The Beatles “Killed” the Soviet Union
“As the sun slides behind the Kremlin, a hundred thousand people pack into Red Square, into the heart of Russia. The fairy-tale domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral and the ancient red walls of the Kremlin seem to be on fire. The vast crowd roars— and many weeps— as a familiar figure strikes the first chords. ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ rolls out across the square— and Paul McCartney is here at last to sing it.”
Leslie Woodhead started the book How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin with the depiction of Paul McCartney’s concert in Red Square on May 24, 2003, 12 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. People cried rivers and waterfalls of tears.
Before reading this book, I knew that the Soviet Union collapsed for complicated reasons and heard that rock music and even movies had played a part in the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Still, I never imagined that these impacts would be so huge. As Woodhead said: “the cold war was won by the West…not by nuclear missiles, but by the Beatles”; Safonov, a researcher at the Institute of Russian History, argues that the Beatles swept away the foundations of Soviet society and arguably played a more significant role in the destruction of Soviet autocracy than Nobel laureates Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov.
John Lennon, left, Paul McCartney and George Harrison at the Star-Club in Hamburg in May 1962.
Personally, I believe in Woodhead’s judgment. Once a closed autocratic world with strong control over people’s thoughts and lives meets a heterogeneous culture, the provocative power of heterogeneous culture is immeasurable, and it is the easiest to become the reforming power of a feudal empire.
Nobel literature laureate Brodsky believes that Tarzan’s Peril, for himself and Soviet youth of a similar age, encouraged them to reject the “successors” that the Soviet authorities wanted to create and become spiritual free people like Tarzan.
At the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students held in Moscow in July 1957, thousands of Western youth poured into the Soviet Union, bringing new cultural and other information about the Western world. Cold War historian believes the two-week event changed the Soviet Union.
These two examples prove the vital influence of heterogeneous cultural communication on the transformation of the empire. The Beatle’s impact on the Soviet Union was the same.
Rock music, the medium through which young people express their desires, intuitions, emotions, and aspirations, has captivated the Western world since it emerged. But on the other side of the Iron Curtain was the Soviet Union: records were destroyed, broadcasts were jammed, the Beatles were even called bugs and caricatured as fleeing under insecticide. Nikita Khrushchev denounced the electric guitar as “the enemy of the Soviet people.” Even two decades later, the general secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Chernenko, declared that rock music is one of the weapons of western subversion used to shake the belief of Soviet youth in the communist ideology.
Khrushchev and Chernenko were right. The rock music with electric guitar represents a rebellious gesture, presenting the characteristics of western culture. This music genre can shake young people’s faith in the existing ideology and regime because music can transcend the ideology and status of class and rebel against the doctrine and system that suppress humanity.
The Soviet regime’s ban on foreign culture was successful for a while, but it did not last long because it was against human nature. The difference is that this time, the revolution was launched in the name of rock and roll. However, its essence is still a cultural and institutional revolution against oppression, and the Beatles unwittingly took part in the revolution that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As I was typing this blog with the Beatles’ songs in my earphones, I stopped and asked myself: “Can rock music help me change the world the way those Beatlelovers in the Soviet Union did?”
The answer is absolutely no.
Neither the Beatles nor rock music was aimed at the Iron Curtain. The spirit of rock is to use musical instruments and their voice to vent their dissatisfaction with the authority, especially against the repression of humanity. For us, rock music may not change the world, but it also let us have our pursuit when suffering.
Owen, D. (2019, May 12). Forget Liverpool. Hamburg, Germany, made the Beatles into the band they became. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-travel-beatles-hamburg-germany-20190512-story.html
Guardian News and Media. (2013, April 20). For young Soviets, the Beatles were a first, mutinous rip in the iron curtain. The Guardian. Retrieved March 9, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/apr/20/beatles-soviet-union-first-rip-iron-curtain
Woodhead, L. (2013). How the beatles rocked the Kremlin: The untold story of a noisy revolution. Bloomsbury.