Why does a 1980 Soviet synth still haunt the underground?
Most instruments from the early 1980s wear the decade on their face. The Polivoks does not. Vladimir Kuzmin, who died on 12 June 2026, designed its circuit in 1980 at the Urals Vector plant, and the Formanta radio factory in Kachkanar built it from 1982 to 1990. Two oscillators, a switchable lowpass and bandpass filter, looping envelopes, a duophonic voice: modest on a spec sheet, formidable in a room.
The filter is what sets it apart. Where a Minimoog warms and rounds a sound, the Polivoks sharpens it. Drive it hard and it snarls, distorts, and seems to resist the player, and that resistance is precisely its appeal. In techno, industrial, and the harder margins of the underground, the Polivoks is no museum piece. It is the instrument you reach for when you want a sound with teeth.
Who built the machine, and who gave it its face?
Kuzmin was the circuit designer, the engineer who coaxed an aggressive analog voice out of Soviet components under Soviet constraints. Its unmistakable look belongs to his wife, Olimpiada Kuzmina, who led the industrial design. The orange and grey shell, the heavy frame, the toggle switches that feel built for a control room: she drew on Soviet military field radios, which is why no other synth on a stage resembles it.
He built a filter that argues back, and that argument is half the reason the instrument never faded.
How does the Polivoks live on?
Kuzmin never let his instrument settle into nostalgia. Its filter alone has been reimagined across the boutique world: Industrial Music Electronics brought a Polivoks circuit to Eurorack, and Analog Craftsman, SOMA, AJH Synths and Erica Synths each offer their own reading. In his final years he worked directly with Elta Music on modern Polivoks-inspired designs, among them a polyphonic analog prototype unveiled at Superbooth 2026. Behringer, which has held the Polivoks trademark since 2019, announced a reissue with him in 2021 that has yet to arrive.
The sound, though, arrived long ago, and it endures wherever the underground chooses to be harsh on purpose.
