Designers - Soviet Rock

The Artists Behind AnTrop’s Covers (Kibalchich & Trifonov)

Artur Netsvetaev — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 05:42:54 +0000

At first, AnTrop’s bootleg records looked like perfect copies of the originals. But a closer look revealed subtle — and sometimes not-so-subtle — differences. Some covers were slightly changed or had extra visual elements added. Others were completely redrawn.

How the redesigns were handled varied. There were a lot of ideas, some of which were great, some of which weren’t. But there weren’t enough skilled illustrators to make them happen. Two artists in particular became AnTrop’s go-to designers: Nikolai Kibalchich and Yuri Trifonov.

Even though they’re so important, these two men have managed to stay pretty much out of the spotlight. They don’t do interviews, they don’t have websites or emails, and they still use old push-button phones. Beyond that, they couldn’t be more different.

But why even do that? In the Soviet Union, it was technically legal to make copies of music, but not to copy the original cover art. As music journalist Andrei Burlaka explained:

“We had to change the artwork because music copyrights didn’t apply to the design. The design was separate. You could write “Recorded from a broadcast” or “From Kolya Vasin’s collection” for the music source, but that didn’t fly for the sleeves — the law didn’t allow it. So we decided to create our own covers, ‘based on’ the originals.”

This wasn’t just AnTrop’s thing. Before Tropillo, the state label Melodiya and other semi-official outfits had done similar things — releasing Western albums with heavily modified or generic covers. As the Melodiya staff later admitted, they had two options: release nothing, or release something altered, so that listeners in the USSR could at least have something.

Alexander Morozov, the producer and founder of Moroz Records, shared some thoughts on the matter. He says AnTrop’s releases were sort of in this legal gray area:

“The copyright law on authors’ and related rights didn’t come around until 1993. Before that, we technically didn’t have any obligations to anyone. After 1993, the law allowed reissuing material released before 1973, but even then you had to clear rights with the authors. I can’t say for sure if it was completely legal or not, though. But from a business perspective, it was a smart move.”

Redesigning the Covers

Nikolai Kibalchich

Kibaltchich and producer Andrei Troppillo first met during their army service. They’ve been close ever since. It was Kibaltchich who helped Troppillo move a five-ton press into a basement to start the first underground vinyl production in Leningrad. Later on, he worked as a designer at the same cultural building that housed Troppillo’s first studio, sometimes stopping by while Soviet rock legends were laying down tracks.

In our conversation, Kibalchich recalled the moment it all started:

“One day, Troppillo stopped by my first apartment. He saw that I had been redrawing record sleeves and labels. Why? Just for fun. Back then, people were obsessed with anything Western because we had nothing like it. We’d grab any pretty plastic bag we could find. People would just patch them up with tape so they could keep using them. That was just the norm back then — sort of a fetishism of the time.”

When Troppillo later started pressing records, he remembered Kibaltchich’s hobby and offered him paid work.

He called me and said, ‘Kolya, you used to redraw those covers — want to design some for me?’ I was working at a military plant at the time, earning 300 rubles a month, and here he was offering 600, plus extra pay for each cover. For me, it was like escaping from a life sentence at that factory.”

To mark his contributions, Kibalchich often signed his work with the initials NKO (Cyrillic: НКО), which Troppillo encouraged.

Selected albums, designed by Nikolai Kibalchich

Yuri Trifonov

Yuri Trifonov; Photo: Alexander Koryakov

Kibalchich was a practical guy, but Yuri Trifonov was more of a romantic. Trifonov is a lifelong Beatles collector and an “artist without formal training.” He had been drawing theater posters and logos when Kibaltchich invited him to collaborate with AnTrop.

“We didn’t have formal meetings to plan things,” Trifonov said. “Everyone just threw in their own ideas. Nikolai probably trusted me more than himself when it came to art, but he was way more into the production side than I ever was.”

Trifonov’s passion was — and still is — the Beatles. His apartment has gradually transformed into a shrine, packed with memorabilia, including a 90-kilogram bust of John Lennon.

Back in ’66, tape recorders were a rare luxury, but my neighbor across the hall had one. The older kids from the building would often hang out at his place. There was no drinking, no parties — just music. We didn’t really understand most of the song titles, but we memorized every Beatles album.

He only finished three covers and three label designs, but there were a lot more drafts that never made it to print. His design proposals for Plastic Ono Band and McCartney would’ve looked totally different from what was eventually released.

“I wanted the Beatles records to have covers that were totally unique — originals that had never existed before. I mentioned this to Troppillo. He thought about it for a minute and said, ‘People won’t recognize the records.’ But how could you not recognize the Beatles? It would have been way more interesting!”

