White on black, snow was sprinkling Sasha Lipnitsky’s beret as we talked in a deserted café near the bandstand in Moscow’s Hermitage Park. I recalled that this was the place where many of the Soviet Union’s first jazz concerts had been held fifty years earlier. Now the pale green pavilions had an abandoned feel, as though a cheery crowd of Young Pioneers had faded into the snow. With his neatly trimmed beard and the world-weary eyes of a character from Chekhov, Lipnitsky seemed a visitor from an earlier time. He was one of Art Troitsky’s best friends, and I liked him immediately. Art had told me Sasha was a bass guitarist with one of Moscow’s most adventurous bands, Zvuki Mu. I had seen a video of the band in action, and it was hard to match up the dervish contortions of the band’s lead singer, Peter Mamonov, with this quiet, aristocratic man in the park.
Lipnitsky was a survivor of the battles between rock and authority, and he told me he owed everything to the Beatles. “Just two songs on a little record, “All My Loving” together with “And I Love Her”—this record changed my life. I was twelve years old.” Like almost everyone I was meeting from the Beatles generation, he was a son of privilege. His grandfather interpreted at meetings between Kennedy and Krushchev, and his connections brought him the Beatles long before most Russian kids had tuned into them. “My grandmother was a big movie star, and she brought me that first record from a trip to India. Like a lot of people, I can’t explain why I loved the Beatles with all my heart and soul.” I was startled by the force of Lipnitsky’s declaration. His feeling for the music felt like a confession of faith. “Nobody even tried to understand the words of the songs,” he said. “We were trying to understand the feeling behind the music.”
“What do you think that was?” I asked him.
“I think freedom, the wind of freedom.”
It was said simply, unself-consciously. As so often in Russia, the direct statement of feeling caught me off guard, made me feel jaded, a cynical tourist from a place where that kind of thing was almost an embarrassment. But then Lipnitsky startled me again by insisting that the Beatles and their music were about spiritual liberation. “Russian pop music was very organized; there was no place for improvization.” Then he said, “The Beatles brought us the idea of democracy. For many of us, it was the first hole in the Iron Curtain. We were the Beatles generation.”
We sheltered under the roof of the café, looking across at the bandstand, blurring now through the falling snow. “This was where Vladimir Vysotsky used to play in the seventies. He was a huge figure for us. He sang his songs about the mess of daily life, about drunks and losers, about real things—about standing in line for everything, about the struggle to find somewhere to live. He was funny and tough and impossible for the system to control, and he was a hero for everyone.”
I asked Sasha to tell me more about Vysotsky. “He had a demonic energy, and his life was a nonstop drama of wild drinking, car smashes, and rebellion.” Even the headlines of the man’s ungovernable life helped me to understand how frustrating it must have been for the bureaucrats to rein him in; and his story also told me something fundamental about how the decades of trying to dictate music according to an official template were ultimately a delusion.
“Vysotsky had two careers, really,” Lipnitsky went on. “He was a very successful actor at the Moscow Art Theater, where he was a celebrated Hamlet. If that wasn’t enough, Vysotsky also starred in dozens of films. Then he married a French film star; for the fans that only made his legend even greater. But in the early 1970s, the authorities decided to crack down on him.” As Sasha told me the story he spoke more quietly and for him it seemed the campaign against Vysotsky summed up the capricious stupidity of state bureaucrats over the years in harassing musicians. “They suddenly announced he didn’t have permission to perform as a soloist, and his list of songs at a recent concert had not been approved.” The idea of a famous singer needing official approval for a playlist of his own songs was so bizarre that for a moment I wondered if I had misheard Lipnitsky’s story.
Vysotsky died in July 1980 at the age of forty-two, unmentioned by official Soviet media. But thirty thousand people turned up on the day of his funeral, and mourners still hold vigils at his graveside every year. “Of course his records were never released,” Sasha said, “until after he died, and Gorbachev came to power.”
We walked around the snow-covered bandstand where Vysotsky used to play, and Sasha came to a halt. “There’s something you should understand,” he said. “For many years, we were told that the West was an enemy—nothing more. Not our neighbors on the planet, just ‘the Enemy.’ The Beatles were the first to show us that there was something wrong with what we had always been taught by our Soviet rulers.”
“Do you think that scared them?”
“I think they understood that this idea about the Beatles will change something inside us.”
It was snowing steadily now, gathering in little drifts against the bandstand. “Let’s go up to my flat,” Lipnitsky said.
The apartment overlooking the park was crammed with a tangle of electronic bits and pieces—big old mixers, dead microphones, abandoned amplifiers. For a moment, I thought someone was watching us. Then I realized that the somber faces gazing through the piles of rock castoffs in the gray winter light, were saints—a gallery of icons hung around the walls. “I collect them, and sell some as well,” Lipnitsky said. Somehow the collision of rock and Orthodox icons was transcendently Russian, but I found it a bit unsettling.
