the kind of islands I’ve imagined!

[KV, 67]

The oppression of human beings by social forces is a venerable and central theme of Russian literature, of course. The distinctive contribution to it made in Galich’s satirical songs of the 1960s derives from a complete absence, on the part of the author, of any sentimentalization or idealization. His ordinary people are not made noble or spiritually regenerate by their degradation, and there is no humanitarian message to be gleaned from their plight. For Galich, in strong contrast to his great contemporary Solzhenitsyn, it is certainly possible to crush the humanity out of a human being, leaving behind a sordid animal. It is in this respect that Galich’s earlier songs convey a message that is incompatible with the ideals of both Communism and Christianity.

But Galich does not depict oppression from the point of view of a moral superior. On the contrary, the power of the songs comes to a large extent from his awareness of his own complicity in the network of guilt. This awareness is not, of course, stated explicitly in the genre songs, such as most of those that have been discussed so far. It underlies them, and is manifest in Galich’s performance. It comes out in full force only in Galich’s first-person songs. Here, he bears witness without any sense of self-righteousness or moral superiority, and he persistently expresses doubt as to his own fitness for his role as satirical exposer and truth teller. One graphic example of this stance is the frame story of “Fame Is the Spur.” In it, Galich presents his real self as a singer of magnitizdat songs, and puts into song the actual circumstances of a recital. The beginning of the song goes:

Unconnected with art,

Not admitted into the temple,

I sing to snacks

And a bottle of vodka.

Why should I get worked up

At the brink of disaster?

Just pour out the first drink

And I’ll give you a song!

The singer introduces a new song; it is the story of the two cancer patients. He comes to the end of it.

. . . My voice dies away as if in cotton wool,

But the strings ring on.

For decency’s sake

Everybody’s quiet for half a minute.

. . .

Unfamiliar faces

Soaked in drunken despair . . .

I tremble with shame,

A twitch in my temple . . .

. . . There I sit, twanging my guitar,

Guffaws, din, cackling, ringing . . .

And the next-door informer behind the wall

Hides his tape machine in its drawer . . .

[KV, 101–102]

The powerful dose of self-contempt behind these lines is the hallmark of Galich’s first-person songs. He feels that what he is doing is sordid and unworthy. Underlying everything is the sense of guilt induced by the application to himself of the doctrine of individual responsibility that he has announced in the genre songs. He himself has not acted in the way he has subsequently understood to be right. He has not suffered. His descriptions of humiliation and deprivation are consciously vicarious; he himself has spent many years as one of the “haves,” the privileged elite.

But there is more to it than that. He has failed to act even after making the decision to dissent. This self-reproach reaches its climax in Galich’s “Petersburg Romance,” which was written in August 1968, actually on the day before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.¹⁰ Using the events of the Decembrist rising of 1825 as the explicit subject, Galich laments his failure to act in the face of a historical imperative:

And then came the fatal morning.

It seemed not at all disgraceful,

So wise it seemed, so discerning,

To say that one wasn’t available.

[KV, 28]

But Galich is not muzzled by this burden of personal unworthiness. He asserts that it does not invalidate the right, even the duty, of the individual to speak out about what he sees to be wrong:

It’s the chosen alone who may judge?

I’m not chosen, but I shall judge!

[“Untitled” (“Bez nazvaniya”; KV, 54)]

The submission to regimentation, even out of the apparently noble motive of a sense of personal unworthiness, is a recipe for disaster:

If everyone marches in step

The bridge will come tumbling down.

[“The Law of Nature” (“Zakon prirody”; KV, 31)]

It is a crime to forgive and forget, to turn the other cheek:

Nonresistance of the conscience—

The most convenient of eccentricities.

[“The Train” (“Poezd”; KV, 61)]

People will forgive me out of indifference.

I shan’t forgive them, the indifferent ones!

