Notes from the Zone of Kaif: An Exploration of the Azazello Archive

Azazello was a legendary hippie and artist in 1970s and 80s Moscow, who was a linchpin in an often forgotten community of the underground, since he and his peers did not pursue publicity for their creative output and were in constant hiding from the authorities both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this chapter, however, I am less interested in Azazello as the creator of an archive but aim to explore his archive as a protagonist in its own right. I begin by examining the idea of Azazello’s archive as a counter-archive and what it can tell us about archiving and collecting practices in the deepest Soviet underground—the world of hippies, druggies and drop-outs. Archiving in this milieu tended to be less intentional than in the intellectual world of political dissidents and more guided by emotions, coincidence and artistic concerns. The article then proceeds to showcase how the Azazello archive is not only a story of one man creating and collecting papers relevant to his ‘self’ over the course of his adult life but also a story of an archive creating a person and persona—and indeed in the process creating much more: a milieu, a generation and an era. This process of reverse agency is arguably more apparent in a subcultural milieu where every scrap of drawing and every dog-eared notebook contributed to the formation of a subaltern and repressed (and hence doubly valuable) identity that was the hallmark of its members. Azazello was made by his archive both during and after his life-time. His relationship with its artefacts is one of continuous negotiation, which involved not only himself but other contributors to the archive and those forces that kept him in the underground. Finally, I will argue that, as demonstrated by the Azazello archive, counter-archives are not only entertaining footnotes to the exploration of official and mainstream archives, but they also tell a story of subversion and re-appropriation of official norms and dominant narratives. Eventually, however, even the most counter-cultural archive is powerless against the work of official historians, whose eyes, hands and minds preserve the evidence but destroy the subversion, turning counter-cultural archives into accepted sources of the past.