“The Beatles more or less melted the hearts and brains of millions of Russian youngsters, and prepared them for the end of the Soviet Union.” Artemy Troitsky’s casual declaration about the impact of the Fab Four on his generation when I met him in London in 1987 was for me the ultimate seduction. He insisted the Beatles were more decisive than nuclear missiles in winning the Cold War for the West. I was riveted.
Troitsky was to become my unpredictable guide, skeptical prophet, and unlikely friend over those extraordinary years as the world I had always known—the world where East and West growled at each other and pawed the frozen ground, and the Berlin Wall split the planet—cracked and shifted. I became a regular visitor and fascinated witness as the curtain began to tumble down on the vast drama of the U.S.S.R.
Troitsky was in many ways an improbable friend. Handsome in a stubbled, thrown-together Hollywood way, arrogant—he sometimes called himself “the Jesus of cool”—ultra-skeptical, ultra-bright, he moved effortlessly through the gathering Soviet counterculture. A star in his own right, he was a celebrity in Russia, when “celebrity” was an unfamiliar label. He was a fearless impresario of Soviet rock when that could be costly, exploring and promoting the scattered, chaotic rock scene from the Baltic states to Georgia and Siberia.
Artemy Troitsky, my essential guide to the Soviet Beatles generation.
In 1985, Troitsky had been exiled from the official state press—what he called “the comfortable swamp of the Soviet cultural elite.” Soon after Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader, his cultural commissars had announced an official “Rock club” in Moscow. It seemed an encouraging sign, but Troitsky was immediately suspicious. “The club was arranged by the usual impeccably official organizations,” he said, “the Communist Youth organization Komsomol, along with the Moscow city cultural department and the trades unions—so I didn’t have much hope.” Art was duly ejected from the door of the Orwellian “House of People’s Creativity.” For Moscow’s rock community, it was not an encouraging introduction to Gorbachev’s new Russia.
Troitsky responded by mounting a huge benefit rock concert in May 1986 for the victims of Chernobyl, bulldozing through the opposition of nervous officials at a time when mega rock charity was unknown in Russia. The concert for Chernobyl was a serious embarrassment for the unseasoned Gorbachev regime, which was still trying to manage information about the disaster with a defensive spasm of evasion and denial. The Kremlin had remained silent until the radioactive plume from Chernobyl triggered sensors in Sweden, and the government had failed to warn people in the area to protect themselves. The Soviet state now found itself upstaged in supporting victims by Troitsky’s rock benefit. Inspired by Live Aid, the Moscow concert attracted a crowd of thirty thousand to hear seven top Soviet bands. It was an unprecedented demonstration of enterprise beyond the control of the state, and it was months before Soviet TV broadcast selected highlights.
I had met Art Troitsky when he came briefly to London, allowed to travel through the Iron Curtain at last in the early days of Gorbachev—though Art’s wife was made to stay in Moscow for fear the couple might defect. He said he was sorry that he hadn’t escaped in a hot air balloon. He came to promote his book about rock music in Russia, inevitably entitled Back in the USSR. It had an eye-catching cover parodying the Soviet hammer and sickle: the hammer had been replaced by a guitar. It was, Troitsky emphasized, with a confidence that brushed aside his slight stammer, “the very first book on Soviet rock.” He introduced me to an alternative universe of Latvian gypsy rock organists and Estonian rockabilly groups with homemade synthesizers, of bands called Hairy Glass and Russo-Turkish War and Purple Catastrophe. It was a rock culture where groups were hedged in by state regulations and required to compete before judges in a kind of Soviet Pop Idol for official prizes. Somehow, the music continued to flourish in a thousand exotic shapes—the “curious epidemic,” as Troitsky diagnosed it, of Russian rock.
Troitsky had no doubt about the source of that epidemic. “Every Soviet rock band,” he insisted, “caught the rock virus from the Beatles.” He first heard the Fab Four when he was nine years old in 1964. He still recalled that moment. “For us the Beatles hit the bull’s-eye. They had everything—joy, rhythm, beauty, spontaneity.” Art said he would introduce me to some of the Soviet Beatles generation, and in the winter of 1988 I traveled to Moscow, hungry to hear more.