[“Dozing Off and Waking Up” (“Zasypaya i prosypayas’ KV, 65)]

Both the satirical genre songs and the first-person songs that Galich created in the 1960s present an unmitigated panorama of disaster, failure, and guilt. There is just one note of consolation. It resides in the efficacy and permanence of the poetic word. Galich created a whole series of songs in memory of the literary victims of Russia’s past, and their subjects and dedications read like a martyrology. They include Solomon Mikhoels (1890–1948; “The Train”); Frida Vigdorova (1915—1965; “Friends Keep Going Away”); Varlaam Shalamov (1907–1980; “Everything Happens at the Wrong Time”); Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) in the poem explicitly dedicated to him; Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966; “August Once More”); Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895–1958; “The Hills of Manchuria”); Daniil Kharms (1906–1942; “The Tobacco Legend”); and Osip Mandel’shtam (1891–1938; “The Return to Ithaca”). There are several more. These songs bear witness to the heroic feat of the people concerned in wresting some lasting achievement from their unequal struggle with the oppressive might of the Soviet system. And by implication they claim association on the part of Galich. However, Galich usually portrays himself in the explicitly autobiographical songs as old, broken-down, tired and ill, second-rate. But he dares to claim personal immortality.

So, for the sake of this single line

That time throws me as a tip,

To the merry generous world

One fine day I bid goodbye.

I made my dear ones prematurely aged,

Strode past the limit with my songs,

Made people who love me weep,

And wouldn’t heed their weeping.

But these whispers of mine

Will ring out until Judgment Day . . .

[“Some Day a Clapped-Out Historian” (“Kogda-nibud’ doshlyi istorik”; KV, 77)]

The ultimate declaration of this faith is a song that could well stand as an epitaph to the entire heroic dissident cause of the 1960s. It is called “We’re No Worse Than Horace.” This complex song portrays two kinds of dissent. On the one hand there is a passive kind that is manifested in covert, fashionable unorthodoxy, saying “boo” to authority only when it’s not looking. On the other hand, there is genuine dissidence, carried on by a small number of people who are prepared to take the consequences. They set up no grand monuments, and they are under constant surveillance. But Galich declares his faith in the effectiveness of their activity:

Untruth ranges round from one area to another,

Pooling experience with neighboring Untruth;

But what is sung sotto voce thunders out,

What’s read in a whisper rings forth,

There’re no stalls, no boxes, no balcony,

No claque going crazy in fits,

There’s just a “Yauza”-type tape recorder,

That’s all! But it’s enough!

[KV, 170]

This declaration is one of the statements that made Galich the principal artistic spokesman for the dissidents of the 1960s.¹¹ The faith that motivated them all was that some progress could actually be achieved in Soviet Russia through moral resistance and bearing witness, however humble and insignificant the means might seem when compared with the mighty state apparatus against which they set themselves. For them, and for the Galich of the 1960s, the main lesson of the Stalinist past was that silence is connivance. Galich’s “Goldminers’ Waltz” (“Staratel’skii val’sok”), probably his most famous single song, encapsulates this attitude. He decreed that it should stand first in any edition of his work.

We’ve called ourselves adults for a long time now,

And we pay no tribute to childishness,

We don’t long to get away into the far distance

Searching for treasure on a fabulous island.

Or into the desert, or to the cold pole,

Or to get into a lugger and . . . beggar off.

But insofar as silence is gold,

We are prospectors, no question of it.

Keep quiet, and you’ll join the rich!

Keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet!

Believing neither heart nor intellect,

Hiding our eyes for safety’s sake,

How many times we kept silent in different ways,

But not against, of course, but for!

Where are the squealers and the moaners now?

They’ve made their noise and come to an early end . . .

And the silent ones have become the bosses,

Because silence is gold.

Keep quiet, and you’ll join the number ones!

Keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet!

And now, when we’ve moved into first place,

We’re itching to make speeches,

But under all these verbal pearls

Silence shows through like a stain.

So let others cry out from despair,

From insult, from pain, from hunger!

We know there’s more profit in silence,

Because silence is gold!

It’s so easy to join the rich,

It’s so easy to join the number ones,

It’s so easy to join the—executioners:

Keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet!

