In spite of the black days of December -- the price St. Petersburg pays for its beautiful White Nights in June -- the city refuses to succumb to inertia.


The city hosted the Exotica festival the weekend before the Dec. 12 holiday.


The annual music and video event was founded four years ago by the Moscow-based Exotica Association. From the very outset, Exotica presented and supported young artists, particularly those working in the experimental genre. Along with the festival, the association developed a magazine, a radio and a television show of the same name. In its early, idealistic days RTR, the newly born Russian Television, generously granted its time to esoteric programs without caring much about their potentially low rating.


With time and the pressing demands of advancing market, Exotica was virtually forced off the air, and as much as the rest of alternative art forms, was relegated to marginal culture clubs. Sorry as we all were to see it go, I must admit that this is where it probably belongs.


This year the festival first came to St. Petersburg and was appropriately hosted by Gora, or mountain, the city's best club, located in a once decaying movie theater on Ligovsky Prospekt. Now calling itself nothing less than Contemporary Music Philharmonia, the space boasts two performance halls, a nighttime rave venue in the basement called Nora, or burrow, and a music store called Dyra, or hole. Each of these spaces is equipped with its own bar. Probably even more important, both the cover charge and the bar tabs are nowhere near the prohibitive prices of the trendy places for the rich.


The star of the three-night festival was Holger Czukay, leader of Can, the long extinct but once-legendary German alternative rock band, whose influence by far surpasses their fame. His video presentation attracted so many people that long before his set started, the room was fully crammed and the staircase lined with those hoping to get in. I couldn't get in myself.


Meanwhile, DSK -- Die Schwarze Katzen -- appeared. Two young men wearing black shirts and with neatly trimmed haircuts were preaching from the Bible of Nordic Aryan Supremacy. Their rhythmic chanting was accompanied by an overwhelming techno sound and video images of totalitarian Stalinist architecture and ritual burning of the U.S. flag. Obviously influenced by Laibach, the Slovenian originators of "totalitarian rock," these Russians, with all their artsiness, went much further: In their grave seriousness they displayed none of the tongue-in-cheek attitude so characteristic of Laibach. It would be an overstatement to say I was frightened by this fascist rhetoric. A sad and desperate feeling lingered. Is there really no way out of the totalitarian cycle?