Tolya Shevshenko, a translator I got to know in Moscow, remembered how as a kid he got hold of some Records on Ribs.
"I remember it quite vividly," said Tolya. "It was a winter's day. I was wearing a heavy coat and looked like a young old man. I went to the GUM store to buy myself something. And, in front of this store, a man, maybe twenty years old, approached me and asked what I was looking for. I said that I was looking for some rock records. These are not available in the official state store. And he said, 'Well, I've got some.' I asked him what was on the records, and he said, 'Rock and roll. Chubby Checker.' I said, 'OK, I'll take one.' It was really Chubby Checker, very badly recorded with a lot of noise. But anyway it was Chubby Checker. It was rock and roll!"
For a few years in the early 1960s things changed, Art said; decadence and disaffection went out of style. Soviet youth was full of enthusiasm over Yuri Gagarin, the Cuban Revolution, and the 22nd Party Congress.
"For the Russians, these were the gung-ho years of the hero astronaut, and Soviet culture could even withstand the Twist," Art added. The bureaucrats said, "Of course, it is all nonsense, this 'tweest', the music is for idiots, but let them fool around, it is nothing terrible."
By the late 1960s, though, the years of stagnation had ground into play. For almost twenty years under Brezhnev, nothing much had seemed to happen. Gray times. Only the distant sounds of the Beatles singing through the crackle of static on illicit radios sounded like life to Art's generation.
Beatlemania swept Russia. Beatles bands were formed. Singing "They say it's your birthday," at birthday parties was a ritual. People learned English to understand the Beatles. Kids took terrible risks to get a look at a poster, and at least one man claimed he had been the first Russian to identify the individual members of the Fab Four from a torn newspaper cutting. Here is John, he said, and George, and Paul, and Ringo.
A Beatles album was an almost undreamed-of treasure, but for half a ruble you could rent a Beatles poster for a day. Fans wore jackets without lapels called bitlovka.
"Elvis was nice," Art mused now. "But the Beatles had melodies. The Beatles were wonderful. The Beatles came knocking at our hearts."
Still, the Beatles were not official and had never been to the Soviet Union, unless you counted the legendary stopover at the Moscow airport their plane once made en route home from Japan. That stopover became the subject of endless conjecture.
Had they really been in Russia? Had they actually disembarked from the plane, and did they play a secret concert, or had it all been one of Moscow's great urban myths?
"Rock and roll meant something extremely exotic," Art said. "It was the most exotic of all Western forbidden fruits, you know, like Salvador Dali, or striptease, or something. I mean, you know, it was always totally obscene because the articles in the local press said that rock and roll performers make pornographic movements while they sing. And that they make the cries of agony or ecstasy into the microphone before the public. So, yes, it was like, like a very, very attractive, but at the same time, a very distant thing."
I sipped some wine, so did Art, and then he said, "Rock was a concentration of all the good things in life."
"Rock and roll meant a lot to absolutely every Soviet kid, even if they lived in a village. Because this was the music that made them feel free, that made them feel slightly different from their parents, you know, who, of course, didn't understand this music." Art paused. "And, for us, more than that, it also meant, you know, it was like a door into another culture, a door into another way of life, which we all fancied, of course.
"We really hated what was going on around us," Art said. "We didn't care about politics. We didn't care about Communist ideology. But we did care about how badly people were dressed in this country, about what an awful thing is official Soviet pop music. What was going on at this official level of culture was absolutely disgusting," Art added, referring to folk music and men in fake Cossack shirts and women in nylon frocks with trilling voices, and choirs of Young Pioneers with reverent faces and zealous eyes singing patriotic songs. "Not exactly for political reasons," Art mused. "But for the reason that this was ugly, unstylish, unlike the West."
Even Art, even this stylish, sophisticated, traveled Muscovite, when he recalled what the West had meant, came alive. His handsome face just lit up like a bulb and he seemed to purr with pleasure when he said the word "West." It was the most potent insight into how ripe the Soviet Union was for Dean Reed when he arrived.
Then he said, "The West was something good. I mean, everything Western, was right. And Dean Reed came and he wore cowboy boots and he came from the land of the free and the home of the brave. And Chuck Berry," Art continued. "He meant everything."
"Come for dinner on Friday," Svetlana said, as she got up to leave. "We will introduce you to this girl who had a friend who loved Dean Reed," she added, while Art tugged at the front of his sweater to remind me it was the girl with the big breasts.
I got a room with a view in the end. Outside my window, in the distance, beyond the Lenin Museum, was Red Square, and at night, from this angle, it somehow resembled the landing pad in Close Encounters. Suspended by day in frozen sunlight, at night it was backlit by those clouds that drifted in from a power station. The red neon star - 5000 watts of it - on top of the Kremlin's Borovitsky tower, blazed among the real winter stars.
I couldn't get enough. I couldn't spend enough time looking or walking across it or thinking up metaphors for this - I didn't know what to call it - awesome place. Across Red Square, St. Basil's looked rich and whimsical, a Spielbergian starship just touching down after a trip to the Arabian Nights, a pile of red and green striped pineapples, of squashed onion domes and spires, and gold, all filigree and inlay. My metaphors collided and crashed, none of them any good. I just looked at St. Basil's and thought: such a pretty thing!
Make me something unique, Ivan the Terrible said to his architects, and they made him St. Basil's, and he asked if they could they make him another. Yes, they said, and thought about a new arrangement of striped pineapples and golden onions. Yes, we can, they said, and Ivan had their eyes put out because he didn't want anyone else to have one.
I liked Moscow best at night. I liked it in the snow, winter obviously its natural element, its grandeur underscored by the sweep of empty squares, vast plazas as burnished and forsaken as the uninhabited ballroom of a tsar's palace. Night hid the cracks in the buildings. The hard-currency hustlers stamped their feet in the snow outside the hotel and in the shadows of the Bolshoi Theater.
Fur hats? Rubles? Sex?
I sat in my window at the National Hotel and somehow it all seemed oddly familiar. The American Revolution always appeared in my mind as a remote woodcut of tiny eighteenth-century figures in wigs in a formal landscape. The Russian Revolution was always a movie. Sergei Eisenstein's fictional footage had shown up so often as documentary evidence of the events that finally everyone just believed his version was fact.
* * *
There was a knock on my door. It was Martin Walker. He was wearing very tight jeans and a fur hat a foot high. It had been awarded to him for extraordinary feats of macho fishing by some Siberian tribe.
Martin was the Guardian's correspondent in Moscow and he had written brilliantly about the coming of Gorbachev and Perestroika and Glasnost, rediscovering the Soviet Union for his readers as a place where people had sex and permanent waves, listened to rock and roll, ate Chinese food, and did not have Tampax. There were no sanitary napkins anywhere in the country.