Post-collapse, Sovtek’s Deluxe Big Muff PI pedal became a big-time favorite among some rock musicians. Their MIG-50 amplifier also has a very good rep.
Still, I’ve yet to hear much about the USSR’s musical instrument industry as a whole. I assume, due to Russia’s classical music tradition, it was mostly focused on instruments like the violin, piano, etc, but I might be wrong. I know that by the 80’s they had a very active rock’n roll scene, with bands like Kino being very popular to this day.
What was the musical instrument industry like in the USSR? How did people go around to buying instruments? Were Western brands available for them to purchase or was it limited to local brands only? Were they accessible to ordinary people, price-wise?
My focus is mostly electric instruments, like the guitar, but I’d love to hear everything you have to say about such a wide topic.
Thanks in advance!
Well, I actually only know about Soviet electric guitar and effects boxes except to say that nylon string seven string guitars, tuned D2 G2 B2 D3 G3 B3 D4 (an open G variant) were ubiquitous. u/mikitacurve has one. He also used to have a Кино tribute band. Like a lot of Soviet guitars, his has a bolt on neck.
There were several manufacturers of electric guitars in the USSR, notably Lunacharsky in Leningrad, but also in Sverdlovsk, Rostov, Ordjonikidze (Armenia, I think), and Lviv. My friend picked up this Leningrad (IIRC that was the model name of this one, as well as the factory, but it might have been Ural) in Riga about ten years ago. It is pretty low quality, even compared to 60s Japanese electrics, but was at the high end of Soviet electrics. It has a two bolt neck, which is an interesting design choice. I guess the revolution wasn’t concerned with neck stability. Also, as was typical of Soviet guitars, it uses a DIN style five pin jack. We had to make a cable for that. Instruments like this were often owned by high schools, and students would sign up to check them out, much like US college students signed up for computer time in the 80s. A Ukrainian friend of mine nearly wet his pants when he saw this one, as his high school had the exact same instrument. Of course, he is also quite nostalgic for his old Lada. The first and most common Soviet guitar was the Tonika, which was made at several factories at different times. It also had a two bolt neck, and as you can see was conceptually similar to 60s Japanese guitars. Undoubtedly Japanese designs influenced the unknown Soviet luthiers behind these instruments, but they also studied guitars from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and the DDR like [Migma] (https://reverb.com/marketplace?query=migma) and [Musima] (https://www.uberchord.com/blog/10-guitars-you-need-to-know-6-musima-guitar/). In the USSR the guitar industry had essentially vanished under Stalin’s five year plans, but the other COMECON countries had their pre-war guitar tradition to draw on. So there were still practicing luthiers when the communists took over and, at least in the DDR, collectivized the industry. A lot of these were much better instruments, at least as well made as say, British Burns guitars, and some much better. Interestingly, these instruments were not imported into the USSR until the 1970s, although there was a gray market for them in the 60s. Almost all the COMECON countries produced more, and usually better guitars than the USSR. Even Bulgaria. Thanks, Comrade Stalin!
As for the electronics to support these guitars, there were tons of options. [NOTE: that rack mount delay/flanger on top of the stack is actually Soviet made, despite the English labeling.] The USSR actually had a pretty diverse and comprehensive radio and amplification industry. And these devices were very well documented, so it was easy to build your own. Building tube electronics was a reasonably widespread hobby. The 1979 Soviet disaster movie “Air Crew” had some cool scenes of our hero pilot building an elaborate sound system and light show for his bachelor pad. So for the pedals I linked above, you could get not only the schematics, but also the layouts for making your own boards. Pretty much everything you can do with a vacuum tube was well documented in the RCA Receiving Tube Manual, and similar publications from other manufacturers. So designing and building amps was a lot easier than designing and building guitars from scratch. Plus, as I mentioned above, they had a thriving radio industry, which leveraged all the same technologies. Unfortunately, even though this is very well documented, I have at least temporarily lost access to most of that due to the war on Ukraine. My best tube connection in Moscow has disappeared, taking his vast online library of Soviet schematics with him. So I can’t really comb through it for details on manufacturers, types and eras. I’ll keep digging though.
There is a lot of good information about Soviet electric guitars on Cheezy Guitars website. There is also a small Hungarian section. Also, independent luthiers did exist in the USSR. Soviet Luthier Yuriy Shishkov, is now a Master Builder in the Fender Custom Shop.
The Soviet guitars 60s-70s were absolutely wacky, a lot of creative, fun designs. With that said, there are some designs that are totally ugly in my opinion. As far as the playability or quality of the inner electronics, I'd assume that it would be comparable to the lower end of Japanese models of the mid to late 60s. By the early 70s however, the Japanese began building high quality copies (aka the "lawsuit era") that are still sought after today. Russia didn't have anything in the same league as lets say Ibanez, Tokai, Aria, Memphis, etc. but the Soviet guitars were inventive and different aesthetically than anything else out there.
It reminds me in some ways of TV advertising in the Soviet Union (check out the ads of Harry Egipt) - they copied the western style but brought it to extremes that look totally bizarre 50 years later.
I've never had the opportunity to play one, only looked at photographs.
