Andrei Makarevich opened his school book. As he turned the pages they crackled, releasing the fusty smell of a Soviet classroom a quarter-century ago, and triggering memories of his boyhood obsession with the Beatles. There were pages of elaborate calligraphy and intertwined song titles, painstaking acts of homage inscribed by the young Makarevich. They reminded me of illuminated manuscripts labored over by monks, and they seemed inspired by an almost religious devotion. SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND curled into SHE’S LEAVING HOME, A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS tangled up with LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS. Russia’s most famous rock star gazed at his doodlings, looking wistful. “This was more than a bible for me. I’m sure I did it during a maths lesson or something I hated. My hand did it by itself.” On the corner of the first page, he had adapted his name, another Beatles homage: MCCAREVICH
I had asked Art Troitsky to fix for me to meet some of the pioneers of Soviet rock—the generation that had been been galvanized by the Beatles. During visits to the Soviet Union in the late eighties in pursuit of various film projects, I seized the chance to pursue my gathering fascination with the Soviet “Beatles Generation.” “You absolutely must talk to Andrei Makarevich,” Troitsky had said. “His band, Time Machine, have been the biggest Russian rock outfit for years. And they were so soaked in the Beatles, I always think they sound like a tribute band.”
I met up with Makarevich in the lobby of a Moscow hotel, where he arrived after taking part in an animal rights demonstration outside the parliament building. He said he was chilled after standing in the street and ordered a scotch. A comfortable-looking man in a tweedy English sports jacket, Makarevich was soft-spoken, more like an academic than a rock superstar. He sipped his scotch and said he had been in Liverpool recently on a Beatles pilgrimage, and it had been a shock. I recalled how Russian Beatles fans believed that the Fab Four lived in an opulent nirvana, so I could imagine that dirty old Liverpool wasn’t what Makarevich had expected. “I couldn’t believe how small and poor the city was,” he said. “I hadn’t realized that when they began, the Beatles were as hard up as Soviet rock bands.” It reminded me how the starvation of information about the Fab Four in Russia had turned them into mythical beings, set apart from the mundane realities of grimy working-class Liverpool. Makarevich finished his scotch and said he had brought something to show me. I suggested we go upstairs where we could find a place to talk.
In a room just off Red Square, with the fantastic domes of Saint Basil’s cathedral peeping through the window, Makarevich unwrapped his old schoolbook. As he turned the pages where he had transcribed the Beatles’ lyrics, he talked about how he had shared the yearnings of his generation. “Every guy who tried to be a Beatle had a book like this—with the words of the songs as we tried to hear them on our terrible tape-recorded copies. I listened ten, twenty, thirty times, trying to write it just as it sounds, without looking for any sense in the words.”
I asked Makarevich about the first time he heard the Beatles. “I was twelve or thirteen. My father was an architect and he was allowed to travel abroad. He brought back two albums, A Hard Day’s Night and a collection of early Beatles songs. I remember I came home from school, and I heard something absolutely extraordinary.” As he talked, he seemed to recover the electricity of that first encounter. “It was like lightning. I began to listen twenty-four hours a day. I got crazy.”
Andrei’s father had lost a leg in the Second World War, and he was an architect trusted by officials, permitted to travel beyond the Soviet Bloc. “Until his final years, he believed that the Soviet way was right, but he struggled all his life with the stupidities of Soviet power, constructing propaganda pavilions for international trade exhibitions.”
It was becoming apparent as I met the founders of Russian rock—Art Troitsky, who grew up in Prague with his journalist father; Stas Namin with his illustrious grandfather; and now Andrei Makarevich—that the Soviet rock revolution was shaped by the children of privilege. In the Capitalist West, rock ’n’ roll had been bred among the underclasses of Memphis or Detroit or Liverpool, but in Moscow—and later in Leningrad—I was finding a different story.
