For young Soviets, the Beatles were a first, mutinous rip in the iron curtain...

Crossing the famous Finland station in Leningrad one day in the early 1960s, Kolya Vasin was stopped by a policeman who had spotted his long hair. "You are not a Soviet man!" charged the officer. "And he grabbed my hair," recalls Vasin, who was then hauled across a platform while dozens of people laughed. "I was crying from the pain, but I had to keep silent. I was afraid the man would drag me off to prison."

Vasin was a diehard Beatles fan. The Beatles' music had given him, he said "all the adventures of my life", for which "I was arrested many times, accused of 'breaching social order'. They said anyone who listened to the Beatles was spreading western propaganda." More than that, in the USSR, the Fab Four "were like an integrity test. When anyone said anything against them, we knew just what that person was worth. The authorities, our teachers, even our parents, became idiots to us."

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There are so many others – rock musicians, eccentrics, writers, dissidents – of the same vintage, with different stories to tell, but all variations on the theme. "There was not a band anywhere in the Soviet Union", says Woodhead, "that did not start life as a Beatles tribute band." Full story...

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