As I approached the end of my time in Vladivostok, I was also ending my journey to explore how the Beatles had rocked the Kremlin. A search that had begun for me thirty years earlier, when the Soviet Union had seemed frozen and unchangeable, was winding to a close here on the remote edge of a country transformed beyond imagining.
I spent a few hours wandering the city from the old Chinese quarter to the soaring new bridges across the harbor. Exploring the tracks behind the featureless apartment blocks, I came upon ancient wooden houses marooned amid vegetable plots, and I felt I was tracking the story of the place, getting a sense of the pell-mell changes that were tearing up historic Vladivostok as they were refashioning Russia itself in the early twenty-first century.
Over the final few days in Vladivostok, I screened five of my films, and tried to answer a torrent of questions. A woman veiled in black net pursued me bearing a photograph of a pretty boy with a guitar. “My son is so talented,” she said, “you must take him to London and introduce him to record producers.” I felt a bit like John Lennon when he was asked to lay his hands on wheelchair fans and make them walk again. The autograph hunters kept up their hunt, and I was asked to smile for countless photos alongside people whose motives eluded me. I found myself growing fond of this place a very long way from home.
On my last day, I went back to my photo exhibition. It was quiet now, just an elderly man carrying a plastic bag who was gazing at the Beatles pictures in a kind of rapture. Out on the street, the old guy with the accordion and the naval cap was playing his folk songs. I found a chair and sat down in front of the Beatles pictures.
It had all begun for me with those kids playing in a cellar in Liverpool. Like millions of others across the world, I had followed the extraordinary blossoming of their music across the sixties, and the story always had the special personal ingredient of that first encounter. Again, like most of my generation, I had lamented the ending of the Beatles, and from time to time had become entangled with the continuing story—the deaths of John and George, the resolute grumpiness of Ringo, the unstoppable epic of Paul—as the music somehow refused to fade and became a soundtrack of our lives.
The Beatles had become bound up with my gathering obsession with Russia. As I followed the Gorbachev revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, I had been astonished to discover how often the Beatles were part of the story. Tracking that story from Moscow and Saint Petersburg to Kiev and Minsk, and finding it was still being told here in Vladivostok, confirmed what I had come to realize along the way. The Beatles had done something remarkable here.
But how had it happened? How had Art Troitsky’s “monster state” been shifted by a few three-minute songs? As I had traveled through the Soviet Union in its final years, I had witnessed some of the forces pushing for change. There was the final loss of faith in the utopian Soviet project and its dream of making a new society; there was the unavoidable recognition that the vast networks of central planning were exhausted and could never deliver a better life for citizens who were becoming more aware than ever of the outside world after Gorbachev’s tentative liberations. And as a disenchanted commentator observed, trying to mix totalitarian control with a bit of democracy was “like trying to fry snowballs.” The melting of monumental state systems left them more vulnerable than ever to the seditious impact of the rock ’n’ roll generation.
Above all, there was the huge frustration of millions of young people who understood their lives were defined and constrained by an old ideology and a frozen bureaucracy. In Belarus, I had seen how in the twenty-first century an entire state was still shut away from the world by its rulers, and it gave me a vivid snapshot of how it had been for the Beatles generation in the U.S.S.R. At the same time, the kids were finding their own escape routes. Seva Gakkel had told me in Saint Petersburg, “I belonged to the Beatles world.” In a society where politics was dangerous and new ideas were seen as threatening, culture was embraced as the only way to pursue change. Andrei Tropillo, the man who made millions of Beatles records available to Soviet citizens, put it simply. “This is what the Beatles did. They opened the door to Western culture, and that produced a cultural revolution that destroyed the Soviet Union.”
I remembered how many of the people I had met felt sure that their lives had been changed by these four young men they had never been allowed to see. Andrei Makarevich had been inspired to become a rock musician, and so had Stas Namin and Boris Grebenshikov and Alexander Gradsky. In a real sense, the explosion of rock music in the Soviet Union had been ignited by contact with the Beatles via crackling illicit radio stations and with the crazy improvisations of records on bones. And as Nikita in Kiev put it, “The Soviet Communist Party was strangled by our tape recordings.” Hearing about those homemade guitars and vandalized telephones, I had felt the unstoppable force that had powered the Beatles generation.
Most fundamental of all was the way the Beatles phenomenon seemed to have shifted something inside the heads and guts of that generation. I was made to understand how visceral that shift was felt to be. Time and again people talked about being “freed from fear,” about the Beatles having “killed the slave inside them.” As Boris Grebenshikov put it, “The Beatles started to change the way people think, the way people feel.” Time and again, people I met insisted on making a direct connection between the impact of the Beatles and the collapse of totalitarianism. Art Troitsky declared, “They alienated a whole generation from their Communist motherland, and prepared Soviet kids for different human values. The message we took was ‘we’re free even though we live behind the Iron Curtain.’” And Vladimir Pozner, the Soviet journalist and propagandist who had spent decades making truth into good news, put it directly. “The system was built on belief and fear. The Beatles helped people to overcome the fear—and they showed that the belief was actually stupid.”
At the end of my journey, it still seemed extraordinary. I’m a confirmed agnostic about most things, and John Lennon’s song could be my mantra: “I don’t believe in magic/Don’t believe in Bible / Don’t believe in Jesus”—and, like Lennon, I don’t believe in mantras. Of course John had ended his list “I don’t believe in Beatles.” And I had struggled to believe this story of how the Beatles had rocked the Kremlin. Fifty-year-old pop songs by a group of lads from an enemy country, who were banned and derided—had they really shifted a superpower? As improbable, surely, as the notion that culture can force change? As naïve as the slogan “all you need is love”; as Utopian as the song “Imagine.”
The old guy with the plastic bag who had been gazing at my photographs came and introduced himself. “Viktor Alexandrov,” he said. “I’m an engineer and historian—and a musician. I used to have this band.” He unfurled a poster. It showed a group of youngsters, decked out in full Sergeant Pepper gear. Three guys, two girls smiled out at me, a youthful Viktor in the middle. “That was us,” he said. “We always loved the Beatles.”