I had been wanting to meet up with Mikhail Safonov for some time. He was a senior researcher at the Institute of Russian History in Saint Petersburg, and he had written an eye-opening article about the impact of the Beatles in the former Soviet Union. It was surprising to find a Russian academic straying into this territory, but Safonov had not pulled any punches. “Beatlemania washed away the foundations of Soviet society,” he declared. “One could argue they did more for the destruction of totalitarianism in the U.S.S.R. than the Nobel Prize winners Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov.”
Safonov was standing in the lobby of my hotel, an unassuming academic in a raincoat, muffler, and flat cap. He seemed nervous, and I wondered if he was going to recant and shuffle back to the safety of his institute. When we got to my room, I quickly discovered recanting and shuffling weren’t Safonov’s style. He took off his raincoat, and it was as though Superman had stepped out of his phone booth. The mild-mannered researcher shimmered. His suit was iridescent silver, strobing and dancing, transforming him into a glam rock star. As we began to talk, it became clear that the hidden raver within the conventional exterior was the core of Mikhail Safonov’s secret.
“I first heard of the Beatles in 1965,” he began, in an accent as thick as borscht. “It was a strange story about how someone called Ringo Starr had had his tonsils removed, but his fans had thought it was his toenails. And then the Liverpool post office was swamped with letters requesting Ringo’s nails.” For a geeky teenager on the other side of the Iron Curtain, this must have been an unfathomably exotic fable. But Safonov was intrigued. He heard “A Hard Day’s Night” on the radio, scorned by the announcer as a song about the pursuit of money. He didn’t care for it at first, but he got swept up in the Beatlemania of his school friends.
“The music came to us from an unknown, incomprehensible world and it bewitched us,” Safonov said. “I began to listen to Beatles tapes on our big wooden radio–tape recorder at home, repairing the broken tapes with homemade glue. Soon I became a friend of the Beatles.” Safonov recalled how he came upon that first Beatles track to be released in the Soviet Union. “I will never forget how I first found ‘Girl’ on the Melodiya ‘Musical Kaleidoscope’ collection. I could scarcely believe a Beatles song could be released in our country. But of course it was not credited to them.”
For millions of kids, the overlap of the immortal name “Lenin” with the Beatle “Lennon” was irresistible but dangerous. To make jokes about that could wreck your education and your career. “If you changed Lenin for Lennon, it was really serious.” Safonov thought that for many kids who were up to that time more curious than seditious, the absurd overkill was the beginning of doubt in the system they were supposed to revere. Like nearly everyone of the Beatles generation, he began to compile a book of their lyrics. And like the others, pondering those lyrics fired up his grasp of English.
Again like many others, young Mikhail grew his hair. He reached into a pocket, sending a psychedelic ripple through the silver suit. He pulled out a photo. “My friends called me ‘Ringo,’” he said. And there he was forty years earlier, a long-faced serious boy, in sober pullover, shirt, and tie—with hair as Beatley as a Beatle wig. He smiled proudly as he held up the photo: “Ringo” Safonov looked back at the bald academic he had become. “This picture is very dear for me,” he said.
He won a silver medal at school, but to collect it, he had to glue his hair down with sugar and water to try and achieve a “state haircut.” As he was leaving the Palace of Culture after receiving his certificate, he was grabbed by police who branded him a long-haired deviant. They only let him go after he showed them his new certificate. Forty years later, the incident still angered him, and I got the sense that it had somehow shifted his life. Now he said, “The history of the Beatles’ persecution in the Soviet Union exposes the idiocy of Soviet rule.”
He told me a fantastic story about how a Leningrad school had staged a show trial against the Beatles. Mimicking the Stalinist trials of the 1930s, they had a prosecutor who railed against the Fab Four, and the whole charade was broadcast. “I heard the thing,” Safonov said, “and how the schoolkids had to denounce ‘the Bugs’ as the Beatles were called. They were found guilty of antisocial behavior.” Safonov shook his head. “The more the state persecuted the Beatles, the more they exposed the falsehood and hypocrisy of Soviet ideology. And in attacking something the whole world had fallen in love with, they isolated themselves even more. It made us more doubtful that our beloved country was right after all.”
I thought of this decent man, laboring for decades in his institute to try and reconcile the orthodoxies of the infallible state with these unsettling ideas from the Cold War enemy. “Everybody who had absorbed the culture of the Beatles began to live another life,” he said, “because they understood that Russian totalitarianism was criminal and it’s no longer possible to live like that.” Art Troitsky, Andrei Makarevich, Boris Grebenshikov, and Kolya Vasin had all told the same story, about the widening gulf between private and public moralities.
