Alisa, one of Russia's top rock bands, which marked its 10th anniversary with a series of performances last year, will play an one-shot concert on Friday.
Alisa used to fill huge sports arenas with ease, but this time the now Moscow-based band will play at the small 700-seat hall at the "Food Industry Workers Palace of Culture," where they have a rehearsal studio.
The band is still massively popular, so the choice of the hall might be explained by the reluctance of stadium managers and the city police to have anything to do with the band, because of the riots and sporadic vandalism which took place repeatedly throughout the years after Alisa's shows.
A concert scheduled to be held in St Petersburg's Baltiisky Dom theater in April last year was cancelled because of police objections.
After last year's album "Chornaya Metka" (Black Spot), which was dedicated to Alisa's late guitarist Igor Chumychkin, the band released another CD called "206, Part 2" on the Moscow-based Moroz Records earlier this year.
In fact, the album was recorded in 1989, but the master tapes were somehow lost, only to surface years later in the deepest Siberia, so the official version goes. It took repeated appeals to fans by the band's lead-singer Konstantin Kinchev to get the recordings back.
Over the years Alisa have substantially changed their style In their latest incarnation they deliver a "hard'n'heavy" sound. Having said that, "206, Part 2" is a "rowdy, rock and roll album," to put it in Kinchev's words.
The story and the name of the album goes back to 1987 when Alisa, one of the three or four most popular Soviet rock bands, were just emerging from the underground and were being viciously attacked by the party-controlled media and police.
After an incident at a stadium concert, involving police brutality and angry words from Kinchev from the stage, the singer found himself under close surveillance and, soon after, in prison where he spent seven days for "petty hooliganism" (which is covered by Article 206, Part 2 of the Russian Federation's Criminal Code).
Given the huge popularity and respect accorded Kinchev by youngsters, he was approached more than once by both mystical sects and political movements. He supported Boris Yeltsin, during the attempted coup in 1991, for which he earned a medal from the Russian government. Later he returned it.
Kinchev now he calls himself an anarchist and labels "a traitor and crap" his counterpart, Yegor Letov from Siberia's band Grazhdanskaya Oborona who joined the marginal National Bolshevik Party and is reported to be preparing to take part in the next Duma elections.
Kinchev said, "Once he [Letov] and I shared the same views but now we've split. He sold out to political structures and lives on their money. A real punk and anarchist should be against any power, be it current Russian authorities or the [nationalist and communist] opposition. That's why I call him a traitor."