Leslie Woodhead - How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution

Copyright 2013 by Leslie Woodhead

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No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Woodhead, Leslie, 1937
How the Beatles rocked the Kremlin: the untold story of a noisy revolution /
Leslie Woodhead. 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN 987-1-6081-9621-0
1. Rock musicSoviet UnionHistory and criticism. 2. Rock music
Russia (Federation)History and criticism. 3. Rock musicPolitical
aspectsSoviet Union 4. Rock musicPolitical aspectsRussia (Federation)
5. BeatlesInfluence. I. Title.
ML3534.R8W66 2012
781.660947dc23
2012031994

First U.S. Edition 2013
This electronic edition published in April 2013

www.bloomsbury.com

To Artemy Troitskymy indispensable guide
and improbable friend.

As the sun slides behind the Kremlin, a hundred thousand people pack into Red Square, into the heart of Russia. The fairy-tale domes of Saint Basils cathedral and the ancient red walls of the Kremlin seem to be on fire. The vast crowd roarsand many weepas a familiar figure strikes the first chords. Back in the U.S.S.R. rolls out across the squareand Paul McCartney is here at last to sing it.

People cried rivers and waterfalls of tears, says Artemy Troitsky, Russias celebrity rock guru. It was like something that sums up your whole life. Moscow girls make me sing and shout, sings McCartney, and the crowd sings back, laughing, crying, hugging, dancing to an anthem that had once put some of them in jail, lost them their jobs and their education, turned them into outcasts. Now the Soviet Beatles generation, the kids of the 1960s and the decades of stagnation, are gathered to welcome a real live Beatle. It was as if the mystical body of the Beatles came to the middle of Moscow, says Sasha Lipnitsky, who has been waiting for more than forty years.

The story of how that Red Square spectacularunimaginable for decadesfinally came to pass is an extraordinary, untold tale. Its the story of how the Beatles changed everything back in the U.S.S.R. and turned a world upside down. It is also the dramatic and troubled history of popular music in the Soviet Union. During seventy years of totalitarian rule in a society where culture always had the power to drive change, exotic Western importsjazz, dance music, bards with a message, rock n rollhad a seditious force. For decades before the Beatles became a catalyst for change, popular musicians and their music had alarmed Soviet leaders, triggering bizarre wars between guardians of official culture and the generations of musical rebels who insisted on dancing to a different tune.

Unrecorded in accounts of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the impact of the Beatlesand the musical revolution they inspiredwere crucial in washing away the vast totalitarian edifice. Their music, their style, their spirit were the keys. They were forbidden, never allowed to play in the U.S.S.R. But their music was irresistible. It blasted open the door to Western culture, fomenting a cultural revolution that helped to destroy the Soviet Union.

Now, the Soviet Union was gone and a Beatle was playing in Red Square. Down in the front row of the audience were Putin and Gorbachev and the bosses of the new Russia, inheritors of the men who once ran the KGB and the vast Soviet empire, the men who had called rock n roll cultural AIDS and banned the Beatles. Now the heirs of those repressive old men who had stood on Lenins tomb gazing out on the armies and the missiles parading through this same Red Square were tapping their feet to Cant Buy Me Love.

Stalin and Brezhnev and all the others buried in the Kremlin walls could never have imagined this night. They were men whose mission was to turn culture into politics, and create Soviet culture. The Party couldnt give the kids anything, said Art Troitsky. There was nothing that reminded me of my dreams. Official culture meant men with bad haircuts belting out patriotic anthems at beefy matrons in cardigans, dancing bears, and massed choirs of soldiers.

It had been in the mid-1960s that the music first reached the Beatles generation, gathered now in Red Square. By stealth, by way of gossip and whispers, through the illicit late-night broadcasts on Radio Luxembourg, the BBC, and Voice of America, the kids tuned in. Bitles, they whispered. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

As a generation of Soviet kids dared to sing along, they gave up on building Socialism and abandoned the beliefs of their parents. The Cold War was won by the West, says Troitsky, not by nuclear missiles, but by the Beatles.

Sitting near Artemy Troitsky to hear Paul McCartney in Red Square was Kolya Vasin. The bear-shaped Vasin is Russias ultimate Beatles fan, a man who insists his soul was saved by finding the Beatles. My soul flew to the light, he says, recalling the first time he heard them, flying with the Beatles. Like so many Soviet kids who defected into their own world, he found a private refuge of peace and love and music. Exiling himself in his own tiny apartment from the repressive realities of the Soviet state, Vasin had created the John Lennon Templethe only place where I could feel like a free man. Today he dreams of expanding his temple into a vast tower on the edge of Saint Petersburg.

Vova Katzman had made the pilgrimage from Kiev to be here. As a boy, he had defied police and parents to keep the faith with the Beatles. Now he ran Kievs Kavern Club, a bar crammed with Beatles memorabilia where devotees from across Ukraine and beyond gathered to swap stories of old battles under the banner of the Fab Four. Being here in Red Square, Vova said, was like a fablesomething fantastic. He struggled to find words. I was shivering deep inside.

Andrei Makarevich was here, too. At school thirty years earlier he had decorated his books with Beatles drawings, and dreamed of starting a band. Just get a guitar, play like the Beatles, and the world would be smashed. For Makarevich, the dream came true. His band, Time Machine, became the biggest group in the U.S.S.R.and eventually they were to record at the Beatles Abbey Road Studio in London.

The Beatles generation were gathered that day in Red Square, many of them grandpas and babushkas now, many who had waited decades, from the very first whispers of the names John, Paul, George, and Ringofrom that moment when they knew there was something else.

Kolya Vasin told me that he had first seen moving pictures of the Beatles forty years ago in a black-and-white clip filmed in Liverpools Cavern Club, a grainy piece of ancient history. I told him I made that little film, and his face glowed. You are great man! he roared.

For me, it all started with that film. Back in August 1962 I made a two-minute cameo of four unknown kids bashing out rock n roll in a Liverpool cellar. Soon the Beatles were conquering the world. But it wasnt until twenty-five years later in Russia that I began to hear storiesincredible at firstabout how those lads I first heard in the cellar had undermined the Cold War enemy.

Over more than two decades of traveling and filmmaking as the Soviet Union collapsed and the new Russia was born, I pursued stories of how the Beatles rocked the Kremlin. Everywhere, I found traces of an improbable but unstoppable epidemic, spawned by the Beatles and their music, which swept through the Soviet Union and helped to destroy Communism. Along the way, I came upon the story of how a superpower struggled for seventy years to control Soviet music; and how finally the state lost its hold on millions of kids who escaped into their own world to dance to the music of four irreverent rockers from England.