I had been in Moscow just once before, a couple of years earlier, as part of a delegation of British TV folk. We had arrived in the uncertain dawn of a new era for the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev had been the Soviet leader for just a few months, and his citizens were struggling to get to grips with his new policies, known as glasnost and perestroika. The words meant “openness” and “reconstruction,” and there was talk of bold initiatives to overturn the stagnation of the past twenty years, as well as allowing more free speech and a degree of cultural freedom. But people were all too familiar with empty slogans, and there was a brooding suspicion about what the new policies might mean, beyond a clampdown on alcoholism. Still, long-banned books, plays, and movies had been released, and it seemed that our invitation to screen films and share ideas with Soviet Television movers and shakers was aimed at opening doors to the West.
But Moscow was still a grim place, confirming all my stereotypes of the Evil Empire. There were as rumored no bath plugs, and all the restaurants seemed to close for lunch. Endless queues waited, hoping for a delivery of plastic shoes. The lives of young people were still largely organized by the Komsomol, the Communist Youth organization which had forty million members—a mobile pool of cheap labor and political activism. Komsomol youth knew that obedience to the official line would be rewarded with privileges and promotion. Glasnost promised to alert the leadership to the concerns of Soviet youngsters; but it also reignited old debates about whether rock music was a Western import aiming to weaken the nation’s fiber and should be banned. Continuing “Revolutionary vigilance” was urged.
Fun seemed in short supply, and the music I watched on Soviet TV was an unvarying diet of folk songs and balalaika music. The only hint of rock ’n’ roll I encountered was when I overheard one of our interpreters saying good-bye to a colleague with a solemn “see you later, alligator.”
That first visit was an uneasy few days. As a former Cold War eavesdropper with a history of snooping on Soviet pilots in Berlin thirty years earlier, I couldn’t shed a paranoid fantasy that some heavy would come and tap me on the shoulder. Hadn’t I heard that there were as many as ten KGB watchers for every foreign visitor? I had after all signed Britain’s Official Secrets Act. Maybe I’d be hauled off for interrogation at the huge yellow-brick KGB headquarters near my hotel. The fearsome Lubyanka—the prison in the bowels of the building—had been dragging confessions from enemies of the people since Stalin’s time; surely they would be licking their lips at the prospect of a Western infiltrator? My uneasiness hadn’t been helped by the fact that in recent years I had made several clandestine trips through the Iron Curtain in pursuit of TV films. In Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia I had tracked down off-limits locations and held whispered conversations with dissident troublemakers who insisted that we meet in remote parks, away from bugs and prying eyes.
But Moscow felt different on my second visit in 1988. A few days before I arrived, Gorbachev had dared to use the word democracy, and there was some evidence to support Gorby’s recent declaration that “what is not forbidden is allowed.” He had suggested that there might perhaps be no need for a party line on everything from ballet to scientific experiments. There was a huge cultural blossoming fueled by an openness unknown for six decades. Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” was playing in the hotel lobby, and the reception desk accepted American Express. I found myself inspecting everything—shops, buildings, people—for signs of change.
Still, three years after Gorbachev began his campaign against decades of stagnation and lethargy, the ice floes of inertia were slow to melt. The more than forty-year-old decrees of culture chief Andrei Zhdanov demanding that artists devote their energies to rallying the people around the Socialist cause had not been revoked. Glasnost was defined as “openness in the interest of Socialism,” and eighteen million bosses commanding countless bureaucrats continued to govern the daily lives of ordinary citizens. The doorman at my foreigners-only hotel still looked like Brezhnev in a cardigan, and ruled his little domain with an apparatchik’s casual brutality, turning away most Soviet visitors. Only the fact that Art Troitsky and his fashion journalist wife, Svetlana, were confident and stylishly dressed, he in black, she in a pink Italian jacket and miniskirt, allowed them to breeze past the doorman.
