“Today is the birthday of John Lennon, like the first day of our world!” On a golden Saint Petersburg morning in 2009, Kolya Vasin was euphoric. “It’s like the day when people first came out of their caves wearing animal skins, found a piece of string, plucked it, and started singing.” He threw back his huge shaggy head and sang, “All you need Is love.” Kolya did a little dance, and the Beatles button pinned to his battered Stetson flashed in the sun. He was unstoppable. “Today is super day; today will be great concert. Russian people will sing John Lennon’s music. John is daddy of all—number one!”
I watched as Vasin and a few of his friends began to unload a truck. With the reverence of curators receiving Picassos for a major retrospective, they gathered up his Lennon hoard and carried it through a doorway into an old redbrick building. A plaque announced that this was the triada club. Before he followed his treasures, Vasin had more to tell me. “John Lennon is a Russian man for us. He is like Gulliver, and me and my friends are like Lilliputians dancing around his feet.” I couldn’t help thinking Kolya was a pretty chunky Lilliputian, but then he became serious. “John is about pain,” he said, screwing up his face. “Russia is full of pain, so for us his songs are like folk music.” Pain—it was a version of the Beatles I hadn’t heard from anyone else, but I could feel that it went to the heart of Vasin’s Lennon obsession. His years of battling with a state that had no place for him, and fighting for the music the state despised, must have been hard. He had told me something of those battles—the policeman who dragged him by his hair, the famous sculptor who tore off his badge. I guessed there must have been a whole lot more struggle—and pain—than I knew. But Kolya had survived, and now it was Lennon’s birthday.
I followed him into the club. It was a single room, bare brick walls with a bandstand at the far end. As I got used to the gloom, I became aware of a figure on the stage, stirring under a blanket. A man was sweeping up broken glass and the harsh scraping merged incongruously with the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” playing somewhere. Vasin wandered through the glass, oblivious. He found what he was looking for: life-size cutouts of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, standing near the stage. They looked oddly unsettling, as though they were about to stir into life. I noticed that Paul’s left hand had fallen off. Vasin picked it up, seemingly puzzled. He found some duct tape and handed it to a friend in a herringbone overcoat that looked several sizes too big. It was cold in the club, and a mirror ball turning on the ceiling, scattering Kolya and the cutout Beatles with occasional flashes, felt more like a police warning light at an accident. Vasin was still euphoric. He looked across to me and laughed. “This is my favorite day,” he said, “the birthday of my guru and hero, John Lennon. We started these parties back in 1971, and we make one for each of the Beatles on their birthdays. But this one is special for me.”
Arranging those parties more than thirty years earlier when Leonid Brezhnev’s culture vigilantes were on the lookout for rock ’n’ roll troublemakers must have been risky and exciting. Even this morning, I could see how it energized Kolya, gave him a purpose and a meaning. Now the battles were over, but the parties had become an essential part of his life. Four times every year, in February and June, July and October, he would gather his friends and the Beatles faithful of Saint Petersburg, and he would be the master of ceremonies, the moving spirit of the celebrations, welcoming a dozen tribute bands.
Vasin went over to the cutout of George and put his arm around its shoulder. “George put it very well,” he said. “We gave people hope, and we gave people the chance to have fun. We gave people the chance to forget boredom and all the other crap—political, cultural, spiritual stupidity. The Beatles made us forget all that, and gave us a reason to celebrate.” Kolya picked George up and moved him close to Paul, as though he were introducing them for the first time. The figures wobbled on their cardboard stands, and they seemed almost to have life for a moment. Then the man with the big overcoat broke the spell. He walked up to Paul with the duct tape and tried to reattach his broken hand. He stepped back and Paul’s hand fell on the floor.
A giant pair of spectacles began to unroll from the ceiling, followed by John Lennon’s nose and then his chin. The painting filled an entire wall of the club, blue and red and yellow. It stirred odd memories for me of those colossal portraits of Lenin or Stalin that used to loom down from the walls of factories and offices, the ultimate Big Brothers. Soon, John was everywhere in the Triada Club, in several more big paintings—a yellow psychedelic portrait, and a somber gray head. There was the famous photograph taken in New York. Then a poster scrolled from ceiling to floor with the lyrics of Lennon’s song “Love”: “Love is truth, truth is love.”