Troitsky had told me that Western rock music had sent a tremor across the Soviet Union. “Rock ’n’ roll meant a lot to absolutely every Soviet kid,” he said, “even redneck peasants who lived in a village.” I didn’t get the impression that Art spent a lot of time trudging through peasant villages, but he had no doubt about why the Beatles mattered, even to those peasants out there in the mud and misery of Mother Russia. “This was the music that made them free, that made them feel slightly different from their parents, who of course didn’t understand this noise.”
In Moscow, Andrei Makarevich pestered his father about the Beatles: who were this Lennon and McCartney? Who composed these songs? When he was told they were the guys who played and sang, who did it themselves, he had to try to copy them. He started scribbling songs, writing the lyrics in English. He tried to find out more, but all he could discover was a scathing article in Pravda that said the Beatles sat on the toilet in their raincoats to perform. With his friends, Makarevich hunted for photos of his new heroes. “Which was John, was that Paul or George or Ringo?” He saw a picture of Paul with his watch on his right hand. “I didn’t know he was left-handed, so I have always worn my watch like Paul.” Searching for any information, he saw a sports film that had two seconds of the Beatles, and went to see it again and again, day after day. “It got shorter every day as the projectionists kept snipping out frames to preserve them.”
Time Machine, the essential Soviet Beatles band, 1960s.
“We were so crazy,” he said. “I had a dream several times that the Beatles come and I show them Moscow, and bring them to school. And the teachers are really worried. They say ‘Who are these guys? Where are they from? Why the long hair?’ So there’s a big scandal. I woke up in a cold sweat.”
One of Makarevich’s friends was determined to make his fantasies come true. “He heard that John Lennon was secretly in Moscow, so he went to the Rossiya Hotel to wait for him”—he pointed to the window at the gargantuan building. I had my own memories of the Rossiya, a dismal citadel where forbidding matriarchs kept watch from their desks on every floor, monitoring every coming and going, making disapproving notes. I recalled the cockroaches patrolling the walls of my room, and the echoing restaurants where gangs of waiters stared without interest at the acres of uncleared tables and picked their teeth with discarded forks. It didn’t seem a likely hangout for John Lennon, but Andrei’s friend had the stoicism of the true fan. “He hid for two days in the bushes outside the hotel without food or water.” Makarevich sucked in his cheeks and became the starving fan. “Then my friend came back and told us, ‘I saw John Lennon.’ We had to believe.” Andrei’s face shone.
But the ultimate dream was to become a Beatle. “Of course I had to try to make myself an electric guitar. There were none in the shops, so I tried to copy from a photo of Lennon’s guitar. I made the body from a piece of wood and painted it red, but then I couldn’t find a pickup.” A friend told him you could make one from a telephone handset in a public call box. Makarevich raided the nearest box, and soon telephones across the Soviet Union had been disabled by kids scavenging pickups for homemade guitars. The harvesting of guitar pickups from call boxes was a story I was to hear time and again, so that it began to feel like a refrain from a Beatles song: “In Penny Lane a rock kid raids another telephone …”
Talking to Makarevich, I could feel his passion to beat the system, to follow the Beatles and make a rock ’n’ roll band. “It looked easy to play like they did, but of course it wasn’t at all. We thought we could just get a guitar, grow our hair, get a Beatle jacket and we were them. And if you walked down Gorky Street with a guitar case you were a hero. So everybody forgot mathematics and sport and literature, and became Beatles.”
Most of Moscow’s wannabe Beatles gave up on their dreams and made their peace with the drab realities of Leonid Brezhnev’s stagnating Soviet Union. It was a time when millions retreated to the sour jokes coined as a kind of sullen rebellion: “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work”; “Why were Adam and Eve the first Communists? Because they had nothing to wear and only an apple to eat—but they thought they were in Paradise.”
1960s rock star hopeful Andrei Makarevich.
