Igor Fedorovich "Egor" Letov (, ; (10 September 1964 – 19 February 2008) was a Russian poet, musician, singer-songwriter, audio engineer and conceptual artist, best known as the founder and leader of the post-punk/psychedelic rock band Grazhdanskaya Oborona (). He was also the founder of the conceptual art avant-garde project Kommunizm and psychedelic rock outfit Egor i Opizdenevshie. Letov collaborated with singer-songwriter Yanka Dyagileva and other Siberian underground artists as a record engineer and producer. Biography Letov was born in Omsk, Siberia to Fyodor Letov, a military man and World War II veteran from Northern Ural (Perm Krai), and Tamara Letova, a doctor of Russian Cossack origin from Kazakhstan. The Letov family had Russian, Mordvin, Komi and Turkic ancestors. The family moved to Omsk from Semipalatinsk a few years before Egor's birth. From a young age, Egor and his older brother Sergey had health issues, and Yegor experienced clinical deaths in his childhood. After graduating from school, Egor went to live with his brother, who was a relatively successful jazz saxophonist in Moscow at the time. In Moscow, Letov learned to play some drums and bass guitar, developed contacts with Moscow underground avant-garde artists, and enrolled in a professional technical school as a builder, working as a plasterer. Two years later, in 1984, Letov left the technical school and returned to Omsk. At this time, he had already started writing poetry and short stories and decided to try music. Letov mostly listened to Rock in Opposition and free jazz in the early '80s, and his first recordings were amateurish garage rock using suitcases instead of drums. Later, Letov characterized these recordings as "talentless curiosity", "baby talk", and "shame and reproach". Soon he found fellow musicians and companions in Omsk, who listened to the same type of music, which was unpopular and little known in the USSR, especially in Siberia, and they started the garage rock band Posev (). The most important of these companions was Konstantin Ryabinov (better known as Kuzya UO or Kuzma), a musician and poet, who was Letov's comrade-in-arms in Grazhdanskaya Oborona up to the late 90s, and a close friend. Posev became Grazhdanskaya Oborona in November 1984. In 1985, the dissident philosophy expressed in Letov's lyrics, as well as his popularity throughout the USSR, resulted in a KGB-initiated internment for three months in a mental hospital, where Letov was forced to take anti-psychotic drugs. On his