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23 The Beatles Did It
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23 THE BEATLES DID IT During the years of cultural resistance to Communist ideology in the countries of FSU [the former Soviet Union] and in EE [Eastern Europe], rock music turned out to be one of the most progressive modernizing art forms of the period. It found itself at the forefront of cultural and ideological struggle, became a conduit of liberal “Western” ideas. — , International Counterculture Archive, in H-Russia (#-) The influence of the Beatles on the youth of the West is well known. Less well known is their following among the youth of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the changes they brought about in those societies during the s and s in another form of cultural exchange. “I am sure that the impact of the Beatles on the generation of young Soviets in the s will one day be the object of studies,” writes Pavel Palazchenko, Gorbachev ’s English-language interpreter and foreign policy aide: “We knew their songs by heart. . . . In the dusky years of the Brezhnev regime they were not only a source of musical relief. They helped us create a world of our own, a world different from the dull and senseless ideological liturgy that increasingly reminded one of Stalinism. . . . The Beatles were our quiet way of rejecting ‘the system’ while conforming to most of its demands.”1 But the Beatles also had fans at the highest levels of the Soviet government. In , Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa met with Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow, and Raisa told her that they were Beatles’ fans.“Gorbachev’s endorsement of rock music,” writes Timothy Ryback, ended three decades of official anti-rock policy in the Soviet Union: “Ever since the late s, when Soviet and East European youth turned to American jazz, fashion, and chewing gum as a means of overcoming the cultural isolation imposed by the cold war, Soviet-block [sic] governments . . . condemned Western youth culture as a form of ‘spiritual poison.’”2 The rock groups that emerged from the underground during glasnost were seen by conservatives as a Western attempt to undermine the Soviet Union by subverting its youth. “Today you listen to rock,” conservatives charged, “and tomorrow you will betray your motherland.”3 But under Gorbachev, writes Richard . Palazchenko, My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, . . Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc, –. . New York Times, June , . Stites,“formerly proscribed rock bands were recognized and all styles of rock blossomed —hard, soft, punk, art, folk, fusion, retro, and heavy metal.”4 “Across more than eight thousand miles of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,” adds Ryback,“from the cusp of the Berlin Wall to the dockyards of Vladivostok , three generations of young socialists, who should have been bonded by the liturgy of Marx and Lenin, have instead found common ground in the music of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.”5 A similar, but more personal and heartfelt, view on the role of rock and roll in the early s is given by Serge Levin, a Russian who now resides in Canada: Rock’n roll was the main factor that brought down the Communist regime. It was the cultural dynamite that blew up the Iron Curtain. People were bringing Western records from abroad, and they could be bought on the black market. Not everyone could afford them, but everyone had a tape recorder, so young people duplicated those records like crazy. And I’m telling you, the smell of freedom radiated by that music had a profound effect on myself and thousands, maybe millions of young people in my country.Very few knew what the songs were about in terms of lyrics, but everyone could feel the energy and was able to figure it out by themselves. So the music was the main factor in “Westernization” of the Russian people, at least of my generation.6 Rock taught Russians to speak more freely, to express their innermost thoughts, as singers Vysotsky and Okudzhava, and poets Voznesensky and Yevtushenko , had done a generation earlier. Before rock there was, of course, dzhaz, another Western import that Khrushchev called “that noise music,” and which Soviet conservatives also tried to outlaw but eventually came to co-opt.“Why did we love it so?”asks Vasily Aksyonov of jazz: Perhaps for the same reason the Communists (and the Nazis before them) hated it. For its refusal to be pinned down, its improvisatory nature. Living as we did in a totalitarian society, we needed relief from the structures of our minutely...