As far as marquee names go, they don't come more wooden than "Vyacheslav Mescherin and the Orchestra of Electro-Musical Instruments." Yet it was the group's sound that turned heads when it first appeared on the Soviet scene in the late 1950s. A blend of communist kitsch, folk melodies, and light classics performed on primitive electronic instruments, Mescherin?s music was the weird, sentimental soundtrack to daily life in the Soviet Union: part proletarian hokum, part futuristic borscht. Mescherin's name is hardly a household word today, even in Russia. Despite his work in film, state radio, television, and theater, his death in 1995 went unnoticed even by most Russians.

That may now change. A new CD retrospective series of the band's archival recordings is bringing back this admittedly bizarre--yet vital--slice of the Soviet cultural fabric.

"Each person who was privileged to live in the Soviet Union in the '60s and '70s, they?ve got Mescherin?s music soaked into their skin," says Russian pop music historian (and Playboy editor) Arteom Troitsky. Troitsky adds that the group?s familiarity owes as much to catchy tunes as to those tunes' onetime ubiquity. "It was all the music on the radio, it was all the ambient music on TV, it was all the ?muzak? played at convention halls and so on. ? I mean, it was f---ing everywhere."

But not initially. The Electro-Musical Orchestra began unknown, and underground. A worker at state radio in the mid-1950s, Mescherin dreamed of a "new Soviet sound" using the latest advances in the electronic sciences. Soon, he and his cohorts slapped pickups and microphones on traditional Russian balalaikas, accordions, and violins, and they pioneered new instruments such as the early Soviet synthesizer, the Ekvodin I. Sprinkle in drums and the ethereal sounds of the theremin--the Russian-invented electronic instrument "played" by waving the hands around a pair of antennae--and the resulting mix was less Warsaw Pact, more Warsaw party.

Practicing at night and before work in the mornings, Mescherin?s band labored anonymously until the day a local agent "discovered" the group?s sound. In this case, though, the agent was from the KGB. The year was 1959, and the Kremlin wanted its latest sputnik satellite to broadcast into the cosmos a stirring rendition of the Socialist hymn, the "Internationale." So the KGB approached Mescherin, making the request all the more persuasive with an unsolicited ride to its headquarters. According to Mescherin?s widow, Lyuba, her husband headed off fearing the worst. "He knew there?s only one reason you go to Lubyanka," she says. "But when he got there, they just asked him to record the 'Internationale.'" She shrugs. "So he did."

The reward? Official permission to perform. The band was off and running.

'ANIMAL FARM' FOR THE MASSES

Initial reviews weren?t kind, however. The conservative Soviet press corps, uncertain what their censors made of Mescherin?s unique sound, kept on the safe side by lambasting the Orchestra. "Mescherin turns on an iron," wrote one particularly zealous critic, "and out comes Tchaikovsky?s First Symphony."

Undaunted, the group scored its first hit in 1961 with a remake of an Estonian folk tune. The band gave the song a Marxist makeover, calling it "On the Collective Poultry Farm." An irresistibly grating polka melody bracketed by what can only be described as two robotic chicken squawks, the song is better known to Russians as the score to the popular farmer-vs.-fox cartoon, Nu Pogodi! ("Hey, Wait a Second!"--a kind of Looney Tune for the peasant class).

Despite such earthy roots, the orchestra established its reputation as an interstellar outfit. The band scored soundtracks to sci-fi films like The Mouse From Mars, and the band was a favorite among the early Soviet cosmonauts. No less a hero than Yuri Gagarin counted Mescherin a personal friend, and the world?s first spacewalker, Alexei Leonov, returned from his mission claiming Mescherin?s electronic cocktail "more than anything simulates the experience I felt while floating in the open cosmos." Naturally, the band was a regular at launchings at Baikonur, the Soviet Cape Canaveral.

