Alexei "Polkovnik" Khrynov (6 April 1965 – 12 September 2008) was a Nizhny Novgorod rock musician, bard, and author-performer of urban romance songs. A host on "Russkoye Radio" and "Radio Shanson" in Nizhny Novgorod, and the face of the "Kayf-Klub" vodka brand.
He died of heart failure. He is buried at the Maryina Roshcha Cemetery.
The Nature of the Phenomenon
A folk bard of Nizhny Novgorod.
He loved a joke about himself: "Damned if I know who that is on stage, but he's got Chizh on bass."
Biography
Text credit: Insurgent.ru/
Early Years
Alexei Khrynov was born on 6 April 1965 in the town of Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod Region. In early childhood the family moved to The City of Gorky.
At school Alyosha became keen on rock, though mostly as a listener. He had plenty to listen to – Khrynov's father was a music lover who constantly re-recorded things from his enormous collection – from the Beatles to Vysotsky – onto countless "Dnepr" and "Tembr" tape recorders (in the best years, Alyosha's family had about seven of them at home).
Khrynov started singing and writing songs back in school, and in the tenth grade he joined a school band. A little later he sang with the band "Bitoye Steklo" ("Broken Glass"), "working" in the style of "Mashina Vremeni" ("Time Machine"). He also wrote songs in that vein, passing some of them off as unknown songs by Makarevich.
The Origin of the Nickname "Polkovnik"
Lyosha Khrynov became "Polkovnik" ("Colonel") at 17, right after enrolling at the local Gorky Polytechnic. Right after enrolling, on 2 September 1982, their entire year – two groups of 25 people – was sent out "for potatoes" (the harvest). Since the automotive faculty was almost entirely male (three girls for fifty men), everyone drank hard before the work began. They got acquainted right there over the table. It was then that the fairly drunk Khrynov struck up a friendship with Lyosha Parchevsky. Lyosha was about twice as broad as Khrynov, and could easily do a bridge, a swallow stance, or drop into a full split. In fact, a junior USSR judo championship had left its mark on Parchevsky. And so, in the course of the conversation, Lyosha decided to make himself memorable to Khrynov and company, and for some reason dropped into a full split.
Khrynov remembered the split well, but by morning the judoka's name had completely slipped his mind. They were put to work along a furrow ploughed by a tractor, with a slow-moving potato truck running alongside. Khrynov looked at the truck, and the comparison to a marshal's car at a parade stuck in his head. As for the mud in the furrow, Alyosha thoroughly disliked it. But the guy quickly found a way out, offering the "future engineers" a division of labour – he would carry the heavy buckets, while they "dug around in this crap". On his first trip carrying buckets, Khrynov had only just thought he'd landed the best job of all, when he suddenly spotted someone who had landed an even better one – the guy receiving the buckets. It turned out to be yesterday's "splits guy". For the life of him, Khrynov could not remember the receiver's name.
But while drunk they had already managed to hug and kiss each other's tipsy faces, Russian-style. Naturally, after that it felt awkward to ask his name. But he still needed to call out to him – the "splits guy" was clearly looking the other way, not noticing Khrynov at all. And then there was that thing about the marshal's car… The right phrase came to Lyosha on its own: "Hey, marshal! Take the buckets!"
The "splits guy" turned around, took the buckets, tipped out the potatoes, and paused for a moment. That morning, plenty of people were suffering from amnesia. Parchevsky, too, thought it over only briefly – tossing the bucket back to Khrynov, he pronounced: "Here you go, Colonel!"
The nickname stuck instantly – and as it happened, nobody remembered Khrynov's own name either. In the end even his former classmates adopted the new nickname. Polkovnik's actual army rank was captain – he left the reserves as a captain of the Soviet Army's tank forces.
First Performances
At the Polytechnic, Polkovnik was actively involved in theatre and even earned a director's diploma.
In 1983 Khrynov first heard BG (Boris Grebenshchikov) and his band "Akvarium". His own musical output was subjected to drastic revision as a result. After this reflection, his work took on a distinctive and recognisable style of its own. Polkovnik's musical signature became a blend of rock and folk motifs, while in his lyrics good-natured humour was interwoven with sharp satirical jabs, seasoned with finely observed sketches of everyday life.
In 1985 he visited Piter (St. Petersburg) for the first time with some student group, immersed himself in the local rock scene, and made his first musical contacts. After returning, Khrynov wrote "Gorkiye Lyudi" ("Bitter People") – one of the first songs in his new manner.