“Back in the U.S.S.R.” was playing somewhere in the background, and Kolya had stripped off his coat and hat now, revealing a T-shirt with a Lennon portrait. He wandered around happily, telling me about his visit to Britain and America. “It was in 1989. Suddenly there was a phone call and I was invited to visit rock ’n’ roll places connected with the Beatles and Elvis. For me it was a rebirth.” The biggest surprise for him was the statues. “I saw how people in the West celebrate their musical heroes. I saw statues of the Beatles and Elvis. We have statues of baldies with mustaches all over Russia. They have heroes of rock ’n’ roll. And they put plaques on the houses where the Beatles lived. That made a huge impression on me.”
When Vasin returned from that trip he had a revelation. “Something in my soul turned. After a huge concert in Saint Petersburg where ten thousand people listened to local bands playing Beatles music, I had a dream about building a temple.” I had seen a little ceramic model of the dream temple in Kolya’s apartment, which he also called a “temple of love.” The model, smeary like a melted candle, suggested a strange tower with two shimmering spheres. I knew he was obsessed with building the thing, three hundred feet high, somewhere in Saint Petersburg. It sounded crazy, and Art Troitsky had told me Kolya had lost a lot of friends because they didn’t support his campaign for the temple. I thought the whole idea sounded like a fantasy, but as he paced round the Triada Club there was no mistaking his belief in the project. “I realized I couldn’t just go through life as a fan. I must do some real work. As John Lennon said, ‘The Beatles were my school.’ After they fell apart, I really started working. And he sang ‘I Am Reborn.’ I had the same kind of personal perestroika inside me.”
Vasin’s temple project had taken over his life. I found it hard to respond to his heady cocktail of spirituality, religion, and Beatle worship, or even to make sense of it. The campaign to turn the dream into an actual structure had consumed him for the past eighteen years. He lobbied city authorities, wrote letters to the Queen of England and the American president. The temple idea had blossomed and expanded like a science-fiction monster. “For me, it was the beginning of a new battle, a spiritual battle with the world around me. Although the Soviet Union collapsed, the new Russia didn’t grasp the meaning of freedom, the spirit of the Beatles. I used to struggle against the cops, and now I had to struggle with these fools who did business and worshipped the dollar. My temple will stir the new Russian generation. I hope it will affect everything.”
Kolya’s vision seemed to have exhausted him for a moment. As he’d been pouring out his dreams to me, the preparations for the birthday party had been going on. The man in the coat was still trying to reattach Paul’s hand, another man was lighting candles. More portraits of Lennon were crowding the walls as Vasin surveyed the gigantic painting. I wondered how I might process the meaning of his temple obsession. Beneath the craziness, it struck me his utopian project had odd echoes of the ideas that had driven the Russian Revolution, notions about creating the perfect Soviet man and engineering the human soul. But I didn’t really see Kolya Vasin as a new Lenin.
He wandered across to me. “I’ve found a place for my temple at the mouth of the Smolenka River, which flows into the Gulf of Finland. There’s a pretty little island at the mouth of the river, and it’s a perfect size for the temple.” I was surprised that the fantasy had found such a realistic base in his head. “I’ll take you to see the place,” he said. He was subdued now, and I could tell he was aware I was not going to be recruited into his small band of temple believers. “You know,” he said quietly, “the world outside my apartment is a sort of hell for me. Maybe if I hadn’t had to survive all that anger and violence in Soviet times, maybe I wouldn’t have had the idea of this temple.”
