In Red Square, it’s Moscow Day 2011, and a toy train full of waving kids trundles across the cobbles where missile squadrons used to parade in front of the grim-faced Soviet leaders. Today, President Dmitry Medvedev enjoys the warm sunshine of a September morning, laughing with the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. The spectacle of military might has been replaced by a Europop song and dance festival, staged for television and choreographed to attract tourists and new business.
Moscow Day is a kaleidoscope of the new Russia. A young soldier with a Beatles haircut belts out a disco ballad; a blonde pop diva cruises past in a blue Cadillac with tail fins as extravagant as her hairdo; a big-voiced tenor in a tuxedo shares a rock anthem with a bulky soprano; a formation of jets roars over Red Square, decorating the sky with smoke trails of blue, white, and red to celebrate Russia’s national flag.
A flutter of ballet dancers in white tutus struggles to stay poised on the rough cobbles, and I see that they’ve swapped their ballet shoes for chunky sneakers. It feels like a metaphor for the uneasy grafting of international pop culture onto Russian traditions, and I guess I’m looking at some of the consequences of the Beatles revolution in the Soviet Union. It’s not always a comfortable spectacle.
I thought back to how I felt about Red Square when I had first come here twenty-five years earlier. Walking into that huge space at midnight with snow falling, it had made me shiver—and not just because of the fierce cold. For a child of the Cold War, being in this place brought me face to face with the fearsome power that had threatened to “bury” me—in Mr. Krushchev’s chilling phrase. Being here had for me the unreality of a dream, and the grip of a nightmare. Red Square was alarming, but it was also gorgeous. The spectacular stage where whole armies could march under the blood-red Kremlin walls, past the spooky mausoleum where the embalmed Lenin still brooded over his fraying revolution, was subverted by the absurd pantomime backdrop of Saint Basil’s cathedral at the head of the square. The Arabian Nights fantasy of painted domes and decorated walls felt at once joyous and cruel, feeding my jumble of reactions on that first evening. It was thrilling and scary and unforgettable.
And now Moscow Day had tamed Red Square, shrinking it behind advertising hoardings and serving it up as tacky spectacle. The square was for hire, a background for commercials, a location for balloon festivals, overlooked by the windows of the great GUM department store with displays for Gucci and Vuitton and Prada. It almost made me sentimental for the old GUM as I’d first seen it in the 1980s. Back then, the window displays on Red Square had reminded me of the shops in my Yorkshire town just after the Second World War, a meager selection of frumpy dresses and plastic shoes. Even austerity Yorkshire would have rejected the dusty jars of bottled cucumbers that were a feature of GUM’s window displays in the eighties. Now the glut of Western luxury baubles glowing in the Red Square windows had a hard, mocking glitter. I studied a Vuitton bag, as advertised by Mikhail Gorbachev, and then noticed that Lenin’s tomb was reflected in the shop window.
I left the square behind me, feeling dejected and conflicted. Wasn’t this what we hoped the end of the Cold War would bring—the messy stuff of democracy, for better or worse? I surely wasn’t yearning for the ugly desperations of Soviet Moscow, but did it have to turn into this?
I walked away from Red Square and Moscow Day, negotiating a tangle of police barricades. It was a reminder that the Beatles generation had not swept away Russian admiration for a strong leader. Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule, hounding journalists and locking up opponents, together with his tendency to be photographed riding a horse while flaunting a macho bare chest, suggested that the hippie message of “All You Need Is Love” was out of style in the Kremlin of the twenty-first century.
I went searching for a man sent by Art Troitsky to drive me to his dacha in the country outside Moscow. Art had told me he’d fallen out of love with the city, and was spending much of his time at the dacha now. “You should hook up with Arseny. He’s a fan of mine, and he has a car.” I could see him now, waving through the crowds, a fresh-faced young man with the crimped hair of a 1940s film star and a big smile.
“What do you say about Deep Purple?” Arseny asked as we headed out through the torrent of traffic. The Beatles’ “Help” was playing on the car’s CD player. It was obviously a gesture to me, as Art had told him about my Beatles history. For Arseny this was an invitation to quiz me ceaselessly about my rock ’n’ roll enthusiasms. “What do you say about Led Zeppelin? What do you say about Black Sabbath?” As I knew almost nothing about Arseny’s favorite bands, it was becoming a somewhat sterile conversation. But he was undeterred. He moved on to his favorite books—unknown to me—and then to his favorite Korean slasher movies—not an enthusiasm I could share, since Tom and Jerry cartoons are a bit too violent for my taste. Nothing dented Arseny’s remorseless affability, or stemmed his interrogations. Convinced now that I was an irretrievable British philistine, Arseny fell back on being Troitsky’s fan and enthused for a while about his hero. He moved on to his mother, who had once been a hippie and loved heavy metal, but of course loved the Beatles as well. We seemed to be lost in the interminable outskirts of Moscow.
