Azazello – who had many real names but only one moniker – was a Soviet hippie, poet and artist.
He lived and shaped Moscow underground life for over two decades, starting as a precocious teenager in the early 1970s and living well into the Putin era.

Azazello was both exceptional and typical in his milieu. He was an accomplished tailor of counter-cultural clothing and an ardent chronicler of his life through notes, miniature paintings and poetry. Yet he was also a true creature of the late socialist underground: streetwise, subcultural, rebellious, and yet unmistakably Soviet. He was a product of Brezhnev's 'stagnation' and its paradoxical consequence: a vivid, parallel underground world operating in a semi-legal sphere in the very same Moscow that was reported to be drab and grey by Western correspondents. His poems, art, scribblings and other material legacies now serve to illuminate the lost world of the world of Soviet hippiesh drop-outs – a community that was a vibrant focus for all kinds of non-conformist behavior but remains virtually unknown. Azazello lived in a Soviet counter reality: His world was not guided by socialist norms. It was a world of people seeking kaif - an elusive non-Soviet pleasure best induced by drugs, alcohol and a community of like-minded peers. And Azazello wittingly or unwittingly became one of this world’s most comprehensive chroniclers.

About the archive

In early 2015 Azazello donated to the Wende Museum in Los Angeles a large pile of papers and notebooks, which on closer inspection turned out to be a unique record of a world that was and remains hidden from view of not only ordinary Russians but also most academic specialists. Azazello chronicled his life not in diary form, but in hundreds and hundreds of pages of painting, notes, song texts and contact details written in thirty-six small notebooks, whose period of production ranged from 1972 to 1993.
He also wrote hundreds of poems, which he dated by day and time and which mostly deal with his personal life and collective sentiments prominent in his circle. This archive provides a glimpse into a world that is usually very difficult to explore and has hence found little scholarly attention. Yet this 'world beyond and outside of Soviet norms' was undeniably an important aspect of late socialism, not only because it shows the 'borders of Sovietness', but also because its existence became a significant characteristic of late socialism.

Azazello – who had many real names but only one moniker – was a Soviet hippie, poet and artist.He lived and shaped Moscow underground life for over two decades, starting as a precocious teenager in the early 1970s and living well into the Putin era.

About the archive

Azazello – who had many real names but only one moniker – was a Soviet hippie, poet and artist.
He lived and shaped Moscow underground life for over two decades, starting as a precocious teenager in the early 1970s and living well into the Putin era.