For me, that brought back something I had been told by the man who wrote the program for Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the audacious document that set the stage for the explosive reforms of 1968. Zdeněk Mlynář was an idealistic young Communist who had studied in Moscow along with another reform-minded young man—Mikhail Gorbachev. Mlynář said that the crucial thing about Dubček’s “Communism with a human face” was that his reforms—free press, freedom of speech—“banished fear.” For the first time since the Communist takeover in Czechslovakia twenty years earlier, private and public morality, what you felt free to say at home and at work, were the same. It was that liberation which the Kremlin was determined to crush with its invasion of 1968. Now I was understanding how the Beatles’ music had helped a Soviet generation to “banish fear” and insist on living another life.
Safonov wanted me to understand how, like Vladimir Pozner, he had found himself “parting with illusions.” It led him back to the theme that had wound through his life. “I think John Lennon was the killer of the Soviet Union. The Beatles hardly sang about politics, and they didn’t think about the collapse of the Soviet empire, but the fall [wouldn’t have been] possible if people hadn’t been freed inside. They helped to make that possible. It was very important to kill the slave inside us, and they helped to take our fear away.
“We had always been taught to love the collective and the masses. Now we began to realize that the individual is hugely valuable, and that changed us. In the seventies and eighties the Beatles generation began to take jobs that had always been locked up by Party hacks. It became a non-Soviet generation.” Millions of people like Mikhail Safonov, “Ringo Safonov” with a silver suit under his raincoat.
He stood up, and pulled on the raincoat. “I don’t think the Beatles thought about all this,” he said, “but they did it. So I say thank you very much.”
At the Catherine Palace outside Saint Petersburg, trumpeters dressed like defectors from Sergeant Pepper’s band welcomed guests arriving for the Pushkin Ball, also known as the Golden Autumn Ball. The gilded fantasy of the palace, which used to be the summer residence of the czars, was reflected in a thousand puddles, but the rain couldn’t dampen the highlight of the social season. Flunkies with umbrellas shielded the hundreds of guests arriving in their ball gowns and tuxedos and escorted them past a receiving line of statuesque women in golden shrouds.
Kenneth Pushkin, a remote descendant of the great Russian poet, was here to welcome his guests. Handsome and charming, his diamond-studded cufflinks sparkling in the spotlights, he told me: “If anyone in Western culture could compare to Alexander Pushkin, it would be John Lennon.” Kenneth Pushkin is an anthropologist who used to study Eskimos and now runs an art gallery in Santa Fe. He also has a blues band and writes songs—“and I’m a huge Beatles fan,” he said. Kenneth had a strange story of how he discovered his family connection to the nineteenth-century Romantic poet. “I was in the Russian Far East working with Eskimos when a woman I hardly knew asked me to deliver a package to an Admiral Pushkin in Moscow. When he opened the door he looked at me and said, ‘You are the real Pushkin.’” After that, Kenneth met many other relatives, and made regular pilgrimages to visit Pushkin shrines in Russia. He set up the International Pushkin Charity Fund, a charity to help Russian children, and the Pushkin Ball became an annual event.
Gold-embossed nymphs and cherubs gazed down on the elite of Saint Petersburg who included descendants of the Romanovs and other grand prerevolutionary families. It was a gathering to make Lenin weep, I thought. Lennon would, no doubt, have invited the guests to shake their jewels to applaud the orchestra, as he had at a Royal Command Performance in London. I knew the Catherine Palace was in fact accustomed to rock royalty and had recently hosted a party for Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, and Sting. Bill Clinton had also dropped by.
In the Grand Hall, the mirrored walls reflected an overload of opulence. The hundreds of pounds of gilding on the walls, the towering ice sculptures, the dwarf in eighteenth-century costume—it was a dizzying display of the new Russia on a posh night out. A procession of thirty flunkies in gold jackets filed past to serve a banquet, as the orchestra pumped out a selection of Strauss waltzes and Kenneth Pushkin led the dancers in a swirl of silk and perfume.
There was a pause. Out of the chatter, a familiar intro emerged—and the orchestra launched into a rather gawky version of “Yesterday.” The dancers twirled again, and Paul McCartney’s endlessly replayed lament for a lost love, played now on a tinkly piano and a sour trumpet, felt hard and brittle, like those ice sculptures.
After forty years, Beatles’ music had dissolved into the fabric of Russia so that it could take on any form. Not long ago I had seen how Lennon’s music was being reshaped as Russian punk, and now McCartney was providing dance music for Russia’s high society.
Kenneth Pushkin was laughing with a friend, another sleek, perfectly groomed man called Nico. “Nico’s a musician,” Pushkin said, “and I write songs.” “He just does it for seducing young women,” Nico said. “That’s true—the beautiful young women of Russia, most beautiful in the world.” Pushkin blew a kiss to a passing girl. Tiring of their testosterone joshing, they moved on to the Beatles. “They invented the culture of having a band and being a band,” Nico said. “Kenneth’s band plays blues with a Russian soul.” I wondered how that would sound. Pushkin shrugged. “It’s like talking about what Pushkin means to Russian poetry,” he said. “The meaning of the Beatles to the popular music of the world is like saying what is Pushkin to Russian literature.” Then he said in Russian, “Dlya nas, Beatles vsyo.” For us the Beatles were everything.