We went back to Vasin’s apartment, leaving his friends to carry on the birthday preparations at the club. I hoped Paul would have been reunited with his hand by the time we got back. Kolya wanted me to see a book he had just published after years of work. We walked through the labyrinth of passageways leading away from the traffic-clogged street near the station. In the courtyard where Kolya’s yellow submarine sculpture sailed along a wall under winged angel Beatles, he led me to a little bookshop. Among a pile of sober Russian novels and travel guides, we found “Rok na Ruskich Kostyach”—“Rock on Russian Bones.” The cover was a riot of Kolya’s enthusiasms. Spiraling around an X-ray disk of a skeletal hand were guitars, vinyls, shouting text—FREE TERRITORY OF RUSSIA, PLAY LOUD, LOVE, WE NEED THE TEMPLE—and a disk-shaped version of the Abbey Road album cover with the Fab Four walking across the zebra crossing yet again. I turned the book over and was greeted with a smiling Kolya, holding a gold record of Imagine. The caption read, “This is my best moment.” I bought the book, and the man behind the counter asked me, “Did you actually meet John Lennon?”
Back in Vasin’s apartment, I cleared a space in his Beatles hoard to look through the book. I moved a plastic Paul McCartney, and Kolya said, “that’s John Lennon’s friend.” On the book cover was a quote: “Sometimes I wrote in a lucky trance, as if I had written ‘A Day in the Life.’” As I turned the pages, “Rock on Russian Bones” certainly had a trancelike feel. It put me in mind of those hippie effusions, psychedelic album covers dreamed up during acid trips in San Francisco. A photo of Jude the cat with flowers sat alongside a painting of a scarecrow in Strawberry Fields; a rooster played a guitar; Beatles lyrics in English wove through pages spattered with Russian text in a hundred styles; a collage of guitars was wedged between photos of Kolya at Lennon’s old house in Liverpool and kneeling at Elvis’s grave in Memphis. Little Richard’s timeless slogan “A wop bob a lu bop, a wop bam boom!” shared a spread with an old monk playing a guitar. There was a raffish painting of a Stilyaga youth in 1958 with bouffant black hair, a garish bathing-belle tie, and red socks, smoking Camel cigarettes. There were urgings to “Go Johnny, go!” “Have some fun to night!” There was a walrus and a painting of Lennon on a tightrope carrying a red guitar case. The 474 pages were numbered backward.
Tucked away in the midst of it all, I found a painting that made me stop turning the pages. On a hot-pink background, imprisoned inside a tilted black cage, a shadowy face with yellow eyes stared out. It seemed to have horns. Across the bottom of the picture, scrawled in English, was the single word scared. I remembered Kolya’s quiet words in the club about having to survive the anger and violence of Soviet times. Then, under a photo in the book of a pair of sheep, I found another quote: KOLYA, DON’T BE AFRAID! It was signed MAMA.
Back in the Triada Club, things were moving slowly. A scatter of musicians slumped on the floor, hugging guitars. Paul McCartney’s hand had been reattached at last, secured by a duct tape bandage, but not much else seemed to be happening. Forty minutes late, the first band tried to begin a sound check, competing with music playing at a thunderous level on the club’s sound system.
After more unexplained delays, Vasin jumped onto the stage to launch Lennon’s birthday party. He was certainly dressed for the occasion, in a shining white suit festooned with Beatles badges, and a white Stetson studded with more badges. By now, a crowd had gathered, an oddly assorted group of fresh-faced young kids, jolly matrons, and gnarled veterans. They stood around in the near darkness, waiting for something to happen.
It started very quietly. Kolya stuck his beard into the mike and began to growl, so softly I could hardly hear him. A tall man in a long yellow coat that put me in mind of a Chinese magician joined Vasin on the stage, and added his own quiet growling. The audience shifted uneasily. Abruptly, Kolya let out a yell that turned into words. “Yes, I’m lonely!” he yelled, and the Chinese magician yelled that he was lonely as well. I guessed they were channeling John Lennon’s pain, but it was hardly the stuff of a fun birthday party. Happily, they soon subsided, and Kolya launched into a speech. “At last,” he said, “we are ready for our celebration of music beyond space, beyond time, beyond the universe.” There was quite a bit more of this, but finally he rambled to a conclusion. “We are celebrating the birthday of a great man, the kindest of men, the man who sang to us all the songs we will hear to night.” The audience stirred in anticipation. “Let’s listen to our anthem!”
