“You should go and see Vladimir Pozner,” said the British journalist Martin Walker. “He’ll be able to give you the insider’s take on why the old guys in the Kremlin were scared by rock ’n’ roll and the Beatles.” Walker had got to know Pozner since he came to report from Moscow, and he had a guarded respect for him as the Soviet Union’s most talented and effective propagandist. “He’s an interesting man,” Walker said, “very bright and oddly enough I think he’s pretty honest—for a Soviet journalist.”
Like many Russia watchers in the West, I had become increasingly aware of Vladimir Pozner over the past few years. He was an intriguing and mysterious figure. Since Gorbachev had begun to shake things up in the Soviet Union, Pozner had become a kind of spokesman for perestroika. He turned up regularly on TV in America and the United Kingdom, beamed by satellite from Moscow like one of those puzzling aliens in Star Trek—the ones who look just like us, but not quite. Speaking in the unmistakable accents of New York City, handsome, urbane, and articulate, with his telegenic Slavic cheekbones, he was plainly an apologist for the New Russia. But we had never before heard propaganda fired back at us in our own voice, and with such eloquence and assurance. It was clear that for all the ambiguities of this American-seeming Soviet reporter, he might be able to give me some rare insights into how the Kremlin felt about the Beatles. Anyway, I was intrigued to meet the man who was becoming one of the West’s favorite commies.
Vladimir Pozner, Soviet-American journalist.
I trudged through the slushy snow, dredging up some of my half-forgotten Russian to find my way to his apartment. I finally tracked the place down in a quiet courtyard not far from the Kremlin. Pozner opened the door, instantly recognizable, and invited me in. It was like a film set for the perfect Soviet intellectual’s flat. Books were arrayed round the walls and piled up on tables; on his desk my attention was caught by a glass model of the Empire State Building. As we began to talk, it was clear that Pozner was well supplied with the seductive charm that is often a key ingredient of the successful journalist. And he was disarmingly frank about the Kremlin’s part in the propaganda wars with the West. “The picture supplied by our propaganda about America and the West was false. And when people here began to understand that, some time in the early sixties”—about the time, I thought, when news of the Beatles reached the Soviet Union—“what happened was that they did a one hundred eighty–degree turn. Everything about America and the West is great from that point on.”
Pozner talked about that gathering divide between Soviet citizens and their rulers, and he had wonderful stories. “People would watch some report about the evils of Capitalism with pictures of poor blacks and drunks on skid row. But they would turn down the propaganda commentary, and focus instead on the miraculous displays of clothes and furniture and food in the shop windows.”
He also began to talk about his own story. It was a drama as adhesive as any Cold War thriller. Over the years since then I have come to know Pozner well, and I count him as a friend. Along the way I have also understood something of the strains of his life as a man stranded between East and West, and of his fierce determination to survive.
On that first afternoon, I only got the headlines. Pozner’s father was a Russian Jew who married his French mother in Paris and then fled the Nazis for New York early in the Second World War. Pozner senior worked in the movie business, and the young Pozner grew up in Greenwich Village, imbibing baseball and jazz and folk music. After the war as the Iron Curtain slammed down, the anti-Communist crusade of Senator Joe McCarthy pulled the plug on the Pozner family. The father, who remained a true believer in Stalin and the revolution, refused to renounce his Soviet citizenship. After a miserable interlude in Communist East Germany, the family arrived in Moscow in 1952, just before the death of Stalin. Vladimir Pozner struggled to settle amid the austerities of Soviet life, and his frustrations came to a head when he met up with young Americans who traveled to Moscow for the World Youth Festival in 1957. The festival reignited his longing for the music and the freedoms of his boyhood in New York. “Suddenly I realized how much I missed America,” he said, “the way they acted, the way they joked, the way they sang. I got this terrible feeling of homesickness, and I decided I was going to leave the Soviet Union.” He told his father he wanted to defect. The response was direct and brutal. “If you ever say that again, I’ll report you to the KGB.”
Pozner was stranded behind the Iron Curtain for the next thirty-eight years, building a life as a successful Soviet journalist, working for official magazines. His radio broadcasts from Moscow to the West in the depths of the Cold War, retailing good news about Socialism, were highly valued by the Kremlin. Pozner became a member of the Communist Party, and a believer in the ideals of Karl Marx. But he grew increasingly skeptical about the old men at the top. His outspoken comments cost him a chance to travel to the West, and that only increased his disaffection. The arrival of Gorbachev in 1985 had been his defining moment. From Leningrad, Pozner hosted the Soviet end of a pioneering Satellite Television “space bridge” between East and West with Phil Donahue as his cohost in the United States. Soon he got his long-awaited permission to travel. “At long last,” he said, “I was able to visit America again. Coming over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, I saw New York and my heart stopped.”
