Ruslan Bogaslovsky was one of the founders of The Golden Dog Gang, probably the best known of the Leningrad x-ray bootleggers. I detail some of his extraordinary story our upcoming BONE MUSIC book. Rudy Fuchs described him as the ‘hero of Soviet underground record production’, whilst his partner in crime Boris Taigin said:
‘Today, when we can have as much music as we like, we should still remember and bow low to the man who laid the first stone in the foundation of our musical freedom”
Bogoslovsky was technically ingenious, producing high quality bone discs, and even shellac based bootlegs, but was not good at avoiding the authorities, He served three prison sentences for bootlegging related activities in the fifties and early sixties.
I met his son Sergey Bogaslovsky in St Petersburg a couple of years back. It seems that even after the end of the x-ray era and after his various spells in prison, Ruslan led an extraordinary independent, anti-establishment life on the fringes of legality.
He died in 2003 at his family house on the shore of Lake Hepo-järvi. We have various drawings of the recording lathes he made and a homemade master disc for pressing records but sadly, a fire at the house in the 1990s destroyed most of his collection of records and equipment.
In our BONE MUSIC exhibition we have an installation: ‘The Bootlegger’s Room’ - the creation of an imagined scene where the bootlegger (Bogaslovky) has just been arrested.
For our Bone Music Berlin catalogue, the artist Silvia Righetti made a truly wonderful cartoon representation of this moment.
You can check out more of Silvia’s work HERE