Makarevich was different. The music he had discovered on those albums his father brought from the West had changed his life. “I can’t say we made music for the first couple of years. We just tried to look like the Beatles and sound like the Beatles. I knew a few chords. We had a drum from the Communist Party Young Pioneers. We stayed at home and just played. We listened and played, listened and played. We tried to sing.” He gave a small sigh, and for a moment he seemed lost in those years of trying to make music. “And then,” he said, “we moved on.”
It sounded like the story of any rock hopefuls anywhere—until I remembered that homemade guitar, and that Young Pioneer drum, and the inevitable cultural commissars, watching, disapproving, controlling. As Makarevich led me through the long journey of Time Machine—the band that would become an icon across the Soviet Union—I was swept up in a very Russian adventure.
Russian rock superstar Andrei Makarevich.
In the late 1960s, Makarevich and his friends fumbled through “Ticket to Ride” and “Hey Jude,” trying to sing in English. “For three years, nobody knew about us. Then we were asked to play before movie screenings, to try and get the crowds, and we began to get known.” I had seen a photo of Time Machine from those years. Four cheerful boys in velvet-collared jackets, clones of early Beatles photo shoots, smiled out at me with the undentable confidence of their youth. The tipping point for Time Machine came on a Soviet holiday in November 1970. “They decided we should do a concert to introduce a free screening. It was a big mistake. The entire Moscow hippie community came and broke down the doors. The police arrived, and the crowd threw a motorcycle in the Moscow River. It was a big scandal.” Makarevich and his band were hauled off to face an official grilling. The questioning captures the bewilderment of Soviet authority faced with the gathering rock revolution. “Are you Soviets or what? Why don’t you sing our Soviet songs? Do you want to look like English or American boys? Why the long hair? We were stuck in prison for the night, and we were scared,” Andrei said. “Then nothing happened. But from that time the Soviet authorities began to pay serious attention to everything we did.”
It was the start of years of playing cat and mouse with Soviet cultural commissars for Makarevich and Time Machine. As he talked about his adventures, I got a sense of what fun it must have been to seize the role of rock outlaw against the plodding sheriffs of the state. “It was difficult to catch us, because we were always invited to play in different places. The gigs were absolutely secret; only the people who’d been invited knew where it was happening. So the police usually arrived too late.” The occasional night in jail only added to the thrill of youthful rebellion, and as Time Machine were never paid, they could never be charged with “economic crimes”—and they never drifted away from their fans.
It was a defiantly Soviet version of the rock ’n’ roll hero, detached in every way from the life of the mega-buck, mega-stadium, Western rock star. Time Machine’s regular standoffs with authority lent them a renegade “Easy Rider-ish” profile that would have been the envy of many a Western band. You couldn’t buy that authentic renegade stuff on Abbey Road or in Beverly Hills. Hearing about Makarevich’s life on the edge of the Soviet mainstream, I thought about how, before the Beatles retreated to the haven of the recording studio, they had become rock hermits, huddling in anonymous hotels, their music drowned by the screams of the crowds. I wondered if Andrei or Paul and John would have been happy to trade places.
By the late 1970s, Time Machine’s music was circulating across the Soviet Union on millions of cassettes, commanding big prices for the hustlers who sold them on the black market. The group wrote their own songs, and sang them in Russian. Makarevich wrote all the lyrics, which explored the despair, conformism, and passivity of a generation growing up under the geriatric regime of Leonid Brezhnev. But Time Machine were still totally unofficial, with no possibility of becoming a professional group. “Soviet officials understood that something was happening,” Andrei said, “but they didn’t know what to do about it.”
Makarevich was still playing a watchful game with authority. He avoided direct attacks on Communist ideology and powerful forces in the Party, smuggling his comments in hints and allusions. With no official information published about Time Machine, the fevered imaginations of their fans created wild stories about the band, reminiscent of the fantasies that had circled around the Beatles years earlier. They were rumored to travel under the protection of a squad of karate heavies and a pack of Alsatian dogs. Concerts became wilder and harder to control.
