Melodiya was founded in 1964 and was, for the whole of the Soviet period that followed, the only record company that existed in the country, a state enterprise with a monopoly on pressing, distribution and the decision about what deserved either, and no band in this article ever had the slightest prospect of appearing on it.
In February 1986 the Central Committee of the Komsomol circulated a memo listing thirty eight Western rock groups whose material was to be treated as dangerous, Black Sabbath, AC/DC and Iron Maiden among them, on the grounds that the songs promoted violence and sentiments hostile to the Soviet order. The memo did not stop the music. It merely established that anybody who wanted it would have to build the entire apparatus themselves, from the recording to the duplication to the sale, which is precisely what happened, on reel to reel tape, through the private duplication networks known as magnitizdat, in volumes that a popular recording could count in the tens of thousands of copies.
That is the founding condition of the whole region, and it distinguishes it absolutely from the countries described in chapter five, where the obstacle was commercial indifference rather than a licensing office.
Moscow builds a label because no label exists
Founded in Moscow in 1984 by the bass player and singer Sergey Troitsky, known universally as Pauk, Korrozia Metalla were the first Soviet band to make a career out of material no state enterprise would touch, and the solution Troitsky arrived at is the one every isolated scene eventually reaches: he started his own company, Hard Rock Corporation, after the state labels refused the material, and issued the debut Orden Satany through it as a self published cassette in 1988, produced by Stas Namin. The band belongs to thrash rather than to death metal, and their significance here is structural rather than musical. They proved that a Soviet band could press and sell its own product. Everything that follows in Russia is downstream of that demonstration.
Extreme metal proper arrived at the very end of the Soviet period and in small numbers. Preispodnyaya were operating from 1987. Phantasm formed in Tomsk in 1991 and became the first band in that city to work in death metal and grindcore, later under the name Infected Flesh. Grenouer assembled in Perm at the end of 1992, by which point the state that had banned the thirty eight groups no longer existed and the problem had inverted: there was now nothing to be forbidden by, and nothing to be funded by either.
Czechoslovakia had a death metal band before the wall came down
The oldest surviving death metal band east of Germany is Czech and was founded before most of the Florida ones. Krabathor were assembled in 1984 in Uherske Hradiste by the singer and guitarist Petr Krystof, spent seven years as a rehearsal and demo proposition inside a state that had no mechanism for releasing them, recorded the studio demo Pocity detronizace in 1991 as soon as there was a market to record for, and converted it into a two album contract with Monitor Records, which issued Only Our Death Is Welcome... on 4 March 1992. Cool Mortification followed in 1993, the German company Morbid Records took the catalogue afterwards, and the band spent the rest of the decade as the one act from the former Eastern Bloc other than Vader that European promoters would book without hesitation.
Seven years of rehearsals inside a state with no mechanism for releasing them, and the demo went out the moment there was somebody left to sell it to.
The traffic then reversed in a manner no other scene in this history can match. Paul Speckmann, who had founded Master in Chicago in 1983 and made one of the earliest American death metal recordings, was invited to join Krabathor in 1999 and moved to the Czech Republic the year after, since when Master has been to all practical purposes a Czech band with an American singer, working through Let's Start a War in 2002, Spirit of the West in 2004, Four More Years of Terror in 2005 and a further six albums up to Saints Dispelled in 2024. Speckmann has said in interviews that he found more freedom in his adopted country than he ever had at home, a sentence worth setting beside the Komsomol memo of 1986.
The Czech scene has produced the region's strangest record as well as its most durable band. Lykathea Aflame, formed in 1999 by three men out of the disbanded Appalling Spawn, recorded Elvenefris at Studio Hostivar in Prague in the summer of 2000 and released it through Obscene Productions, a single album of technical death metal built out of ascending, almost devotional writing that had no obvious ancestor and produced no school. The band then stopped. Twenty six years later it remains one of the most argued about records the genre has, on the strength of one release and no career at all.
A scene assembled under a licensing office learns one habit above all others, which is to finish the work before anybody has given permission for it. The permission arrives late or not at all. The tapes are already in circulation.
Andrzej Sawicki, KaosMetal
Budapest recorded an album in 1988 and waited for the state to fall
The clearest single illustration of the regional condition belongs to Hungary. Tormentor formed in Budapest in 1986, recorded the album Anno Domini in 1988, and could not release it, because releasing a record in Hungary in 1988 required an apparatus that had no intention of pressing this one. The tape circulated instead, reached the Norwegian bands who were then assembling the second wave of black metal, and did a great deal of damage from inside a drawer. The group came apart in 1991. Its singer, Attila Csihar, went to Norway and recorded De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas with Mayhem, which is how a Hungarian record nobody could buy ended up audible in the most notorious album of the decade.
Ukraine and Belarus arrived on a similar schedule and turned outward rather than inward. Nokturnal Mortum began in 1991 as a death metal group under the name Suppuration before moving to black metal and to the pagan and folk material that made their reputation. Gods Tower were working in Belarus from 1989, settled on their name and on a doom oriented style at the end of 1992, and recorded the demo that circulated under the title Demolition Tape in that year. Neither country produced a death metal industry. Both produced bands whose records left the country long before their musicians could.
Russian death metal arrived twenty years late and hit very hard
The country that had the largest population and the strictest apparatus produced its own death metal last, and when it came it was not a continuation of anything Soviet. It was brutal death metal and slam, written by people who had grown up with the American and European catalogues freely available, and it was competitive at world level almost immediately.
Katalepsy formed in Moscow in 2003, appeared first on a four way split issued by the domestic label More Hate Productions in 2004, put out the EPs Musick Brings Injuries in 2007 and Triumph of Evilution in 2008 through Soulflesh Collector Records, and were then signed by the American label Unique Leader, which released Autopsychosis in 2013, Gravenous Hour in 2016 and Terra Mortuus Est in 2020. Abominable Putridity assembled in Moscow in the same year, 2003, released In the End of Human Existence in 2007 and The Anomalies of Artificial Origin in 2012, and became one of the most imitated slam bands anywhere.
| Band | Country | Formed | First album | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Korrozia Metalla | Russia | 1984 | Orden Satany | Hard Rock Corporation | 1988 |
| Tormentor | Hungary | 1986 | Anno Domini, recorded 1988 | Unreleased at the time | 1988 |
| Krabathor | Czechoslovakia | 1984 | Only Our Death Is Welcome... | Monitor | 1992 |
| Gods Tower | Belarus | 1989 | Demolition Tape (demo) | Self released | 1992 |
| Lykathea Aflame | Czech Republic | 1999 | Elvenefris | Obscene Productions | 2000 |
| Katalepsy | Russia | 2003 | Autopsychosis | Unique Leader | 2013 |
| Abominable Putridity | Russia | 2003 | In the End of Human Existence | Independent | 2007 |
Set the two ends of the table against each other and the argument writes itself. A Hungarian band recorded an album in 1988 that no institution in its own country would press, and it changed the direction of Norwegian black metal from inside a cassette shell. A Moscow band formed in 2003 signed to a Californian label and toured on the same festival circuit as everybody else. Nothing improved about the music in between. What changed was that the licensing office closed.
Southern Europe had neither a licensing office nor a monopoly, and produced very little for twenty years anyway, for reasons that are commercial and linguistic rather than political. That case is examined in french, Italian and Spanish Death Metal. The scene most directly comparable to this one, geographically distant and economically inverted, was described in japanese Death Metal Bands.
