Jack Yeovil - Route 666

Lynne: About this time, you had a great following. Russian kids copied the way you dressed…

Andrei: We all wore those flared blouses and tight, shiny boots. Tie-dyed kaftans were the uniform of protest. And the beards, of course. My beard was bigger than all the others, my moustache droopier and more luxurious. In Helsinki, I found I had lice, picked up in the boxcars I had hidden in during my escape. I shaved the lot off, all my hair, and the kids copied that too. I was amazed. Everyone trooped around as if they had already been shipped off to Siberia. The Labour Camp Look was huge. Jerkussoff, who had to have artificial hair implants to fit in with the previous style, was so livid he developed a multiple personality disorder.

Lynne: Those were hard times?

Andrei: Intolerable. Everybody thought the Chins had long-range missiles which could strike at Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad. The end of the world was coming. That was why the kids were rebellious. They felt their parents had gambled away their future. There was no reason not to sleep around, to smoke kif, to play records loud, to defy authorities, to ride tractors through collective farms at the dead of night.

Boys of fourteen and fifteen were packed off to die in Vietnam for a cause they couldn't understand. There've been a lot of recent Russian books and movies about Vietnam, trying to make out the suffering was good for the soul. You've seen the Rostov films, about the Stakhanovite veteran who never stops fighting. Or The Bear Hunter, Dosvidanya, Vietnam, Born on the First of May. All of them are beetroot mulch.

Back then, we were having to get our real news from the BBC World Service and the Voice of America. When the Chins came in to support the People's Republic of the North against the People's Republic of the South, we did not find out for many months. Those over twenty simply did not believe we were losing. The official Tass line was a succesion of easy victories. But if the victories were so decisive, why was the war dragging on? Brezhnev even tried to keep the nuclear exchanges quiet.

Apart from the areas poisoned by bug bombs and nukes, the USSR lost much territory to scavengers. The Japanese reoccupied Sakhalin in 72 and the Shah spearheaded a drive to seize Transcaucasia. The Pan-Islamic Federation got together just as Turkey was invading Greece and armies of the faithful "liberated" Albania and subcontinent-sized swathes of Soviet Central Asia. The crescent still flies over those lands and, though it is always the Greek Christian terrorists who get publicity, tiny guerilla wars fester after over twenty years, as in Serbia and Ireland. Of course, the resources channelled into Vietnam meant Russia had to duck out of the space race, leaving the stars to the Americans, who turned out to have no use for them. In 1973, Mao claimed he had won the war just because Brezhnev had fallen from power. Of course, China was in the middle of its own break-up into semi-feudalism. I deal with all this in my concept album. The Dragon and the Bear …

Lynne: Is it true that Yuri Andropov personally invited you back to the USSR?

Andrei: That's what I heard. Of course I thought it was a trick. To us, the KGB were pigs. It was rumoured they had death camps for dissidents, deserters and evaders. The Movement was riddled with KGB Cointerpro spies who would encourage protestors to acts of defiance then turn them in for harsh punishment. But Andropov knew a dead horse when he saw one and engineered the overthrow of Brezhnev in 73. His great slogan was "anti-corruption" and there certainly was a change in the Soviet character in the mid-'70s. I returned to Moscow, and, though interviewed extensively, was not arrested or assassinated. At this time, I was a Scientologist. Many fans who came to my first concert in post-Brezhnev Moscow were disappointed that I made the artistic decision not to sing any songs but chose to play an acoustic accompaniment to texts from L. Ron Hubbard. I was sincere in my beliefs, just as I was sincere when I converted to Judaism, Catholicism, Sufism, EST and the Brethren of Joseph. Searching for truth has always been a part of the Russian soul.

Lynne: How had things changed in Moscow?

Andrei: I wasn't so young any more. Fashion had passed me by a little. There was a burst of reactionary music. You remember the kulak rock of 1977, all the spitting and slam-dancing and such. The Sex Vostoks, Little Vera, that shower. The youth of the day despised the message of peace my generation wished them to receive. They pierced their noses and cheeks with sharpened vodka bottle caps and wore surplus Red Army uniforms with radiation burns and bullet holes. My records were still popular with those of my old fans who hadn't been killed. It was a relief, actually, not to have to pander to teenagers. I was able to follow artistic impulses, to plough my own furrow.

Lynne: Those were the years of your Nostalgia album and tour. Many viewers will remember the spectacular circus which accompanied that remarkable achievement.

Andrei: I was looking for a way of expanding my vision into a totality of art, to reach beyond the confines of popular music. I felt my vision demanded the twelve elephants, the banana-shaped dirigible, the cannons, the dead clowns, the hologram mushroom clouds, the mass tractor pull and the dance of the duelling chainsaws. In America, I'm still best known for the songs from Nostalgia. I believe that "Looking Back to the Future Unborn" was recently sampled in a television commercial for a psychiatric health drive.

Lynne: Indeed, then it re-entered the charts.

Andrei: It's a good cause, and I'm proud to serve it.

Lynne: Among your contemporaries, who do you most admire?

Andrei: Vania Vanianova, of course. The Kulture Kossacks were the only indie band of the early '80s worth standing in line for.

Lynne: You were married to her?

Andrei: Briefly. Between Sufism and vodka rehab. After the vasectomy but before the cancer ward.

Lynne: What do you really think of Petya Jerkussoff?

Andrei: I suppose he can't hurt anyone. We had a sort of detente. All that' Glum and Glit business seems antique these days. He was supposed to appear on the Of fret album but had one of his nervous breakdowns the day before the recording.

Lynne: And Boris Yeltsin?

Andrei: He does about as good a job as anybody does. There might not be much left of the Soviet Union but we are fairly prosperous, reasonably democratic and culturally in acceptable shape. He hasn't had to call out the tanks and shell his opponents, unlike your President North, has he? But I'm disappointed by the Soviets of the '90s. When I think of the good people who died, the struggles and sacrifices, I'm saddened to see that we have such a trivial, money-obsessed society. Our heroes are not poets and painters but computer programmers and contraceptive entrepreneurs Moscow is a plague of Nostalgia Boutiques pushing expensive recreations of our fashions from the '70s. I wish I had copyrighted the usage of the word. The blouses are even baggier, the kaftans more tie-dyed, but it's not the same. These clothes are clean, for a start. We Russians have turned our backs on melancholy and brainwashed ourselves into happiness. Happiness is not good for us. We should lead the world; instead we manufacture more and more useless luxuries Things must change.

Lynne: Andrei, thank you.

Andrei: Thank you, Lynne.

Lynne: No, thank you…

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