Каскад at Bagram: VIA Music and the Compression Ratio of Sincerity

In 1988, a band called Каскад played a concert at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Someone recorded it. The recording survived the withdrawal, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the chaos of the 1990s. Now you can find it on obscure Russian music sites, sandwiched between other artifacts of wars that no longer make sense to anyone who didn’t fight them.

The sound quality is what you’d expect from a field recording in a warzone. The applause between songs is sparse - these are tired men, not a concert crowd. The songs themselves are simple: acoustic guitars, maybe a keyboard, voices that crack on the high notes. Twenty-five tracks, about an hour and a half total.

It’s one of the strangest and most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.

To understand what Каскад was, you need to understand VIA.

VIA stands for вокально-инструментальный ансамбль - vocal-instrumental ensemble. It was the Soviet Union’s answer to Western rock music, which was officially decadent and corrupting but also undeniably popular. The compromise: state-approved bands playing state-approved venues, with lyrics vetted by cultural committees.

The result was something genuinely weird. VIA bands had to sound enough like Western pop to satisfy audiences who’d heard smuggled Beatles records, but they couldn’t sound too Western or the censors would shut them down. They had to be optimistic - socialist realism demanded optimism - but they couldn’t be saccharine or nobody would listen.

What emerged was this strange hybrid. Take the Beach Boys’ harmonies, strip out the California sunshine, add minor keys and lyrics about collective farms or space exploration or the dignity of labor. The production was often surprisingly good - the Soviets had talented engineers and musicians, even if they couldn’t get their hands on a Fender Stratocaster. The melodies were catchy in ways that bypassed ideology entirely.

Most VIA music has aged poorly. It sounds like what it was: a compromise, a workaround, music made under constraints that no longer exist. But some of it - the stuff that pushed against the boundaries, that smuggled genuine emotion past the censors - still resonates.

The Afghan War created its own musical tradition.

Officially, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was an act of internationalist solidarity, helping a fraternal socialist government resist imperialist aggression. Officially, Soviet soldiers were heroes fulfilling their sacred duty. Officially, everything was going fine.

Unofficially, everyone knew it was a disaster. The soldiers knew it first. They wrote songs about it - not the official songs about glory and sacrifice, but the other kind. Songs about fear, about boredom, about the particular quality of light in the Hindu Kush. Songs about friends who didn’t make it home. Songs that couldn’t be published or broadcast but spread anyway, hand to hand, tape to tape.

This was афганская песня - Afghan song. The genre had roots in the earlier tradition of авторская песня (author’s song), the Soviet equivalent of the singer-songwriter movement. Bards like Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava had pioneered the form: one voice, one guitar, lyrics that said things the official culture couldn’t say. The Afghan veterans took this tradition and gave it teeth.

Каскад was somewhere between VIA and авторская песня. They had the ensemble format, the harmonies, the occasional keyboard flourish. But the lyrics were pure soldier’s poetry - specific, vernacular, unsentimental. Songs about convoys and ambushes. Songs about the road from Kabul to Bagram. Songs about waiting.

The concert recording opens with a piece called “Предисловие” - Preface. It’s five and a half minutes of the band explaining why they’re there, what they’re trying to do. The music underneath is gentle, almost pastoral. The voice is calm.

Then comes “Пусть память говорит” - Let Memory Speak. The title tells you everything. These are men who know they’re living through something that will need to be remembered, that the official version will not be accurate, that someone needs to get it down while the details are still fresh.

The setlist moves through the geography of the war. “Хост” is about Khost, in the southeast. “Баграмская дорожка” is about the road to Bagram. “Зеленая зона” - the Green Zone - is about the irrigated lowlands where the fighting was worst. Each song maps a place onto an emotion.

Halfway through, a bard named Alexander Minaev joins them for six songs. His voice is rougher, less polished. The songs are more personal. “Где-то за Салангом” - Somewhere Beyond Salang - is about the Salang Pass, the main supply route from the Soviet Union, the road everyone had to travel to get in or out. “Мы уходим” - We’re Leaving - is about exactly what it sounds like.

The concert ends with that song. We’re leaving. By February 1989, they were gone.

What strikes me most is what’s missing.

There’s no irony. No distance. No protective layer of cool. These are men singing sincerely about their experiences, in public, in front of their peers. The emotions are on the surface: grief, fear, dark humor, love for the men beside them. When something is sad, it sounds sad. When something is absurd, they let the absurdity speak for itself.

This is the thing that’s been lost.

Western popular music used to have this. Listen to Townes Van Zandt, to early country, to blues. There’s a directness there, an emotional availability, that’s almost impossible to find now. Van Zandt could sing about waiting for a train and make you feel the weight of every choice that led to that platform. The specificity was the point.

Here’s a test I like: take an artist’s entire catalog, feed it to an LLM, and ask it to synthesize the core message. What do you get?

For Townes Van Zandt, you might get something about roads that lead nowhere good, love that costs more than you have, the particular silence of a room after someone’s left. You’d need paragraphs. You’d still miss things.

For Drake - fifteen years, hundreds of millions of dollars, cultural dominance - you get: “I started from the bottom. I’m lonely at the top. Women want me but don’t understand me. My old friends changed. I’m emotionally unavailable but it’s because I care too much. Toronto.”

Five sentences on rotation. That’s the compression ratio of modern sincerity.

Soviet VIA music never developed that armor. Maybe because it was already operating under external constraints; the censors forced a kind of sincerity by making certain forms of cleverness impossible. Maybe because Russian culture has different norms around emotional expression. Maybe just because the stakes were real. Hard to be ironic about a war that’s killing your friends.

Каскад at Bagram is pure sincerity. It’s men singing about what they’ve seen, what they’ve done, what they’re afraid of. The recording quality is bad. The performances are imperfect. It doesn’t matter. The thing they were trying to capture is there, on tape, still audible thirty-five years later.

The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989. Fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers had died. The Afghan government they’d been propping up collapsed three years later. The whole thing was pointless, or at least that’s how it looked from the outside.

But history has a way of rhyming. Bagram Air Base would become famous again, under different occupiers, in a different war that ended the same way. The songs the Americans sang there - if they sang at all - probably sounded different. More ironic, maybe. More distant.

I don’t know what happened to the men of Каскад. The internet has scattered information - some names, some later recordings, the usual gaps and silences of lives lived outside the Western spotlight. The recording survives. The songs survive.

“Пусть память говорит.” Let memory speak.

It’s still speaking, if you know where to listen.