It was a very long journey. Beyond the wilderness of shopping outlets, through small featureless towns, we came at last to Dachaland. Ugly new houses, bloated and garish, littered the forests along the road. “Cottagezhe,” I remembered they were called, in weird homage to some fantasy of an English village. We came over a hill, and a big sign in English announced SUNNYDALE DACHA PROJECT. Mercifully this didn’t seem to be where Russia’s rebellious rock guru was hanging out. We drove on. “What do you say about Pearl Jam?”
The birch trees hid most of the new houses out here, but Troitsky’s pagoda was unmissable. Inspired, he said, by a nearby water tower, the multistory house soared into the trees. He came to meet me at the gate, and I thought he looked tired. “Come in and check out my new slacker’s paradise,” he said.
The first thing I spotted in the spacious living room was a cushion embroidered with the Beatles in Sergeant Pepper costumes. It looked perfectly at home in Art’s hippie pad. As his new wife, Vera, cooked lunch, and his Scottie dog, Churchill, scampered around, he told me how this place was now the center of his life. “Moscow is so dirty and polluted, and the traffic is so horrible,” he said, “so I work out here and try to stay away from the city as much as possible.” It was a surprising shift of focus for this most urban of men, but as we talked it emerged there was more to his change of life. “I’m tangled up in a bunch of legal problems,” he told me, “five separate cases at the moment.” One involved a rock star who Troitsky had called the “trained poodle” of a Kremlin apparatchik. “I wouldn’t be offended to be called Che Guevara’s trained poodle,” Art said. “Poodles are kind, intelligent dogs.” He told me that he had also upset some powerful people by comments on his radio program, and now he felt the salvo of legal attacks might be orchestrated from the Kremlin. The freewheeling style of the Gorbachev years was no longer welcome, and he had the feeling he was being hounded for the decades of outspoken broadcasts and articles. “All this is affecting my health,” Art said, “and now I have a really painful back problem. I’m treating it with leeches.”
The quiet life in the country dacha with the leeches and the birch trees seemed to be more in tune with his post–rock ’n’ roll passions. We tucked into Vera’s delicious joint of lamb, and Art talked about how he was no longer interested in Britain, where I had first met him more than twenty years before. “I prefer America now, but I hate the American work ethic,” he said. “These days I have a fondness for the slacker society of the old Soviet Union.” Vera came in carrying their new baby and I had a feeling that the domestic cameo was drawing a line under Art’s time as a renegade troublemaker. It seemed that for him the Russian rock revolution inspired by the Beatles was growing old. We talked about the current Russian rock scene, and Art said the veteran band Time Machine had become a state institution. “In fact,” he said, “their leader, Andrei Makarevich, is now a cultural adviser to President Medvedev.”
So Makarevich the seditious trailblazer of Soviet rock, a man whose life had been transformed by the Beatles, an underground hero who had spent years dodging the attentions of the state, had mellowed into a presidential adviser. I recalled how, in a confrontation with Art Troitsky thirty years earlier, Makarevich had insisted that the state was moving toward him. Now I wondered if there were any real victors in the fifty-year war between the Kremlin and rock ’n’ roll. Perhaps both sides had settled for an exhausted stalemate—and both sides had been reshaped by the struggle.
We went for a walk up the lane, and Troitsky wanted to show me a view. We passed through a wood and came to a break in the trees where a rural panorama opened up. “See—this is a perfect Russian scene,” he said, “the church, the river, the forest.” It was as though he was becoming one of those aristocrats in an eighteenth-century English painting, where the artist has been commissioned to celebrate the ownership of the landscape his patron stands on. Churchill the dog dashed around, and Vera trundled the pram. Art breathed in good Russian air, and looked content.