Trifonov wasn’t in it for the money or a sense of mission, unlike Kibalchich:

“I did it because I’m passionate about it, not for the money. Back then, there were easier and more fun ways to make money. I never thought of myself as part of some great rock ‘n’ roll movement. I was just the artist carrying out the work. But it was fun. Anything to do with the Beatles was always fun for me.”

He never signed his covers, and he still finds that funny:

“Why would I? I was pretty happy with the work itself. I didn’t need to promote myself.”

Albums, designed by Yuri Trifonov

The Production Process

Unfortunately, almost none of the original sketches or mock-ups have survived. Everything was done in a hands-on, analog style: collage, cutouts, and hand lettering. Once the layout was approved, the physical mock-up went straight to production — and the artist never saw it again.

“I don’t know what happened to them,” Trifonov admits. “Maybe they’re in AnTrop’s archive, maybe they were just thrown out. It didn’t bother me back then. I got my records as payment — that was enough.”

Early attempts to design sleeves digitally were abandoned due to poor quality. The team switched to a more professional analog method using color slide film. Photographer Andrei Baranovsky handled the high-quality transfers, often for payment in hard currency.

“He was a pro with great equipment,” Kibaltchich recalls. “He’d make the slides, and then I’d take them to the Aprelevka plant in Moscow, where they had the best printing presses. That’s where the final covers were made.”

Since the USSR didn’t make professional-grade slide film, they had to import materials, often from East Germany, which made the process take a lot of time and money. But the results were unmatched.

Alexander Florensky — Artist & Designer

Artur Netsvetaev — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 04:24:18 +0000

Painter, illustrator, and co-founder of the St. Petersburg group “Mitki,” Alexander Florensky grew up on traded tapes, hosted an early Viktor Tsoi living-room show (which he taped), came up with imaginary LP sleeves for Kino, and brought a collage sensibility into animation. His memories show that the idea of “Beatles worship” was a myth and that there was a wider and truer Soviet listening world.

“Access was there if you really wanted it.”

His first exposures were the usual suspects—The Beatles, Jesus Christ Superstar, Uriah Heep, and later Pink Floyd. But what mattered wasn’t just one band; it was the whole infrastructure of desire. As he put it, “It was perfectly accessible—to anyone who wanted it.” The real unlock was a home tape recorder his mom finally got him when he was about fourteen. Before that, listening meant visiting friends; afterwards, a network appeared—people who would dub LPs to tape, or tape-to-tape.

“LPs were around, but for our age, they were pricey and hard to find. Tape was the ecosystem.”

When asked about the usual “we were all Beatles fanatics” story, Florensky disagrees. Yes, the Beatles were there, but there was more to it than that: Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, later Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk—whatever was on someone’s reels. He says that the closest thing to Western rock were Polish and Yugoslav bands touring officially. He doesn’t think it was life-changing musically, but he says it was invaluable because they were there, in the flesh.

Along with Western rock, he followed the singer-songwriter current that was off-limits: Vladimir Vysotsky (he remembers hearing him around 1972), then Alexander Galich. These weren’t just about aesthetics; there was a social and taboo element to it.

“With Galich, the hook was the social, the forbidden—and the talent.”

He also recalls Arkady Severny and émigré “chanson”—“white-guard flavor,” as he puts it—prized precisely because it was off-limits.

The Mitki and an early Tsoi tape

Mitki was an informal circle of artists, writers, and poets that included up to twenty members, with Vladimir Shinkaryov, Viktor Tikhomirov, Olga and AMitki was an informal group of artists, writers, and poets that included up to twenty members, with Vladimir Shinkaryov, Viktor Tikhomirov, Olga and Alexander Florensky, and Dmitry Shagin as key figures. They were inspired by earlier nonconformist painters and staged small shows, which were often banned, until the group solidified in 1984 after the release of Mitki, described by Vladimir Shinkaryov and drawn by Alexander Florensky. It had a playful philosophy, mixing irony, postmodernism, and a quiet refusal to cooperate with Soviet authority. They summed it up with the motto “Mitki don’t want to defeat anyone.”

By the early ’80s, small exhibitions moved from apartments to semi-legal venues under the Fellowship for Experimental Fine Arts, but censorship lasted until 1987. Researchers compare Mitki to Western hippie culture and American and European countercultural groups, but they also point out that its members have a lot of different ideas, even though they’re all part of the same story and they don’t have a leader.

