Working for the BBC’s World Service in the middle 1960s, I used to broadcast a weekly pop programme in Russian, aimed at Soviet listeners. Countless people have asked me: ‘weren’t the shows jammed; was it safe to listen; did you get any feedback; what did they think of the Beatles?’ Some of the answers are to be found in two recent publications. One is Leslie Woodhead’s HOW THE BEATLES ROCKED THE KREMLIN (Bloomsbury 2013, in this article referred to as LW), the other, a lengthy two-volume monograph in Russian, by Vladimir Bokarev and Yury Mitrofanov, entitled HISTORY OF THE BEATLES IN THE USSR 1964-1970 (Roliks 2014, hereafter VB/YM). Leslie is a former RAF national service student of the JointServicesSchool for Linguists, where he acquired more than enough Russian to carry out his later duties in Berlin monitoring Soviet military radio traffic for analysis at GCHQ in Cheltenham. His autobiographical memoir, MY LIFE AS A SPY (Pan Macmillan 2006), is as entertaining as convincing, especially for someone like me whose northern provenance and national service trajectory, albeit in the Navy, were similar to Leslie’s. For several decades now, he has been considered, with justification, one of the most distinguished and fearless of British TV programme makers. He’s the winner of several international awards and a pioneering producer of drama documentaries, several of which dealt even-handedly with Cold War controversies. Working as he did at GRANADA TV in Manchester gave him the opportunity in 1962 to direct the first ever film with the Beatles, shot at the Cavern Club in nearby Liverpool. He has remained a staunch devotee ever since. Unsurprisingly, Leslie’s latest publication is as engaging and lively a read as you would expect from someone with those credentials, to which should be added his many filming trips in the USSR, where he was able to meet people as dedicated a fan as he. His version of the Beatles’ reception in the former Soviet Union is based very largely on testimony from these encounters. Anyone involved in the Cold War (as Leslie and I can claim to have been, however peripherally) has a natural inclination to sympathise with those dissidents brave enough to confront Soviet power – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Josef Brodsky spring to mind. There were many others, all regardless of talent, hostile to the Communist regime. But were these rebels, however just their cause, necessarily the best source of information about what was actually happening in the USSR? Effectively all Leslie’s Russian interlocutors were, to varying extents, dissident. It’s their recollections which prompt him to state (P16) that: ‘… the Communist leadership were determined to block the Beatles virus. Every hint of … seditious music was to be stifled. Radios were jammed, censors were equipped with record scratchers, sneering anti-Beatles campaigns were mounted.’ Abundant evidence adduced by VB/YM over 600 and more pages (plus three times that number of footnotes) shows that only some of those claims are true, and that Leslie’s thesis is seriously one-sided. Between July 1963 and August 1968, the years of my employment with the BBC’s Russian Section, my colleagues and I must have played every Beatles’ single plus many tracks from their LPs. Throughout that period there was no jamming of our programmes by the Soviets. Of course, BBC broadcasts had been jammed, and the practice restarted some half an hour before Soviet tanks crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, very shortly after I left Bush House to work in TV. However, Leslie offers no proof that the music of the Beatles was ever the censors’ target. I’ve no doubt that individual Communist leaders were hostile to all kinds of emanations from the West, including the Fab Four, but if the Soviet leadership was as united and monolithic on this issue as Leslie suggests, they certainly didn’t make it clear to one of their most noteworthy cultural icons, the actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Internationally renowned for his role as Hamlet in Grigory Kozintsev’s 1964 film, Smoktunovsky was invited to our World Service studios that year to give a lengthy interview and take part in a Desert Island Discs programme, both in Russian. On each occasion he talked in ecstatic terms about the Beatles and chose one of their records (sadly, I no longer recall which). These were programmes, it needs to be stressed, which he knew were being beamed to Soviet listeners back home. Maybe the celebrated actor was simply being courageous or foolhardy. He must have been aware of hostility to the Beatles in the Soviet establishment, especially during the first two or three years they were in the public eye. But wasn’t he much more likely to get it in the neck for participating in a BBC Russian language programme than for praising a British pop group? Yet we know his subsequent career was not harmed by this episode. Although neither LW nor VB/YM cite any instance of individuals being punished for listening to or performing Beatles’ material, they both relate stories which indicate a climate of fear. The historian Mikhail Safonov told Leslie about a Leningrad school staging a show trial against the group, echoing the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s: ‘… the school kids had to denounce “the Bugs” as the Beatles were called. They were found guilty of anti-social behaviour.’ (P179). In similar vein, P81 of the first tome of VB/YM describes an Estonian group ELEKTRA performing BACK IN THE USSR on a 1970 tour of the Far East of the Soviet Union. They sang the song in English on TV and fans later asked them – weren’t they afraid to perform Beatles’ songs? If the local cultural commissar had challenged the performers they would have had what VB/YM call a ‘reliable alibi’. They knew the Beatles’ version of the song had been heard the previous year on all-Union radio. Furthermore, three editions of the sheet music for the song totalling 665,000 copies were printed in 1970 accompanied by a Russian translation of the lyric. VB/YM is chock-full with such statistics Vladimir Bokarev and Yuri Mitrofanov are academics. The former has a doctorate in history for his thesis entitled ‘John Lennon’s social views, political and creative activity during the “youth revolution” in the west (1966-1973)’. He is the author of many articles on musical and historical themes. Mitrofanov is an archivist, bibliographer and has worked as a journalist covering press conferences and concerts of foreign artists visiting Russia. The principal aim of their book is to lay to rest the ‘myths&r... Читать дальше
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