[KV, 25–26]

With songs like this one attaining ever wider notoriety through the uncontrollable labyrinths of magnitizdat, it was inevitable that the wrath of Party and state would come down on Galich’s head. When the blow eventually did fall, it was with exemplary severity.¹² On 29 December 1971, Galich was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. Shortly afterward, in an associated decision, he was expelled from the Union of Cinematographic Workers. The consequences of expulsion for a Soviet writer are far-reaching. They include probable deprivation of earnings, loss of the privileged access to material goods that is essential in order to live a half-decent life in Soviet conditions, and the implication that future publication of work will be difficult, if not impossible. That had happened to several writers before Galich, the most famous path-breaker of the post-Stalin period being Boris Pasternak in 1958. But Galich was also expelled from membership in the Literary Fund (Litfond), which meant that in future he would not be able to collect payments for his works. Solzhenitsyn’s is the only other widely known case of expulsion from the Litfond. It meant that the authorities anathematized Galich and condemned him to starvation if he wished to remain a writer inside Russia.

The reasons given for expelling Galich from the Union of Writers were two: not disavowing the publication of his works abroad, and encouraging Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel, “crimes incompatible with the high calling of Soviet writer.”¹³ The evidence for the second of these charges was a number of songs which explicitly deal with the problems faced by Soviet Jews in the period after the Six-Day War. The most substantial of them is the long poem “Kaddish,” which is about Janusz Korczak, the outstanding pedagogue, a Polish Jew who met a martyr’s death at the hand of the Nazis during World War II. The poem abounds in implied parallels between the situation of the Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe under Hitler and their present situation under Communism. Among the other songs on Jewish subjects is one that became a kind of anthem for the early members of the Third Emigration, which was beginning just as Galich was expelled from his union memberships. “Song of Exodus” (“Pesnya iskhoda”) is dated 20 December 1971:

You’re leaving? Well, leave, then,

Through customs and clouds.

From farewell handshakes

My hand’s grown thin!

The final, defiant stanza of the song goes:

Here I stay . . . is that so strange?

My habitual wave of the hand!

Leave, then! But I’m staying.

I shall stay on this soil.

Someone, despising his fatigue,

Must guard the peace of the dead!

[KV, 47–49]

The dead that Galich mentions in the body of the song are the Jewish victims of World War II and the victims of the GULag. There is an even more provocative song from the point of view of the Soviet authorities, “Warning” (“Predosterezhenie”), which counsels Jews not to take part in Soviet social life, because they will always be suspected, discriminated against, and kept away from high responsibility. Here, Galich has turned full circle from his aborted play. And the message of “Warning” was nothing short of an act of high treason in the eyes of the Soviet official world. The direct political advocacy in this song, and the others on Jewish themes, has no equivalent in the work of other guitar poets, and it is this element that motivated the severity with which Galich was treated when he was called to account.

The last phase of the third period of Galich’s creative life lasted for over two years from the time of his expulsion from Soviet literature. He continued to live in Moscow. He took an ever more visible part in the civil rights movement, signing several open letters of protest about the maltreatment of literary intellectuals. And he continued to sing his songs at private gatherings. He also continued to write. It was in 1973 that he wrote The Dress Rehearsal, making it a settling of accounts with his past as a Soviet citizen and writer.

Among the songs written during this period of limbo are some that retain the authentic ring of the old Galich. One of them, “A Confession of Love” (“Priznanie v lyubvi”), is his ultimate expression of guilty remorse for the plight of woman in Soviet society. The song sketches a scene in a typical packed Moscow bus. Strap-hanging in the crowd, an elderly woman falls into a reverie about her life—two sons killed in the war, husband frozen to death in the camps, daughter in the hospital with cancer, and son-in-law a drunk—and she forgets to buy a ticket. She is publicly reviled by a “conscientious” Soviet citizen:

We’re in the lead in history,

With gales lashing our heads,

And there are still people

Who want everything for nothing!

