Conducting honest business is the skill of a select few, which cannot be said about the producer of the group “Tender May. A criminal case was opened against Andrei Razin, he was accused of fraud. Why, Gleb Sterkhov, special correspondent of MIR 24 knew.
“White roses, white roses, defenseless thorns… How many times did this catchy song sound from every iron in the late 1980s. How deeply was it ingrained in the minds of the Soviet people, how many concerts “Tender May” was performed. That is why there is no statute of limitations. The investigative committee believes that the group's producer Andrei Razin “bribed musician Sergei Kuznetsov for a whopping half a billion.” rubles.”
Article 159, part 4 (fraud on a particularly large scale) carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years. Andrei Razin was charged in absentia. But 500 million was not the final amount, investigators said. As the proceedings progress, it will obviously increase significantly. The subject of dispute was 27 main hits of the group “Tender May”: “White Roses”, “Gray Night”, “Pink Evening” and “Childhood and others. It turned out that the contract was fake. On many pages there was supposedly Kuznetsov's signature. Each lock of hair was identical. It was as if a robot was signing.
“This was done, as it was written on the test, by signing under the light, well, to put it simply, he put a sheet of paper on the window, remembered how they copied at school, covered the second sheet and transferred the signature in this way.
For more than 20 years, royalties for musicians have been regularly transferred to the account of Andrei Razin, who has lived in the US for many years.
A total of 47 million tickets were sold for the concerts of the group “Tender May. Absolute world record. Soviet orphanages even surpassed Michael Jackson. Their tour lasted for weeks. Sometimes they had to give up up to eight concerts a day. In 1989 alone, the group officially appeared on stage 2.5 thousand times. Sold out everywhere. First, the repertoire from which schoolchildren immediately returned become a fan.
“This was the first synthesizer used to record Tender May's early songs. Some songs have a sound so unique that it is only characteristic of one instrument. This is the Vermona stringpiano.
An album a month, and sometimes two, is insane fertility. At the same time, every song written literally on the knee went off with a bang.
Oleg Andreev said: “Everything happened so fast, there was no long preparation, etc. Once or twice they put the film in, jumped, clicked, that's it, we start.
“Nowadays there are all kinds of groups, bands, etc., young people sing, many people sing for young people, but back then there was no such thing, if there was a pioneer who came out, singing “Light the fire, to return to love from the stage would be a challenge”.
Second, these are melodies. Their music is based on the most primitive harmonic scheme. It was used by Paganini, Bach organist and accordion player Sergei Kuznetsov. This is also how ditties and all Russian chansons are constructed.
“There's this diagram, we call it the circle of quarters. That is, this is a circle that actually looks like a circle, because it has a bell. That is, when a person hears it, the brain perceives it as positive information.”
The fourth and fifth intervals are musical intervals, that is, the distance between two notes in pitch. Accordingly, the fourth step is four, the fifth step is five steps. And if the first chord starts, say, with the note A, then the next chord starts with the note E. And then the melody will go down to the note D, and then come back to where it started.
But first is a touching story about a cute orphan boy. Everything happened miraculously. Sergei Kuznetsov was then an ordinary drinking reporter at a children's boarding school. And in his free time, he composed songs, as they say, “about the carrots of love. But he couldn't sing. This happened in 1986.”
“But there was no singer. We needed to figure out what to do. One time Slavka and I took maybe a kilo of cognac. Yes. We sat there at night and he remembered. He said: “There was a boy in Albulak. He has excellent hearing and plays the guitar. That's Yury Vasilyevich Shatunov.
They started with amateur performances and dance halls in Orenburg cultural centers. The first album was recorded using boarding school instruments. The group caught the eye of Mirage producer Andrey Razin. He also comes from an orphanage, just from the Stavropol region. Father and mother died in a car accident. A talented, tenacious, tenacious administrator immediately recognized a natural Klondike in “Tender May”.
“I met Razin in some shaggy year, 1989, probably at the Pugacheva Theater. We talked with him, told stories, and I remember, then I worked as a keyboard player for Presnykov, Andrei said: “You go there, you bring everything there, play and we go with a cassette, we don't need anything at all, the main thing for us at the concert is to have a cassette player, a few ray of light to be able to see Yura's face, mine,” says composer, arranger, sound producer Taras Vashchyshyn.