The following year, still just as a spectator, Polkovnik attended the "Rock-86" festival. Polkovnik was literally pushed onto the "big" stage for the first time at the end of August 1987, between sets by the Nizhny Novgorod band "Khronop" and the Kirov band "ChP" (it was the ChP crowd who talked Lyosha into singing a couple of songs).
His first triumph was taking part in the third Gorky Rock Festival. He didn't win top places back then purely because of the "Komsomol lobby", which did everything it could to push the "inconvenient" Khrynov aside.
By 1987 Polkovnik had begun performing – more or less regularly – in Nizhny Novgorod and Kirov, and a little later in Kazan, Kharkov, and Piter. At the time Khrynov sang solo, with a guitar, which didn't stop him reaping the rewards of his growing popularity.
First Bands
In 1988 Polkovnik and the remnants of "Gruppa Prodlyonnogo Dnya" ("The After-School Group", GPD) attempted to merge. GPD was going through a crisis at the time, having lost Benya – Vladimir Bykov – who had given the band its "metal" direction. Incidentally, GPD's metal was the only metal Polkovnik ever loved and respected. A trio from GPD – Zhenya "Moshchny" ("Mighty") Barinov, Chizh, and Misha Staroverov – had already been friends with Khrynov for a long time and took an interest in each other's work, so the merger came together without any trouble. Chizh played accordion and sang, Polkovnik also sang lead vocals, Moshchny "handled" the drums, and Mike played bass guitar.
The merger took shape during a joint tour of Kirov, giving rise to the project Polkovnik – GPD. The guys worked out a joint programme, and even set about mixing a shared album. In Khrynov's opinion, the crowning achievement of Pol-GPD's joint work was a "pretty good" performance at the third Nizhny Novgorod rock festival, and the tour that followed it. The partly recorded album circulated in tape copies. Around the same time – in 1988 – Polkovnik also recorded his first solo record, the acoustic album "Volga da Oka" ("The Volga and the Oka"). It was recorded in Leningrad, at the Leningrad branch of "Melodiya".
The new band was warmly received, and probably, if Chizh hadn't left for Kharkov, the band might have had a great future ahead of it.
But Chizh left, first joining the Kharkov branch of GPD, then, after a split, the band "Raznyye Lyudi" ("Different People"), and the Pol-GPD project fell apart. Khrynov still tried making music as a trio with Misha and Zhenya, but without Chizh it was nothing like the same. In Polkovnik's own words, he "strummed alone on the guitar again for a while", but after that even that faded away too.
The 90s were beginning, interest in rock was declining, and Polkovnik himself seemed to have given up on music – he had no ambition to dig into it any deeper, and the pursuit brought in little money at the time. The result was a five-year gap in Polkovnik's output. Not that he ever cut himself off from music entirely – he was invited to some small concerts, sometimes travelled to them, and collaborated with the "Rok Chistoy Vody" ("Clean Water Rock") movement. He also occasionally played "at home", in his own city, giving apartment concerts.
Khrynov wrote no new songs during this period; the only exception in the whole five years was the song "Dushegub" ("Murderer"), better known as "Beda S Sapogami" ("Trouble with the Boots").
However, despite abandoning music as such, Polkovnik remained in the music-adjacent scene – he ran the affairs of the "Emka" club at the Avtozavodsky District, and hosted programmes on the radio.
Main Activity
The beginning of "Polkovnik's musical renaissance" was, arguably, Chizh's cover of the song "Serp i Molot" ("Hammer and Sickle"), included on his album "O Lyubvi…" ("About Love…"). But the driving force behind Polkovnik's creative process was not Chizh, but the then well-known collector and sound engineer Sergei Firsov. It was he who came up with the idea of getting together and recording Polkovnik's best songs in an electric arrangement, secured funding for the project from the label "Bomba-Piter", and put out the call to musicians he knew.
Polkovnik's popularity can be judged by the musicians who answered that call. Among them were the frontman of "Auktyon", Leonid Fyodorov, along with Misha Kolovsky; the frontman of "Chizh & Co", Sergei Chigrakov; Zhenya "Moshchny" Barinov from the same band; "DDT" rhythm guitarist Andrei Vasilyev; and Igor Dotsenko, also of that band. Khrynov himself brought along Dima "Lysy" ("Baldy") Nekrasov from the Nizhny Novgorod band DNK. The line-up was, without exaggeration, "star-studded" – so "star-studded", in fact, that Polkovnik himself later relished the joke: "Damned if I know who's on stage, but he's got Chizh on bass."
