LAD (Russian: ладъ, often written as “LAD’”) was a Moscow-based company connected to Melodiya—the USSR’s state record label—and its international broker Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga (“Mezhkniga,” literally “International Book”). By the late 1980s, Melodiya had started ordering licenses for current international rock releases through Mezhkniga. This was a deal with Western labels where they exchanged rights.

According to Mezhkniga’s website (as of 2025), LAD was set up in the perestroika era as a joint-stock company to record Russian artists domestically and then assign overseas distribution rights via Olympia, a UK-based firm created for that purpose. As perestroika got going, foreign-rights dealings got pretty chaotic. The USSR didn’t really have a handle on “neighboring rights” (related rights) until Russia’s 1993 copyright law set up a legal framework.

Legality vs. the slide into gray areas

If you read between the lines, it looks like LAD’s path is similar to Russkiy Disk’s. Over time, some unofficial (pirate) pressings seem to have slipped through under the LAD umbrella. That said, the headline releases look properly licensed. The jackets matched the originals, the dead-wax carried the original matrix references, and the sound was close to contemporary European issues—even if the vinyl compound itself was typically lower grade than Western pressings.

How it fit alongside Melodiya

Producer Alexander Morozov says that Melodiya kept making music under license (like Paul McCartney’s stuff), but their main focus stayed on classical music. Even before the 1990s, they put out some Soviet rock and a few foreign songs too. LAD became its own thing as cooperatives popped up all over the place. It had a tape library and a recording studio, but internal disputes dragged on in court while Melodiya itself began to fracture. Pressing plants and retail “record houses” went their separate ways—Aprelevsky and others basically had to fend for themselves as the old system fell apart.

LAD had a catalog, so it tried to make money from its library. But there was no single rights owner, and the materials were all over the place. The engineers working on the production side at LAD didn’t have much of a relationship with foreign labels, so a lot of Russian operators started flying to MIDEM in Cannes to buy licenses in person. Italian pop was especially popular back then (Riccardo Fogli is a good example).

Notable releases

LAD’s most visible titles included three Dire Straits albums, among them the then-new On Every Street (1991). Back in 1992, Russian papers pointed out that Brothers in Arms and Communiqué—already hits with Soviet listeners—sold even better.

Other big names on the list were Yello’s Baby, albums by Supertramp (the Russian original lists “Superstamp,” probably a typo for Supertramp), and Sting. The packaging was similar to the originals, the matrix numbers matched the source references, and the audio quality was pretty close to European pressings, even though the vinyl wasn’t as good.

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LAD was a licensing company that was around during the perestroika era. It connected Melodiya’s old structures with the new market economy. It also released several Western games with full licenses that reached Russian buyers with a presentation that was almost original, even though the broader rights situation was still legally unclear and operationally chaotic until the post-1993 reforms.

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© Artur Netsvetaev, interview with Alexander Morozov