Back in ’78, Andrey Tropillo said he wanted to build a vinyl plant and flood the USSR with Beatles LPs. His friends thought he was out of his mind.
A decade later, he was the director of Melodiya’s Leningrad studio, and he realized he could finally do it legally. He later put it plainly:
“The first thing I did was release the entire ‘golden fund’ of rock ‘n’ roll. From 1989 to 1991, I published most of it on my own, through the Rock-and-Roll Parish of the Unified Lutheran Church of Russia. I was the head of the consistory there at the time. These were special orders on behalf of the Parish, the same S-90s, to remove responsibility. Melodiya pressed the records, and the Lutheran church made the sleeves.”
Journalist Andrey Burlaka said that Western reissues came later and that the initial plan was to publish domestic bands—until demand and money attracted opportunistic hangers-on, shifting the enterprise’s focus.
Name and logo
Photographer Andrey Usov came up with the name “AnTrop” and drew the logo in 1982, playing off of Tropillo’s last name (a bit he’d teased on the Aquarium’s Blue Album with “Los Pills Records”). Over the past ten years, the mark has changed a bit. It started out as a big T with “trop”/”trop” tucked beneath it. Later on, it morphed into a signature paired with an “ohm” symbol and the Latin tag “consummari in unum.”
Pirate AnTrop
Recording new bands in the rehomed studio was real, but it also fronted the broader activity that made AnTrop infamous: mass-pressed Western rock on cheap vinyl in the legal vacuum of 1991–93. Russia’s pirate landscape was huge—most cassettes and a lot of CDs were pirated—while LPs stayed cheap and popular. Tropillo said he wasn’t paying labels, but he was sending royalties through Russia’s RAO. Basically, he was acting like “Robin Hood,” getting quality music to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it.
He said that sources weren’t always CDs:
“For Sonic Youth, we had the original American vinyl, so we dubbed from that. Sometimes we even got original studio tapes. Like, Warner Communications sent a bunch of masters for the Russian issue on professional reels at 38 ips. As for Zaideko and Solomon Burke, a Berlin company, Zenzor, gave me a batch of recordings to publish in Russia to get them out there.”
At the same time, AnTrop translated album and song titles, and issued booklets (gospels for Jesus Christ Superstar, Russian libretto, even comics) both to aid understanding and to ease censorship:
“No one had to, but I wanted people to at least understand the titles. Sometimes translating into Russian helped get things approved and relaxed censorship so people wouldn’t nitpick.”
Artwork “after” the originals
Because of the different rights that artwork had, sleeves were usually modified or re-created “in the style of” the originals by Yuri Trifonov, Nikolay Kibalchich and sometimes other artists. This was an approach Soviet institutions had used for years to justify domestic issues of foreign recordings. AnTrop’s art teams came up with some pretty convincing but altered covers to keep things moving with the releases.
Selected Bootleg Albums
Business mechanics and scale
They got around the 10% Soviet resale markup by bundling LPs with printed inserts, pricing them as a service rather than a resold good. So, JCS shipped with different booklets depending on the region. You could see Beatles titles like the White Album, Magical Mystery Tour, Help, Sgt. Pepper’s, Revolver, and Let It Be, as well as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Deep Purple’s Stormbringer, Led Zeppelin IV, and more. Often, the liner notes were translated. The number of reported runs per title was between 200,000 and 500,000. Later on, Tropillo estimated that the total number of copies across all the plants was in the tens of millions.
Parallel pressings and the Santa Records
By late 1992, designer Nikolai Kibalchich was handling production himself. He and Tropillo soon found out that Andrei Shendrik was pressing extra runs at Tashkent and Riga without permission, chasing profit over quality. Tropillo said he could only really influence Aprelevka; elsewhere, “my records were pressed without my knowledge, paying neither me nor the musicians.”
He was disillusioned, so he shut down new AnTrop LPs in the spring of 1993. Kibalchich then continued with Shendrik under the Santa Records logo, pushing out wide catalogs with shrinking quality and quantities as CDs took over. The last Santa LP was reportedly Paul McCartney’s All the Best (1995).
Why it ended
By 1994, the market had shifted decisively to compact discs, and the earlier cultural-educational logic of budget vinyl no longer held. Tropillo decided not to chase profit at all costs and backed off. Others were quick to fill shelves with clones that were getting cheaper and cheaper. He always saw the project as educational, not something to make money off of. And he didn’t make a quick buck off the LP boom:
“All the other plants beat my records without telling me, paying neither me nor my firm… My interest was enlightenment. If I’d gone after other goals, maybe nothing would’ve happened. I came up with the idea, and others capitalized on it after I was already in the game. I didn’t earn a dime, but I was happy that I was doing what I loved.”
© Artur Netsvetaev, interviews with Andrei Burlaka, Nikolay Kibalchich, Yuri Trifonov, Yasin Tropillo
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