November 1991 – Gagarin Party

Artemy Troitsky:
«It was precisely those people who had done mini-raves at St. Petersburg's Planetarium and who, in November 1991, organized the Gagarin Party in the Kosmos pavilion at VDNKh. It wasn't Novye Kompozitory (New Composers) directly, it was their organizational crowd. These were Petersburg people: Ivan Salmaksov, Oleg Tsodikov, Lesha Haas, that whole gang. I was just about the only Moscow person there who had anything to do with organizing that party.
I handled agitation and propaganda. At the time I was the boss, the editor-in-chief of the music programming at Russian Television (RTR) and, exploiting my official position, I ran announcements there about the Gagarin Party. What's more, I got so brazen that on the evening of that very night I went on live air and said, «Guys, everyone come to VDNKh, to the Kosmos pavilion, it's going to be great». Today it would be utterly impossible to imagine such a liberty, and on a state channel no less, for a whole bouquet of assorted reasons. But back then it went unpunished. The TV brass didn't react to it at all, and I did whatever I wanted there.
I have to say that the Gagarin Party was an epoch-making event. No event, either before or since, could compare with it. That sense of novelty, freedom, and a step into a new reality had never existed anywhere, ever.
It was a completely new story. At that time our music community was floating in an ice hole bounded, on the one hand, by Russian rock and, on the other, by pop schlock. It was either DDT or Presnyakov and Laskovy May. Electronic music was a novelty. It was equally distant from both rock and pop. Musically it was closer to pop, to that same Mirazh. Ideologically it was closer to alternative rock. It was seen as a completely new story, and a story grounded, first and foremost, in a hedonistic attitude toward life. That is, rock was positioned as something intellectual and social, pop as utter trash, and so raves came across as a hedonistic-psychedelic alternative to rock. The psychedelic side was very important, since from the very beginning it was ideologically tied to ecstasy.
This culture was taken up by the bohemia. And by its very youngest segment. That, by the way, was one of the reasons I got involved with the movement at all. A generational watershed ran very clearly through the raves. The young bohemia embraced them completely, while the seventies generation utterly rejected them. Raves immediately cut off the people who had thoroughly worn me out, the people from that rocker crowd. They took it as a joke and saw me as an out-and-out idiot and traitor. That was exactly what appealed to me, since the human scenery had changed almost entirely, except for a few thoroughly gone characters like Sveta Vickers. The rest merged back into a past life. Around me swirled young, close-cropped, and very strange people.
A lot of people showed up, by the way, around a thousand. The public was very mixed. There was a lot of bohemia, musicians and artists, loads of foreigners, plus the ordinary Moscow public, including those who had heard my calls on TV. How things stood with tickets I don't remember. There was definitely an entry fee, but all the financial and technical questions should be put to Tsodikov.
The DJs played were both from Petersburg and from Moscow. There was even one Frenchman, practically Laurent Garnier. No, I'm mixing things up – Garnier came later, at Mobile. There was this fat French fellow, I can't recall his name. I remember the details poorly, since I was in a heavily altered state of consciousness at the time.
By the way, that whole party, all those strange and stoned people, was later shown on Russian television. It was very funny. I even have a cassette with a recording of the Gagarin Party, very funny».