We ate in the hotel’s dining room, taking in a stupendous view of Red Square through the ruched net curtains while an orchestra got up as Cossacks played Viennese waltzes. Snow swirled around the Kremlin towers, creating a cinematic tableau as Art talked about how the first rumors of the Beatles had reached the Soviet Union.
“Their music arrived here at exactly the right time in the mid-sixties,” he said. “A couple of years earlier, the Beatles might have landed on far less fertile ground. We had our own heroes then—Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and Fidel Castro with his romantic bearded revolutionaries in Cuba, plus of course our charismatic leader Nikita Khrushchev, who promised to bury the United States. And we believed it. I remember as a kid it was cool to be a Soviet.” Troitsky’s father, a Soviet journalist specializing in relations with Latin America, had known Che Guevara. “My dad idolized Che,” he told me.
Khrushchev called Yuri Gagarin “the new Columbus” and Gagarin’s pioneering space flight inspired an explosion of heroic songs. “We had many very popular patriotic songs about our victories in space,” Art recalled, and he sang me a little of a ballad by Shostakovich: “The motherland knows how her son is flying in orbit.” “It was the last splash of genuine popular enthusiasm for the Soviet Union,” he said. A song cycle called the “Constellation of Gagarin” with soaring lyrics celebrating “the heavenly dome aflame with the dawn of a Gagarin Spring” sold millions of records. I recalled Krushchev’s welcome to Gagarin when the space hero returned to Moscow. He kissed Gagarin on both cheeks, and delirious crowds danced in Red Square.
Troitsky’s father was based with the family in Prague from 1963, just before the first echoes of the Beatles reached the Soviet Union. Art grew up in the Czech capital, where Western radio was more accessible than in Moscow. There he discovered rock ’n’ roll as an eleven-year-old, and it soon got him into trouble.
“I played Beatles and Stones, Beach Boys and Kinks tracks over the school radio during break times. The other kids loved it, but the school head didn’t.”
Troitsky was ordered to stop, but he protested that this was the music of progressive youth, music against the Vietnam War, the music of love and peace.
“The head was unmoved and told me I must repent. When I refused, I was called ‘uncorrectable’ and expelled from the Young Pioneers youth organization.”
In the spring of 1968, the Troitsky family were recalled to Moscow. Art kept quiet about his rock’n’ roll sins, and got hold of a red scarf so he could look like a Young Pioneer. But when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague that summer to stamp out “Socialism with human face” in Czechoslovakia, Art told his classmates the truth about the invasion.
“I said that Soviet propaganda about how the soldiers were welcomed by cheering crowds was a lie.”
His shocked parents were hauled into the school to hear young Artemy being rebuked—and once again expelled from the Young Pioneers. His life as a cultural dissident was launched.
By the time the Troitsky family had returned to Moscow, the heady days of Krushchev’s heroic Socialism when it was “cool to be a Soviet” were long gone. But then, as Art put it, reducing titanic Kremlin power struggles to a hip shorthand, “in 1964, Mr. Khrushchev was kicked out and replaced by a bunch of much more boring guys. And this was exactly the moment when the Beatles’ music started to infiltrate our hearts and brains.”
We went upstairs to the smoky little bar where hard-currency hookers in angora sweaters stuffed themselves from a box of chocolate-covered cherries and clawed at German businessmen. The bar seemed poised on the edge of the new Russia, Pepsi-Cola cans displayed in a glass case like precious icons, while an ancient babushka with a broom snoozed in a corner. Troitsky talked about the irresistible appeal of Beatles music for Soviet kids. “American rock ’n’roll like Little Richard was way too fast, too violent, too weird. When the Beatles arrived with their beautiful melodies, it was completely different. And they had the ‘something else’ factor—the electric sound, long hair, the spirit of freedom.”
Troitsky’s wife, Svetlana, had her own early memories of the Beatles. “At the beginning, they looked very unthreatening, like Russian men who live with their mums till they’re forty, wearing nice little suits and white shirts.” She glanced at the hookers and their German targets, and it seemed to spark a recollection of a more innocent time. “I remember at school I could buy a very bad copy of a Beatles photo for fifty kopeks—it was a choice either to have breakfast or the picture.”