The Orchestra cultivated friends in high places and soon even top composers like Dmitri Shostakovich began offering material. Nikita Khrushchev, too, took a fancy to the band after he heard a song Mescherin recorded in the Soviet premier?s honor. In "Fantasies on Peruvian Themes," an extended theremin solo mimics the exotic vocals of Peruvian chanteuse--and Khrushchev favorite--Yma Sumak. It was the perfect gift for the man who (at the time anyway) had everything.

Still, this was no elite--pardon the phrase--Party band. Average Soviets wanted in on the act, and the Mescherin Orchestra brought a Stakhanovite work ethic on tour. "He just didn?t think there was any point to [being] another big orchestra in Moscow or St. Petersburg," says Lyuba Mescherina. Dressed in trademark formalwear, the band?s 13 members played farms, factories, and military outposts throughout the Soviet empire. Indeed, driven by fierce socialist ideals, Mescherin considered his mission to be carrying the banner of culture beyond the cities to the far-flung proletariat. "My husband tried to make instruments that were light, easy to carry, and that could work under any conditions," explains Mescherina. "He always said, ?We should be as strong as our instruments.?"

For 30 years and more, they were. Mescherin and his orchestra lugged their gear to the forgotten corners of the communist universe: nuclear submarines off Vladivostok, remote stations in the Arctic, theater halls in Eastern Europe, even occupied Afghanistan. With a seemingly endless repertoire, this little state-sponsored orchestra had a tune for every occasion, with just one notable exception: the end of the state.

A HIPSTER AHEAD OF HIS TIME

When the Soviet Union opened up to the world in the late 1980s, Mescherin?s brand of kitschy pop suddenly sounded anachronistic--too Soviet--to ears now tuned Westward. Worse still, says Lyuba Mescherina, the band?s own musicians wanted change. "They started saying ?Vyacheslav, why don?t we play rock? Everyone?s playing rock.? And he?d say ?Well, I like rock too, but you need to play it well. If we play just like the other rock groups, nobody's going to need this orchestra.' "

In 1990, Vyacheslav Mescherin concluded no one did, and applied to disband his Electro-Musical Orchestra once and for all (in true Soviet fashion, he needed a stamp to officially break up his own band). Mescherin died just five years later, a footnote of Soviet cultural history largely forgotten.

Until now.

For the series of Easy USSR CDs released on the Russian Legkie label (distributed abroad by Bliss Records), the producers culled the stacks of the old House of Sound-Recording in Moscow, unearthing an archive of more than 1,000 tracks. With some 60 hours of Mescherin material expected in forthcoming releases (two discs have been released to date), the sheer volume of the band?s output may finally make good on Khrushchev's long-stalled promise to the West: "We will bury you."

The sound of the future is now dated, of course, and Mescherin?s music for the masses is today marketed as "easy listening" and "bachelor pad music" to hipsters in Russia?s big cities (among the few Russians who can afford to pay full price for a CD). Still, in a Russian society that famously failed to agree on one "national idea" to unite the country following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Mescherin Orchestra has post-Soviet hipsters and old-Soviet pensioners oddly humming the same tune. Who except perhaps Vladimir Putin can stake a similar claim?

Meanwhile, capitalists may find that this "Esquivel of the East" forces them to rethink their notions of the Evil Empire. Arteom Troitsky says Mescherin?s work should dispel those lingering stereotypes of the Soviet Union as that cold, gray, industrial country you maybe thought you knew. "The Soviet Union was a swinging country ? and we did have a lot of fun," he says, mentioning the popular tvist dance craze of the 1960s as additional evidence.

Adds the Playboy editor, "I think the music of the Mescherin Orchestra would make a perfect soundtrack to this long-gone, swinging USSR." Indeed--one to remind that behind the Iron Curtain, the reds weren't always so square.

This article was originally printed in Transitions Online.

Charles Maynes is an independent radio/print journalist and musician. He currently divides his time between Minneapolis, Minnesota and Moscow.