Beatlemania in the Soviet Union

Although the 1960s was a decade full of iconic figures and moments that brought about great change in society, arguably the most famous figures of the whole decade were musicians: The Beatles.  After several number 1 hits in the UK and an appearance on American television, "Beatlemania" became a worldwide phenomenon and the band became famous on a global level.  One aspect of the Beatles' height of popularity that is often ignored in the west is the impact of Beatlemania on the youth of the Soviet Union.

Leslie Woodhead's book "How the Beatles rocked the Kremlin: the Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution"¹ describes how the Soviet Union viewed music as a means to help motivate the population to create the perfect society.  Naturally, under Stalin this meant that the state decided what its population could and could not listen to.  As the Soviet view on art and its purpose ran counter to the western, capitalist view, it could be seen as quite surprising that Beatlemania even existed in the Soviet Union.  According to Woodhead, the principle, unkowing architect behind Beatlemania in the USSR was in fact the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.

The "Khrushchev thaw" was a main characteristic of the USSR in this period, as following Stalin's death the Soviets gradually relaxed many of his more hardline policies on censorship and on the nation's stance against capitalism.  In 1957, the World Festival for Youth and Students took place in Moscow: this would have been unthinkable under Stalin, but now the youth of the Soviet Union could interact with the West in some limited capacity.  Woodhead describes a group of Soviet defectors crossing the iron curtain and escaping from East Germany because their officer wouldn't let them listen to Elvis Presley.  In fact, citizens in the USSR began using more and more unorthodox methods of listening to American music, including inscribing music taped from western radio stations onto medical X-ray films.  According to a Russian rock musician that Woodhead interviewed, anybody found distributing X-ray disks could spend seven years in a gulag.

An interview with "Russia's ultimate Beatles fan" gives us more context, as a man named Kolya Vasin describes what the Beatles meant to the Russian youth at the time: "After the Beatles came into my life, I had some sort of place in society."  For Kolya and many other young people of his generation, the Beatles represented a different world: unlike the stifling censorship of the USSR, which would once again progressively encourage censorship under Brezhnev, the Beatles music represented a completely different vision of the west from the one that the Soviet leadership wanted to cultivate.  Beatlemania was worldwide, and the enormous popularity that the band enjoyed meant that people wanted to hear them regardless of the consequences.  For the youth of 1960s Russia, the Beatles represented a rebellion against a government and a system that neither they nor their parents generation had any great love for.  This is a very clear indication- to myself at least- that the 1960s were at least in part defined by artistic expression, and the use of modern technology meant that that art could have an impact in places that nobody could have foreseen.

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1 Leslie Woodhead, How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution (London: A&C Black, 2013)^↩