Who was Sergei Kuryokhin? The ‘Lenin Was a Mushroom’ hoaxer who electrified the Soviet underground and, at the very end, embraced fascism and occult politics.

July 9 marked 30 years since the death of Sergei Kuryokhin, one of the most important figures in the Soviet and Russian underground of the 1980s and 1990s.

Few people defined that era more vividly.

Kuryokhin, known by the nickname “the Captain,” moved effortlessly through every sphere of cultural life, winning over those he encountered and setting the tone wherever he went.

He collaborated with the Soviet Union’s finest jazz musicians, recorded with the bands Kino, Aquarium, and Alisa, befriended Timur Novikov’s New Artists, and was regarded in the West as a dissident genius.

His own project, Pop Mekhanika (“Pop Mechanics”), was a kind of total theater that fused performance art, ballet, opera, variety entertainment, circus, and fashion.

To a wider public he was best known as the creator of the notorious hoax “Lenin Was a Mushroom.” Near the end of his life, Kuryokhin grew close to Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party and the philosopher Alexander Dugin, who would later become the ideologue of the “Russkiy mir” (“Russian world”) political doctrine.

That turn in the Captain’s life looked grim at the time; it is more painful still to contemplate today.

Meduza journalist Alexander Filimonov tells the story of Sergei Kuryokhin. ...