Banned in the USSR: the 38 “dangerous” artists the USSR removed from circulation
I highly doubt that anyone reading this has any experience of running a country or making any decision that would affect millions of people. You might be the boss of a relatively large team, but nothing you do is going to be as consequential as the actions of a world leader. However, if you were in charge, what would be the most radical change you’d choose to bring about? I don’t know about you, but if I were put in control of an entire nation, I’d want to ban any and all media that promotes neofascism, you know, to protect citizens from dangerous information that could radicalise them into believing an inherently evil ideology.
The thing is, I don’t know at what point this sort of prohibition of neofascist or right-wing art would lead to me removing people’s rights to listen to Sparks and 10cc. As two of the finest art-rock groups of the 1970s, their music was largely inoffensive in terms of its thematic content, and at the same time, Madness are not the sort of act that one might consider being the type to incite violence, and Talking Heads weren’t exactly big on perpetuating the “myth of the Soviet military threat”.
These above examples are all reasons why the USSR chose to ban a total of 38 Western acts from having their art distributed in the former Communist nation at the tail end of the Cold War, which saw acts as varied as Pink Floyd, The Stranglers and Donna Summer removed from circulation in the country for promoting what the government deemed to be dangerous ideologies.
In 1985, the Communist Party for Young People, also known as the Soviet Komsomol, released an order to prohibit these acts and cited their messages as having the potential to corrupt the Soviet way of life and thinking. “The following is a list of foreign music groups and artists whose repertoires contain ideologically harmful compositions,” the paper read, continuing: “This information is recommended for the purpose of intensifying control over the activities of discotheques. This information must also be provided to all vocal-instrument ensembles in the region.”
With their offences ranging from “violence”, “eroticism”, and “homosexuality” to incredibly specific crimes such as “religious obscurantism”, “cult of strong personality”, and “distortion of Soviet foreign policy”, bands and artists covered plenty of genre bases, with disco, punk, heavy metal and progressive rock appearing to receive the harshest of judgements.
The USSR was known for having strict controls on what media was available for consumption during the Cold War, and anything Western that threatened the spread of their pro-Communist messaging was invariably banned from being available within the country. However, the Cold War would last less than a decade after the publication of the list, and by 1991, the USSR had collapsed, with its member states becoming independent countries that established their own individual policies on acceptable media.
The list, which sees some incredible acts receive the seal of disapproval from the Soviet government, is largely full of acts that one’s grandmother may well frown at, with the Sex Pistols and Alice Cooper being prime examples of acts that have the potential to cause offence even in their home nations, but the thought of Yazoo being prohibited for being “punk” and “violent” is nothing but a hilarious concept.
The 38 artists who were banned by the USSR:
- Sex Pistols – punk, violence
- The B-52s – punk, violence
- Madness – punk, violence
- The Clash – punk, violence
- The Stranglers – punk, violence
- Kiss – neofascism, punk, violence
- Krokus – violence, cult of strong personality
- Styx – violence, vandalism
- Iron Maiden – violence, religious obscurantism
- Judas Priest – anticommunism, racism
- AC/DC – neofascism, violence
- Sparks – neofascism, racism
- Black Sabbath – violence, religious obscurantism
- Alice Cooper – violence, vandalism
- Nazareth – violence, religious mysticism
- Scorpions – violence
- Genghis Khan – anticommunism, nationalism
- UFO – violence
- Pink Floyd – distortion of Soviet foreign policy (“Soviet aggression in Afghanistan”)
- Talking Heads – myth of the Soviet military threat
- Perron – eroticism
- Bohannon – eroticism
- The Originals – sex
- Donna Summer – eroticism
- Tina Turner – sex
- Junior English – sex
- Canned Heat – homosexuality
- Munich Machine – eroticism
- Ramones – punk
- Van Halen – anti-Soviet propaganda
- Julio Iglesias – neofascism
- Yazoo – punk, violence
- Depeche Mode – punk, violence
- Village People – violence
- 10cc – neofascism
- The Stooges – violence
- Boys – punk, violence
- Blondie – punk, violence
