Kremlin faces up to the Beatles’ music

Press, 25 August 1976, Page 16

Kremlin faces up to the Beatles’ music

By 1

VICTOR ZORZA

in Washington

The Soviet decision to purchase a record of the Beatles from Britain, after many years during which the Beatles’ songs have been banned from Russia as a particularly pernicious form of Western cultural poison, marks the beginning of a new trend. There are indications that other record albums will follow, by the Beatles and others, and that the Kremlin is at last prepared to face the music it has feared in the past. Why? Only last month, when the negotiations to purchase a licence for Paul McCartney’s record, “Band on the Run,” were already well under way, the Moscow youth paper “Komsomolskaya Pravda”, which speaks with authority on these matters, reiterated some of the old misgivings.

It described the “sudden” revival of the Beatle cult as being due mainly to the quest for profits by the British firm which makes the Beaties’ records. If this was a message for the Soviet officials who were about to make a decision on the new purchase, it was intended to discourage them.

The article, mainly concerned with more recent developments in Western youth music, drew from them

certain lessons which kept harking back to the Beatles. The new phenomena were the clearest example of “mass hysteria” since Beatlemania, one of the cults which, “Komsomolskaya Pravda” said, made the young “submissively receptive” to advertising tricks and to the devices of mass culture, so that they became “the passive objects of spiritual manipulation.”

But there is also another Soviet view of the Beatles. Two years ago a rumour swept the Soviet Union that the Beatles had at last found favour in the Kremlin, and that they would be allowed to tour the country. The youth papers were getting a flood of letters. When were the Beatles coming? Where would they perform? How did one get a ticket? The rumour was false, “Komsomolskaya Pravda” replied. The Beatles no longer existed, it explained. The group had broken up. But it conceded that the interest in the Beatles w’as quite legitimate, because their songs helped the young “to understand life” and “to fight against injustice”. The Beatles, helped in part by the stand which some exmembers of the group took against the war in Vietnam, were becoming politically respectable in the Soviet Union. The United States Department of Justice was

said to be trying to deport Paul McCartney, and thus helped him to get some favourable publicity in the Soviet Press. (Actually, it was Beatle John Lennon who was threatened with deportation.) But this was not enough to break into the Soviet market, which continued to be dominated by “illegal” versions of the Beatles’ songs. At one time, before the Soviet Union caught up with the tape recorder, the more ingenious youngsters used to copy the Beatles’ records on old X-ray pictures.

The brisk black market in this gruesome product was frequently denounced in the Soviet press. But the tape recorder made things much easier, and virtually anyone who wanted to own a Beatle recording could pick one out of the air—by copying it from one of the foreign broadcasts beamed at the Soviet Union. Moscow accused both the Voice of America and the 8.8. C. of using pop music as bait designed to catch the unsuspecting young of the Soviet Union.

One way to overcome this would have been to build up a domestic pop music industry, but attempts to do so did not get very far. Russian singers were “blindly” copying from foreign groups, “Komsomolskaya Pravda” said earlier this year. They did indeed sing in Russian—but with “foreign accents.” The forbidden fruit was

obviously more attractive. Pirate radio stations, operated by youngsters who found the official fare unsatisfying, kept springing up in various parts of the Soviet Union. Their broadcasts offered recordings of foreign songs, which might sometimes be interspersed with comments so crude as to make the agit-prop chiefs’ hair stand on end.

The Soviet monopoly of the mass information and en-

tertainment media was proving ineffective. It was being overtaken by modern technology which was making both tape recorders and broadcasting facilities available to the young, who were using them to breach the barriers enclosing the Soviet Union.

Indeed, the temptation to join the Western pop culture was also laying them open to Western political ideas, which is why the Kremlin

had tried to shut their ears in the first place. The Kremlin now seems to have recognised that its efforts have been in vain, and that the only way to control the foreign sounds that penetrate into the Soviet Union from abroad is to legitimise the commercial distribution of the product and to make it available through approved channels. If you cannot beat them, join them. (C) 1976, Victor Zorza.