But it seemed he had preserved his interest in championing strange new bands. Arseny drove us back into Moscow, his interrogations mercifully muted now. Troitsky wanted me to hear his latest discovery, a Finnish band called Ville Leinonen. They were playing at the Chinatown Café, a place I remembered from a previous visit as a location for Art’s birthday party. I recalled it as a gloomy warren, reminiscent of the Liverpool Cavern Club. Now it was a stylish bistro, with white umbrellas hanging from the ceiling. Troitsky introduced me to the band with my well-worn credentials as “the man who made the first film with the Beatles,” and it surprised me all over again how the Fab Four connection went through these twentysome-thing rockers from Helsinki like an electric shock—though they can’t have been born when the Beatles broke up.
They were really good, I thought, fresh and melodic and witty. They did a song that Troitsky said was a parody of Julio Iglesias, but the references eluded me. At one point they brought a blonde doll dressed in Lurex onto the stage, and it sang along with the band. Art looked like he was in for a long evening of talking and drinking, so I said my good-byes. As I was leaving the club, I spotted a poster announcing upcoming gigs. The Plastic People of the Universe were due in a couple of weeks, “presented,” the poster said, “by Artemy Troitsky.” Inevitable, I thought, that Troitsky would be hosting the seditious old rockers from Prague. I was sorry I’d miss them.
I was going to meet up with Art again in Vladivostok in a few days, four thousand miles to the east on the farthest edge of Russia. He had fixed for me to screen some of my music films at a festival there, as well as exhibiting a collection of photos I had taken of the Beatles and other classic rockers in the early 1960s. Before I left the club, he gave me a phone number for someone I’d been wanting to meet for ages—a pioneer Soviet-era rock star and Beatles disciple called Alexander Gradsky. I had been puzzled about why Troitsky had seemed reluctant to make the introduction, but I had finally pushed him for Gradsky’s number, and at last he handed it over with a shake of his head. “We’re enemies now,” Art said, “but you should meet him.”
I walked up the Moscow street where the Stilyagi used to parade in the 1950s. Their old “Broadway” was now a string of expensive boutiques and perfume outlets. It was hard to imagine those rebellious kids braving outraged citizens on these sidewalks, which had become a kind of catwalk for affluent young women. Dodging the flood of BMWs and Mercedes, I found the alleyway I was looking for. I rang a bell on an unmarked steel door. After a couple of minutes, it swung open and a big man with a mass of gray hair down to his shoulders stepped out. He saw me and waved. “Gradsky,” he said.
In the hallway of his apartment, I couldn’t miss the signed photographs of Gradsky with Putin, and Gradsky with Medvedev. I remembered that one of Troitsky’s quarrels with him had been that he was too close to Russia’s political bosses, and they’d had some kind of public row in a radio studio over that. We moved into a vast kitchen, lined with glass-fronted cabinets. Gradsky’s two Yorkshire terriers, Elizabeth and Charles, skittered round our feet, and recalling Troitsky’s dog Churchill, I wondered why Moscow’s rock aristocracy had adopted English Establishment names for their pets.
We settled down to talk at a long table, and Gradsky began by telling me about the powerful connections that had first introduced him to the Beatles. “My uncle was a dancer with the Moiseyev dance troop, and he often traveled abroad. He brought me records from the West, and I started copying Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers. In 1960, I was just twelve when I got on a stage at Moscow University and persuaded a visiting Polish group, the Cockroaches, to let me sing with them.” Gradsky reckoned this may have been the first-ever rock concert in the Soviet Union. “When I was thirteen,” he said, “I even made a record at one of the recording booths on Gorky Street.” I relished the thought that the first-ever rock record in the Soviet Union had been made in one of those streetside booths set up to preserve fond messages from homesick soldiers.
In 1963, Gradsky’s well-traveled uncle brought him the Meet the Beatles album. Like everyone I met from the Beatles generation, he was transfixed. “I went into a state of shock,” he told me. “Everything except the Beatles became pointless.” He crossed himself quickly, and the gesture looked almost apologetic.
Gradsky was a trained musician, a violinist and a singer with a three-octave range, learning to sing Schubert. But the Beatles defied his musical education. “I don’t understand how they did it,” he said, shaking his mane of hair. Like so many Beatles devotees, he began to compile his own book of lyrics. But his real passion was to try to be a Beatle. In 1965, with the grandson of Nobel Prize–winning novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, he put together his first group, the Slavs. It was yet another story of how the sons of privilege pioneered rock in the U.S.S.R. Thc Slavs were one of the earliest groups in Moscow, and in the mid-sixties they quickly became Moscow’s top band.