[KV, 312]

She dissolves into helpless, despairing tears. The framing commentary of this song is significant. There can be no comparison between the circumstances Galich depicts as bringing about the woman’s despair and those affecting the lives of women in official songs; but the attitude of the author is a similar reverent compassion:

I love you, your eyes, lips, and hair,

You tired people grown old before your time,

You wretched people who newspaper columns

Praise with shameless fanfares every single day.

[KV, 313]

The last stanza of the song summons people to forget the official call to be “vigilant”—the Stalinist euphemism encouraging mutual denunciation—and instead to be “trusting,” and leave vigilance to the security forces.

The masterpiece of the limbo period is a vignette inspired by Galich’s coming across a peculiar machine outside the sanatorium for actors of the Bolshoi Theater just outside Moscow. It was a wooden post, with numbers crudely painted down it, and a string going over a wheel at the top. One end of the string carried a counterbalancing weight and dangled by the post, while the other disappeared into the ground. When Galich asked the janitor what this thing was, he learned that it was a “shitometer” (govnomer). On the unseen end of the string was a float resting on top of the contents of the cesspool; as the level rose, the string ran out and the weight made an indication against the numbers. The caretaker would then know when to call in the sanitation men to come and empty the cesspool. Galich called his poem on the subject “Landscape” (“Peizazh”):

Everything was overcast and gray,

The forest stood as if dead,

With only the shitometer weight

Barely nodding its head.

Not all’s in vain in this world

(Though it’s not worth a cent!)

For as long as weights exist

And you can see the level of the shit!

[KV, 314–15]

The image of the shitometer, of course, stands not only for Galich himself as a satirical witness but for the entire civic tradition in Russian literature. The poem (Galich spoke this piece rather than singing it) expresses that faith in the value of the poetic word which had provided the redeeming streak of optimism in the work of the underground, dissident third period of Galich’s creative life.

Through 1972 and 1973, Galich’s material position, and his health, got steadily worse. Eventually he was forced to betray the statement he had made in “Song of Exodus” and apply to leave the country. When he knew finally that it was only a matter of time before he left, probably forever, he began a set of songs in which he tried to cauterize the wounds of nostalgia before he actually experienced the sensation itself. He explained later that it was like a mother deliberately taking her child into a house where there is measles, so that the child will be infected and then be done with the disease. Thus began the fourth and final phase of Galich’s creative life, the émigré phase.

In the limbo period between expulsion from his union memberships and expulsion from the country, Galich wrote about twenty-five new songs. They include the two satirical pieces that have just been cited. But the sentimentality present in the first-person frame of “A Confession of Love” comes more and more to set the general tone of the work. The pitiless views behind the songs of the 1960s, their black picture of unmitigated human disaster, are softened. The most overt sign that Galich’s views had actually changed was that at some time in 1972 he was received into the Orthodox Church. The sense of spiritual reconciliation and peace that this step brought with it is adumbrated in some of the songs he wrote in the limbo period, such as “Psalm” (“Psalom”). This song tells of how the author in his youth created himself a false god, a god made from words, who commanded “Go forth and kill!” He was replaced by a god made from fear, whose whispered command was the same. This notion is a renunciation of Galich’s former creative personality, of course. It does not actually announce the acceptance of the new God, but it makes the point clear with the use of a capital letter in the last stanza:

Once more, sadly and sternly

I leave the house in the morning—

Searching for the good God,

And—oh! may God help me!

[KV, 329]

The most poignant song of the limbo period, a song that was used as the title for two books, was “When I Return” (“Kogda ya vermis’ ”). It was also used as the epigraph for all the work of the fourth period. Here, the religious element is explicit:

When I return,

I will go to that one and only house,

Where the sky cannot rival the sky-blue cupola,

And the smell of incense, like orphanage bread,

Will strike into me and ripple in my heart—

When I return,

Oh, when I return!

The confidence of the constantly repeated line in this song is undermined by its modified use as a coda: “But when will I return?” (KV, 299).

