Cartoon Music in USSR and the Sound of Soviet Childhood
A Little Bit About Me
I was born in the Soviet Union, in Ukraine, in the city of Dnipro, in the beautiful USSR. I say “beautiful” because that is what I was told as a child by my school and teachers. USSR means Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Союз Советских Социалистических Республик) in Russian. The USSR existed from 1922 to 1991.
The street I was born on was called Rabochaya (Рабочая in Russian), which means “a street of workers.” My grandmother hated the Soviet Union because her family was a family of middle-class farmers who owned land, a house, and a farm. During the Soviet period, their land, house, and animals were taken away to be shared among the people of the Soviet Union. The entire family worked from morning until night on the farm. There were 10 family members, plus cousins, uncles, and friends. Everything they had achieved, including their middle-class status, was the result of very hard work.
My great-grandfather loved horses, and he became a veterinarian. The family was well known and respected. They had also adopted children from orphanages and raised them as their own. On top of that, the family was very musical. My great-grandfather played the accordion, and his son Ivan also played the accordion and guitar. All the sisters, including my grandmother, sang Ukrainian songs together. None of them knew how to read or write except my grandmother. She always wanted to learn to read and write and to become a doctor, and she did. She was not a practicing doctor, but she was responsible for sanitation of food and water. From what I remember, she checked meat, vegetables, fruits, and sugar for bacteria in Soviet food factories.
I was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in a government apartment. The only books I was allowed to read or had access to were Soviet books or books approved by the Soviet Union. The music I heard was mostly classical music and music approved by the Soviet government. There was no jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, or rhythm and blues in my everyday musical environment. I never heard rock or metal, jazz or blues, or much of any kind of Western music.
My dad and my mom divorced when I was born because my dad was Jewish and came from a prominent family of doctors in Odesa, Ukraine. My mom was a Ukrainian Orthodox Christian from a family of farmers, with some family from a very remote part of Western Ukraine where they spoke only Ukrainian. My dad’s family never accepted me or my mom, unfortunately (they never accepted me because my mother was not jewish).
My dad was a musician, and he hated the Soviet Union because, from what he told me, he could not listen to, play, or compose the music he wanted. It was very difficult to get records by the Beatles or any Western rock group. He obtained them through the black market for a lot of money.
My dad knew the Beatles, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, and Joni Mitchell. He first worked in a VIA, which stood for Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble (Вокально-инструальный ансамбль). There were many of these groups, and they were all called VIAs. They could only play songs approved by the Soviet authorities. Usually, they played songs by Soviet-approved composers, but they could not perform or write their own songs unless those songs were approved by the government. My dad was a composer, but he could not play his own music. Thus, in his early teenage years, his dream was to escape the Soviet Union. My dad’s favorite band was the Beatles. He especially loved Paul McCartney and his songwriting. He had a poster of them at his house by the piano.I did not live with my dad, I lived with my grandmother Anya. He divorced my mom because she was not Jewish and was pursuing his dream of becoming a rock star.
Soviet Union Television and Three Channels
I lived in Dnipro, Ukraine, with my grandmother. Everyone had a television, but there were only three channels. “Channel 1” was the official first channel of the Soviet Union. The second channel was mostly devoted to nature and classical music, and the third channel was a local channel from Dnipro. Most of the channels operated from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., and then again from 5 p.m. until midnight.
Cartoons were shown on the official main USSR channel, “Channel 1”. Everything we had access to had to be approved by the government. There was a special time when cartoons were shown in the evening. Ordinary Soviet people had only three channels of any kind of information and mainly the first channel showed cartoons and movies along with the news. Therefore, television was one of the only ways we had to hear music, watch movies, or access information.
The Union of Soviet Composers
The Union of Soviet Composers (Союз советских композиторов) was the main professional organization controlling and representing composers in the USSR. It was established in 1932, after the Soviet government dissolved independent artistic organizations (Kerridge, 1934). Renamed the Union of Soviet Composers in 1939, it existed alongside the Union of Soviet Writers and similar organizations for other arts. Membership was extremely important for a professional composer. It could provide commissions, performances, income, publishing, housing, and access to the musical establishment. At the same time, it helped enforce Soviet cultural policy, particularly Socialist Realism.
The Union had republican and regional branches throughout the USSR. Composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, and Dmitri Kabalevsky were connected to the organization. It was part of a larger institutional system involving the Communist Party, the Ministry of Culture, concert organizations, publishing houses, radio, and censorship (Kerridge, 1934).