Florensky had a pretty sweet setup by the mid-1980s. He had his own studio, no parents, and a phone, which made it a natural hub for the young Leningrad scene. He first heard Viktor Tsoi on a friend’s tape; not many people knew about him at the time. He invited Tsoi to play a living-room concert at the studio. Florensky recorded it on a single 60-minute cassette (he chose the cheaper Soviet tape over a 90-minute German one—”five rubles saved = two bottles of wine”). Tsoi sang for over an hour, but the last 30 minutes were lost.

“A historical concert—and I saved five rubles instead of buying the longer tape.”

He didn’t realize the tape’s value until after Tsoi’s death. He transferred it to a high-quality cassette and gave the original to Tsoi’s widow, Marianna, with sleeve notes and a designed CD package. The original master disappeared after a technician died, and Marianna passed away as well. Years later, Tsoi’s son Alexander digitized Florensky’s copy. Florensky promised not to publish online, but the disc he was hoping for never came out. He’s been true to his word.

“I promised Tsoi’s son not to publish it online. He never released it, and I still keep my promise.”

He believes the set includes two songs Tsoi often sang live but likely never recorded properly.

Working with Kino & Aquarium

Music connected the circle to Leningrad rock. Friends like Boris Grebenshchikov and Viktor Tsoi performed at early Mitki exhibitions, and Aquarium’s Triangle album was often played at shows. Later on, Grebenshchikov started working on soundtracks for Mitki films.

Alexander Florensky took cues from Peter Blake, David Hockney, and Terry Gilliam when he created the covers for Aquarium’s 10 Arrows and Thirst. They’re improvised, playful, and deliberately rough, which is a nice change from the polished precision of Andrei Usov.

Also, Florensky painted LP-sized gouache covers for Kino, not as official commissions but as a playful gesture: let’s pretend these albums already exist as records. At the time, the idea that Melodiya would publish Kino seemed crazy—”one minute before it became thinkable.”

From Krugozor to collage animation

Florensky says that the flexi-disc magazine Krugozor was a big influence on his musical taste and visual culture. He was into the strong art direction, eclectic imagery, and steady drip of new sounds.

He says his later animation style was influenced by The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine interludes and Terry Gilliam’s cut-out work for Monty Python: collage, inserts, playful typography. In the film project Mitkimayer, typographic sequences by collaborator and wife Olga Florenskaya weren’t just titles; they were animated gags, and a plasticine vignette became a standout.

“Disney-style wasn’t right for us. The collage and inserts were”

Underground vs. outsider

Is a “real artist” always an outsider? Florensky is blunt: most 1970s underground painters would have gladly had an official studio, cheap supplies, and orders—without ideological compromise. A lot of people turned it down because they didn’t want to compromise their integrity. Others made some tactical changes, like teaching, doing minor design work, or leading children’s circles, to make ends meet while continuing to paint on their own.

“They’d have loved a studio and cheap canvases—not the compromise that came with them.”

He mentions that official landscapes could show churches, but only if the cross was cropped by the frame—like a fig leaf to avoid “religious propaganda.”

For whom he draws

He’s always been more into the approval of certain elder artists than museums, fairs, or curator circuits. Biennales and market peaks aren’t reliable measures.

“Keep the Hermitage as the horizon; don’t measure yourself by a fair that’s forgotten in a week.”

How to judge the work (and why Russians can be harsher)

He points out that there’s still a lot of local respect for foreign “properness” — like how jeans and LP records were all the rage in the 70s, but now it’s like imports are “real” and anything made at home is seen as “provincial.” That psychology still affects how Russian audiences rate DIY sleeves or rough, hand-built editions.

He didn’t often work for pay, except for friends and literary projects he was passionate about (like Dovlatov). Two official posters (a circus bill and a ballet poster) are the exceptions, though. He did those as he would for himself, not to chase a client brief.

“I never took on what I don’t love. If it pays for what I’d do for free—fine. Otherwise, no.”

On AI and tools

AI is great for things like upscaling, translation, and compression, but it’s not so hot when it comes to taste and creativity. Computers have been a part of his workflow for decades, but he doesn’t see them as replacements for the originals on paper or canvas.

“From the outside it looks like me; in spirit it isn’t me.”

Systems change; conformity remains

Curators and fairs can become a new norm—like another Union of Artists, but with a different style. The oxygen is for those who don’t adjust.

“Structures change; conformity stays. A few people refuse—and that’s where the oxygen is.”

