lit a candle 4h agook so i did not expect to be up at 2am over a russian guitarist but here i am, my nephew burned me a cd years ago with Kolibri on it because i kept asking him for music that wasnt just top 40, and that album Lyubov i yeyo konechnosti got played so many times in my kitchen while i was testing recipes, it was just background music until it wasnt, i read he was 60, that number keeps bouncing around my head, i dont even know what he looked like, never saw a photo till today, anyway. edit: found the year now, 1990s, that bridges something in my brain about how music travels so far from where it started and ends up in a kitchen in manila.
Their story
Andrey Gradovich (Андрей Градович) was a Russian guitarist whose playing threaded through three distinct strands of the Saint Petersburg underground: the gothic-leaning indie of Jugendstil (Югендштиль), the theatrical art-pop of Kolibri (Колибри), and the genre-hopping experiments of Dva Samolyota (Два самолёта / 2ва самолёта). He died on 5 October 2026…
Andrey Gradovich (Андрей Градович) was a Russian guitarist whose playing threaded through three distinct strands of the Saint Petersburg underground: the gothic-leaning indie of Jugendstil (Югендштиль), the theatrical art-pop of Kolibri (Колибри), and the genre-hopping experiments of Dva Samolyota (Два самолёта / 2ва самолёта). He died on 5 October 2026 after a prolonged illness, aged 60. News of his death reached the public two days later through TASS, citing people close to him, and through a warm farewell from Kolibri on VKontakte. His sister, Anna Gradovich, announced that a farewell would be held at 13:15 on 9 October in the large hall of the Saint Petersburg crematorium, after which he was to be cremated.
Gradovich belonged to a generation of Petersburg sidemen whose names sat in small type on cassette inlays while their fingers sat on every take. Colleagues remembered him less with monument language than with the ordinary shared life of the road: rehearsals, concerts, dressing rooms, train compartments, talk and laughter. Kolibri thanked him for the music they made together, including work on the album Lyubov i yeyo konechnosti (Любовь и её конечности), recorded around 2000 and released in 2002 on Real Records.
His early path ran through Gatchina bands Chance (Шанс) and Variant (Вариант), where local rock players learned by ear and by records. In mid-1990, in Leningrad, he co-founded Jugendstil with bassist and singer German Podstanitsky (Герман Подстаницкий). Drummer Vitaly Sokulsky completed the classic trio. Critic and art historian Alexei Kurbanovsky suggested the name, nodding to German Jugendstil modernism and to the band’s taste for Bauhaus and post-punk drama. The group joined the Leningrad Rock Club that autumn, put demos onto Radio Baltika and Radio SNC, and became a fixture of the TaMtAm generation of Petersburg alternative rock. Gradovich’s guitar parts, as rock encyclopedist Andrei Burlaka later described them, favored laconic lines and sharp staccato attacks that locked with Podstanitsky’s explosive bass and Sokulsky’s marching drums.
Jugendstil played the Indyushata festival in Orekhovo-Zuyevo in March 1992, toured Germany in 1994 (including Markthalle in Hamburg that November), and recorded the studio album Nikto Nikomu Nichego (Никто Никому Ничего) in February 1996 at the Petersburg Recording Studio with Vsevolod Gakkel’s encouragement. After financial conflict Sokulsky left; the band limped on and dissolved in January 1998, briefly reuniting on 3 April 2003 at club Moloko with drummer Igor Mosin. Podstanitsky died in 2017. Gradovich’s work with Jugendstil remains the clearest document of him as a founding voice rather than a hired hand.
In 1999 Gradovich joined Kolibri together with arranger and keyboardist Oleg Emirov (Олег Эмиров). Founded in 1988 by Natalia Pivovarova, Kolibri had built a reputation for costume theatre, cabaret irony, and female vocal harmony against Leningrad’s louder rock-club masculinity. After Pivovarova left at the end of 1998, the remaining vocalists Elena Yudanova, Inna Volkova, and Irina Sharovatova moved from backing tracks toward live band sound. Gradovich and Emirov were central to that shift. Zvuki.ru noted in April 2000 that Kolibri would no longer sing to minus-one tapes, with Gradovich on guitar and Emirov on electronics both on stage and in the studio. The album Lyubov i yeyo konechnosti, produced by Emirov, featured Gradovich’s guitar among contributions from Alexei Ratsen, Igor Mosin, and Sergei Rusakov. The video for Plastinka (Пластинка), directed by Alexander Bashirov, appeared in 2001. Gradovich left Kolibri in 2004; Emirov had left the year before. Wikipedia and obituaries list him among former members, and Russian Wikipedia updated his entry after his death in 2026.
In August 2004 InterMedia reported that Dva Samolyota had brought in Gradovich, known from Kolibri, and keyboardist Armen Shikunov (Чикунов), giving the band a more rock-oriented live sound while promoting the album Ka Ra Bas, the last recorded with late singer Vadim Pokrovsky. Dva Samolyota, formed in 1990 by Anton Belyankin and Pokrovsky, mixed ska, funk, Latin, and invented “Swahili” vocal play and ran the Petersburg club Griboyedov. Gradovich’s later Wikipedia listing among the band’s members reflects that chapter of his career.
Public sources say little about Gradovich’s private life beyond his sister Anna’s farewell and her words of love and pride. Education details, a birth date beyond the age reported at death, and a precise cause of death were not made public. What the record does show is a musician who moved among scenes without demanding the spotlight: gothic indie in the early 1990s, art-pop stage craft around 2000, and the restless Petersburg fusion of Dva Samolyota after 2004. On 8 October 2026 Kolibri wrote that he had left their world after years of shared work. The songs he underpinned still play. The guitar lines that held the air under other voices remain audible whenever those records are turned up again.
Biography adapted from RIA Novosti; KP; Lenta; Life.ru; InterMedia; 360.ru; MR7; English Wikipedia Deaths in 2026; Russian Wikipedia (Kolibri, Jugendstil, 2va Samolyota); Zvuki.ru (26 Apr 2000); Andrei Burlaka rock encyclop.
In their own words
“Ушел из нашего мира Андрей Градович, с которым мы сотрудничали несколько лет - репетировали, играли концерты, сидели в гримерках и купе поездов, разговаривали, смеялись. Делали музыку. Записали замечательный альбом «Любовь и ее конечности». Прощай, друг! Спасибо за музыку.”
Kolibri official VKontakte farewell, quoted by RIA Novosti and other Russian outlets, October 2026
“Мой единственный любимый родной брат - Андрей Градович. Ты навсегда останешься в моем сердце.”
Sister Anna Gradovich on VKontakte, quoted by 360.ru, October 2026
“Гитарным риффам Градовича были свойственны общий лаконизм и обилие резких стаккато.”
Andrei Burlaka, Rock Encyclopedia of Popular Music in Leningrad-Petersburg, on Jugendstil
Photos
1Andrey Gradovich, archival portrait
by People Forever
From social media
1Posts by Andrey, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.