prologue
5
As I got deeper into my journey, I wondered from time to time why I was so obsessed with the Soviet Beatles revolution. Why did it feel so haunting, so personal? There was that little film, of course, and there were my first encounters with the Fab Four long ago. There was the fact that I learned some Russian during my military ser vice as a junior spy back in the 1950s. But underlying all that, for me—a child of the Cold War—the pull was that the story felt like an essential narrative of my times. The standoff between East and West split the world, and nuclear oblivion seemed a real possibility. I remember wondering one night in October 1962 during the depths of the Cuban Missile Crisis if I would wake up the next morning. But somehow the Cold War didn’t boil over, and the austerities of the postwar world began to relax. Better times were driving change everywhere across the West; and the soundtrack was rock ’n’ roll. From the early 1980s, I began to work in the Soviet Union and the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe, spending time in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia—as well as in Russia—all still under strict authoritarian control. As I came and went— often unofficially—I met up with those kids who made the Soviet Beatles revolution. In the mid-eighties I hung out with nervy rock dissidents in Leningrad and Moscow; in the nineties I journeyed through the messy liberations of post-Communist Russia where the Beatles music was legal at last in a gangster state. Over the past decade, I followed the story to the outer edges of Russia, seven time zones east of Moscow in the once-closed city of Vladivostok. I tracked down Beatles true believers in the chaotic new states of Ukraine and Belarus, where fourteenyear-olds and their grandparents still insisted “All you need is love.” Their stories of how it was for them back in the U.S.S.R. are wild and funny, scary and farcical, and foolishly brave. Their memories of doing battle with the crazed repressions of official culture also chart the final acts of the huge Soviet epic.