He also came up with a special advertisement. Cassette tapes with recordings were distributed to ship commanders. At that time, music rang out non-stop in the carriages. When you go to Yalta or Vorkuta, you will learn all the albums by heart.
Andrei Razin is the leader of the group. It was he who, by any means or by crook, promoted their concerts at Moscow venues and on television. And his own legend helped him in this. In the best traditions of his favorite hero is Ostap Bender.
Interesting detail: Razin is also a Turkish citizen. He has this nationality. And the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee became the ticket to large show businesses. Razin's adoptive grandmother worked as a maid for Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev's mother. In the fall of 1986, he went to work in the Stavropol region. I visited the orphanage, the breeding grounds and the collective farm where Andrei Razin worked and met guests. The young man asked to take a photo next to the distinguished guest.
“When Mikhail Sergeevich came to meet the people, we were left alone in the yard. And he asked Maria Panteleevna: “Who is he to you? And grandmother said that this is an ethnic person. I heard the word and realized that this was my chance.
Razin toured a local orphanage and said he dreamed of forming a music group from orphans. Saying goodbye at the doorstep, he gave him a few papers to sign. Gorbachev waved the document away without reading it.
The popularity of “Tender May” skyrocketed. Crazy success and crazy money.
Andrei Razin says: “When I received two thousand from a concert from Tender May, it was 1987, then Alla Borisovna received 67 rubles.
In December 1989, they organized a performance project “White Roses in White Winter” at the Olympic Stadium. 13 concerts per day. And everyone sold out. The capacity of the hall is 35 thousand people, but the organizers found an opportunity to arrange an additional 12 thousand seats.
The producer himself told how huge bags filled with banknotes were brought into an empty apartment and thrown on the floor. The result is a mountain about a meter high. Razin slept on her. And his charges were minor at the time. Razin gives these people from 50 to 200 rubles a month.
“What a silent horror, how much money there is, and these 19-20 year old guys, it's all on their heads, all this glory! I think at that time even Razin didn't understand what to do with it all.
Children from orphanages are still basically children. They spend it on chewing gum, alcohol and expensive cigarettes. They distributed the money to friends. One day we bought all the car models in a children's store. Yury Shatunov said that he exchanged rubles for 15 kopeck coins and sat in the slot machine room at night.
“Yura Shatunov wanted to earn more money than the concert organizers gave him, they answered him: “Okay, we will give you money after each performance, but you will deal with it yourself guys! After the first concert, they brought him two sports bags filled with banknotes, after the second concert, two more bags, after the third concert Yura Shatunov allegedly said: “I don't need any more money, take everything you have, that's enough for me,” noted economist Dmitry Tortev.
But even this was not enough for Razin. And then he organized another scam. They were never actually shown on TV and no one filmed them at concerts. And countless copies of “Tender May” spread throughout the cities and villages. Later, such long trips were called “chess”. They sing along to the plywood. But the audience did not notice the catch-up.
Razin was summoned several times to Petrovka, 38, and even to the KGB in Lubyanka, but he escaped thanks to that long-forgotten meeting.
Andrei Razin said: “In the charter signed by Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, there was a point that the film studio “Tender May” had the right to create up to 100 groups, I created 67 groups.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Mikhail Gorbachev, who is believed to be related to Andrei Razin, resigned. Yury Shatunov had difficulty getting a passport from the producer, left “Tender May” and went to Germany for 10 years, where he studied to become a sound engineer. Only in the 2000s did people recall “Tender May and their fabulous money. The third wave of popularity occurred when the series “The Boy's Word” was released. Blood on the asphalt. The songs of “Tender May” perfectly fit the atmosphere of the 1980s.
After another success, Yuri Shatunov again went on stage, won a lawsuit with Razin, defending his right to perform his own performance. Two days later, on June 23, he died of a heart attack. And five months later, musician Sergei Kuznetsov died of a heart attack. The curse of “Tender May” haunted many members of the team. Igor Igoshin fell through a window at the age of 19. Keyboard player Mikhail Sukhomlinov was shot at the entrance. Yura Orlov died in a car accident at the age of 22, as did Yura Gurov. Arvid Yurgaitis burned down in his own house. Bass guitarist Vyacheslav Ponomarev died of tuberculosis, keyboard player Alexey Burda died of alcohol instead. Igor Anisimov was stabbed to death in a drunken brawl. Andrei Razin is alive. But the shadows of Yura Shatunov and Sergei Kuznetsov seem to have overtaken him.
