9 Politically Influential Singer-Songwriters from Europe under Communism

jacek_kaczmarski_ag.jpg, small, Jacek Kaczmarski performing at a small concert in Warsaw, 1990, photo: Tomasz Wierzejski / AG

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Poets with guitars in their hands singing their own politically loaded songs in shabby flats for small crowds of their compatriots... The bards, as they are called here, are a key cultural phenomenon of 20th-century Eastern Europe.

Despite being censored and intimidated by the communist state, the bards wielded tremendous moral influence in their home countries. In some cases, their following stretched beyond the borders of countries, languages and cultures. People across the whole Soviet Bloc massively recorded and copied their songs, finding comfort and hope in the Aesopian language of their lyrics, as well as practical hints on how to preserve one's dignity in inhumane times. Here’s our selection of the greatest Eastern European bards who led the way to freedom under communism.

1. Alexander Galich

Although not as famous as the other great Russian bards, Alexander Galich was arguably the most bold of them all – or perhaps just the least lucky. Galich, a successful screenwriter and playwright who only composed songs in his spare time, was the first artist to speak openly about the Stalinist prisoners who were now – after 1956 – leaving the Gulag camps. But he would soon pay the price.

Galich's successful career came to an abrupt end after a member of the Politburo overheard some of his anti-Soviet songs playing from a tape recorder at his daughter's wedding. After a couple of years of constant persecution, Galich was forced to emigrate to Western Europe. He died in Paris in 1977.

Compared to Okudzhava or Vysotski (who even sounds a bit like him), Galich's songs may seem more embedded in the specific historical events of the Soviet Union and thus less universal in meaning. Still, he could be considered the first bard – the others were following in his footsteps.

2. Bulat Okudzhava

Born in 1924 to an Armenian mother and a Georgian father (both dedicated Bolsheviks), Bulat Okudzhava was only 14 when his father was killed in a Stalinist purge. His mother eventually spent some 18 years in the work camps of the Gulag. As a young man Okudzhava joined the army and took part in the Great Patriotic War. This experience had a big impact on his works – both on his novels (which he considered his greatest accomplishment) and songs, like Paper Soldier or the Ballad of Soldier Boots.

In Eastern Europe, Okudzhava was the name which came to symbolize highest moral values and dignified resistance to the communist regime. His songs and performances were praised for their lyrical qualities and metaphysical depth, which made Okudzhava exemplary of the Slavic spirit.

Censored in his own country, s was for a long time more popular in the other countries of the Bloc, particularly in Poland. People would recognise him on the street, and he himself called Poland his first love. It was actually here that his debut LP was produced in 1968.

3. Vladimir Vysotsky

Vladimir Vysotsky is one of the greatest phenomena of 20^th-century Russian culture. Although his songs were never endorsed by the Soviet establishment, and for the most of his lifetime weren’t even released, he became one of the most influential figures of mainstream Russian culture.

Vysotsky’s amazing gift of observation and eye for social detail, which encapsulated the real character of life in the Soviet reality, have turned many of his songs into great realist literature or quasi-reportage.

In his short life he wrote around 1000 songs, spanning different genres of Soviet bard song: from blatnye (outlaw or labor camp songs) and war songs, to so-called sea songs and tourist songs in their numerous variants (like a mountaineering song), and he was particularly loved for his sports songs. His often humorous lyrics were the first to introduce street jargon into the language of Eastern European song-writing.

Vysotsky, who was also an accomplished actor, died on 28^th July 1980. Despite information on the subject being suppressed, his funeral attracted tens of thousands of Russians who gathered at the Taganka Theatre and later at Vaganskovski Cemetery. It was there that people burnt their guitars in spontaneous bonfires.

4. Karel Kryl

Karel Kryl (1944-1994) began performing his lyrical songs in the small bars of Prague around 1967. But his career as a bard is closely connected with the events of the Prague Spring of 1968, when he became one of the icons of the reform movement. His most famous song, Bratříčku Zavírej Vrátka (Close the Gate, Brother), was reportedly written on the day of the invasion of the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact, which suppressed the movement.

Kryl, who emigrated to Germany after the Prague Revolution and continued to live in Munich even after 1989, was also fluent in German and Polish – he even sang in the latter language. His song Veličenstvo Kat (His Majesty the Hangman) was particularly popular here (watch Kryl sing the Polish version here).

Meanwhile in Poland...

In Poland under communist regime, where censorship was for the most time not as harsh as in other countries of the Bloc, the influence of Vysotsky and Okudzhava was particularly strong, reaching into the areas of popular culture (compare the songs of Wojciech Młynarski). After the traumatic events of August 1968, which in Poland included a suppressed student revolt, Kryl's songs were also popular, but the country naturally had its own bards.

5. Jacek Kleyff

Jacek Kleyff, fot. Andrzej Wiernicki / Forum

One of the most important Polish bards of this era was Jacek Kleyff (born 1947). Kleyff started his career as a singer-songwriter in 1967, inspired by the bards of the Soviet Gulag like Galich and Shulz, as well as the American folk tradition of Bob Dylan. However, it was the political events of March '68 – which in Poland included street riots and student demonstrations, and climaxed in the expulsion of Polish Jews from the country – that became a key moment in the process of forming his artistic personality.

In 1969, Kleyff co-founded Salon Niezależnych (The Independent Salon), a cabaret group which combined witty social critique with an ironic and often absurd sense of humour. Dobre Wychowanie, one of the songs performed by Kleyff at around this time, became a hymn to the March generation.

