The phrase «everything’s going according to plan,» used in the novel, echoes one of the most famous and influential songs of Soviet punk rock — a track by Yegor Letov and his band Grazhdanskaya Oborona.
How It Was Written
The song was written by Yegor Letov in 1986 and first recorded in early 1988 in Omsk. In the author’s own words, he wanted to create a stream of consciousness for an «ordinary, worn-out, drunken Soviet man» who comes home, turns on the television, and watches the Central Television evening news.
Letov deliberately turned on the TV and wrote down everything he saw, imagining himself as this character. He then reworked the material «mockingly,» exaggerating certain clichés — «he was a good leader,» «grandpa Lenin,» and similar phrases he himself would never have uttered. Out of more than twenty verses written, the most striking were selected for the final song.
Meaning and Interpretation
Letov repeatedly stressed that the song is widely misunderstood. He called it a «terrifying song» with a «tragic-ironic character,» not an anthem or an endorsement of the existing order. The author complained that listeners took the lyrics literally, as spoken in his own voice rather than that of an invented character.
In Letov’s view, the «totalitarian categories and realities» he used served as images and symbols of an «eternal, metaphysical totalitarianism built into the very essence of any group, any community, and indeed the world order itself.»
Popularity and Influence
The song quickly became the band’s best-known work, more famous even than its author. Journalists called it «the anthem of a generation,» «a hit for all time,» «almost a Russian folk song.» It spread among street musicians and courtyard guitarists, many of them far removed from Letov’s own body of work.
The song gained particular popularity in the post-Soviet period. Many observers noted that despite the change in political system, Letov’s songs remained relevant, since the underlying dynamics between people hadn’t fundamentally changed, and neither had a broader dissatisfaction with the surrounding world.
The Context of the Time
By 1993, when the novel’s events take place, «Everything’s Going According to Plan» was already widely known and was being heard in a completely new way. What had been written as satire of Soviet reality took on a particular irony amid the chaos of the early 1990s.
The phrase became a kind of meme of the era — uttered with irony whenever things were going anything but according to plan, when familiar structures were collapsing, when the economy was in free fall, and the future seemed unpredictable.
Cultural Legacy
Ordinary people invented additional verses for the song, and it became part of a living, evolving folklore. Letov said he’d heard as many as twenty such folk verses performed by street musicians on Moscow’s Arbat and St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt.
The song had an enormous influence on Russian culture, becoming one of those tracks that defined the spirit of an era, and has since been included on more than one list of the songs that most shaped the country’s cultural memory.