Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

==== The 1998 Russian financial crisis obliterated many cultural projects overnight. Galleries shuttered. Publishing dried up. The Whitney’s traveling Red Silence exhibition was canceled mid-tour in St. Petersburg. ====

But amid the collapse, something curious happened: sales of Yakob’s recordings increased in Europe and Japan, where his music came to represent not just dissident suffering, but a kind of Soviet spiritual clarity—angular, brutal, and unflinchingly honest.

A new generation of Russian artists and intellectuals, raised without real memory of the Soviet Union, began to reinterpret the Gershovitzes, particularly Yakob and Franka, as symbols of pure Russian artistry uncorrupted by ideology—ironically reversing their actual history.