In later years, Kleyff’s unorthodox personality and his constant quest for personal freedom led him to explore Rastafarian philosophy and other ethnic traditions, as well as endorse an ecological lifestyle.

6. Jan Krzysztof Kelus

March 68' was a formative experience for Jan Krzysztof Kelus, but maybe not as much as his first prolonged stay in prison in 1970 after he was sentenced for smuggling forbidden books through the Tatra Mountains.

Throughout the '70s, Kelus authored very serious if ironic ballades which dealt with the most important moral concerns of his generation: the sense of honour, friendship, decency in the time of political oppression, his songs capturing the spirit of the most important political events, like the Radom Strike of factory workers in 1976 and the formation and evolution of the Solidarity movement (Sentymentalna Panna S.). He wrote for a close circle of friends, rarely performing live – his songs circulated on tapes which Kelus recorded himself, becoming a pioneer of Polish magnizdat.

Throughout the 70s he was consistently harassed by communist security forces. Interned in prison during Martial Law, he wrote some of his last songs there. After 1989, he never returned to his career as singer-songwriter, staying away from the mainstream and living a very private life in the Mazurian countryside. In 1997, Kelus became the hero of a documentary film, in which he famously refused to speak to the camera.

Kelus’s musical style is marked by very simple guitar technique (as he claimed, only four chords) and the impeccable integrity of his lyrics.

7. Jacek Kaczmarski

But it was Jacek Kaczmarski (1957-2004) who came to be known as the ultimate Polish Bard. Kaczmarski considered himself a successor to Vysotski, yet his singing style and guitar-playing manner (as a left-handed guitarist strumming heavy the bass strings) had a distinct quality of their own.

His songs, like Mury (Walls) or Obława (Wolf-hunt, based on Vysotski’s song), were well-known to workers striking in the Gdańsk Shipyard in August 1980, and eventually became the quasi-hymns of the first Solidarity movement.

The poet – along with fellow musicians Zbigniew Łapiński and Przemysław Gintrowski – performed at rallies and strikes for the whole period of the so-called Solidarity Carnival, a period which ended abruptly with the the imposition of martial law in 1981.

8. Stanisław Staszewski

Stanisław Staszewski fot. Lucjan Fogiel/ Forum

But being a bard doesn’t necessarily have to imply a strong political stance. One of the most fascinating figures of communist-era Eastern European bardship may be Stanisław Staszewski (1925-1973), a Polish singer-songwriter who emigrated to France in 1967. Rather than exploring the social and political aspects of life under the communist regime, Staszewski engaged in writing some of the most beautiful Polish lyrical songs of the century. Staszewski would perform these at spontaneous house parties thrown by friends and acquaintances in any town he happened to be in: be it Warsaw, Płock or Paris.

For a long time, and even after his death in 1973, Staszewski’s songs were known to only a handful of friends and acquaintances. After tapes with amateur recordings of his songs started circulating, some of them were performed by Jacek Kaczmarski at his concerts. Still, the bard was virtually unknown in Poland until the 1990s, when his songs were performed by his son Kazik (by this time an accomplished figure of Polish punk scene) and his band Kult. The songs of the bard returned to his native country in hard rock form some 20 years after his death.

Back to the (former) USSR: present-day Ukraine

9. Viktor Morozov

Миниатюра — Victor Morozov. Photo: Hordiy Malkovych

Back to the USSR… At a time when Vysotski and Okudzava were singing in more or less full voice in Moscow, in the Ukrainian SSR a whole generation of intellectuals and artists of the 1960s, including poets like Vasyl Stus, was being locked up in prisons or sent to gulags. After serving their sentence, they would be forced to take menial jobs (that of a night guard or stoker) or be sentenced again as ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists’ – a pattern which would function until the end of the communist regime.

Bard and composer Victor Morozov (b. 1950) was one of the artists who tried to defy this situation. Having been thrown out of Lviv University in the early 1970s, he co-created two of the first Ukrainian rock groups. In 1988, he co-founded a cabaret style musical theatre called ‘Ne Zhurys!’. The group’s performances ‘sharply criticised and mocked the Soviet regime and were instrumental in raising national awareness in Ukraine prior to its independence’.

In 1989, Morozov published the album Skrynnya (the name referred to a samizdat 1970s almanach whose authors were all repressed). It included songs based on poems by, among others, poets of the so-called Executed Renaissance – a generation of Ukrainians writers murdered in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, but also other important Ukrainian modern poets, like Vasyl Symonenko, Oleh Lysheha and Ivan Malkovych. These songs openly touched on issues like Russification, censorship and the Ukrainian language – and could certainly not have been published before Perestroika.

In 2002, Morozov recorded the album Tylku vi Lvovi, an interesting take on interwar street folklore, much of it Polish, in the city of Lviv. He developed the concept further on the album Sertce Batyara (2008). His other foray into Polish folklore includes an uncompromising cover of Stanisław Grzesiuk’s Komu Dzwonią, Temu Dzwonią (a paragon example of Warsaw street culture). Since the early 2000s, Morozov has lived in Canada, which is home to a large Ukrainian diaspora.

Written by Mikołaj Gliński, 25 Jan 2016; updated March 2022.

The previous version of this article featured a chapter about Jaromir Nohavica. It has been removed for the time being, as he has failed to denounce Vladimir Putin in the face of Russian aggression on Ukraine, an act we believe is in contradiction of the freedom-driven spirit of East-European bardship.

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