Kamchatka Boiler House

In the courtyard of house number 15 on Blokhin Street stands a small, freestanding building — a former coal-fired boiler house known to the entire Russian-speaking rock community as "Kamchatka." This ordinary utility building owes its fame to Viktor Tsoi, the frontman of the band Kino, who worked here as a boiler stoker; today it is a club-museum that has become a place of pilgrimage for fans of Russian rock from across the post-Soviet world.

The boiler house heated a women's dormitory belonging to a construction trust, and the job amounted to shovelling ten scoops of coal into the furnace every two or three hours — undemanding work that left the stokers plenty of time for creative pursuits. In the autumn of 1986 Sergei Firsov and Viktor Tsoi took jobs there; Firsov's first shift, on 11 November 1986, is regarded as Kamchatka's birthday. Other notable figures of the Leningrad rock club soon appeared here too: the poet Alexander Bashlachev, Alisa's founder Svyatoslav Zadery, the future frontman of Mashnin Band Andrei Mashnin, as well as members of Kino and AukцYon. The boiler house took its name from Tsoi's 1983 song of the same title, long before he himself began working there.

This freestanding building, largely shielded from prying eyes, proved a convenient venue for unofficial concerts. The surviving boiler equipment now stands alongside Tsoi's personal belongings, including a guitar he had bought back in the 1970s. Of particular value are the stokers' logbooks: instead of the required temperature readings, they filled the pages with poems, drawings and notes to one another; over the fourteen years the boiler house operated, around forty such notebooks accumulated, forming a unique document of the era. In 1987 scenes for Alexei Uchitel's film "Rock" were shot in the boiler house, the film opening precisely with a scene set in Kamchatka.

After Tsoi's death in 1990, the boiler house became a site of spontaneous pilgrimage. In 2006 the building, which held the musician's personal belongings, came into the private ownership of a firm planning to demolish it to build a hotel; in May 2007 the public and representatives of youth movements succeeded in saving the museum. A new threat of demolition arose in December 2013, when the building was declared structurally unsound, but the city's deputy governor publicly pledged to preserve it.

By the early 2000s the building had been connected to the central heating system, and in 2003 the former boiler house was officially converted into a club-museum. Sergei Firsov, who had started out there as a stoker alongside Tsoi, became its director. Today Kamchatka combines the functions of a free-entry museum and a working concert venue, where young rock bands regularly perform, continuing the tradition of informal shows from the 1980s.

The story of Kamchatka is a rare example of how an ordinary municipal utility space, through the efforts of musicians and their fans, turned into a significant cultural landmark of the Leningrad rock club era. The preserved logbooks, instruments and boiler equipment make this one of the most personal and authentic memorials to Russian rock in St Petersburg.