4 days ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
The original picture discs that could get you thrown in a Soviet jail
Take out your
earpods for a sec – really – so I can tell you a crazy story. (Or smack you – you should be more aware of your surroundings.)
Music today is, of course, a commodity almost as readily available as water on tap – click a button or two and pretty much anything you can think of is yours to listen to.
In the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 60s, authorities allowed only state-approved music, banning genres they considered decadent.
Now imagine another place and time, the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s, where no music was allowed. (OK, I exaggerate: state-approved music was allowed but not even parents wanted to listen to that dreck – anything actually good was forbidden.
Western radio stations were jammed, rock music was banned, records were confiscated at the border.) The authorities tried to seal off all of that Western decadence outside the Iron Curtain.
But the pressure of rock 'n' roll was hard to contain, and inevitably the wall leaked. A lot. Especially in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), a Soviet port town dripping with incoming Western indulgence. Ships arrived with smuggled records (and worth-their-weight-in-gold Levi's jeans, as well as just about anything else cool from the West) in sailors' duffel bags and diplomatic pouches.
Beatles records, along with those of other Western artists, had to be smuggled into the Soviet Union. Photo: AP
Sooner or later you could find somebody who had smuggled in the latest Elvis or Beatles 45 record, and if you had enough roubles, and were willing to risk getting busted, that vinyl could be yours.
