'Beatles washed away Soviet foundation'
Crossing the famous Finland station in Leningrad one day in the early 1960s, Kolya Vasin was stopped by a policeman who had spotted his long hair. "You are not a Soviet man!" charged the officer. "And he grabbed my hair," recalls Vasin, who was then hauled across a platform while dozens of people laughed. "I was crying from the pain, but I had to keep silent. I was afraid the man would drag me off to prison."
Vasin was a diehard Beatles fan. The Beatles' music had given him, he said "all the adventures of my life", for which "I was arrested many times, accused of 'breaching social order'. They said anyone who listened to the Beatles was spreading western propaganda." More than that, in the USSR, the Fab Four "were like an integrity test. When anyone said anything against them, we knew just what that person was worth. The authorities, our teachers, even our parents, became idiots to us."
The band inspired dissidents and musicians worldwide but meant more to youth in the USSR than in the west, claims a new book, 'How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin'.
"Beatlemania washed away the foundations of Soviet society," explains Mikhail Safonov at the Institute of Russian History.
And the Russian rocker Sasha Lipnitsky insists: "The Beatles brought us the idea of democracy. For many of us, it was the first hole in the iron curtain."
As Woodhead points out, to Beatles fans in 1970s Russia, "Everything west was good. The kids came to believe the exact opposite of everything they were being told all those years. "
"The more the state persecuted the Beatles," concurs Mikhail, "the more they exposed the falsehood and hypocrisy of Soviet ideology."
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