How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution

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A&C Black, 2013 M04 25 - 288 pages

Imagine a world where Beatlemania was against the law-recordings scratched onto medical X-rays, merchant sailors bringing home contraband LPs, spotty broadcasts taped from western AM radio late in the night. This was no fantasy world populated by Blue Meanies but the USSR, where a vast nation of music fans risked repression to hear the defining band of the British Invasion.

The music of John, Paul, George, and Ringo played a part in waking up an entire generation of Soviet youth, opening their eyes to seventy years of bland official culture and rigid authoritarianism. Soviet leaders had suppressed most Western popular music since the days of jazz, but the Beatles and the bands they inspired-both in the West and in Russia-battered down the walls of state culture. Leslie Woodhead's How The Beatles Rocked the Kremlin tells the unforgettable-and endearingly odd-story of Russians who discovered that all you need is Beatles. By stealth, by way of whispers, through the illicit late night broadcasts on Radio Luxembourg, the Soviet Beatles kids tuned in. "Bitles," they whispered, "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah."
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
6
Section 3
18
Section 4
31
Section 5
54
Section 6
61
Section 7
67
Section 8
68
Section 20
136
Section 21
141
Section 22
148
Section 23
156
Section 24
167
Section 25
177
Section 26
183
Section 27
188

Section 9
72
Section 10
75
Section 11
77
Section 12
83
Section 13
90
Section 14
96
Section 15
103
Section 16
111
Section 17
119
Section 18
123
Section 19
130
Section 28
196
Section 29
199
Section 30
208
Section 31
214
Section 32
238
Section 33
251
Section 34
269
Section 35
273
Section 36
275
Section 37
279
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

Leslie Woodhead, OBE is one of Britain's most distinguished documentary filmmakers. His films have won many international awards, including recognition by the Emmy and Peabodys in America, and by BAFTA, and the Royal Television Society in the UK. He is the author of two books, My Life as a Spy and A Box Full of Spirits. He lives in Cheshire, England.

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