Down a quiet street lined with trees showing off their fresh summer leaves, I found Pushkin Boulevard. It was June 2008, and I was near the center of Kiev, the unexpectedly handsome Ukrainian capital of parks and gold-domed churches, when I spotted what I was looking for. A curtain of old vinyl LPs dangled from a purple awning, and unmistakable music drifted from a doorway. This had to be the Kiev Kavern Club. I went down the steps and found myself in a Beatles wonderland.
An ABBEY ROAD NW6 street sign was propped on the bar under a clock made from an old LP inscribed LET IT BE; Beatles photos covered the walls, Lennon in his NYC T-shirt, Ringo in an army beret from Help. Beatles faces, Magical Mystery Tour vintage, were painted on the brickwork in psychedelic reds and yellows and greens. “Penny Lane” soared out of speakers. There was a Hard Day’s Night album cover in Russian, “Vyecher Trudnovo Dnya.” An ancient radio stood on a shelf, the Cyrillic stations on the dial like a roll call of the vanished Soviet empire: Vilnius, Minsk, Tbilisi, Kiev.
Polishing glasses behind the bar was a small man in a gray tracksuit. I introduced myself, and asked him about the place. Vova Katzman told me he was the owner. The Kiev Kavern was “really my way of sharing my crazy love for the music,” he said.
The Kiev Kavern Club, keeping the faith.
I told him his club looked a bit like the original Cavern in Liverpool, and he had a surprise for me. “I saw that film from the Cavern in 1962, and when I found this place, it reminded me of that so I decided to make my club here.” I tried to tell him that I had made the film, but he was already lost in his own story. “I first heard them in 1966 when I was just five, listening secretly to Voice of America. I started learning English through the Beatles songs, and they made my life better.”
“Could you get hold of any records?” I asked him. He looked wistful. “It was illegal. There were no records. It was a different world.” Now the world had changed again for Katzman and his generation. The Soviet Union was gone, and Ukraine was a new country, struggling to come to terms with the mess and confusion of democracy. The Kavern Club, transplanted from another time and another place, felt like a refuge from all that.
Hanging on a wall was an electric guitar, circled by a quotation: A GUITAR’S ALL RIGHT, JOHN, BUT YOU’LL NEVER EARN YOUR LIVING BY IT”—AUNT MIMI. “That’s for my mother,” Vova told me. “She said, ‘Don’t listen to that music—teach mathematics.’ She grew up with Communism. Now my mother loves the Beatles.” Vova looked over his shoulder at his bar, which was also a shrine. A smile lit up his tired face. “Beatles forever, love forever,” he said.
I came to Kiev for a huge free concert Paul McCartney was due to play in the city’s Independence Square. He had been invited by a Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, in support of an AIDS charity run by Pinchuk’s wife. The event was a heady post-Communist brew of mega-money, conspicuous philanthropy, and big media—since Pinchuk owned a batch of Ukrainian television channels and planned to broadcast the concert across the country to an audience of millions. McCartney’s company MPL would, as usual, own all the rights. We had all come a long way since I watched John Lennon squeezing his sweaty shirt into a bucket at the Cavern Club. And now I was here with another film crew, British and Ukrainian, to shoot at the concert, and to talk to local fans.
I had checked the McCartney fans’ website Macca-central.com before I left home, and its comments on the upcoming Kiev concert seemed to catch perfectly the tone and spirit of charity rock in the twenty-first century. “This exciting event,” it declared, “will allow people of different ethnicities and religions, political preferences and geopolitical orientations to come together around ideas of peace, love and unity—the very ideas that Paul McCartney with the Beatles helped to bring into the world.” There was some uplifting stuff about how “the ideology and spirit of the Beatles helped build the democratic aspirations for much of the Soviet society, and eventually led to the peaceful collapse of the U.S.S.R.” Paul had added a “thumbs-up” personal message: “Pull together, groove, rock and roll.”
The fans gathering at Katzman’s Kavern Club were elated. “It seemed impossible,” Vova told me, “that any of the Beatles would ever come here, except in my dreams.” A crowd was gathering now, wrinkly survivors of Socialism and the long battle with Soviet authority to keep faith with the Beatles. I spotted an upright old guy clutching a Sgt. Pepper album, framed behind glass like a holy icon. It was evident that old Beatle schisms were still fresh here, most of all the long-matured grievances about how Yoko Ono had destroyed the band. A chubby veteran spilled out of a T-shirt with the slogan: STILL PISSED AT YOKO.
“People have been coming here from everywhere—Russia, Belarus, even Australia—looking for concert tickets,” Vova said. Fans wearing Paul McCartney Independence Concert T-shirts flooded the bar as a band of teenagers took to the little stage. They wore natty white shirts and narrow ties, reminding me of the Beatles as I first saw them in 1962. “We’re Brown Sugar,” a youth brandishing a red guitar told me. They may have borrowed their name from a Rolling Stones song, but they launched into an old Beatles classic, “I Saw Her Standing There.” And it was terrific. Even the incongruous presence of a pianist in the band failed to blunt the drive and energy of the performance—including authentic Beatles style, head-shaking howls: “So how could I dance with an other—woooooo!” It felt as if the yell echoed from Liverpool to Kiev, like an animal cry flung across the rain-forest canopy. Absurdly, I found a lump in my throat. Maybe it had to do with that memory of my first contact with the young hopefuls who went on to fire their music around the world.
As the band got stuck into “Lady Madonna” I sat down for a snack with Katzman. The menus were his homage to the Fab Four, laid out like the labels on Beatles LPs: Magical Mystery Food and All You Need Is Eat and All You Need Is Sweet. I scanned the options: Please Please Me (canapé with black caviar), Yesterday (vegetable omelet), All My Loving (veal medallions). It had to be Back in the U.S.S.R.—pelmeni. Maybe I should have From Me to You for afters—that’s chocolate mousse with liqueur. The Kavern food was a glorious melange of Ukrainian, Jewish, and scouse—a bit like Katzman himself.
