By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - Reverence for Russia’s leaders, be they czars, general secretaries or presidents, has never come easily to Yuri Shevchuk. A bespectacled, slightly graying rock star, Mr. Shevchuk has spent much of the last three decades growling into a microphone in an effort, he says, to awaken in his compatriots a passion to break from their long history of bowing to heavy-handed authority.

These days, at 53, Mr. Shevchuk remains a guttural voice of defiance, just as he was when he began dodging Soviet censors by holding secret concerts in apartments throughout Russia in the early 1980s. But now he denounces Vladimir V. Putin’s government in his packed shows and openly scorns other musicians he accuses of selling out.

In June, he put his preaching into practice, stunning Russians by making an impromptu speech against official abuses during a meeting with Mr. Putin . He denounced abuse of power, restrictions on free speech and the “rich dukes with their privileges.”


“The only way
forward is making
everyone equal
before the law.”


“The only way forward is making everyone equal before the law,” he said. Mr. Putin snapped back, defending the police, but also the people’s right to demonstrate against the government. The confrontation was shown on government- controlled television, and the video put on Mr. Putin’s Web site .

In his St. Petersburg recording studio , Mr. Shevchuk spoke of a 1,000-year-old split between Russia’s elite and everyone else. Mr. Putin, Russia’s paramount leader, and the country’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, are just the latest incarnation of the aloof and disconnected authority that has stymied Russian society , Mr. Shevchuk said.

Mr. Shevchuk was first drawn to rock music as a way to escape the morass of 1970s Soviet Russia, the Brezhnev era of stagnation. “The sound of the electric guitar with fuzz freed our generation from this darkness and slavery,” he said. “We sought out the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin and Van Morrison, and we were thankful for every song because it was fresh.

It was the energy of modern times.” In 1980, he founded DDT, a band that ultimately became a mainstay of the perestroika-era rock scene in St. Petersburg, though it did not play its first public concert until 1987, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev began easing the stultifying restrictions of Soviet rule.

With new freedoms, Russians got economic collapse, rampant corruption and criminality, two wars in the separatist southern region of Chechnya, and a string of deadly terrorist attacks born of those conflicts. The chaos led to the rise of Mr. Putin . Mr. Shevchuk and other musicians describe a kind of soft censorship on performers that accompanied Mr. Putin’s rise to power and has continued under President Medvedev.

Mr. Shevchuk says his refusal to conform has cost him. Though he retains a fairly large fan base, his concerts are rarely televised. He has accused radio stations of censoring his songs - a recent tune that includes the line “When the oil runs out, our president will die” is rarely played. Whatever Mr. Shevchuk’s popularity, Mr. Putin is Russia’s biggest celebrity, and no amount of criticism has eroded his support.

Mr. Shevchuk acknowledged that his influence eroded since the perestroika days. His latest project will capture some of this frustration. “The working title is ‘Before the Flood,’ ” he said. “But now I am thinking of a new name: ‘Tomorrow Will Be Different.’ They are both the same, but in the second name there is more hope.”