In 1979, weary of the endless battles and angry that the band still had no income while profiteers and forgers fed on proceeds from their cassettes, Makarevich signed up with the state promotion agency, Rosconcert. After a decade of surviving on the edge, Time Machine became legitimate. It meant they could rely on national publicity and a steady income. But it also meant a degree of supervision and control—and it undercut their renegade image.
The Moscow Olympics in the summer of 1980 compelled the state to relax its cultural straitjacket—at least for a while. “They understood they had to open the doors, just a little,” Makarevich told me. Time Machine was getting a lot of attention by now, but their real breakthrough came at the Spring Rhythms rock festival in the Georgian city of Tbilisi in March 1980. Competing against bands from across the U.S.S.R., Time Machine won the top prize. Inevitably, some of their fans who had stayed loyal through their long years on the margins felt betrayed. It encapsulated the dilemma of Soviet rock musicians: keep the rebel image of free-spirited opposition and stay unofficial and poor; or join the official mainstream where the state would provide concert bookings and support, but risk losing credibility and loyal fans. Art Troitsky reported a famous confrontation he had with Makarevich, during which he accused Andrei of being “a bourgeois sellout.” “But we haven’t become any worse or more stupid,” Makarevich told Troitsky. “The way I see it, the state has moved toward us.” In a way, I thought, they were both right; in embracing a rock ’n’ roll supergroup, the cultural bureaucrats were inviting a Trojan horse into the citadel of the state. In due course, the Beatles generation would break out and begin to shift the foundations of the system that believed it had co-opted and neutralized the threat.
In the early 1980s, while the U.S.S.R. decayed under the leadership of sick old men, Time Machine flourished. They were an official supergroup, starring in movies and on TV, traveling their vast country for months with a crew of roadies and piles of stage equipment. Their song “Povorot” stayed on the top of the Soviet hit list for eighteen months. They were attracting international attention now, and Time magazine reported that their concerts were “like a return to the early days of the Beatles.”
In 1982, though, during yet another swerve in the Kremlin under Yuri Andropov, Time Machine were denounced with words that could have been coined under Stalin: they were dubbed “un-Russian” and “advocates of indifference.” But when they were briefly compelled to wind up the band, protests from thousands of fans earned a reprieve. Even the Kremlin could no longer ignore the clamor of a generation. Then Gorbachev arrived, and everything began to change. Makarevich told me at our meeting in 2007 that he was due to head off with the band for a tour of Europe and America.
Makarevich turned a page in the old schoolbook and found a drawing he had done one afternoon, back when the U.S.S.R. had seemed stuck in time. His fuzzy sketch of four youngsters who were going to change his life, his generation, and his country looked back at him, as if he had made it only the previous day. As he was leaving he glanced through the window at the Kremlin.
“Every time I see Gorbachev,” he said, “I say thank you for what you did.”
I met Vladimir Matietsky in a Moscow rock club on an afternoon when only the cleaners were performing, vacuuming acres of sticky carpet after the mess of the night before. Art Troitsky had told me that Matietsky was a veteran of the Moscow scene, a bass guitarist and all-around rock survivor. He was a striking figure, well over six feet tall with a bouffant mane of silver hair, louche good looks, and a faintly intimidating self-assurance. He also spoke the excellent English of yet another son of privilege.
We sat down in a cavernous upstairs room, hemmed in by six snooker tables. On the walls I saw that the club had a gallery of exquisite black-and-white photographs of jazz musicians, taken by a hero of mine, Herman Leonard. As we began to talk, I had the sense that Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were listening in.