Art chatted with a British journalist friend, Martin Walker from the Guardian, who was feasting on stories of Gorby’s new Moscow, where Soviet rock and the new privatized lavatories jostled for his attention. Walker had dubbed Russia “Upper Volta with rockets”—like an impoverished African state, equipped with nukes—but it was nirvana for a young reporter. He had been Art’s best man at his wedding, and as they huddled to talk about some new story, Svetlana explained how she had improvised her own style by copying items from Western magazines and hunting down vintage dresses in antique markets. She recalled the early impact of the Beatles with a fashion writer’s eye. “We cut the lapels off old jackets to make a collarless Beatles-style copy we called a ‘Bitlovka.’” Lennon’s rimless glasses came from second-hand shops, and Armenian shoemakers improvised Cuban-heeled boots from old army castoffs. “So it was like a fairy tale,” she said, “thousands of kids grabbing this window from the West to change their image just a little.”
We headed off into the Metro, on our way to meet up with a Soviet rock pioneer Troitsky had found for me. In the gorgeous Stalinist palace of Mayakovsky station, a couple of American tourists with guidebooks were gaping at this workers’ paradise of gray marble and mosaics celebrating the “Soviet Sky.” On the spot where Stalin had addressed the Communist Party faithful at the opening of the station just fifty years earlier, Art began a tirade about the oppressive horrors of Soviet culture when he was growing up. “I just hated it all,” he growled, “because it was all totally square, totally uncool, the singers had awful haircuts and sang like Brezhnev at the Party Congress. It was totally unsexy, totally rigid.” I could hear the train approaching, but Troitsky was on a roll. “There was nothing bright and free and funky and funny about it. And those were exactly the vitamins we needed back then in the sixties, so we grabbed them from the Beatles.” The train swept away the rest of Troitsky’s dazzling rant.
In Gorky Park, crackling loudspeakers were belting out “The Skaters Waltz,” and skaters were twirling on a frozen pond. They looked effortless, as if freed for a moment from the oppressive heaviness of their daily lives.
The paths were frozen, too, and skaters regularly swished past us as we teetered along in the darkness. Art was talking now about Russian rock. “The real wave started in the mid-sixties,” he said, “and without exception they were all inspired by the Beatles.” Another skater hurtled past, and Art picked up his story. “Listening wasn’t enough—they wanted to do it themselves. They played cover versions of Beatles songs, trying to copy the English words, but most of them had no idea what they were singing about.” In Gorky Park, we were headed to meet one of the first of those Soviet Beatles.
We came to a building near the Moscow River, where a wheezy old guy was minding the door. Along a shabby corridor the sound of assorted rock guitars rattled the flimsy walls, mingled with the smell of cooking. There seemed to be a warren of rehearsal rooms, and somewhere a kitchen. Album sleeves lined the walls, all featuring a hairy tribe led by a chubby guy with a tangle of black hair.
“This is Stas Namin’s place,” Troitsky announced.
I knew something about Namin. The grandson of Anastas Mikoyan, a former premier of the Soviet Union, he had been raised in a house of privilege and music. Shostakovich, Rostropovich, and a parade of famous musicians were regular visitors. At a top military cadet school in the early sixties, Namin marched in Red Square parades—and fell in love with the music of the Beatles. He got permission to form a rock band at the military school, playing to officers and fellow cadets. When he left the military, Namin grew his hair and deployed his impressive political pedigree to establish a rock group of his own called Tsvety—“Flowers.” A quarter of a century before Gorbachev’s liberations, the band pioneered official rock in the Soviet Union; they were invited to join the fusty Composers’ Union and were allowed to make nationwide tours.
I had a memory that things had not always gone well for Namin, and while we waited for him to show up I asked Art to fill me in. “What happened to him is what happened to lots of people when rock music got mixed up with big shit called Communism.” Art sounded as bitter as I had ever known him. “Stas was great at using his contacts, and he managed to make the first Soviet rock records on the state label Melodiya.” Troitsky made “Melodiya” sound like a dirty word. “Then the press called Stas’s group ‘the Soviet Beatles,’ so the Ministry of Culture banned them and their name ‘Flowers’ for making Western propaganda and pushing hippie ideas.”