Membership and official approval were important for composers who wanted to participate professionally in Soviet musical life. Yet two most famous cartoons became iconic for their music. We loved not only the cartoons themselves but also their amazing and magical music. Let us see what we can find about this Soviet music through two of the most famous cartoons: The Bremen Town Musicians (1969) and Nu, Pogodi! (meaning “Watch Out!” or “Just You Wait!”).
Bremen Musicians and the Music I Heard as a Child
The Bremen Town Musicians (Бременские музыканты) is a very important Soviet animated film from 1969. It was produced by Soyuzmultfilm (meaning “Union of Cartoons”) and directed by Inessa Kovalevskaya. The music was composed by Gennady Gladkov, with lyrics by Yuri Entin (НЮБЕРГ, 2023).
I heard The Bremen Town Musicians as a child in the late 1980s on Soviet television. The music was so mesmerizing. I do not think I even understood the story. It was the music that mattered to me. Later, I will describe how accurate my instincts actually were as a child because, as I found out through my research in 2026, music was the main driving force of this cartoon. The music changed the story, style, and drawings of the main characters and gave a forever life to this cartoon about wandering musicians (НЮБЕРГ, 2023).
The project was driven by music written by a young composer, Gennady Gladkov. Yes, the lyrics were good too, but the music was what everyone remembers even now, as we will see later. This was the Soviet Union. Things, songs, films, and art were not made primarily for profit. There was not the same goal of making money that existed in the United States. Artists worked for the government, and composers and filmmakers had to work within the Soviet system.
One young film director came up with the idea of making a cartoon based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale The Bremen Town Musicians. She had never actually read the story, but she liked the name and the idea of musicians being animals. Gennady Gladkov decided to write the music. He was also a government-approved composer. Yuri Entin was supposed to write the lyrics, while the artists would create the characters. The young director decided that the Bremen musicians should have a leader - a Troubadour, a kind of director and conductor - and that they should be traveling musicians. They would travel all over the world and basically live on the planet Earth and sleep under the stars. They would have no home. The world would be their home, and these wandering musicians would represent freedom. Perhaps freedom from the USSR and the repression, and the isolation people felt who did not fit in.
Gladkov wrote the music, but recording it was not easy. The Melodiya studio (the main USSR recording studio) in the USSR was extremely busy, so they had to record at night. None of the singers showed up except Oleg Anofriev, who was very sick. He came to tell them that he was too sick to do it. But then Gladkov showed him the music. Anofriev liked it. He heard something new and fresh - music that was different and free, just like the Bremen musicians themselves. He ended up recording almost all of the vocal parts overnight, including the different characters and the choir, except for the Princess’s part, which was recorded by a friend of the composer, Elmira Zherzdeva (НЮБЕРГ, 2023).
There is also a very sad story behind the music. At that time, the young composer Gladkov and his wife had lost their newborn child, and he was writing this music during that period of grief. Perhaps this is one reason he was not afraid to experiment. When we are face-to-face with death, our perception of life can change profoundly and forever.
After the music was recorded, it became clear that it did not really fit the traditionally drawn cute animals, princess, and prince. The music was too modern. So they changed the drawings. The young director decided that the Troubadour should look something like Elvis and the Beatles. She had seen a Western fashion magazine and based him on a hippie model.
The Princess and Troubadour looked like hippies from Woodstock, while the animal musicians became a kind of Beatles-like band. And this is where it becomes very funny to me. The Beatles were a Western band that was forbidden in the USSR and whose music was extremely difficult to access in the Soviet Union. Yet here they were, almost hiding inside a Soviet children’s cartoon.
It is funny that in the USSR, where Western music was officially criticized and forbidden, and yet Soviet composers and directors were actually very clever at taking whatever they could find from Western culture and transforming it into something new.
The Bremen Town Musicians was inspired by Western music, and it remains one of my favorite Soviet cartoons.
But Nu, Pogodi! Cartoon (Well, Just You Wait!) takes this even further.
The music in “Nu, Pogodi!” cartoon was basically “stolen” from everywhere. The director Vyacheslav Kotenochkin was a serious music lover and had his own vinyl collection. He went through his records and took short pieces of music from all over the world, cutting them and putting them into the cartoon in a special way, so he could never be found in 1969 (Cineast, 2021).