Modern projects: Alphabets

Jerusalem’s alphabet

Alexander Florensky’s alphabet series didn’t start in his hometown of St. Petersburg, but in Jerusalem. The idea came from his friend, the poet Mikhail Korol. Korol would write a poem for each letter, and Florensky would illustrate it. Eight months later, Korol sent all 33 poems—and even bought Florensky a ticket to Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Alphabet was the start of a long-term personal project.

After that, he created the Tbilisi Alphabet while he was staying in Georgia for a while. These books were different from the usual commercial commissions because they started informally. They were just friends working together, with no contracts or publishers. Later, a patron covered the cost of the print run, and the book was published locally.

Peterburg’s alphabet

After those projects, Florensky finally returned to his hometown. The Petersburg Alphabet came out with support from Timofey Markov’s boutique press and Pulkovo Airport, which put large prints of his playful illustrations in its new terminal. That exposure led to another invitation—to create a Voronezh Alphabet.

Montenegro alphabet

Over time, the series expanded: a Montenegro Alphabet, supported by curator Marat Gelman; a New York Alphabet, developed with his Voronezh publisher; and others. Each book follows the same compact format, designed to be approachable and affordable—”like a schoolbook you can carry under your arm,” Florensky says.

Even though there are more and more cities on the list, the artist sees each city as a personal exploration. His drawings often highlight hidden corners rather than well-known landmarks: quiet courtyards in St. Petersburg, a remote bridge in Montenegro, or a forgotten street in Tbilisi. “It’s all about what I like,” he says. “If that matches a guidebook, great. If not, that’s fine too.”

Research is as important as drawing. For Montenegro, Florensky spent weeks traveling the country, guided by locals and friends, photographing, sketching, and collecting details—even down to lettering styles and local idioms. He worked exclusively in Cyrillic, keeping the script alive by preserving it in its original form, even as it slowly gives way to Latin letters.

Today, the alphabet books form a series that makes sense as a whole, with the same size and concept, but each one is still unique. “Every city is different,” Florensky says. “And every time, I discover something new—even in places I thought I knew like the back of my hand.”

Key facts

Name: Alexander Florensky (Александр Флоренский)
Known for: Co-founder of the “Mitki” art movement; book and album cover design; animation art direction; prolific illustrator.
City: Leningrad / St. Petersburg
Intersections with music: Early tape-trading of Western rock; friendships with Aquarium and Kino; private 1984-ish studio concert by Viktor Tsoi (recorded to cassette); hand-painted, LP-sized mock covers for Kino albums during perestroika.

Timeline

Early 1970s (age ~12–16): First wave of Western music via friends’ homes and, later, his own tape recorder: The Beatles, Jesus Christ Superstar, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Alice Cooper; later Pink Floyd, eventually Kraftwerk. Access was mostly reel-to-reel, then compact cassettes; actual LPs were rare/expensive.
Parallel Soviet/Russian stream: Deep impact from Vysotsky (first heard c. 1972), then Galich; also underground favorites like Arkady Severny and émigré “Russian chanson.”
Live “near-West”: Polish and Yugoslav touring bands in Leningrad (e.g., Czerwone Gitary and others) offered one of the few legal “rock-adjacent” live experiences.
1983–1984: Meets the emerging Leningrad rock scene; hears a then-unknown Viktor Tsoi on tape; hosts an intimate Tsoi concert in his studio and records it to a 60-minute Soviet cassette—accidentally cutting off the last half-hour.
Late 1980s: Paints full-size, LP-format Kino cover “prototypes” (gouache), as if their albums already existed on vinyl—equal parts fandom and joke about the still-impossible idea of Melodiya issuing them.
1990s–2000s: Animation and book design; collage-driven style aligned with Yellow Submarine interludes and Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cut-outs.

Andrey Usov: Photographer and Cover Designer of Soviet Rock

Artur Netsvetaev — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 14:26:21 +0000

In the Soviet underground, album art wasn’t just for show—it was a key part of getting music out there. Striking covers and band portraits helped bootleg reels travel, stick in people’s minds, and spark word-of-mouth. Usov was one of the main people responsible for shaping that visual language.

Table of Content [hideshow]

Early years
Design philosophy & influences
DIY sleeves in a no-design environment
Aquarium, Zoopark, and AnTrop
Learning pro technique by necessity
Beyond the Rock Club

He was a close friend and collaborator of the Leningrad Rock Club crowd, and he photographed and designed most of Aquarium’s and Zoopark’s releases recorded at Andrei Tropillo’s AnTrop studio. Before the Rock Club was even a thing, Usov was jamming with future Aquarium members and capturing the scene with a practical, hands-on approach that matched the era’s all-analog limitations.

