The Beatles Rock the Kremlin

“I’m sure God sent them to us.”

Politicians love to claim credit for the big – and best changes – of history. Life is rarely so simple.

There are those odd little movements like twitches on obscure nerve endings that end up reverberating throughout cultures and eras.

The twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall is, of course, marked with all kinds of political triumphalism.  As always, there are layers and layers of ironies and absurdities.

One unlikely commemoration is How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin (you can see a preview here).

The premise of the documentary is that, in spite of extreme persecution – people were arrested for smuggling Beatles music or kicked out of University for having a Beatles album – this unlikely music way made its way across the Iron Curtain into the hearts and minds of a generation (or two) and changed the mood, direction and identity of a cultural held hostage by a grim ideology. One of the ironies was that this same music was also seen as a threat in the USA. There were those adult voices who saw the Beatles as corrupt and revolutionary and, yes, as a sign of the End Times.

This peculiar music that, at least according to this documentary , undermined Communism, was in fact portrayed by many as Communist itself. Perhaps it was inherently threatening to authoritarianism of any stripe.

In 1999, I had a brief stint as a radio host in Beijing China on CRI (China Radio International). Back then, the program I worked with played the sappiest love songs. Certainly nothing by the Beatles.  As I was gathering music for my show, I asked the program director to clarify the format.

In her full capacity as a state sponsored radio program director, she stared at me solemnly as she told me in icy terms “We don’t play rock and roll. The government hates rock and roll”.

I nodded politely and thought to myself “Hallelujah for rock and roll.”

As I reflect on that conversation, I realize that perhaps the government of Communist China knew – and recognized – the inherent power of that pesky music that seemed to be nothing but a disruption and threat to established power and authority.

So here we are forty years after the Beatles broke up and twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So did “God send them to us?”

The grim bureaucrats of every political spectrum will be forgotten, and the paranoid fantasies and sheer hatred of life will pass away, and the most unlikely of musical messages will prevail for generations.

How about these lines:

All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.

In the USA, How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin can be seen on your local PBS station.