Plaid pants, Lenin badges, gyms and hatred of informals. Only in the Union, where the Soviet and Western were melted in a fancy cauldron, could a movement of Lyuberians emerge - bodybuilders from the outskirts, who set themselves the goal: to clear the capital of skateboards, Iroquois, break dance and heavy music.
How did muscles come to serve the communist ideology? Why is a quilted jacket for Lyuber the best? And what does Gorky Park have to do with it?
Brother luber
“I myself am nobody, but we are called“Lyuber”. These are just Lyubertsy guys. And they started going to fight in Moscow and the Moscow Region 10-15 years ago, our fathers told us about this. We are driving now. But we do not hit everyone in a row … but only those who we do not like. Do you really like those who walk with chains, all "riveted" or repainted, who dishonor the country?"
This text is a letter from a 16-year-old resident of the Moscow Region Lyubertsy to the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. January 1986. After the publication, the whole country started talking about the Lyuber - bodybuilders from a working-class suburb who declared war on everything "not ours".
“Bodybuilding has always flourished in Lyubertsy, long before the early 1980s,” recalled Anatoly Klyuikov, “Uncle Tolya”, the permanent coach of the Luber sports club, in a conversation with the author of this material several years ago. - The favorite gathering place for jocks were sand pits five kilometers from the city. There was a beach, and already in the 1970s, every summer there was a lot of pumped up guys.
A scattering of factories, a railway station, a short distance from Moscow, a city of temptations and vices. An ideal place for the birth of an aggressive community, where big biceps, shaved heads and normality, as it was understood in these places, are held in high esteem. Beginning from about 1982, the regular trips of Lyubertsy teenagers to Moscow began to acquire an "ideological" character. These were no longer just outings for entertainment. The trips became "a struggle for an idea," namely, "a struggle against those young people who disgrace the Soviet way of life," writes Dmitry Gromov, a researcher of the Lyuberian subculture.
Promotional video:
Moscow in the first half of the 1980s, through the eyes of a resident of Lyubertsy, was a hotbed of evil of all stripes. Metalists, punks, rockers hung out in Gorky Park. There are skateboarders at Luzhniki. Break dance was danced on the Arbat. And everyone sported around with chains, badges, ripped jeans and strange hairstyles.
“Lyuber came to concerts, they were seen in cafes, discos. By 1986, fights between informals and Lyubertsy took place literally every day, recalls Vladislav Kuzmin, in the 1980s - a breaker and a victim of Lyubertsy. - Their favorite gathering place was the Seasons cafe in Gorky Park. There was so much of it: the then fashionable striped glasses were taken away from the breakers, the hairy ones were cut, the girls were bullied. On weekends, a whole crowd of Lyubertsy people came. We got up on the Crimean bridge, chanted something, hit anyone."
Chemistry and other sciences
In the winter of 1987, the Lyubertsy police conducted a series of raids. Their goal was to find out how many illegal rocking chairs function in the city. Police have identified about 40 gyms and enumerated over 500 visitors. Most of the rocking chairs were located in basements, and some were busy grabbing, or simply squatting - without notifying the utilities.
“The best option was to find a basement in a non-residential building. Then the problem of sound insulation was solved by itself, - recalls the atmosphere of the Lyubertsy rocking chairs, the user of the forum about bodybuilding Steel Factor. - Iron on the floor rattles strongly: bykh, bykh! And if the first floor above the basement is inhabited, a showdown with the tenants is inevitable."
Another common problem was low basement ceilings - they were not suitable for standing presses and a number of other exercises. According to legend, the Lyubertsy pitching solved this issue by making holes in the middle of the hall. They stood in the pits with a barbell and did not reach the ceiling with their hands.
From the very beginning, two groups were formed in the subculture: "athletes" and "hooligans", writes Dmitry Gromov in one of his articles. The first ones put sport at the forefront, striving for results. For the second, sport was only a means to achieve another goal - winning fights. According to Anatoly Klyuikov, since the mid-1980s there have been a lot of people in the halls: “And there were people who grew very quickly, literally overgrown with muscles in one and a half to two years. Everything was clear about such people - chemistry."
Symbolism
The Lyuber movement had its own coat of arms and anthem. The coat of arms was a triangle with a bar crossing it and the inscription "Luber" below.
