Heavy Metal from USSR, 1986

[if6was9]

Russian (soviet) heavy metal band Kruiz, live in Omsk 1986. Not bad!!!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MFdPTBxojQ

[TJMKID]

Amazing how quickly USSR changed after Gorbachev seized power in '85 --- a few years earlier and this band prolly would've been hung in the town square for displaying "Western excess"



Russian (soviet) heavy metal band Kruiz, live in Omsk 1986. Not bad!!!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MFdPTBxojQ

[Nitro Express]

The Soviet Union was still pretty hardcore in 1978 when we went there. My uncle was a russian history professor and booked the trip. People would come up to you and ask if you had chewing gum or ball point pens (they were still using fountain pens). They would trade russian medals, military belt buckles and things like that. If they got caught the secret police would drag them off so they were taking a risk. The mother of all trades were Levi blue jeans. That was the holy grail for the russians.

It was isolated and backwards. The cars and even the hyrdoplane boats on the river looked of the 1950's concept of modern. You went over to the famouse GUMM department store on red square and there was nothing to buy. No consumer goods. Everything went to the military or whatever government project they had going. The people meant nothing to the government other than being a resource like cattle. Hmmmm. Sounds like the United States today.

The Kremlin had bricks falling out of it. The Bolshoi theater was showing it's age and was in bad need of a renovation. I later learned no real extensive maintenance had been done on the Kremlin palace for 150 years! When they got into the Bolshoi theater it was in such poor structural shape the russian government had to step in and help with the costs. The private fund they had raised was not enough. There just was no money to those kind of things because the USSR was trying to keep up with the west and fund a huge military machine. No wonder they hid so much.

What was interesting is we had no restrictions on traveling anywhere in Moscow or Leningrad. We could get on the subway and go anywhere. Of course we were being tailed but hey, someone would always be around who spoke english if needed. I'm sure the KGB would make sure we found ourselves back to the hotel. LOL!

Anyone that thinks communism is a good system never experienced it or they are fucked in the head. LOL! Russia is much better now; even though, it has many problems still.

[FORD]

These guys are sort of like the Russian version of the original Quiet Riot.....

Not that they sound like them at all, but just in the sense that the guitar player is a lot better than the band he surrounds himself with.

Even so, they're better than either Autograph or Gorky Park, and if a commie band had to break through the "Iron Curtain", why wasn't it these guys instead of those crappy bands?

Used to be a record store called "Freeway Records" a couple of miles from here, back in the 80s. They had a lot of metal imports there, and I think I might have seen an album from these guys. Didn't buy it, because all the writing on the cover was in Russian, so I didn't have a clue what I was looking at. But the band name "Kruiz" seems familiar.

Hell, if I had known they sounded like this, I might have bought it, despite not knowing what the fuck they were singing about. My knowledge of Russian is limited to "nyet", "vodka" and "Glasnost" (thank old Gorby for that last one)