Russian Chanson

Russian chanson is an umbrella term for Russian-language urban song traditions centred on the blatnaya pesnya, the song of the criminal underworld, alongside the urban romance and the bard song. Its typical setting is a single voice with guitar or small band, delivering first-person narratives of prison, exile, war, drink, love and fate in a confessional, speech-close manner. Suppressed or ignored by Soviet official culture, the style circulated on home recordings before becoming a commercial industry after 1991, when figures such as *Mikhail Krug* and *Grigory Leps* carried it to a mass audience.