The Slavs played at dances in colleges and schools, but Gradsky told me that the first “beat” concert in a hall with a stage was in 1966, improbably at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “The bands and their audiences all tried to look like the Beatles,” he said. By the late sixties, he could list more than two hundred unofficial rock bands playing in Moscow. With names like Little Red Demons, Midnight Carousers, Cramps, and Bald Spots, they stood defiantly outside the boundaries of the state’s Komsomol youth organization. “Hundreds of unofficial rock clubs sprung up,” Gradsky said, “where young hustlers with a tape recorder and a sound system played rock music in borrowed rooms packed with sweating kids. They charged a small entrance fee, which was risky, but the odd arrest didn’t cure the rock epidemic.” Some bolder promoters hired local bands to play live, making thousands of rubles in a single evening—more than a worker could earn in months. “There were constant raids by Komsomol vigilantes, and equipment was regularly confiscated,” Gradsky said. “Organizers were imprisoned. But rock was resistant.”
Armed with his classical training, Alexander Gradsky was determined to become more adventurous. With his new band, the Jesters, he devised a rock opera based on nursery rhymes. Playing twelve instruments, he became one of the first rock musicians to sing his own songs in Russian and established a following with his blending of rock with folk-influenced Russian bard music. He became notorious for his flamboyant onstage antics, and Gradsky told me he reckoned the Jesters were Russia’s first punk band. “We taught people to leave their chairs—and then we took them from a dance party to the concert hall.”
“I think my real breakthrough,” Gradsky said, “was doing the soundtrack for Andrei Konchalovsky’s movie Romance for Lovers in 1973. I wrote and performed all the male vocals, and it gave me a huge audience across the Soviet Union.” From the mid-seventies, he toured the country regularly, becoming a focus of the gathering Russian rock movement. “I spotted the potential of Andrei Makarevich and Time Machine very early,” he said, and it struck me how incestuous the rock scene was in those years. From that point Grad-sky became a very particular kind of Soviet music star, performing across a range of genres from rock to opera, traveling the world, giving a concert at Carnegie Hall, and recording with Western stars such as Liza Minnelli, John Denver, and Elton John. To confirm Gradsky’s position as a grandee of Russian music, in 2000 President Putin presented him with a medal as People’s Artist of Russia.
He played me some of his CDs, and it gave me a new understanding of how porous the identity of Russian rock has always been, blurring the lines between dramatic ballads, dreamy poetic laments, gritty folk songs, and soaring rock anthems. With his rich operatic tenor voice, Gradsky moved effortlessly between Freddie Mercury, Placido Domingo, and Paul McCartney. His impeccable diction also emphasized how essential the lyrics have always been in Russian pop music. His CDs helped me to realize how “beat music” in Russia always remained more open to classical influences than in the West where, for true rock fans, the dividing line was as uncrossable as the Berlin Wall. It was one reason why Beatles ballads with their sighing violins and cellos, songs like “Michelle,” “Yesterday,” and “Eleanor Rigby,” were embraced by millions of Soviet fans.
Finally, Gradsky played me a video of a recent concert at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. A florid conductor in a white tuxedo flourished his baton to command a huge orchestra, and Gradsky powered into a duet version of the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” trading the lyrics in English with a dramatic diva. It was a world away from Art Troitsky’s smoky clubs and edgy rock dissidents and it wasn’t hard to see how Art could have fallen out with Gradsky. “Troitsky thinks we are boring conservatives here in Moscow, while his friends in Saint Petersburg are poets.” Then he added, “Poets—with their drugs and alcohol and talk.” Gradsky laughed as he talked about a TV program that had brought together a group of Russian rock royalty. “They immediately began to argue, of course, and the thing almost ended in a fight.”
But for all their disagreements, Alexander Gradsky and Art Troitsky shared their certainty about the impact of the Beatles in the Soviet Union. “Yes, yes, yes,” Gradsky insisted, “the Beatles changed the Soviet Union. The Kremlin lost the Beatles generation, and then they lost the country.”