Now we know that more than 150 musical tracks have been identified or are still being identified by people researching the series. Some pieces are only a few seconds long. Fifty years later, people are still trying to figure out where the music in particular scenes originally came from. Today, Kotenochkin is sometimes described as one of the greatest Soviet musical “diggers” - someone who searched everywhere for interesting music and found ways to bring it into his work. There are also many funny stories and legends surrounding him.
So while the Soviet Union was telling us about the “Rotting West” and ordinary people had access to only three television channels, at the same time composers, directors, and other artists were incredibly clever at finding, borrowing, using “cut-and-paste” sampling, masking, and hiding Western music inside a very Soviet children’s cartoon, right in front of our eyes.
The very Soviet cartoon Nu, Pogodi! actually contains a lot of Western music, including music by the Beatles, Duke Ellington, Terry Snyder and the All Stars, Electric Coconut, Dick Hyman, James Last, and Mel Taylor and the Magics. The list goes on. A list of performers whose music appears in Nu, Pogodi! can be found in “Список мелодий мультсериала «Ну, погоди!»” on the website (https://sheet.zohopublic.com/sheet/open/0vo1g709ffd97edae41559a0c6ba2f7e1c2be?sheetid=2&range=G151)
That is pretty funny and sad at the same time. I often think about the guitarist Vladimir Vavilov, who released a record supposedly presenting lute music from the 16th century so that he could actually release his own compositions. Vavilov was not an approved Soviet composer, so he could not simply release his own music under his own name.
This is one of the things that fascinates me about Soviet music. There was the official Soviet culture, but underneath it there was another world. Musicians found ways to bend the rules. They borrowed, disguised, encoded, and transformed music. They found ways to hear what they were not supposed to hear. And I was there, listening to it as a child.
I loved Soviet music. I also loved the dream I was sold. Maybe I was little, and maybe I still had hope. The United States is probably the best country there is, and I am grateful to be an immigrant and a refugee in this country. I am grateful to live in New York. But somehow hope that I had as a child is gone. Maybe you need to be young to be hopeful instead of disillusioned.
I don’t know. I performed on TV in Ukraine as a child and I believed that love and good always win, even though we had nothing to eat very often. And now I have food and I am not hungry, but I miss the music from my childhood and the free spirits of the Bremen Musicians.
I never had it hard as my dad, he risked everything to come to the United States, the land of freedom for his music. He abandoned his family and his children to become a musician who can write music without being chased by the police. Maybe there is always a way and one should never give up a dream of finding your own Heavenly Music.
Heavenly Music (poem)
Carry me where I found a friend (found a friend)
Carry me won wongs of love (wings of love)
Carry me on wounds of change (winds of change)
Carry me till I turn to dust (turn to dust)
I hear your voice calling me softly
In Heavenly music we will dance forever
I hear your voice calling me softly
In Heavenly music we will dance forever
No black clouds in my way
I am not afraid today
No black clouds in my way
I am not afraid today
You’re magician who stole my heart (stole my heart)
You’re magician of love and art (love and art)
Carry me across the universe
Carry me to place where love is born.
I hear your voice calling me softly
In Heavenly music we will dance forever
I hear your voice calling me softly
In Heavenly music we will dance forever
No black clouds in my way
I am not afraid today
No black clouds in my way
I am not afraid today
Today today today
I am not afraid today..
References
Cineast. (2021, May 24). Вячеслав Котеночкин — самый безумный музыкальный диггер в мейнстриме Советского Союза. https://cineast.com.ua/2021/05/24/nu-pogodi-vyacheslav-kotenochkin-digger/
Kerridge, W. H. (1934). The Union of Soviet Composers. The Musical Times, 75(1102), 1073–1075. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i237835
НЮБЕРГ. (2023, September 10). Они развалили СССР! История создания “Бременских музыкантов” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uLRHKPfBaA
Список мелодий мультсериала «Ну, погоди!» [List of melodies from the animated series Nu, Pogodi!]. (n.d.). Zoho Sheet. https://sheet.zohopublic.com/sheet/open/0vo1g709ffd97edae41559a0c6ba2f7e1c2be?sheetid=2&range=G151
Wanderer Records. (n.d.). Vladimir Vavilov—Lute music of XVI–XVII centuries. https://www.wanderer-records.com/w10464
