FOR SOVIET ROCK MUSICIANS, GLASNOST IS ANGST Six months ago Boris Grebenshchikov was an underground rock idol whose music was passed hand-to-hand on illicit tapes. Today he has a best-selling record on the Soviet Union's only label, he is lionized in the official press, and go-betweens are negotiating the ultimate prize - a recording trip to the United States. Is he a contented man? Well, no. He is an angst-ridden, 33-year-old Soviet rock-and-roller who worries that the fans who have filled the stairwell of his sixth-floor Leningrad walkup with adoring graffiti will think he has sold out. ''We are so official now, so taken to heart, that the people who were with us before are not sure of us,'' Mr. Grebenshchikov said in a recent interview. ''Nobody can believe that the system has changed. They think we must have changed.'' The Question of Freedom Mr. Grebenshchikov, the leader of the group Aquarium, calls himself, with bittersweet irony, ''the darling of glasnost,'' a prominent exhibit in the Kremlin leadership's campaign to certify the new openness of Soviet culture. His misgivings about official acceptance are just one sign of the passionate debate that has grown up among Soviet rock musicians and fans now that the Soviet state has granted freer license to a music long damned as the noise of Western moral decline. Some rock musicians worry aloud that they are being used to legitimize the state or to lure disaffected young people back to the Communist Party, or that official blessing necessarily means a taming of rock's rough spirit. By Bill Keller, Special To the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/09/arts/for-soviet-rock-musicians-glasnost-is-angst.html