“Zvuki Mu was born in this apartment,” Lipnitsky said, “and we did all our rehearsing here.” Art had told me Sasha had sold part of his art collection to buy the band’s instruments. Now he went over to a battered leather case and lifted out a bass guitar with reverence. It struck me that for Lipnitsky the guitar in its velvet shroud was another icon. He slung it around his neck and began to talk about the troubled history of his band. “Nineteen eighty-four was our worst year,” he said, and I could understand why. It was the year when the last of a succession of geriatric Soviet leaders, Konstantin Chernenko, came to power. A former propaganda chief under Brezhnev, he led hard-line campaigns that recalled the dark days of the Cold War. “When Chernenko became the Kremlin top guy,” Sasha said, “they really started to crack down on anything connected with the West, and rock music was an obvious target.”
This was the time when Art Troitsky had been exiled from the Moscow press, and Stas Namin had been forced out of music. It was a shock to realize that only four years before my meeting with Sasha Lipnitsky, the Kremlin had mounted a crackdown on rock ’n’ roll that echoed the era of the Stalinist purges. “We did our first concert in eighty-four,” Sasha said, “and that was just when the KGB were hounding rock bands. The concert was at my old school, and all the rock people showed up. There was a huge fuss, and the director of the school had a hard time with the authorities. I was arrested, but we still wanted to have more concerts. For some reason, I felt really brave.”
Sasha Lipnitsky looked more like one of the ascetic saints hanging on his wall than a man who would choose to slug it out with the KGB, but he had a martyr’s determination. He decided to invite a half-dozen top bands to play at his country dacha about twenty miles outside Moscow. “But then the KGB moved in. They went to Art Troitsky’s house and threatened him, and then a half-dozen black Volgas arrived at my dacha. The KGB colonel was very aggressive. He shouted that this concert ‘was obviously a Western-inspired provocation.’ When the bands arrived at the dacha from Moscow, the KGB told them to leave and take their fans with them. They were really frightened.”
Hearing the story, I felt I was tuning in again to a nightmare from the 1930s, slipping into a black hole from the years of Stalin’s Terror. But a quiet-spoken musician made me understand that for his generation, the terror could be confronted. “I asked to see the KGB’s orders. There was a ludicrous row about official stamps on our lyrics, and whether we could play without lyrics, and in the end, it seemed the KGB guys just lost interest.” It was agreed Lipnitsky could have his birthday concert if it was on his own property. So he invited a hundred fans to hang out in his garden, and the concert began at last, with the KGB peering through the fence. “It was raining,” he recalled, “and with all the electric cables lying around, I thought someone might get killed.”
When the concert was over, Sasha had the hundred fans sleeping in his dacha for the night. His grandmother, who had spent years in Stalin’s gulags, thought it was lots of fun. He dug out some photos he took that day. A girl in a bikini danced while a guy strummed a guitar and a crowd listened under umbrellas. I thought they looked like people left behind from a hippie commune in Haight-Ashbury. Kids ate salad and drank wine in a garden. A man sprawled asleep on a bearskin rug as if he’d fallen on the bear and flattened it. A fan slumbered on a mattress in the garden under a plastic bag. It was innocent and naïve and hopelessly defiant, and I found myself suddenly moved by the photos and by Sasha’s story. Moved and angry. How could the vast engine of the Soviet state have stirred itself to lumber down a country lane just to bully a few kids with guitars? The whole episode gave me a new understanding of just how threatened authority must have felt, bewildered and flattened like that bearskin rug under the weight of music made by youngsters having fun in the rain.
Sasha put away the photos and for a moment he got lost in the memories of that day when the KGB had gate-crashed his birthday party. “There was a weird follow-up,” he said. “I heard that Gorbachev made a speech to the Central Committee about how my rock ’n’ roll birthday party had been organized by plotters against the state.” This was startling. So only months before he became the top man and began to chip away at the Soviet iceberg, Gorby felt he still had to rehash the old paranoias about rock being a Western virus, sent to infect the U.S.S.R.
Chernenko was a sick man, and he died in 1985, only thirteen months after becoming the Soviet leader. The new top man, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a very different figure, nearly twenty years younger and full of fresh ideas. It was hardly surprising that musicians hoped for better times under Gorbachev—though some were still unconvinced.
As he was nestling his guitar back into its case, Lipnitsky said something that made me think Gorbachev might have been right after all about the seditious potential of rock ’n’ roll. “I reckon,” Sasha said, “Gorbachev is a result of the Beatles. I’m sure he was a fan.” He snapped the case shut. “Gorby’s naïve and romantic attempts to change Russia are a result of that Beatles romance.”