I looked at the faded photos on the album covers around the walls, and now the faces had a feeling of condemned men. There seemed to be a kind of watchful insecurity in the shifting kaleidoscope of styles. Here they looked as well drilled as Socialist Young Pioneers, there they leaped in the air with the abandon of sixties flower children, sometimes they were Europopsters with shining white T-shirts, sometimes they were big-city funk stars with satin pants and greasy hair. Surviving through it all, Namin was a rock star for all seasons. Troitsky carried on with his story. “Stas took a two-year break, and then re-formed his band with a safe, boring name—the Stas Namin Group. It was even more popular, but of course it was banned again—forbidden to appear on TV or radio, never mentioned in the press.”
Another political mood swing in the early eighties allowed the group to surface once more, but following an enthusiastic review in Time magazine—a bourgeois endorsement that made them politically suspect—they were targeted by the KGB. By 1983, Stas Namin had had enough. He switched to film and video, and became a successful photographer. The head-spinning contortions of official policy made me understand how Namin and his generation of Soviet musicians had often simply given up on fighting the system.
“But that wasn’t the end of the story,” Troitsky said. “Like lots of us, he was rescued by Gorbachev. Stas and his band were the first Soviet rock group to tour America, and they went around the world.”
And now Namin had a new focus for his unstoppable energies. Art said this down-at-heel hangout in Gorky Park was the Stas Namin Center—one of Russia’s first enterprises not controlled by the state. “The idea,” Troitsky said, “is to give a chance to young artists, poets, designers, and musicians.” It was hard to see this ramshackle place with its food smells, flimsy walls, and candles in Chianti bottles as a hub of creativity, but I guessed if anyone could pull it off, Stas Namin might be the man.
And here he was at last, looking much like the hairy troll on those album covers. Art said he had given me a big buildup as a guy who had made films with the Beatles and the Stones, and I was hit by a tide of charm and affability that must have been a key asset in Namin’s long battles with the state. We sat down at a little table with a pink check tablecloth, and Stas talked about the Beatles.
“They changed everything,” he said, “our music, our way of dressing, our way of living.” He laughed, a genial rumble that strained at his tight T-shirt. “Officially the Beatles were called things like ‘Long-haired bastards,’ very rude and unpleasant. But at that time everything that came from the West was forbidden.” Namin’s group were regularly accused of smuggling “Western-style music” to subvert their audiences, and his family connections with Soviet power gave him an understanding of how authority felt about the Fab Four. “They were very dangerous for the regime, because [the leaders] knew the Beatles gave Russian kids some kind of freedom inside.” It seemed extraordinary that the drab apparatchiks who ruled over Soviet culture would have been aware of a threat from these boys far away in Liverpool. “Did the people at the top really understand this threat?” I asked him. “They felt it,” Namin said. “They didn’t really understand, because that would be too smart for them.” I could see Troitsky nodding. “But they always hate everything not under their control”—his hands mimicked pushing something away—“they were scared by anything that has power and might influence people. Their music, their energy was not under control. That’s why the Beatles were dangerous.”
Namin’s insight into how four kids from the backstreets of the Cold War enemy had alarmed the all-powerful men in the Kremlin was fascinating. But it was also puzzling. How could this seemingly artless music, free of any obvious political message, sung in a foreign language with regional accents, have provided a catalyst for changing an entire generation? It felt almost like a chemical reaction, as though something at the heart of Soviet culture had been touched and altered by the Beatles and their music. I wanted to track down how that had happened, and what it meant for millions of the children of Socialism.
Abruptly, the cunning Stas Namin became very Russian. “The Beatles were a strange mystical phenomenon,” he murmured, “way beyond a rock group.” His command of English seemed to be running out of oxygen, and he wanted to talk about something else. “What do you think of this?” he said. He walked across the room and slipped a tape into a cassette player. Thunderous rock music flooded over us. “My new band,” Stas said, “Gorky Park.” He was already on to his next adventure.