Early years

Usov’s musical awakening hit in the mid-1950s when he caught Finnish radio and heard “Rock Around the Clock.” Back in ’58, his grandpa gave him a Lubitel camera—the USSR’s version of the Voigtländer Brillant—and he got into serious experimentation. He studied French and linguistics but wanted to be a musician, so he tried violin until an injury forced him to stop. Then, at 14, he taught himself seven-string guitar. “I tuned it like a six-string and played solos. I didn’t know chords, so I played it like a violin,” he recalls. Later on, he picked up the flute (Jethro Tull was a big inspiration for him).

He got the nickname “Willi” while he was in the military and used it professionally to avoid putting his full name on covers (remember, his work was illegal!). After performing in an army ensemble, he formed a band with the knowingly absurd title “The Association of Those Mourning the Winter Holidays,” which in winter flipped to “…the Summer Holidays.” The group was around until 1978 and included some of the scene’s most prominent members, like Dyúsha Romanov and Seva Gakkel, at different times. The steady gig income funded a growing collection of western LPs, and with it—an education in sleeve design.

Design philosophy & influences

For Usov, good art depends on craft. He admired sleeves that made technical choices work hard for meaning and mood. Among his touchstones:

Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water: “cheeky, grainy, hyper-enlarged—brilliantly done.”
U2 – The Joshua Tree (Anton Corbijn): “a photographer with a real black; that deep, impenetrable black stunned me.”

DIY sleeves in a no-design environment

Back in the 1970s, when the USSR was still around, top-notch graphic design and photography were mostly in foreign magazines, not local ones. Usov subscribed to or hunted down England, Nous les garçons et les filles, America, and others. He’d often take clippings of logos, ads, and layouts from Hungarian, German, Polish, and Czech magazines and stick them on Melodiya sleeves, then seal everything under film. It was a practical solution and a visual manifesto: if the system wouldn’t provide modern design, the underground would make it.

Aquarium, Zoopark, and AnTrop

Usov’s sleeves for Aquarium featured surreal, graphic, and staged imagery, paying homage to Angus McBean and Storm Thorgerson without outright copying them. Titles and visuals were added after the record was tracked, and they were sometimes random at first, then they got more in sync with the music.

Boris Grebenshchikov got Usov into the heart of Leningrad’s rock scene. There was a big book of LP-sized cover reproductions that was passed around among friends (think Grateful Dead-level iconography). Along with foreign magazines, it gave Usov a solid foundation in pacing, grid, and sequence.

When Grebenshchikov and Mike Naumenko decided to record the acoustic set “All Brothers Are Sisters” (1978), they asked Usov to create a proper reel-box design, not just a title scribble — they were the first musicians in the USSR who wanted a specific album cover!

He did a sunset shoot with a bronze Buddha figurine held between the two musicians in profile. It was quietly transgressive in an officially secular state, but safe within a tiny private run of 10–20 copies.

“We lived a separate cultural life,” Usov says of that late-Soviet underground. “If you wanted to, you could avoid the ‘official’ Soviet world entirely.”

In 1982, he also made the first logo for the Antrop studio.

Learning pro technique by necessity

Usov used to be an airport mechanic, and then he got a staff photography job at an institute, where he got access to professional gear and materials. He was a master of color printing, large-format, and flat films. He even repurposed industrial black-and-white stock—meant for high-contrast technical work—into subtle halftone masters by controlling chemistry. He made master transparencies combining images and text, then printed small runs on 13 cm reel boxes (slightly larger than a CD). When LPs were later issued, those masters scaled up cleanly.

Each sleeve was made by hand. First, the master was printed onto photographic paper. Then, it was developed, dried, trimmed, and mounted. All of this was done at home, in a closet, without ventilation. No computers; just cut, paste, reshoot, repeat. It was like endurance art and production design all in one.

“We wanted to make rock seriously—music and presentation both. We overdid it a bit,” Usov jokes. “Now those underground reels sit on my shelves as heavy German-pressed vinyl.”

Beyond the Rock Club

Usov kept a broad practice. In the 1990s, he worked in film (casting stills, unit photography), did commercial shoots, and in 1995 mounted what was billed as Russia’s largest photo exhibition (488 prints). He documented Paul McCartney’s visit to Russia in the 2000s, and recently he’s been doing books, lectures, and workshops.

He’s not tied to any specific tools. A lot of his iconic photos were taken with a cheap Lubitel camera, and some of the stuff he’s shown recently was shot with a basic digital compact. This shows that the way you do things and what you’re trying to achieve is more important than the gear you use.