I went back to Stas Namin’s club in Gorky Park where I had started my search for the Beatles generation more than twenty years earlier. On a sunny afternoon, the place that had looked so down at heel in the winter of 1988 now appeared transformed. New paint and stylish lighting declared that the Stas Namin Center was very much in business. Gradsky had told me that he’d said to Stas years earlier, “Why play? Why sing? You’re a great organizer!” It seemed Namin had taken his advice. A plaque announced the list of companies and organizations in the Stas Namin orbit, SNC Holdings. It included a recording center, a production center, a concert agency, a model agency and fashion theater, a record company, an art gallery, a radio station, a magazine, and a TV production company. Namin had clearly become a mogul, though the band he had played for me back in 1988, Gorky Park, appeared to have become extinct.
Stas was more grizzled but as affable and unstoppable as ever in a T-shirt decorated with an evolutionary cartoon: from ape through Neanderthal to rock band, with the words SOMETHING WENT TERRIBLY WRONG. He offered me a roll call of celebrity names who had visited his center—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd—and told me he had been to Cuba with a Russian-American delegation including Leonardo Di Caprio. “But I’d love for you to see something we’re rehearsing right now in my theater.”
A dozen youngsters were milling about on the stage while a band ran through a spirited version of “All You Need Is Love.” We sat in the stalls, and Namin told me about the show. “It’s a musical I’ve written about how the Beatles helped to destroy the Soviet Union, and it’s really based on my own experiences back in the sixties.”
The cast began to rehearse a scene, and Stas whispered an outline of what was going on. “A group of students who love the Beatles have got together in secret to sing some of their songs when the head of military training bursts in and orders them to stop singing forbidden music.” I watched as the scene played out between the bullying commissar and the protesting students, and the simple fable with its cartoon characters still got to me. The reenactment of the officious brutality handed out to a bunch of kids for singing songs felt all too convincing, and it reminded me of that KGB squad who had gone to Sasha Lipnitsky’s dacha to snuff out his little concert. The surreal stupidity of the assault on pop music was somehow perfectly encapsulated in this modest fantasy. “I’ll kick you all out into the subways,” the commissar was ranting. “This is music about love,” a student was protesting, “music that will change the world!”
Then the scene became a fairy tale. The students persuaded the commissar to listen as they sang the Beatles’ “Because.” Inevitably, he was charmed and won over, going on his way to the accompaniment of “All You Need Is Love.” Only in fairy land.
After the rehearsal, Namin wanted me to see a video. “This is another thing we’re doing at the center,” he said, “the Beatles in India concert.” He told me he was, like all good hippies, a devotee of George Harrison and his passion for Indian spiritualism. He had offered his theater in Gorky Park to the Moscow Krishna Temple for a concert of Beatles music.
He slipped in a CD and I watched an extraordinary spectacle. A man in a shimmering blue turban and Indian sherwani jacket was performing George’s “Here Comes the Sun.” The song had been refashioned as a swaying hypnotic anthem, punctuated by cries and invocations, but the real shock was the troupe of dancers swarming around the singer. Women in searing pinks and greens, with fantastic headdresses modeled on the spires of Indian temples, gyrated; a man with a lion-head mask and a waistcoat decorated with exotic birds, yellow and blue and pink, twirled ceremonial swords, which flashed in the pale Moscow sunshine.
“Why don’t you go and talk to Yuri Parshikov at the Vedic Cultural Center?” Namin suggested. “He’s the Hare Krishna guy who arranged the Indian Beatles concert here.” I usually cross the street to avoid Hare Krishna processions, and I’ve always found their insistent brand of chanting uncomfortable and cloying. I’m an inveterate rationalist and skeptic, so I was surprised to find myself touched by the joyous performance I had just been watching on the video. “That would be interesting,” I said.
I trekked out into the Moscow suburbs, losing my way in a tangle of muddy lanes. Finally, I found the Vedic center, a featureless modern building that offered no hint of transcendence. Yuri was a cheerful, round-faced young man with circular spectacles, and he welcomed me with a vegetarian Krishna cake. I thought it tasted like balsa wood and strawberry jam.
We chatted in front of the shrine, a bizarre clutter of gods and cows and old gurus. “The Beatles really gave humanity something,” Yuri said. “They changed people to look for something higher—not to live life like a vegetable.” He said he was going to India soon for his annual visit to the birthplace of Krishna—“just chanting the holy names and wandering around.” It sounded wonderfully relaxing, a bit like Art Troitsky’s dream of slacker’s nirvana. I liked this gentle man, even though his tangle of gods and gurus eluded me. And he said something about the Beatles that I hadn’t heard on my travels, and it seemed right. “Their music was filled with some kind of freshness, maybe something childish. An open heart.”