Most of the technically complex goods in the Soviet Union were copied from the Europeans, Americans and Japanese. In rare cases it was licensed, like Zhiguli cars, but often it was simply disassembled and rebuilt on Soviet components, like Yamaha HP-1 headphones, which were called TDS-5 (I owned both, USSR is a cheap one).

Vintage Soviet-era headphones on wooden table, symbolizing the roots of Soviet rock music history.
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In the case of records, and specifically Melodiya, it was much the same. But the deeper I dug, the more ridiculous the official story seemed. 

What’s Wrong With Melodiya

If you look at wikipedia or other typical sources, you’ll see the same thing everywhere: Melodiya was founded in 1964, the biggest company, a monopolist, wow! BTW, recently they released a book about their records and right in the announcement the unknown author again says that «”Melodiya” was the main and the only record label in the Soviet Union». They omits only a couple of details. 

First, how did the largest record production company emerge from nothing? Russian Wikipedia article cautiously specifies that it was “based on existing factories”. They built factories, I guess? No way. Further a little less carefully they write “nationalized”, but, of course, do not specify how exactly. In general, briefly about the factories that suddenly became “Melodiya”:

Then, at the time of the unification of plants in ’64 and for some time after, there were a lot of small enterprises in the Union, producing their own records, which then simply closed down. Melodiya and that’s it.

By the way, Melodiya, which has been selling its archive of classics to the West for the last 20 years, was once again resold in 2020 for a fraction of its real value through a strange (as always in Russia) government tender. In addition to the book, the Melodiya website sells a T-shirt, a panama and a bag as a merchandise.

The Aprelevsky factory now “produces socks and paper forms for the exams”.

Author: Artur Netsvetaev