In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union began opening itself to the West, one of the country’s biggest underground rock stars suddenly found himself working with the likes of Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde and Dave Stewart.
Boris Grebenshchikov was unlike almost anyone Western audiences had encountered before. The Russian singer-songwriter and poet was variously compared by critics to David Bowie and Marc Bolan, but one nickname proved particularly irresistible: the “Russian Bob Dylan.”
Now, a documentary capturing that extraordinary moment in his career is resurfacing some 30 years after it largely disappeared.
The Long Way Home: Remastered and Expanded, directed by the late Michael Apted, will be released Oct. 20 on Amazon, Apple TV, Google and other major digital platforms in the United States and Canada. The film will also become available in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other countries during the week of Oct. 19.
The newly restored film follows Grebenshchikov, the leader of the influential Russian rock band Aquarium, as he became the first Soviet musician to record in the West during the Glasnost era.
His unlikely musical adventure brought him into the orbit of some major Western stars. The documentary features Stewart and members of Aquarium, with appearances by Lennox, Hynde, Ray Cooper and Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Apted, who died in 2021, was already an acclaimed filmmaker when he made The Long Way Home. His credits included Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist and the groundbreaking Up documentary series. He would later direct the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough.
In The Long Way Home, Apted documented Grebenshchikov as he seized a newfound freedom to make music with Western artists while confronting a much more complicated situation back home.
Members of Aquarium felt abandoned, while some of Grebenshchikov’s longtime Russian fans weren’t sure what to make of the English-language songs he brought home.
His push into the West culminated in the 1989 album Radio Silence, released by Columbia Records and produced by Stewart. Lennox, Hynde and other prominent musicians contributed to the project.
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The original documentary aired in the United Kingdom and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, but despite receiving critical acclaim, it largely vanished from public view over the ensuing three decades.
Producer Steven Lawrence has now overseen a restoration based on the only existing 16mm print of the film, with original editor Susanne Rostock.
But The Long Way Home: Remastered and Expanded isn’t simply a restoration.
Lawrence and Rostock also created a new epilogue following what happened to Grebenshchikov in the decades after Radio Silence. The addition partially fulfills Apted’s hopes of making a sequel before his death.
And Grebenshchikov’s story has acquired a dramatically different final chapter.
The musician, now living outside Russia, has become an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. The new epilogue follows Grebenshchikov’s life in exile and brings Apted’s portrait of a musician emerging from the Soviet Union into the present day.
Grebenshchikov’s connections to Western rock didn’t end with his 1980s breakthrough, either. In 1997, the musician dubbed the “Russian Bob Dylan” recorded in the United States with members of The Band, the group famously associated with Dylan.
Over the years, Grebenshchikov has also worked with musicians including Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt and recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios.
The Long Way Home: Remastered and Expanded runs 98 minutes and features dialogue in English and Russian with English subtitles.
Related: Forgotten Singer, Compared to Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens, Vanished for 30 Years—Then Was Found Alive
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