He had a good story. Talking so quietly that I sometimes had trouble hearing him over the band and the chatter of the old fans, he told me how it had been with him and the Beatles back in the depths of the Cold War and Soviet paranoia. “There was a place in the botanical gardens where a man sold black-market Beatles records. We knew it was risky, and there were police raids sometimes. Anyway, I saved up some money—half a month’s salary for an engineer—and I bought a Beatles album. The police saw me, and I was arrested. They grabbed hold of me and cut my hair, and then sent a threatening letter to my school.” He smiled. “I didn’t care. I loved the Beatles.” Then he added, “All my friends supported me.”
That must have been the real problem, I thought, for the bewildered rulers, the fumbling policemen, the nervous teachers, the geriatric Party bosses in the Kremlin. How should they deal with an incoherent mass movement, millions of kids like Vova and his friends, who simply grew their hair, listened to “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and laughed at them?
Then Katzman looked straight at me as though he had suddenly decided to throw off the diffidence he’d been deploying to shield him from some half-remembered fear. This mild, middle-aged man in the mouse-colored tracksuit needed me to understand something. “The Beatles changed the world,” he said, “and they destroyed Communism—more than Gorbachev. If something’s illegal, people want it more and more. If the Kremlin had allowed the Beatles, Communism would still be going on.”
After all my journeying in search of the Beatles legacy in the old Soviet empire, and all the stories of the faithful, I was still impressed by the force of Katzman’s conviction that four rockers from Liverpool could have shifted the world. Something real had plainly happened here.
We listened to the band for a little while, recycling a Wings song. A grizzled man, the one clutching the Sgt. Pepper album cover he had framed like an icon, sidled up to the table. “I am Sergei Gorashko and I have come from Donetsk,” he said, thrusting his icon at me. “I want you give this to Sir Paul.” I had an image of McCartney’s basement stacked high with love tokens from fans, hopeless paintings, awkward poems, blurry photos, the detritus of adoration. I tried to explain to Gorashko, gently I hoped, that this was not going to be possible. He retreated with a sigh, trailing the weight of his disappointment.
A wispy woman told me her husband had been hoping to sing “Yesterday” for me, but he was too shy to come into the club and he was sitting outside. I told her to bring him in. She returned a few minutes later, looking upset. “What happened to your husband?” I asked her. “He became melancholy, and went home,” she said. The sad icon man, and now the melancholy singer—it was as though Russia’s attachment to wistful yearning, all that pining for birch trees and cornfields, had been distilled into a hopeless passion for the Beatles and their music.
Katzman’s passion had been consummated in Red Square with Paul McCartney’s concert. “It was like a fable,” he said. The euphoria had faded now, a half-dozen years later, shouldered aside in Russia’s new oil-fueled dash for national assertion. Big money and oligarch macho seemed to be the new rock ’n’ roll. I remembered those nervous bank people, waiting for President Putin to arrive at McCartney’s concert and guarantee their investment. But for people like Katzman, that moment in Red Square had lit up their lives. And now a Beatle was coming to his city.
The night before the concert I headed off to meet some of the oligarch’s people. Crawling through clogged traffic in hot, thick rain, I spotted the concert stage, a vast construction site in the main square, lit up like the Apollo launch pad on the eve of liftoff for the moon. Hunched over his wheel, Evgeny my driver cursed: “Bloody Paul McCartney blocks up whole city.” He slammed on the brakes again.
At last we reached “Horizon Office Towers—Where Business Wants to Be!” I survived the stares of the hulk with a gun checking my passport, and ran the gauntlet of the metal detector. In the lift, the Muzak played “A Man and a Woman.”
Olga Serdyuk welcomed me in her office crammed with stuffed Teddy bears. The teddies had something to do with a campaign the oligarch’s wife was mounting to help children in hospital. Olga was exquisite, illuminated with what my journalistic hero James Cameron once called “the intolerable bloom of youth.” She said “frankly speaking” a lot, and she was very nice. Only her spectacles, as exquisite as Olga herself with perfectly crafted scarlet frames, hinted at an oligarch’s high-powered assistant.
She was engagingly frank about the madness of organizing a massive concert for an ex-Beatle. “I’ve been getting furious calls all day,” she said, “about how Paul is messing up the traffic. Even my father called to complain—and he lives two hundred miles away.” She sighed prettily. “I’m also getting dozens of calls from people who—frankly speaking—I haven’t heard from in years, all begging for tickets.”
We moved on to a rooftop bar with a view of an operatic square decorated with a gold-domed cathedral. Olga had more stories about preparing the way for a rock legend. Her big problem recently had been confetti. At one point, McCartney’s stage show calls for a cascade of confetti to pour down on him and the band. But not just any confetti. “Paul’s people told me to collect six different grades of confetti—from coarse as gravel to fine as sand—and send them to London for Paul’s personal scrutiny and approval.” Now she was working on the opening of an exhibition of McCartney’s paintings at the oligarch’s gallery in Kiev. “Frankly speaking, I think they’re childish,” she said.
Olga’s husband, Dima, bustled in, dark and a bit menacing, packed into a Hawaiian shirt. He was keen to let me know that Kiev was very old and very expensive. Then he was telling me that he got the exquisite Olga to make him soup at midnight. I couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed or thrilled. Dima was determined to make enough money to buy a Brazilian island where he could swim with dolphins. Olga looked at her watch.
Dima was right about the prices in Kiev. The bill for our drinks was unfeasible. It had been a long day.