how the beatles rocked the kremlin
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sions of Beatles songs, trying to copy the English words, but most of them had no idea what they were singing about.” In Gorky Park, we were headed to meet one of the first of those Soviet Beatles. We came to a building near the Moscow River, where a wheezy old guy was minding the door. Along a shabby corridor the sound of assorted rock guitars rattled the flimsy walls, mingled with the smell of cooking. There seemed to be a warren of rehearsal rooms, and somewhere a kitchen. Album sleeves lined the walls, all featuring a hairy tribe led by a chubby guy with a tangle of black hair. “This is Stas Namin’s place,” Troitsky announced. I knew something about Namin. The grandson of Anastas Mikoyan, a former premier of the Soviet Union, he had been raised in a house of privilege and music. Shostakovich, Rostropovich, and a parade of famous musicians were regular visitors. At a top military cadet school in the early sixties, Namin marched in Red Square parades—and fell in love with the music of the Beatles. He got permission to form a rock band at the military school, playing to officers and fellow cadets. When he left the military, Namin grew his hair and deployed his impressive political pedigree to establish a rock group of his own called Tsvety—“Flowers.” A quarter of a century before Gorbachev’s liberations, the band pioneered official rock in the Soviet Union; they were invited to join the fusty Composers’ Union and were allowed to make nationwide tours. I had a memory that things had not always gone well for Namin, and while we waited for him to show up I asked Art to fill me in. “What happened to him is what happened to lots of people when rock music got mixed up with big shit called Communism.” Art sounded as bitter as I had ever known him. “Stas was great at using his contacts, and he managed to make the first Soviet rock records on the state label Melodiya.” Troitsky made “Melodiya” sound like a dirty word. “Then the press called Stas’s group ‘the Soviet Beatles,’ so the Ministry of Culture banned them and their name ‘Flowers’ for making Western propaganda and pushing hippie ideas.”