What Depeche Mode’s Seduction of Eastern Europe Can Teach Us About Late Capitalism

Two documentaries—one new, one newly resurfaced—nod to the Depechemania that gripped the Eastern Bloc.
Depeche Mode circa 1982
Depeche Mode circa 1982. Photo by David Corio/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

Anyone hoping to make sense of synth-pop’s dominion over Eastern Europe could do worse than a visit to the former Soviet city of Tallinn, Estonia. Gothic churches frown upon dinky watering holes, while processions of men on bachelor-party getaways prowl along the cobbles, bedevilling locals. Perhaps you’ll spy, in lowkey eyeliner, some darkly glamorous figure breaking from the crowds, venturing toward the alleyway of Voorimehe. There, between a traditional fabric shop and a vegan chocolatier, is the great Baltic temple to Depeche Mode.

Step inside DM Baar and you’re submerged in the Essex band’s murky underworld. Rakish pilgrims slide off their overcoats and drink “Master and Servant”-themed cocktails while perched atop red leather seats. The smoking chamber welcomes dusky individuals with seen-some-shit smirks and grisly tales to tell. Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan vamps and twirls in looping concert footage, while a dearth of natural light reminds interlopers this is not just a bar or a shrine but also a sanctuary.

Even after the Kremlin relinquished control of the Eastern Bloc in 1991, Estonia remained haunted by the latent threat of Russian annexation, and Tallinn, accordingly, is a majestic city where majesty feels risky, where nobody crosses on red. Counterculture was confined to the underground well into the 1980s, sending the curious down shadow trails to secret gigs and congregations. The DJ Raul Saaremets, a local cult hero, once told me of a time with no fashion, no business beyond the state’s. “Just one record label!” he added, searching for recognition of his injustice.

Depechemania was the crest of the rebellion—their boom across Eastern Europe during the ’80s brought with it an air of glamorous catastrophe. Merch and cassettes smuggled across the East-West German border would decorate fans’ dingy bedrooms, the sort of quarantine-paradise that DM Baar now emulates. As Polish journalist Agata Pyzik writes in her 2014 book Poor But Sexy, the band seduced fans with an aesthetic of “bling meets Soviet symbols.”

“There’s an element of tragedy in the back of everybody’s mind here,” says Helen Sildna, who worked as a Baltic promoter for Depeche Mode in the ’90s. She compares their epic melancholy with bleak sayings adopted from Estonian literature: “Before love comes hard work.” “After great joy comes great sorrow.” Estonians subscribe to “the notion of being a victim and suffering,” she adds. “But you’re still secretly romantic about hoping for the best.”

This internalized gloom, key to Depeche Mode’s Eastern empire, is one subject of Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams’s documentary Depeche Mode Is Our Hobby, first aired in 2006 and now legally streaming. A precursor to the new Depeche doc Spirits in the Forest, this earlier film marvels at the group’s Soviet following. A mother recalls her daughter, now hopelessly obsessed, hearing Gahan’s voice for the first time: “Mama,” she said with a sigh, “I feel so sorry for him.” A teen fan approvingly notes the tragedy and despair in Martin Gore’s lyrics, his fidelity to “the transcendental nature of existence.”

Throughout the ’80s, the band channeled the thrill of growing up in a restrictive state while feeling like “part of the international pop culture,” band scholar Sascha Lange tells me. Strict socialism instilled some sense of belonging to the state, but it left arty folk yearning to belong elsewhere, in the symbolic universe of a leather jacket or a homoerotic band poster. In a perceptive turn of phrase, Lange has written that Depeche Mode and their illicit merch opened “a cosmos of endless yearning” within socialist listeners.

“This music coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union,” a middle-aged fan announces in Depeche Mode Is Our Hobby. “So I see it as having been the music of freedom.” Yet when freedom came, Depeche Mode’s fantasy remained pungent, a time capsule from that generational no-man’s-land when everything—in politics, sex, art—seemed up for grabs. The cusp of change, that cosmos of consumer possibility, animated fans as a capitalist reality couldn’t.

Writers like Pyzik reject the West’s liberation narrative, stressing that many Eastern Europeans funnelled into capitalism now yearn for the security of the old way: After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the EU reform program meant Bloc countries “gained only in as much that they were now exploited in the Western way,” she writes. As early as the ’90s, the welfare state became a dirty word, with Estonia levying a 26 percent “flat tax” that crippled the working class while withdrawing their social safety net. Dodgy dealers blazed into the housing market. The just-can’t-get-enough model of neoliberal excess heated up.

Footage from Depeche Mode Is Our Hobby shows “Depecheism” resounding into the 21st century: Die-hards in eyeliner sing along in St. Petersburg; nostalgists gather in East German streets; paraders in Moscow herald Gahan’s birthday with champagne and nightclub takeovers. Spirits in the Forest, which is built around concert footage from 2018, casts a wider net: Director Anton Corbijn celebrates fans from Mongolia and Romania (along with various non-communist countries) but puts the songs’ gift somewhere between catharsis and personal salvation, only hinting at their insurrectionary allure to fan networks. Both films, at least, recognize it wasn’t just the music but the medium—the secrecy and paranoia, samizdat and paraphernalia—that made buying into Depeche Mode under late-socialism feel revolutionary.

As the climate crisis debunks the illusion of a limitless capitalism, what might a modern parallel to Depechemania look like—an artist at once anti-establishment and astonishingly popular, able to deal an existential blow to the ruling ideology? It may have roots in interdependence, with artists collectivizing to share funds, outsmarting market logic. It would likely harness independent distribution and glamorize anti-capitalism while reckoning with the claim that anything presented for sale, no matter how virtuous, automatically advances consumerism. It’s a knotty question, but our inability to imagine a post-capitalist music for the masses may be symptomatic of nothing more than our failure to imagine an alternative to capitalism.

To demand a coherent emancipatory politics from artists alone would put the cart before the horse: Depeche Mode didn’t single-handedly raze the Iron Curtain, didn’t try to. As frivolous as it seems, though, we’re edified by the band’s blueprint, the ecosystem of myths, documentaries, and sites of worship that survives today.

In neoliberal Tallinn, where crafty startups and WiFi sweep the streets, DM Baar remains reassuringly kitsch, its neon throb as crucial to the city pulse as the patter of footsteps up cathedral stairways and down wet cobbles. Places like this preserve an echo of Soviet resistance but also remind us what’s possible, corralling friends who’ll pour out a drink as we mull over the decline of civilization—and, galvanized by music, consider what’s in our power to help stop it.