By the end of 1995 all the "stars" had somehow been gathered in the Northern Palmyra, and from January work got underway at the St. Petersburg "Melodiya". Back home, Polkovnik and Dima Nekrasov had already been working on the lyrics, shuffling and refining them together. Nekrasov often "polished up" Khrynov's raw compositions. Right before leaving, they wrote three new songs overnight – "Utrenniy Veterok" ("Morning Breeze"), "Irlandskaya Pesnya" ("Irish Song"), and "Ryba Posukhu Ne Khodit" ("A Fish Doesn't Walk on Dry Land"). Bringing along some old material along with these songs, they arrived at what was now the St. Petersburg "Melodiya". The album was "engineered" by Sasha Doshkin; besides the new songs, it included the tracks "Gorkiye Lyudi" ("Bitter People"), "Dushegub" ("Murderer"), "Volga da Oka" ("The Volga and the Oka"), and "Lesnik" ("Forester"). The single from the album (which, unfortunately, was not included on the album itself) was the track "Indiyskoye Kino" ("Indian Cinema").
The album was titled "Pervy Prizyv" ("First Call-Up"), but the "band's" own name proved harder to settle on. "Polkovnik so Tovarishchi" ("Polkovnik and Comrades") – the "…and comrades" tag was a cliché. "Polkovnik i Kompaniya" ("Polkovnik & Co.") was even more worn out, and off the mark besides. In the end they settled on "Polkovnik i Odnopolchane" ("Polkovnik and the Fellow Soldiers"). Once the album came out, something in Polkovnik suddenly "broke loose". He abruptly started writing again – the song "Shyol Muzhik" ("A Man Was Walking"), for instance, he composed at night in a KamAZ truck, on the Moscow highway. There was nothing to record it with, and it was dark, so Polkovnik ran through it line by line in his head. At home, on the spot, he scribbled the lyrics onto a sheet of paper his wife held out for him. Though he did cut one verse – the song was turning out too long.
It was on this material (Khrynov also took a song from Dryoma; there was a Nekrasov song, one Chizh song, and one half-and-half by Polkovnik and Nekrasov) that the second "Odnopolchane" album, "Voyna i Lyubov" ("War and Love"), began to take shape. By then, violinist Nikita Zaitsev, already quite ill, had joined "Odnopolchane" – Khrynov respected him enormously. A few tracks were recorded as early as March 1997 at "Melodiya", the rest were finished later. Between album recordings, they tried to get together and play the occasional concert. Given the line-up, this didn't happen very often – but "Odnopolchane" played a couple of concerts in Piter, made a trip to the capital, and appeared at a festival put on by the magazine "Rock Fuzz". Polkovnik played solo at the avant-garde festival "Polosa" ("The Stripe").
The album "Voyna i Lyubov" came out in May 1999, by which time "Odnopolchane" had practically ceased to exist as a band. It's clear that a line-up like that could barely come together for recording, only just about manage the occasional rare concert, and simply couldn't manage regular concerts at all, so afterwards Polkovnik performed solo for a while – at "Vudstoker" in Nizhny Novgorod, at PUSHKING's fifth anniversary, and at bike festivals and events in Yekaterinburg, Kirov, Nizhny Novgorod, and Irbit.
At the same time, in 2003 Khrynov put together a new "PiO" line-up drawn from the band MOPR – Zharinov on bass, Malakhin on drums, keyboardist Gorlyansky, and vocalist Lyokha "Komandor". With this line-up plus Polkovnik, the album "Zato Kak Pogulyali" ("But What a Blast We Had") was recorded, with the tracks "Ya Vsyo Proplyu" ("I'll Drink It All Away"), "Ne Pora li Dat Muzykantam" ("Isn't It Time to Pay the Musicians"), "Vesnu" ("Spring"), Tarasov's "Tri Drugana" ("Three Buddies"), and the Chizh-era "Vykhlopnaya Truba" ("Exhaust Pipe").
Polkovnik released the album only in 2006, and on his own – he sold it at concerts, and shot the video for "ZKP" with money from friends. At that time "PiO" performed with the MOPR line-up; altogether, up to 60 "fellow soldiers" passed through the "regiment" over the course of its existence.
Before his death, Polkovnik managed to re-record a live version of "Volga da Oka". In his last years he only rarely performed on stage.
The last major festival "Odnopolchane" played was the St. Petersburg festival "Okna Otkroy" ("Open the Windows") in 2005.
In 2008 he was laid low by acute heart failure.
On 12 September 2008 Alexei "Polkovnik" Khrynov passed away.
Interesting Facts
- Polkovnik's actual army rank was captain. He left the reserves as a captain of the Soviet Army's tank forces.