Returning from his morning run, my Soviet journalist friend Vladimir Pozner switched on the television. Instead of the news, he found an old recording of Swan Lake. “I realized that was the end,” he recalled. “Whenever anything major happened in the Soviet Union, we were treated to Swan Lake. You weren’t told what was going on.” It was August 19, 1991, and what was going on was a power grab by Kremlin hard-liners, determined to abandon Gorbachev’s reforms and turn back the clock. “So you had this terrible military takeover, tanks on the streets of Moscow,” Pozner recalled, “and Swan Lake.”
Suddenly, it seemed the rock ’n’ roll years of perestroika and glasnost might be snuffed out. The dour gray men who had always hated rock music—the men who Pozner had told me couldn’t handle being laughed at—were back in control. “I thought immediately I’d be in jail and the experiment was all over,” Pozner said. “I was afraid. That terrible feeling of nausea came back and I realized the fear was still sitting there.”
The attempt to seize power was mounted by a few Kremlin hard-line conspirators while Gorbachev was on vacation in the Crimea. For two desperate days, the people of the Soviet Union held their breath. Pozner got calls from all over the world asking for his reaction to the coup. Speaking out would be dangerous—and he had a visa to escape to New York. He decided he must speak. Via satellite, he appeared on American television and said, “The fate of democracy in this country is being decided.” Then he joined the democratic forces who were massed outside the Russian White House. In scenes like the final act of a heroic opera, Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank outside the White House and defied the hard-line plotters. Fearing they were losing control, the desperate coup conspirators went to seek the support of Gorbachev at his vacation villa. He refused to meet them, and on the night of August 21, the tanks began to leave Moscow. The coup was over.
Many in the huge crowds defending the White House building were rock musicians. During the massive concert that followed the collapse of the coup, a telegram was read out from George Harrison. Pozner recalled, “Nobody wanted to leave. This had been what they call in Russian their ‘starry moment.’” And it was in many ways the defining moment for the Beatles generation.
After the final collapse of Communism in 1991, I worked on several projects that led me through the chaos of the new Russia. The streets of Moscow were a dismaying spectacle in those days, lined with desperate people trying to sell an empty Coke bottle or a single shoe to supplement their ruined currency. As gangster “biznissmen” looted state assets, everything was for sale—including information from state archives. For reporters and filmmakers, it was a bonanza. I researched a film about the abortive coup that had tried to overthrow Gorbachev, meeting up with disgraced politicians and shady generals in the backs of cars. I also spent time inside the fearsome KGB building, which was suddenly open for business. I heard that the KGB’s swing band was available for hire to play Glenn Miller arrangements at weddings.
I pursued a film about the theft and smuggling of Russia’s chaotic nuclear stockpile, but the trail was impossible to follow through the dangerous criminal underworld. Paranoia, rumor, and macho posturing blurred the borders between reality and fantasy.
Amid the wild freedoms unleashed during Boris Yeltsin’s volatile presidency, I was able to get inside two of Russia’s most secret military outposts. In the chaos that had invaded every corner of the country since the dismantling of the U.S.S.R. it was reassuring to find that Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road had penetrated some of scariest places in the formerly Evil Empire.
I managed to film inside a top-secret nuclear missile base a thousand miles south of Moscow near the Volga River. I spent some time with Russia’s “roketchiki” as they stood ready to launch their giant Topol missiles around the world. The affable colonel in charge of a missile battalion told me he had never met a foreigner before; but I discovered the Beatles had invaded the secret base. Colonel Petrovsky invited me to a family party in the countryside alongside a lake where his wife cooked lamb over a fire, while he fished with a fellow officer. It was a scene from Chekhov, languorous but full of unreadable undercurrents. While the delicious smoke drifted over us and we traded fraternal vodka toasts, a young roketchik lieutenant, Yevgeny Pavlov, picked up a guitar and played “Yesterday.” McCartney’s melancholy ballad was a long way from home, but it felt hauntingly Russian on that winter afternoon on the Volga. Back on the base, I was treated to more from the Beatles songbook. A raucous rock band of junior missileers thrashed out “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” and I wondered how the cultural dictators who had fought for years to exile the Fab Four would feel about finding their anthem had breached a nuclear citadel of Mother Russia. Art Troitsky’s bold declaration about how the Beatles had been more effective than nuclear missiles was being played out for real.
Star City, Russia’s cosmonaut training center just outside Moscow, was a shock when I filmed there. The cluster of high-tech facilities that had been a showcase of Socialist achievement since Yuri Gagarin led the world into space had become a dispiriting collection of grubby buildings where broken tiles littered the weed-infested campus. Only Gagarin’s office remained as he had left it, Spartan and ready for action. The clock over the door was stopped at the moment of his death.
The Russian space program was broke, reduced to selling theme park visits to rich Americans who could pay five thousand dollars for a few days at Star City, where they were crammed into space suits and whirled around in the centrifuge until they were sick. I met up with Sergei Krikalev, a cosmonaut who had been stranded in the Russian space station for a year when Communism collapsed and the state ran out of money to bring him back to Earth. I also talked to veteran Russian cosmonaut Georgy Grechko. With a frizz of hair that shot up from his head as though it had got stuck in zero gravity, Grechko was unfailingly jolly despite the dismal state of the Russian space program. He told me he had taken Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana into space to help him cope in adversity. He also talked about the music he took into orbit. “Some of the younger cosmonauts had Beatles cassettes,” he said, “but I had big bands, especially Glenn Miller.” “Moonlight Serenade” was his soundtrack as he circled the Earth in the 1980s when there was still a U.S.S.R. to call home.
Art Troitsky provided an unlikely musical coda for the era of Soviet space heroics. In 1992, he helped to organize a “Gagarin party” at the Museum of Space Achievements in Moscow. With pensioned-off spacecraft hanging over them and strobe lights firing off like shooting stars, hundreds of kids gyrated in a thunderous techno-rave. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Troitsky was becoming a little sentimental for the old days when it had been cool to be a Communist. “It was pleasant,” Art recalled, “to be able to say ‘here’s Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, the man who managed in 1961 to destroy the whole American Dream overnight.’” By the time I got to the space museum a few months after the Gagarin party, it had become a used-car lot for imported Western castoffs. In the echoing hall where the retired spaceships had made their final landings, a gigantic portrait of Gagarin smiled down on a jumble of dusty Cadillacs and Chevys. As Art said, “In this new Russian reality, there is no space for space.”
I checked in with Troitsky whenever I was in Moscow. His responses to the huge changes in his country were predictably unpredictable. He relished the messy liberations after the fall of Communism, becoming the first editor of Russian Playboy magazine while discovering a new taste for heroic Stalinist anthems. And of course we talked about the Beatles, and about their role in helping to wash away at the foundations of Soviet totalitarianism.
In the early nineties, I found Art fighting a heavy cold, shut away in his apartment with his vast collection of arcane CDs. I had made a bet with myself that the ultimate test of his hip awareness would be whether he had anything by the surreal Merseyside band Half Man Half Biscuit. Sure enough, as we talked, I spotted the Biscuit’s 1985 debut Back in the D.H.S.S. on the shelf behind him. With its sideways allusion to the Beatles song, mixed up with the acronym of the U.K.’s unemployment agency, it seemed the ideal background to our talk about the continuing impact of the Fab Four in bankrupt post-Communist Russia.
“The fact is they alienated a whole generation of young well-educated Soviet kids from their Communist motherland,” Troitsky said. “They wanted to live in an alternative world, consuming alternative culture, pursuing an alternative lifestyle.” He was stopped by a sneeze. “Life in the Soviet Union as we saw it was like a boring, pale version of real life. And real life was elsewhere—it was in Britain, it was in America.”
“OK, so now that it’s all over and there’s no more Soviet Union,” I asked, “how significant do you reckon the Beatles really were in making it all fold up?”
Troitsky pondered for a moment and poured a scotch from the bottle I’d brought. “It’s interesting,” he said. “In the big bad West they’ve had whole huge institutions that spent tens of millions of dollars trying to undermine the Soviet system—you know, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. and Radio Liberty and all that stuff.” He took a swig of the scotch. “And I’m sure the impact of all those stupid Cold War institutions has been much, much smaller than the impact of the Beatles.”
It was the most resounding statement I’d heard of how the Beatles changed the Soviet Union. And Troitsky had more to say. “The Beatles turned tens of millions of young people to another religion. And by the end of the eighties, the whole of Soviet ideology and Soviet power disappeared like fog in the morning.” He looked saddened for a moment, and I felt how dismaying it must be, even for a man like Troitsky, who had spent his life opposing the Soviet system and had felt its unwavering hostility to the things he cared about, to find that it was gone and the decades of repression had been about nothing but the preserving of power. I recalled that the book Vladimir Pozner had written as he came to understand the betrayals of his Socialist convictions was called Parting with Illusions. Troitsky hadn’t even had the illusions.
“It all vanished so quickly,” he said, “because by then two or three generations of Soviet people, I mean anyone under forty, they were ready for a different life.” I wondered how the Beatles fit into that hunger for change. It was a question Art had clearly thought about a good deal. “They prepared Soviet kids for a different lifestyle, different ideologies, different human values. They never articulated any of this, of course, but the music itself was very important. The message we took was that we’re free, even though we live behind the Iron Curtain. You can pretend to be a young Communist, but at the same time you are someone totally different. You’re a stranger in your own country.”