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leslie woodhead
items from Western magazines and hunting down vintage dresses in antique markets. She recalled the early impact of the Beatles with a fashion writer’s eye. “We cut the lapels off old jackets to make a collarless Beatles-style copy we called a ‘Bitlovka.’ ” Lennon’s rimless glasses came from second-hand shops, and Armenian shoemakers improvised Cuban-heeled boots from old army castoffs. “So it was like a fairy tale,” she said, “thousands of kids grabbing this window from the West to change their image just a little.” We headed off into the Metro, on our way to meet up with a Soviet rock pioneer Troitsky had found for me. In the gorgeous Stalinist palace of Mayakovsky station, a couple of American tourists with guidebooks were gaping at this workers’ paradise of gray marble and mosaics celebrating the “Soviet Sky.” On the spot where Stalin had addressed the Communist Party faithful at the opening of the station just fifty years earlier, Art began a tirade about the oppressive horrors of Soviet culture when he was growing up. “I just hated it all,” he growled, “because it was all totally square, totally uncool, the singers had awful haircuts and sang like Brezhnev at the Party Congress. It was totally unsexy, totally rigid.” I could hear the train approaching, but Troitsky was on a roll. “There was nothing bright and free and funky and funny about it. And those were exactly the vitamins we needed back then in the sixties, so we grabbed them from the Beatles.” The train swept away the rest of Troitsky’s dazzling rant. In Gorky Park, crackling loudspeakers were belting out “The Skaters Waltz,” and skaters were twirling on a frozen pond. They looked effortless, as if freed for a moment from the oppressive heaviness of their daily lives. The paths were frozen, too, and skaters regularly swished past us as we teetered along in the darkness. Art was talking now about Russian rock. “The real wave started in the mid-sixties,” he said, “and without exception they were all inspired by the Beatles.” Another skater hurtled past, and Art picked up his story. “Listening wasn’t enough—they wanted to do it themselves. They played cover ver-