“It was 1964, and I was twelve years old when I found the Beatles on my short-wave radio. My first thought was ‘wow—they sing so high.’ But the whole sound was cool, different. Then we made recordings on reel-to-reel tape recorders from LPs parents brought from abroad.” It was more evidence how the Beatles revolution was made by bourgeois kids in the Soviet Union, the ones with parents who could travel and had tape recorders—and cameras. “There was a guy in our class,” Matietsky recalled, “who started to copy Beatles photos with his camera, and sell them. It was a big business. I got known as an expert, and other guys called me in to check out the photos—to weed out the Stones or the Kinks.”
Matietsky recounted a strange fable that had blossomed around the Beatles. The acute shortage of real information bred a tangle of speculations and fantasies about the Fab Four, but his story struck me as especially poignant. “Some fans believed that the Beatles loved Soviet pop music,” Matietsky said. “The legend insisted that the band would gather in Lennon’s attic to try and listen to Russian radio, hunting for Time Machine and any other groups they could find through the static of British secret-service jamming.” The fans also said that the Beatles secretly recorded Russian pop songs on X-ray film, but that they were banned from singing in Russian. “Some kids really built a complete alternative world with this stuff,” Matietsky said. “They told stories of how British kids who tried to dance like Russians would be deported to the Falkland Islands.”
Soon, like millions of other fans, Matietsky had to do it himself. “Everybody who had a guitar and a mop-top hairstyle was a Russian Beatle. I was.” The memory lit him up and he smiled. “I was skinny, big hair, guitar—Paul McCartney playing bass!”
Like everybody I met, Matietsky had his own story about a Beatle in Moscow. “I knew guys who convinced everyone that they saw John Lennon on Gorky Street. ‘I definitely saw him buying bread,’ one kid told me.” I thought it seemed a disappointingly mundane sighting of a rock hero, but then I guess the real point was that the great Lennon might be moving among them, a prophet with his people. Matietsky made me understand how the prophets could be disappointing. “When we got to see Hard Day’s Night, it was a big surprise that the Beatles were so funny. I thought they were serious, because for us their music was serious. So it was a big shock.” It made sense, of course. In a place where people had gone to jail not so long ago for telling jokes, your heroes should not be fooling around. The Beatles’ lyrics were a disappointment as well, Matietsky said. “We thought they must be about important stuff, but when we managed to work them out, they seemed mostly about girls and having fun.”
But in the end, nothing dimmed the magic. “The Beatles were like fresh air,” Matietsky said. “In Russia they had this amazing power, because they had this free spirit. And all the young people started to imitate them, and so they started to feel more free as well.” There must have been an acute shortage of attractive role models. I thought of the stodgy middle-aged politicians and bossy officials, the dusty saints Marx and Lenin, the state-approved entertainers with their cardboard suits and military haircuts. Inevitably the Beatles—impulsive, exuberant, fearless—were irresistible.
Matietsky glanced around the club at the jazz photos. “The culture bosses were so stupid they couldn’t tell the difference between jazz like this and rock. The Party’s youth paper talked about ‘the Beatles or some other jazz king.’ So the kids had absolutely no respect for anything they said.” He shook his head and smiled. “Of course we’re living in a completely different world now. But the Beatles are still in the hearts of people who are fifty and kids of ten. No one knows how long it will last.” He tossed back his hair that was like a memento from the sixties. “But I think it will.”
Matietsky’s affair with the Beatles was to have a fairy-tale conclusion. In 2007, as a producer, he arranged for Andrei Makarevich and Time Machine to record an album in the Beatles’ legendary Abbey Road Studio in London. They rode around the city in an open-top bus and trooped in single file across the inevitable Abbey Road crossing. In the studio, they gazed at the master tapes for Sgt. Pepper, like pilgrims at a holy shrine. Then, just as their recording session was ending, the door opened and Sir George Martin, the “Fifth Beatle,” the man who had shaped all the iconic albums, came to say hello. There’s a photograph of the moment when, more than forty years after the Beatles’ music first reached the Soviet Union, a band from the generation they transformed comes back to where it all began. Andrei Makarevich looks radiant.
