WHEN Paul McCartney played Moscow’s Red Square in 2003, he was the first Beatle ever to perform in the former USSR.
Despite them singing “I’m back in the USSR” in their 1968 hit, they were not permitted to play in the Communist state.
With their favourite band damned as an “embodiment of Western debauchery” and the authorities concerned about the Fab Four’s perverting influence on young people, their fans were forced to listen in secret to bootlegged copies of their songs.
“The Soviet media reacted not on Beatles music but on Beatlemania – ‘see what bourgeois capitalism is doing to young people.
"It’s making them crazy’,” explains Sergey Radchenko, who has curated an exhibition of memorabilia for the LIverpool Academy of Arts.
The Back From the USSR show, first displayed in Hamburg earlier this year, reveals the ingenious methods fans used to share Beatles music. A flourishing black market became more imaginative as Communist rule continued, recording the hits on to used X-Ray film known as “ribs”, because you could often see an image of bones on the discs.
As well as these self-made records, the exhibition includes Russian fanzines, singles coupling Beatles songs on one side and Russian folk songs on the other, and newspaper articles decrying the band as a bad influence. Owning any of these was against the law and carried a severe penalty.