Galich left Russia in the summer of 1974. He spent a year based in Oslo, where he had connections dating back to his visit as a Soviet filmmaker. It was in Oslo that he made his only recording under studio conditions, resulting in the album called A Whispered Cry.¹⁴ The high technical quality of this recording only emphasizes a drop in artistic quality compared with the homemade magnitizdat recordings of the late 1960s. Some of the songs are provided with an accompanying trio, and the vulgarity reaches its height with a realistic train effect from the drummer in the song dedicated to Solomon Mikhoels. The evidence of this record, and of the one Vysotsky made in France, strongly suggests that solo guitar accompaniment is the only possible vehicle for guitar song. Okudzhava has never agreed to record with anything else but his own guitar, and his recordings are the purer for this restraint.

Galich also began giving concerts as soon as he arrived in the West. And he began making broadcasts over Radio Liberty. In the autumn of 1974, under the title “Aleksandr Galich Talks and Sings,” he began a series of recitals of his own songs, interspersed with commentary on them and on current affairs. Paradoxically, through this means he was undoubtedly reaching a wider audience at any given time than he could ever have hoped to reach as an underground poet inside the USSR. And he became associated with the board of the new journal Continent (Kontinent), which has gone on to become the most successful and prestigious literary-political organ of the new émigrés. About a year after he left Russia, Galich accepted a staff post with Radio Liberty. He first worked in Munich and then in late 1976 transferred to Paris, where he became director of the organization’s cultural section. In Paris, of course, he was at the heart of the European component of the emigration. He continued to travel widely, making two tours to Israel and one to the United States, and many appearances throughout western Europe.

The fourth and final phase of Galich’s creative life was cut short by his accidental death. He gave what was to be his last concert on 3 December 1977, as part of the Venice Biennale, which was dedicated that year to the dissident culture of Eastern Europe. After the conference, Galich returned to Paris. On 15 December he came back from work to his apartment and, without even taking off his overcoat, went to plug in his new tape recorder (or radio receiver, according to some accounts). There was a short circuit, and he was electrocuted. There have been all sorts of rumors about the “real” cause of his death, with the security services on both sides of the ideological divide being suspected and accused, but the inquest conducted by the French police reached a verdict of accidental death. Galich was buried in the Russian Orthodox cemetery in Paris along with generations of other Russian exiles.

When Galich came to the West, he was confident that his creative gift would survive the loss of his native linguistic environment, the wellspring of his greatest songs. He was in his mid-50s, he said:

I’m not a boy, I’m someone who’s lived. During these years I’ve accumulated and worked up so much, that I hope God will grant me the time to finish, here in the West, everything I began or intended to write in the Soviet Union.¹⁵

And he emphasized the positive role he thought that he, along with the other new émigrés, could play:

Russia, the spirit of the Russian people, has so to speak sent us forth into other countries, with a single purpose—to preserve our spiritual culture, to take it into the world, to nurture it, and, if we have the strength, to increase it.¹⁶

But he was concerned with more than such a conservation of cultural values. Galich considered that he could break through the language barrier and get his message through to foreign audiences. After all, his preferred medium was song, which had the additional, international, element of music; and he possessed the training of a professional actor and had a considerable amount of experience as a performer. Galich did indeed receive an enthusiastic response on occasion from foreign audiences, working in the usual way for foreign poets, having a translation read in the appropriate language before he performed the song. But it was clear that the intimate immediacy of magnitizdat and the clandestine Moscow performances had been irrecoverably lost. Galich himself once admitted his awareness of this loss:

My appearances in Italy have convinced me that with a good interpreter it is possible to appear in front of an audience that doesn’t understand Russian. There’s nothing you can compare with the joy you feel when you’re in contact with Russians, though. . . . Consequently, I long very much for my Russian audience.¹⁷

Galich also made the attempt to turn his attention to Western society and comment on it in song from the point of view of the post-Soviet Russian émigré. This endeavor produced the cycle “The Wild West” (“Dikii zapad”), which is made up of nine songs. Here, Galich gave poetic expression to that indignant scorn for Western liberalism, its indifference to the Communist threat, and its flirting with Communism itself, that has been expressed frequently and forcefully by the editors and contributors to Continent. In “An Old Song” (“Staraya pesnya”), Galich complains about a lack of orientation. In Russia, it had been clear which side any individual was on:

We knew for sure

On which days

It was our disaster and their honor.