The speakers crackled into life and the opening notes of the “Marseillaise” fired across the room. “All you need is love!” Kolya shouted, and he threw a cascade of paper into the air. As the sheets fluttered down on the crowd, Lennon’s hymn of togetherness was picked up in the audience. Swaying lines of people slung their arms around the person next to them and roared out the old song—word perfect in English: “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done … It’s easy!” I remembered that night in the summer of sixty-seven, watching the Beatles singing the song for the first time on my black-and-white TV at home in Manchester. The band wore garlands of flowers and we called it “the summer of love”—when that was still possible—and four hundred million people around the world tuned in for the first global satellite linkup. More than forty years later, Kolya’s party was tuning in one more time—and Kolya at least was still a true believer.
It was the trigger that started the celebrations. The tribute bands followed one another onto the stage, awkward kids with bow ties, haunted old geezers with guitars, fumbling through “Revolution” and “I Feel Fine” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret?,” and “With a Little Help from My Friends.” The crowd waved cigarette lighters for “Imagine.” The bands had names like Bluebird and Number Nine and Yellow Pillow, and they were having a ball. Vasin gave each of the acts a little goody bag as they left the stage, presumably his Beatles spoons or a heart-shaped mug. Most of them were pretty hopeless, but it didn’t matter. The audience sang along with everything, pretty girls danced with each other, wrinkled couples rediscovered their old moves. Kolya moved through it all, arms waving, eyes closed, ecstatic. He looked across at me and gave me a huge wink.
Standing in the crowd, I found myself touched by the tide of feeling. Alongside me, a boy of twelve or so sang along with every word, his face lit up with happiness. Nearby an old man mouthed the lyrics without missing a word. I was realizing more than ever that the Beatles had mattered here—really mattered—and still mattered far more than they had for us in the West. I also had an overwhelming sense of slipping in time. Standing with this crowd, singing the old songs that had been so fresh and vital when I was young, was a kind of hallucination. I was back on that morning in 1967 when a friend unwrapped his brand-new vinyl of Sgt. Pepper, and I was transported to join the millions who believed the world might be remade. It seemed that Soviet Beatles generation was still living on that morning when the music was new—and they had infected their children and grandchildren with the virus.
Kolya had asked me to say something to the crowd about filming the unknown Beatles in 1962, and now he invited his “new friend Leslie” to the stage. I reckoned they’d much rather keep on dancing, but he was insistent. He gave me a huge hug, and I stumbled through my story one more time, ending with a rousing “Beatles forever!”
The bands and the music rolled on, Vasin did lots of bearish dancing, and a man with a beard clasped my hand and told me, “You are doing God’s work.” The fresh-faced boy I had spotted singing along with every song found me to ask how old I was when I made that first film. I told him “About twice as old as you are now,” and he looked puzzled. A woman in an abbey road T-shirt told me her nine-year-old son had asked her recently why “Yellow Submarine” was in English since he knew the Beatles were Russian.
A grizzled guitarist called Leonid delivered a rousing set of Beatles classics ending with “Yellow Submarine,” which he managed to transform into a defiant protest song—as though reluctant to abandon his decades as a rock dissident. I was by now glutted and weary and ready to call it a day. But of course Kolya still had to deliver his final message. As Lennon’s record of “Imagine” rolled over the swaying, waving crowd he bombarded them with flowers from a huge bunch in his arms. John sang, “And the world will live as one” and like this big gentle man in his white suit it was impossibly sentimental—and affecting. “All you need is love!” Vasin yelled.
I was heading for the door, but Kolya wouldn’t hear of it. “You must stay for our feast,” he said. With a crowd of veteran devotees, I drank sweet Russian champagne from bottles labeled temple drink—only for beatles fans and munched cheese and tomato sandwiches. Many noisy toasts were exchanged, and I was told that Vasin’s John Lennon party was “a matter of love.” A couple of old guys claimed me to insist that “Saint Petersburg and Liverpool are two brothers.” Kolya was at the heart of it all, still glowing. “A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful day,” he said.
At last, I made my farewells. A young man, blond and nervous, followed me to the door. “What was John Lennon like?” he asked. I fumbled for something fond. Then the man looked at me intensely and said, “Are you happy?”