A Russian Woodstock: rock and roll and revolution?; not for this generation.(Nashestviye Festival)

Byline: Anna Nemtsova

Try free-associating the words "Russian" and "Woodstock" for a few seconds, and you'll likely have a fair idea of the scene. Mud. Vodka. Pouring rain. Grumpy police. Imperfect to nonexistent sanitation. Eighty thousand tipsy, happy, very dirty people. The Nashestviye Festival is Russia's biggest, drunkest, most fun rock festival, held in a huge field 200 kilometers east of Moscow. I've been going for years; earlier this month I brought along Sasha, my 14-year-old son, for the first time. And it was a blast.

What a change. When I went to my first such concert, circa 1988, the scene would be somebody's crowded apartment with everyone sitting on the floor. The singer was wanted by the KGB, or could easily have been. Teenagers like to dramatize, but this really was deadly serious. At the very least, we risked getting into serious trouble from our parents. At worst, by cavorting with acknowledged "dissidents" in that repressive still-commie era, we could have ended up in jail.

My son is growing up in a very different Russia. At Nashestviye these days, secret police are hard to find--at least those on duty. Instead, it's all dancing and kissing. Veronica, a 23-year-old girl with a colorful Indian scarf wrapped over her jeans, grooved to the guttural singing of a Siberian shaman on stage; she was here to "forget about the country and its politics for at least a few days." Other festival-goers painted their faces bright colors, wore horns and smiling Mexican death masks, and waved all manner of flags: Communist, Imperial Russian, even American Confederate. A guy with a Che Guevara banner loudly complained that there "wasn't enough freedom at this festival"--freedom, he meant, to bring your own vodka.

Freedom. It meant something very different when I was in school during the perestroika years. Our history teachers had just thrown out the old Soviet textbooks and read aloud from newspapers to the class. Our rock idols told us we were part of something bigger than ourselves. "This train is on fire and there is no place for us to run," sang Boris Grebenshikov of Aquarium. "Our hearts demand change!" cried Viktor Tsoi of Kino. No one thought for a moment that we could "forget" about politics. The entire country was opening up; something new and electrifying was in the air. We were drunk on more than beer.

Some musicians playing at ...