The words of the anthem were as follows:
“We were born and raised in Lyubertsy, The center of brute strength.
And we believe our dream will come true:
Lyubertsy will become the center of Russia”.
Fashion
The cult of physical strength, together with its practical application, led to the emergence of a special Lyubertsy fashion. In the summer, they wore sweatpants, T-shirts so that the muscles were visible. T-shirts with movie heroes "Commando" and "Rambo" went with a bang. There is information about the popularity of white shirts with narrow ties among the Lyuber, but, most likely, this is a later invention of cinema.
In winter they put on quilted jackets, knitted or fur hats and wide trousers in a cage (they were also called "blankets"). People whose youth fell on the 1980s still remember quilted jackets with nostalgia - warm and comfortable, they saved from blows in a fight and made a man more broad-shouldered. They loved to gird their quilted jackets with army belts: so visually the waist became even narrower, and the shoulders wider. The army belt was also used in a fight. They were wound on the arm like brass knuckles, or unwound over the head. The heavy plaque on the belt worked like a club.
Fur hats were considered ceremonial clothes. On trips to Moscow, they took knitted hats, which in the common people are called "gondons". So in a mass brawl it was easier to distinguish strangers from theirs. Wide checkered pants made of dense fabric have become the most famous part of the Lyuber wardrobe. Such trousers were launched into mass production by Soviet weaving factories - the Lyuber people wore them as opposed to Western dumplings and jeans.
Komsomol badges with Lenin became the same opposition. Because of the badges of the Lyubertsy brigades (or offices, as they called themselves), they were often mistaken for Komsomol vigilantes. Badges were generally popular at the time. Informals wore other badges - with attributes of rock groups, inscriptions in English. The 1987 Sobesednik newspaper tells how a typical Luber could make some money: he took badges from an informal under the pretext of fighting the West, but immediately resold them to another informal. The price of the badge reached 10 rubles - with the price of a loaf of bread at 20 kopecks.
Luber and art
At various times, the activities of the Lyuberians were reflected in works of art.
The DDT group on the 1990 album "Thaw" has a composition "Mom, I love Lyuber": "He gives me chains, he gives me badges / Piglets ring in his leather jacket / Every night from Moscow he brings me a trophy / Scalps of enemy punks, hippie amulets / Mom, mom, mom, mom / I love Lyuber."
DDT - "Mom, I love Lyuber":
Lyuberov is mentioned in their songs by Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Hey, Brother Luber), by the Lyube group (Lyubertsy) and, for example, by rapper Roma Zhigan.
In his extremely pathetic video, they show boxers and inspire the idea: Lyubertsy is the place where real boys lived.
"Lyube" - "Lyubertsy":
The life of the Lyuberians is actually reconstructing the Belarusian film "My name is Arlecchino". The protagonist, a resident of a working-class settlement, goes to extinguish informals in the city, where he falls in love with a difficult girl.
The scene of a mass fight between Lyuber and informals is shown in the film by Pavel Lungin "Luna Park". The Lyuers in the film are bred under the name of the "cleaners" organization.
Now
According to various estimates, up to 70% of the inhabitants of Lyubertsy rocking chairs in the 1990s were involved in criminal groups associated with racketeering. “The first leaders of the organized criminal group left the bodybuilding team in 1991. At the best of times, the Lyubertsy men had 150 active bayonets, which could, if necessary, collect five more young jocks once more,”writes Sergei Dyshev, author of the book“Bandit Russia”.
Zero Lyuber was greeted by leaving for legal business. Few like to remember the old days. On one of the Internet forums about bodybuilding, the FURFUR correspondent found a person who claims that in the 1980s he traveled from Lyubertsy to a showdown with informals. But he did not want to give details and give his name and surname. He motivated this by the fact that he was busy with business and did not want associations with the Lyuers.
Alexey Kireev, aka Doctor Luber, a Lyubertsy bodybuilder and author of the book "Bodybuilding in Our Way", refused to give an interview to our site.
Politics
According to the magazine "Ogonyok", politician Vasily Yakemenko spent his youth in the legendary Lyubertsy sports club "Titan". Yakemenko is a native of Lyubertsy, former head of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, one of the founders of the pro-Kremlin youth movements Walking Together and Ours.