NY Times · Aug 19, 2019
A Russian B-Boy Dreams of Gold
VORONEZH, Russia — Russian break dancers these days, they don’t know how easy they have it.
Sergey Chernyshev, 39, was reminiscing recently about starting out as a young B-boy in Voronezh. That was in the mid-1990s, before the internet shrank the world and the city still seemed a universe away from the wellsprings of hip-hop culture. Chernyshev’s only lifelines then were the VHS tapes that trickled in from the West.
“Someone would get a tape from abroad, and we would make copies,” Chernyshev said. “We would take something from one video, another piece from another video, and that’s how we learned how to dance.”