And the connection between Teller and the Beatles would be… what? That Ringo starred in a movie with Peter Sellers? Actually, many Russians themselves believe that the Western cultural forces symbolized by Beatles music helped hollow out communism, slowly eroding its authority until it collapsed. That it disintegrated without a huge war is the greatest blessing of the last half of the 20th century. In other words, “hard power” (Western strength and resolve) and “soft power” (Western ideas of freedom) worked together, with plenty of help from brave refuseniks, a pragmatic, bumbling and ultimately peace-loving Mikhail Gorbachev–and the numbing effects of vodka.
This week, A&E network will air “Paul McCartney in Red Square,” a concert film that chronicles McCartney’s first-ever trip last May to Russia, where he was greeted like a conquering hero. McCartney’s first world tour in a decade was surprisingly big–close to half a million turned out for him in Rome–but the rapturous throngs of Muscovites below the onion domes at sunset were there to celebrate more than just the music. “The only person in Red Square who wasn’t moved was Lenin,” one Russian critic reported. As he sang “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” originally a spoof, “that’s when the volts went through them,” McCartney told me last week. The song plays to a Russian national pride that is no longer frightening.
The film explains how young fans in the mid-1960s would spend half a month’s salary on contraband albums, or disassemble public telephones to build “electric” guitars. Old pictures of the Fab Four were passed around like icons. Gorbachev turns up to recall how the Beatles “taught the young that there was another life.” Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov says that as an ambitious young party member he was “moderated” by the music. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, attending the concert flanked by goons who boogie like crazy, says the Beatles gave people “a gulp of freedom.” (He might consider giving them a few more gulps now.)
Even discounting the usual exaggeration in these films–and the fact that other bands toured the Eastern bloc while no Beatles ever did–there’s something instructive here. McCartney makes no claim to being a geopolitical thinker, but suggests, “When somebody comes in with an alternate idea that’s just a little looser–that’s powerful… [The people] are thinking ‘If only, if only…’ And it starts to spread.” Periodic Soviet crackdowns on rock fans, including the confiscation of memorabilia, continued into the 1980s, each one creating yet more “inner immigrants”–Russians fleeing Lenin for Lennon without leaving home.
The music was more important to them than it was to us. I remember visiting Moscow in 1987 and seeing hippies still there more than a decade after the whole thing disappeared in the West. It was a way of rebelling without becoming a full-fledged dissident. Songs of love and freedom helped make ordinary Russians ideologically undependable in the eyes of their rulers. The Red Army’s pathetic failure in Afghanistan showed a certain lessening of the old Russian fighting spirit. By the end in 1989, victory for the West was like walking through a door that was already open.
So what does any of this have to do with today’s challenges? On one level, nothing. “I don’t think they smuggled Beatles records into the Arab world,” McCartney says. In fact, today’s Islamic fanaticism is in part a reaction against Western popular culture. In the Middle East, unlike in the U.S.S.R., young rebels are the enemies of the West. Bin Laden’s picture is the forbidden icon, not some Western rock star. And the whole “soft power” bit can be overdrawn in other ways. In Canada last week, the National Post editorialized that the soft focus has become a handy excuse for the Canadians to avoid the hard work of helping the United States catch terrorists. It doesn’t sound promising in North Korea, either, where if anyone smuggled in CDs, the strange imports might get used as tiny plates on which to serve their tiny food portions.
None of which is to suggest that soft power can’t work today. But perhaps McCartney’s most important observation was that “we did it without knowing it… It all begins with whispers and then ideas are launched and spread on the wind.” Cultural and even political ideas are more appealing, particularly to the young, when governments are not trying to push them on people. The Russians’ second-favorite song in Red Square was “All You Need Is Love.” Yet if the Bush administration were sponsoring the show–or if the Johnson and Nixon administrations had been big rock-and-roll fans–the Beatles’ reception would have been very different, even back in the U.S.S.R.
