Sergei Mironenko began as one of Russia’s semidesyatniki – a group of artists who fought for expression during the changeable “stagnant era” of the 70’s. He was educated at the Gorki Theater Academy of Art in Moscow and graduated from the theatre department at MXAT in 1981. Mironenko began his artistic career when in 1978 he joined a group called the Mykhomor (“Toadstools” in English.) Other members included Sven Gundlach, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Alexei Kaminski and Vladimir Mironenko (Sergei’s twin brother). This anti-establishment collective dabbled in various forms of art including writing, performance, graphics, painting, and music. They wrote and bound their own books of poetry, made posters and put on performance art skits. In 1982 they released a musical piece entitled “Golden Disk” which launched them into brief super-stardom. The production, quickly banned in the USSR after being played on the BBC, featured the young artists reading poetry over a diverse collection of world music. Included in the musical mash-up were the groups Shocking Blue, ABBA, and Stasa Namina, but also the ringing of the Kremlin bells, Verdi, Arabic melodies, blues improvisation, country, jazz standards, and fragments from the symphonies of Chekhov and Beethoven. Despite the fact that none of the members of the group had any particular musical talent, the poetic piece attracted an avid cult following. Soon they were ranked on a par with Pink Floyd on Russian musical charts. The Mykhomor handled the idea of being pop stars like it was any one of their other conceptual art projects, and they continued to put on skits and write poetry. Using the Futurists of the 1910s as an example, they turned their own image into an earnest art project. Konstantin Zvezdochetov declared: “We are not concerned with art. Our main work – it is our existence.”