http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8232235.stm
4 September 2009
By Leslie Woodhead
Director, Storyville
While the Beatles were at the height of their success in the West,
back in the USSR they were a forbidden influence. But that did not
stop them from being heard.
Presiding over his "John Lennon Temple of Peace and Love" in St
Petersburg, Kolya Vasin is Russia's ultimate Beatles fan.
An affable bear of a man with a wild beard, Mr Vasin sits amid his
fantastic collection of Beatles memorabilia - ceramic statues of the
"Fab Four", an All You Need is Love teapot, an Abbey Road street sign
- and says: "I fell in love with the Beatles 40 years ago. They
became my friends, my spiritual brothers."
Generations of Soviet children have shared his passion for the Beatles.
As Russian cultural commentator Artemy Troitsky says: "The Beatles
turned tens of millions of Soviet youngsters to another religion."
Mr Troitsky also insists the Fab Four and their music had a more
profound impact.
"They alienated a whole generation from their Communist motherland," he says.
Bigger than Gorbachev?
From Russia to Ukraine and Belarus the Beatles played an important
part in the lives of millions behind the Iron Curtain.
Although the band were never permitted to play in the Soviet Union,
where they were officially denounced as "capitalist pollution", the
"four lads who shook the world" unwittingly helped shake the Soviet
system to its knees, according to many of those who spent their 1960s
east of the Iron Curtain.
"They destroyed Communism - more than Gorbachev," says Vova Katzman, in Kiev.
A music producer in St Petersburg says The Beatles "produced a
cultural revolution, the cultural revolution destroyed the Soviet Union".
To Yuri Pelyushonok, a doctor in Minsk, they "made a quiet revolution
in our brains. We had it in our hearts."
In Moscow, leading journalist Vladimir Pozner is emphatic about the
significance of the Fab Four.
"The Beatles did more to undermine the system than the most
anti-Soviet literature for which people went to jail," he says.
Music on X-ray
In the early 1960s, the Beatles were conquering much of the world -
but the repressive old men in the Kremlin somehow recognised the threat.
As Mr Pozner puts it: "They had an instinctive detector for things
that might challenge their authority."
Many people have vivid stories of their struggles with hostile authorities.
"I was really afraid," confesses Mr Vasin, for whom the 60s was no
swinging affair. "In Soviet times, my life was lived in fear. They
were so aggressive I was scared if I said anything good about the
Beatles, I would be arrested."
In Kiev, Vova Katzman recalls being arrested by police who cut his
hair. "I didn't care," he says. "I loved the Beatles. If something is
illegal, people want it more and more."
That feeling of being part of a vast Beatles community opposing an
authoritarian system was everywhere in the former Eastern Bloc countries.
It helped to inspire wildly ingenious way of defeating the ban on
Beatles music.
Veteran fans had what they called "Records on Ribs", Beatles tracks
copied from illicit tape recordings and inscribed on to old X-ray
plates - so children could listen to Can't Buy Me Love on Uncle
Sergei's lungs.
Tapes, secretly recorded from Radio Luxemburg were copied and recopied.
"Those tapes helped to hang the Communist Party," believes Nikita
Poturaev in Kiev.
Musical myth-making
If evidence is needed of just how radically Russia has changed, look
no further than the country's current deputy prime minister, Sergei
Ivanov - a huge Beatles fan. He even insists he learned his
impeccable English from Beatles records.
"In the Soviet Union official propaganda was one thing, but real life
was totally different," he says.
Beatles style seized a whole generation across the Soviet Union.
For impresario Stas Namin "they influenced everything - our music,
our way of dressing, our way of living, everything".
Collarless Beatles jackets, known as "Bitlovka", were assembled from
cast-offs; clumsy army boots were refashioned in Beatles style. And
with much of the Western media blocked out, bizarre Beatles myths blossomed.
Yuri Pelyushonok recalls hearing at school how "the English Queen
gave John Lennon a Gold Car; but the Beatles had to play in cages to
avoid their fans".
The most persistent myth was that the Beatles had played a secret
concert at a Soviet airbase on their way to Japan.
Everywhere, fans claimed it happened close to them.
Each year, Mr Vasin stages a birthday party in St Petersburg for each
of the Fab Four.
At the John Lennon Party a dozen tribute bands play Beatles songs to
a packed audience of teenagers and grandfathers. They all sing along
with every word.
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1 comments:
Beautifully written. As a person who visited Moscow in 1992, the hidden verve of the people was not too cautiously below the surface. Did the Beatles contribute to the tearing down of the Berlin wall? Do their ideals and music still rule today? I think yes.
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