Russian chanson is misnamed — it has nothing to do with French chanson. It is blatnaya pesnya (prison-thief song) fused with the urban romance of the Russian bourgeois nineteenth century, sung in a low male baritone over acoustic or electric guitar, button accordion (bayan), and occasionally violin. Tempos sit 80-120 BPM, keys are Slavic and Roma-influenced minor, and the subject matter is prison camps, betrayed love, mother, back-alley Moscow, the thieves' code, vodka and cigarettes, the labour camps of the Soviet era. This is the music of the roadside restaurant and the taxi radio.

The tradition sits at the crossing of three older strands: the Russian classical urban romance (klassicheskiy romans), the criminal songs of nineteenth-century Odessa and Moscow, and the labour-camp songs of the Soviet era. Under the USSR it was suppressed officially and circulated only via magnitizdat (home-recorded cassettes) and via émigrés — most importantly Willi Tokarev, who emigrated from the USSR to New York in 1974 and became a source point for tapes smuggled back into the country from Brighton Beach. The decisive moment for the genre was the 1990s, when the post-Soviet collapse produced both the audience and the singers for it in enormous numbers. Mikhail Krug's 'Vladimirsky Central' (1998) is the definitive song.

Listen to the voice as a raconteur, not as a singer. Krug's 'Vladimirsky Central' is a three-chord song, but the bayan enters in the second half and the whole thing becomes the sound of a man narrating a story across a smoky bar. Shufutinsky's 'Tretye Sentyabrya (Third of September)' is more pop-shaped — a chorus with a repeated hook, 'On the third of September I remember again the burnt-out fire' — that has become a full-scale annual meme in Russian-speaking social media. Rozenbaum's 'Gop-stop' shows the Odessa-tradition trick of singing violent content over a bright, upbeat rhythm.

Mikhail Krug, 'Vladimirsky Central' (1998) — the canonical text. Then Shufutinsky, 'Tretye Sentyabrya' (1993) — best heard on 3 September, when it recirculates through Russian-language social media. Rozenbaum, 'Gop-stop' (1983) for the Odessa criminal-ballad style, and his 'Vals Boston' (1987) for his lyrical side. Late night, Russian restaurant, plate of borscht in front of you.

Mikhail Krug was shot dead in his Tver home in front of his wife on 1 July 2002. Two intruders entered claiming robbery, opened fire, and Krug died of an abdominal wound at hospital. One perpetrator was convicted in 2007, but whether the shooting was a straight robbery or a contract killing has never been fully resolved. The all-day Russian chanson station Radio Shanson (launched 2000) has held the top AM radio audience share in Russia for a quarter-century, dominated by taxi drivers, roadside restaurants and provincial workplaces — the demographic footprint is close to that of Japanese enka AM stations, and the age gradient (older men mostly) is similar too.