Troitsky: “The original meaning of Russian rock is lost now.” Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

The talk in sprawling Fulton 511 was billed as “Let’s Twist Again: The Traumatic Saga of Russian Rock Music,” a title no doubt meant to attract the attention of American college students. But only a handful of listeners turned out on that unseasonably cold April day. Elena Lapitsky, a lecturer in Russian language, brought several students from her “Practice of Russian Speech” class, hoping to share with them some of the music she remembered from her youth in Latvia. Most of the rest of the 11-strong audience spoke to one another in Russian.

The guest lecturer, a trim man with close-cropped graying hair and fashionable salt-and-pepper stubble, was the veteran rock DJ and critic Artemy Troitsky, one of Russia’s first and best-known pop-culture writers. “Troitsky’s a living legend where I come from,” said Timur Zyapparov later. A student at the Graduate School of Social Work and a native of Kazan, Russia, Zyapparov had come for the chance to see the celebrity in person. “I just could not believe my eyes,” he said. “He’s been covering Russian rock music since it began.”

Troitsky made his name in the early 1970s when he became the first rock DJ in Russia, spinning records for an audience at a Moscow State University café. Over the next three decades, he promoted and chronicled rock and roll (his 1975 story for Rovesnik, the official Soviet youth journal, on the British group Deep Purple is considered a landmark), even as the Soviet government forbade rock concerts, prohibited the music’s distribution, and, through censorship, denied the existence of Russian offshoots.

“I remember his articles from when I was in high school in Moscow, when Russian rock was an underground scene,” said Maxim D. Shrayer, professor of Russian and English and the chair of Boston College’s Slavic and Eastern languages department, which sponsored the lecture. Shrayer, who left Moscow in 1987 at the age of 20, introduced Troitsky and later spoke about his critical role in capturing the movement’s history. “Russian rock during the Soviet years was a power tool of subversion and resistance and the government literally wanted no record of it,” he said.

Troitsky’s talk was the second in what the department plans will be a series of visits by distinguished figures of post-Soviet culture and media. In October 2006 the political analyst Evgeny Kiselev, former chief correspondent of NTV, Russia’s once-independent TV station, spoke about the political war in Chechnya and the corruption of the press in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“There is a certain serious stereotype of Russia and its high culture that people carry in the West, and it doesn’t include things like pop culture,” Shrayer said a few days after Troitsky’s visit. “We hope the [lecture series] will show students that Russia is not just about great novels.”

Troitsky, 52, belongs to the first generation to grow up with Russian rock. Young Russians fell in love with rock music in the early 1960s with the emergence of the Beatles, he told the audience. Beatles songs, “a hybrid of American electric music with rock and roll drive and a European music very melodic with beautiful harmonic vocals,” were more appealing to Russians than rhythm-centric American rock.

Russian bands started off covering Western rock songs, and by the mid-1960s were writing their own material. But according to Troitsky, Russian rock, with its minimalist mix of acoustic guitars and soft beats paired with impassioned lyrics, is not really rock in the Western sense of the word. “It has never been especially sexy, nor funky, nor energetic,” he said. Rather, it reflects a traditional cultural taste for poetry and “schmaltzy . . . melodic [songs] you can sing along to, especially if you’re drunk and [sitting] around the table.”

In the United States, rock and roll was rebellious—it was black music introduced to a white culture in a segregated society and it emerged alongside new ideas about sex and race. But in Russia, Troitsky said, the rebellion was more basic, driven by a thirst for cultural freedom and an urge to stray from the strict dictates of Soviet society. In the 1950s and early 1960s in America, “the official dogma had been, ’sex is sinful.’ In the Soviet Union, the common understanding was that ’sex doesn’t exist,’” he said to a swell of laughter.

Although Russian rock rarely criticized the establishment overtly, the Soviet government frowned upon its Western roots and “negative” subject matter: the problems of everyday life, drugs, alcohol, loneliness, betrayal, alienation. The music was never outlawed, but authorities kept a tight rein: Only musicians approved and registered by the state—classical musicians, opera singers, jazz and folk musicians who sang about love and vitality—could perform in concert halls or record on the state-owned record label. And so, Russian bands released their songs on magnitizdat recordings—reel-to-reel dubs of bootleg quality. Western rock records, sold only on the black market, were sometimes distributed on discarded X-ray plates—plastic photographs of bones imprinted with record grooves.

Through the early 1980s, bands performed in scattered canteens, small bars, clubs, and student dorms—concerts the government tolerated, but made difficult. The musicians could not publicize their performances; singers were required to submit their lyrics beforehand to censors.

For Elena Lapitsky, Troitsky’s recollections opened a door back into life in the U.S.S.R. Occasionally, if bands ignored local censors, or if the crowd numbers swelled, she said later, their electricity was pulled midsong. “When I was in high school in the 1970s, there were huge illegal rock concerts in the woods,” she said. “Sometimes, police would shut [the concerts] down or take people into custody.”

Troitsky described how by the early 1980s rock and roll had nonetheless swept the country. Soviet authorities tried to take control by opening a state-run rock club in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). All live performances in the rest of the country—and any articles written about rock—were banned. Troitsky’s writings reached their audience through underground samizdat publications—magazines typed on carbon paper and passed from hand to hand.

Troitsky peppered his talk with music video clips of rock bands from each of the decades he described—though the videos themselves, he reminded the audience, weren’t made until the post-Soviet era, when Gorbachev’s perestroika loosened the strictures on Russian rock along with the rest of Soviet culture. The hushed acoustics and steady beats of Machina Vremeni (Time Machine) filled the room, and later the crooning of Akvarium (Aquarium)—famous artists in Russia who have little name recognition elsewhere. Some audience members nodded or cheered softly when favorite bands appeared.

At the end of the lecture, Troitsky took questions. Zyapparov asked about the current state of Russian rock. “Technically it’s still alive,” Troitsky told him, but with the old establishment brought down, “the original meaning of Russian rock is lost now.”

Alexei Colin, a Harvard freshman and native of Moldova who had taken two buses in the rain to hear the lecture, asked Troitsky about his experience working and playing music in his current job with a Russian radio network. “I listen to him at least an hour a week on the Web and I extremely love him,” Colin said while waiting in line to speak one-on-one with Troitsky. He paused, trying to overhear the journalist’s conversation in Russian with the students in front of him. “I didn’t recognize Troitsky’s voice until I heard him say some words in Russian. Now, it’s amazing—the voice of Russian rock music is right here in the room.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg