I found Andrei Tropillo hunched over a mixing desk like something from the Starship Enterprise, nodding his head while a thunderous heavy-metal track bounced off the walls of his studio. Art Troitsky had told me that though Tropillo “suffered from mild delusions of grandeur,” there was some truth in his declaration that he had “changed the course of Soviet rock.”
Troitsky said that Tropillo had distributed millions of Beatles albums to the Soviet masses. Of course, I was keen to hear more about that.
Tropillo was a man of volcanic energies. A barely restrained pigtail streamed behind him like a vapor trail as he raced around his empire, an old factory in the muddy outskirts of Saint Petersburg, spilling out his wildly improvised version of English. An inventive sound engineer, he had dodged the Soviet system to set up recording studios and became a pioneering producer of bands like Aquarium and Time Machine. “He was a true believer in Soviet rock,” Troitsky said, “never accepting money from musicians, while he endured all the hassles. Without Tropillo, we’d still be listening to the patriotic anthems sung by geriatrics with bad wigs.”
Tropillo took a break from mixing his latest discovery, and in the lull after the heavy-metal attack, I asked how he had found his way through the stifling web of state controls to set up a recording studio. “I suppose it all goes back to my father,” Tropillo said. “He was in jail for four years for insulting Stalin, but he invented a form of radar, which helped us to win World War Two. So my childhood was littered with galvanic cells and electronic marvels. I made my first radio receiver when I was a kid at school.” In the late sixties as the Beatles generation began to make their own music, like countless other young Russians, Tropillo learned to play guitar. “But my dream was to build my own recording studio.” He organized underground concerts for unofficial new groups, supporting musicians such as Andrei Makarevich and Boris Grebenshikov. “I was lucky,” he said. “For some reason I never got caught by the militia.” Tropillo remembered that his father, after spending those years in prison, was always fearful that Andrei would be arrested for organizing illegal concerts. “I took my father to a Time Machine concert, and he was sure that as soon as it ended the doors would open and there would be a line of black police cars ready to take everyone to prison. But it didn’t happen, and I made enough money to buy some recording equipment. At that time in the early nineteen seventies a lot of Jewish musicians were leaving Russia and they wanted to sell the stuff they had used for jazz recordings, so I bought enough to start my first studio.”
Tropillo hunted around for a place where he could set up his studio without being arrested. He tried a series of spaces in official buildings that might give him protection, such as the House of Pioneers and the Institute of Psychology. It was a constant battle to find a way through the crazed labyrinth of regulations, but he discovered a loophole. While you were not allowed to make more than six typewritten copies of a document, there was no limit on copying recorded tapes. “So I began to record Soviet rock bands and I never asked them for money”; that avoided the risk of being arrested for profiteering. “Instead I just took some rights in their recordings to make my disks.”
Tropillo also funded his commitment to Soviet rock through the national obsession with the Beatles. “At that time, the state record company Melodiya released a special record a couple of times a year called ‘Musical Kaleidoscope.’ It was a collection of various songs. In 1967 they quietly included a Beatles track ‘Girl.’” He sang a snatch of the song: “Is there anybody going to listen to my story all about the girl who came to stay …” “It was the key that opened the door for rock ’n’ roll in Russia.” The track was listed on the sleeve as “an English folk song”—with no mention of the Beatles. I guessed the state had released the Beatles’ sweet, sad little item because they thought it was safe. But for Tropillo the release had an unintended meaning. It also signaled that a Beatles song could be official, no longer prohibited. “That meant that millions of copies of ‘Musical Kaleidoscope’ were distributed, which introduced ‘Girl’ and the Beatles to the masses.”
Inevitably, the Melodiya record reached far beyond the privileged kids of Moscow and Leningrad to Art Troitsky’s “rednecks and peasant villagers.” It was a crucial moment in spreading the Beatles and their music across the Soviet Union. “People listened to the records, and it changed their minds,” Tropillo said. “This wasn’t the evil music the state had warned them about. This was beautiful.” Other people had told me how actually hearing the Beatles after being bombarded by hostile state propaganda had made them begin to doubt the previously infallible state.
Andrei Tropillo became a fearless bootlegger, pumping out countless copies of Beatles records in the years before the Soviet Union finally signed up to international copyright agreements in 1995. “I believe in ‘copyleft,’ not copyright.” His shoulders shook as he relished his joke. “I was sure that in Russia we should support musical piracy.” His breezy declaration of rock banditry was, I suggested, an early version of the downloading revolution. Tropillo insisted it was a weapon in the battle with Soviet cultural repression. “Musical piracy was a guarantee of freedom, an absolutely legal way to have free information in Russia.” I suggested that I wasn’t sure how happy Paul McCartney would be with Tropillo’s Robin Hood campaign. “Paul McCartney didn’t live in Russia,” he said with a smile.
In 1990, the pirate went legitimate. Tropillo became a director of the State’s Melodiya label. He had one crucial ambition: to use the vast resources of the U.S.S.R. and the lack of international regulation to copy and distribute millions of Beatles records. “I knew how Soviet people felt about the Beatles,” he said. He had a wonderful simile to describe the Soviet addiction. “It’s like dogs and cats: they don’t understand what you say, but they feel your feeling. Russians were the same with John Lennon and Paul McCartney.”
So at last in 1990, twenty-five years after the Beatles had reached the Soviet Union via crackling radios, bootleg X-ray films, and reel-to-reel tapes, people could buy their albums in state stores. “The government got the money of course, not me,” Tropillo said. “But I gave these records to people who had the right to hear them.”
Tropillo said he wanted to show me something. I followed him, trying to keep up as he scuttled down flights of stairs, chattering nonstop. He opened a door into a high-tech factory where robot machines were churning out endless shoals of silver CDs and DVDs. “This is very clever,” he repeated, skipping between the humming machines and cascades of disks. He had, I thought, the gleeful and faintly sinister assurance of Charlie lording it over his chocolate factory. Then he was already away and heading for another door.
It was quiet away from the machinery. We were in an office lined with CDs, many of them by familiar Western bands. Tropillo led me to the iconic Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. At first sight it looked just like the album in a million homes, with a gallery of eighty-eight celebrated faces—Einstein, Brando, Sonny Liston, Karl Marx, Mae West, and all the rest. Then I spotted that an interloper had sneaked into the back row. Peering out between Edgar Allan Poe and Fred Astaire was the face of Andrei Tropillo. But he wasn’t the only gate-crasher. Between Laurel and Hardy wasn’t that Kolya Vasin?
Tropillo had a couple of final surprises. He scampered ahead of me and stopped at a strange oil painting. It seemed to be a portrait of him in eighteenth-century costume, holding some kind of furry demon with staring eyes. “This is me as ‘the Navigator,’” he said, “wearing the costume of the explorer Captain James Cook. I’m holding a creature that represents my work.” Then I noticed a Masonic symbol. “Yes, I’m a very high Mason,” he said, looking almost shy. “My role is to join God with people.” Then he told me his ancestors were founders of the Knights Templar. Feeling faintly dizzy I asked, “You mean like the folks in The Da Vinci Code?” “Yes,” Tropillo answered. “I have a drop of Jesus’s blood in me.”
I was relieved to get back to the Beatles. Tropillo found a little gray disk and handed it to me. “This is an X-ray flexi from the sixties with ‘Can’t Buy Me Love.’ Please have it.” It felt a bit like being given a handful of moondust, and I was touched. “This is what the Beatles did,” Tropillo said. “They were the key that opened the door to Western culture. Western culture produced a cultural revolution here—and that cultural revolution destroyed the Soviet Union.” Then his mood changed. “We destroyed the system, but other people have used the results—bullshit business people, and the old KGB creeps.”
As I was heading away down the stairs, Tropillo had a final message. “Don’t forget to come tonight and hear the new punk band I’m managing, the Oz. They’ll be doing their punk opera, ‘Che Lennon.’” I said I’d be there.
Down a backstreet near the main railway station, I found a small crowd, huddling against the rain. This was where Tropillo had said I’d find his new band, and its leader Igor Salnikov. It wasn’t hard to spot Salnikov. Tall, skinny, dragging on a damp cigarette, he exuded the easy confidence of a would-be rockstar. He was also displaying a bright red T-shirt decorated with an image of John Lennon in a Guevara beret and the words CHE LENNON.
I introduced myself, and he offered me a starry smile. “I think I got almost everything from Lennon,” he said. “There was a Beatles album a long time ago, and I really loved it.” He spoke almost perfect English with a slight American accent, and he was cute. “Later I got some of John Lennon’s albums, and I started to read a lot about him and his thoughts—and it changed my life.”
So here was this kid, probably twenty-five years younger than Boris Grebenshikov, and the Beatles were still working their magic for him. “All John’s songs are so simple,” he said, “but they’re so true. And I suddenly realized I can do the same thing, I can feel what he’s saying. This thing is so huge for me.” It was pouring rain now, and we took cover under an old archway. “It’s my plan to change my name officially to John Lennon,” Igor said. He made the declaration with a shy giggle, but he was plainly serious. “I have my second Russian name from my father, so it’s gonna be John Vladimirovich Lennon. They say it can be done.”
The doors of the club were open at last, and we went inside. A handful of youngsters stood around, dragging on cigarettes, skewered by a lurid green laser. Three nearly naked men began to thrash out angry punk. An elderly punkster sidled up to tell me all his friends hated John Lennon. “We liked George Harrison.” I couldn’t imagine what gentle old George would have felt about being the darling of the Saint Petersburg punks. Things didn’t sound promising for the Oz band and their Che Lennon opera.
Looking as though he’d had a long day at the mixing panel, Andrei Tropillo introduced his new band to the sullen crowd. The Oz drifted onto the little stage, a teenage rhythm guitarist with the Che Lennon T-shirt, a wizened lead guitarist who looked like a truck driver, a lean drummer—and a boy wielding a trombone! You had to give the boys points for originality. Igor/John looked nervous, fussing endlessly with a mike. And then, suddenly, they exploded into noise.
The Oz belt out their punk versions of Lennon with their leader, “John Vladimirovich Lennon.”
Igor screamed, the trombonist made elephant bellows, the others thrashed away. Somewhere in the midst of the din was Lennon’s “Power to the People.” The crowd looked as though they were elsewhere. As abruptly as it began, the song stopped. There was no reaction at all from the audience. And so it went on, Igor’s cacophonous reworkings of “Working Class Hero,” “Crippled Inside,” “Jealous Guy” all received in glum silence by the crowd. Tropillo looked desperate. “Wait till you hear ‘God,’” he said. “That’s the show stopper.” Igor/John gave it his all, kneeling on the floor, pouring out his anguish. “God” ended. Silence again.
The old punk slunk up to me again. “They’re shit,” he said.