For we were we,

And they were they,

And the others, well, they didn’t matter!

However, in the West:

But, here,

Amid this flaming darkness,

Where even shadows live in shadow,

We’re at a loss sometimes—

Where are we?

And from which side are they coming?

The result is a feeling of abandoned isolation:

There we stand,

Open to all the winds

From all four sides, you could say!

[KV, 359–60]

Galich’s impatience with what he saw as the spinelessness of Western society, and its fatal inclination toward compromise, is expressed in the title song of the cycle. The song has the subtitle “A Letter to Moscow, Sent by Hand”:

Don’t drop tears on your letters,

Our hearts are breaking as it is!

We’re living in the Wild West,

And it sure is pretty wild!

But it isn’t a cowboy wildness.

There’s another game going on here:

They prefer to drink Polish vodka

With their Moscow caviar.

Here, in the West,

Which has been sold out

And crucified for a bet,

In their Parises and their Londons

Like devils

There are savages!

. . .

Stupified by Sartres

Of all sizes and breeds!

Out of idleness, out of weakness,

What they like best is noise!

They want another Bastille

So they can go off and storm it!

It’s stupid to argue with them,

They’re only shadows!

[KV, 374–75]

There is very little evidence on which to essay judgments about what would have become of Galich as a guitar poet had accidental death not cut short his life. There is the possibility that he would have turned the cutting edge of his satirical talent against Western society in a more substantial and successful way than he does in “The Wild West.” It would be stupid not to understand the passionate anxiety felt upon contemplating open societies by those people who have passed through Stalinism and the rigors of dissidence and exile. But Galich’s denigration of what he saw as the West’s inability to recognize the paramount danger from the East is expressed mainly in abstract fulmination. Unlike the satires about Soviet society he had composed in the sixties, these songs lack the authentic speaking voice, and they lack the depth of understanding of the societies and their inmates which form their targets. But most of all they lack the moral basis of the earlier songs.

This basis was Galich’s sense of guilt. In the USSR after his anathematization and before his exile, and in the West in emigration, he was speaking from a position of moral rectitude, of reconciliation with his own personality; and it led him, with damaging results for his art, to preach and teach. Galich’s great guitar songs were the satires, written and sung about his fellow citizens and in their own voices. His own personality was shielded, but the songs were fueled by his personal sense of guilt at his morally ambiguous position as a privileged beneficiary of Soviet society. The spiritual peace and the moral resolution that he acquired when he became an outcast seem to have fatally diverted him from the expression of his truest talent, which was for dramatic satire.

But nothing can take away from his achievement as a guitar poet inside Soviet Russia. He took the genre that Okudzhava had developed as a new outlet for the expression of the lyric sensibility in Russian and turned it into a mighty weapon of social and political criticism. The most telling tribute to Galich’s power is the complete official suppression of his work in the USSR. When Vysotsky died, many words were written and spoken publicly about guitar poetry and the “bards”: Galich’s name was never mentioned.¹⁸

Of all the guitar poets, Galich was the most intimately tied to Soviet society and culture. His language, his characters, the situations and framework of ideas found in his songs, are all reflections of the unique society of which he was the coeval and which he understood so profoundly. As a modern Russian satirist he ranks with Zoshchenko, and he has no equal among satirists of the post-Stalin era. As a master of the grotesque he ranks alongside Bulgakov. His achievement was to speak to his contemporaries with sufficient power to overcome and make nonsense of the denial of publication that was imposed by the controllers of the media. And there is no doubt whatsoever that this power will suffice to keep Galich’s songs at the forefront of the Russian cultural consciousness, whether or not they are ever published in their native country.