He took me for a drive along the vast boulevards of central Moscow, and filled in more of his story. “I was never fully trusted here,” he said, and I felt again the restlessness of a man who was never at home in either of his worlds. It made him a wonderful interpreter between East and West, and as we drove along the Moscow River under the walls of the Kremlin, I asked him about the strange obsession of the Kremlin with the Beatles. “The Beatles were never invited here,” he said, “and I think that really is an indication of the kind of built-in radar system of Communist officials. These were not stupid people, and they probably would have found it hard to explain what it was about the Beatles that made them jittery. But there was a kind of freedom, ‘fuck-the-power-structure’ thing—and they felt that. They had this detector sitting inside them.”
It was fascinating to have this insider’s perspective into how the Kremlin felt about the Beatles. I was particularly struck by Pozner’s suggestion that their hard line was based not on ideology or political conviction, but on instinct and feeling. It confirmed my gathering sense that the Beatles’ challenge to the Kremlin went to the heart of the Communist leadership’s alarm about the ungovernable power of culture in Soviet society.
Pozner laughed as he turned on to a road that took us past one of the Stalinist towers overlooking the river. “High-ranking party officials do not really have a great sense of humor—apart from jokes about the toilet. The idea of anyone laughing at them, they couldn’t deal with that. They saw it as undermining the status of the Communist Party.”
“What do you think Brezhnev would have said about the Beatles if you had asked him?”
“I doubt he could have put his finger on it, but I guess he’d have said something like ‘we don’t need that.’”
I wondered if inviting the Beatles to play in Moscow wouldn’t have been a better idea, to defuse the threat by embracing it. “No doubt,” Pozner said, “but they couldn’t see that. The more the Beatles were prohibited, the more the kids wanted them. ‘This is somehow the apple we’re not supposed to taste, so it must taste very, very good.’”
We stopped alongside a towering titanium statue of Yuri Gagarin. “He’s supposed to spread wings and fly on his birthday every year,” Pozner told me. Gagarin was still a hero for Soviet citizens a quarter-century after his pioneering space flight. As we gazed up at the statue, a “just-married” couple were piling out of a car. The bride’s white dress swirled in the wind, and the impossibly young groom looked blue with cold. “They’ll be coming to dedicate their marriage to the space hero,” Pozner said. It was oddly affecting to hear that people were still paying their respects to the secular saint. “The Soviet Union has actually stood on a profound belief, shared by most people, that their system was the best in the world,” he said. “Now that’s beginning to fade, the whole edifice could fall apart.” We drove away and I looked back at Gagarin, disappearing behind an anonymous block of apartments. “How has it all lasted so long?” I asked Pozner. “It’s been held together by fear and by belief,” he said. “The Beatles played a role first by helping to overcome the fear.” He looked across at me. “And then they showed the belief was actually stupid.”
I went out of Moscow for the weekend to Art and Svetlana’s dacha. Even such a sophisticated and worldly couple shared the Russian obsession with having a place in the country, a painted wooden house with a prospect of their own stretch of pine trees. Svetlana cooked a chicken, and I updated Art on my Beatles explorations.
“Pozner was interesting,” I told him. “He helped me to get a sense of why the comrades were so scared of the Fab Four.” Troitsky nodded. “Yes, in the sixties we were coming to understand that we were living in a monster state, and we needed something else. Of course party hoods picked up on that, and so the Beatles were an obvious target for Soviet satire with the haircuts and hysterical girls. But I think the heavy-handed satire actually added fuel to the Soviet Beatles mania.”
“Do you think that there was ever a chance they could have been allowed to play here?”
“No way. In the late sixties Madame Furtseva, who was our minister of culture, actually sent a guy to check out a Rolling Stones concert in Warsaw. Of course he was shocked and terrified, and the story he brought back absolutely closed the door to any hairy electric band—especially the Beatles.”
We sipped the scotch I’d brought from England. “There was another thing that bothered the culture ghouls,” Art said. “In the Soviet Union, we always like to follow a leader. And the Beatles were the leaders of rock ’n’ roll. I was a little snob, so I knew the Kinks, the Pretty Things, and all those bands. But for most Soviet kids, there was one leading band, and that was the Beatles. They were on every tape machine, and they personalized the whole of rock music. So it was obvious that they shouldn’t be allowed to come here.”
Svetlana arrived with the chicken. Surveying the two middle-aged men trading memories, she said, “You guys remind me of a gang of Beatles fans in this country—mainly men. The girls were probably stuck at home cooking a chicken.” It reminded me that Russia was still a remorselessly macho society, where drunken men staggered home on Women’s Day to offer their wives a bedraggled flower.
Art seemed hardly to notice. He had more to say about the fantasy of a Beatles concert in the Soviet Union. “I think it would have been a bad idea anyway. The audience would have been stuffed with the children of Party creeps, and young activists with awful haircuts and terrible ties. That would have made us feel that the Beatles had betrayed us rather than coming to rescue us.”
Troitsky leaned back in his chair. It was getting late, and I had to head back to Moscow. “You should come with me to Leningrad and meet a real Russian rock star. Boris Grebenshikov is due to play a big concert. I know he’s a huge Beatles fan, and he’ll tell you about that. But you’ll also hear how we’ve found our own voice at last.”