Behind the Iron Curtain: Elton John’s concert in defiance of the Cold War
In 1979, Elton John was a certified global superstar. A year after releasing his twelfth studio album, A Single Man, he had established himself as an artist worthy of selling out stadiums worldwide.
The well-trodden path of mega-stardom ultimately led to the well-publicised implosion of an artist like John, who, in many ways, had achieved everything to be achieved. And so with that, where did a fresh challenge lie for a musician who had played the biggest shows the Western world had to offer at that time?
That year, Cold War tensions flared, and fans from within the Soviet Union could only enjoy Elton John’s music on highly expensive bootleg cassettes. But despite the legal selling of his records, he became as much of a smash-hit artist as he had in the rest of the country, and there was a fervent appetite for his live performance.
“I’m knocked out,” John told The Washington Post in an interview that year. “This has to be my biggest achievement as an artist. These people don’t have any records, and yet they reacted like that. I’m at a loss for words.”
After months of negotiations, the Soviet Union agreed to allow Elton John to perform eight shows, four in Moscow and four in Leningrad. But ticket sales were far from straightforward; upon the agreement, the Russian media did not announce Elton’s visit in print, and by the time state-sponsored radio announced the sale of tickets for April, high-ranking Communist party officials had bagged the best seats of the respective concert halls.
But by the time John landed behind the Iron Curtain, the mood was at a fever pitch. Upon his arrival on May 20th, fans turned up at the airport in droves, bearing gifts and requesting autographs from their bootleg idol. Not only was it a decisive moment for music, unifying two vastly different worlds, but also for society, as his openness as bisexual would have been at odds with communist Soviet ideals.
The nervousness of breaking that mould certainly wasn’t lost on John, who said: “I was terrified before the first night. I felt nobody really knew me here and that it could all go terribly wrong. … I think we all felt up to the last minute that someone somewhere would give us a ‘No’…or a ‘Nyet!’, as they say”.
But the reaction was very much on the contrary, as fans screamed in between hits and adorned John with flowers. When John dropped into a cover of The Beatles’ ‘Back In The U.S.S.R.’, unscreened by The Soviet Union beforehand, it gave an opportune moment for fans to rush to the front of the stage and dance along in what was an act of cultural defiance. The reception was so frenzied that John’s butchering of the lyrical delivery whereby he “just sang ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ over and over again” went unnoticed.
The political effect of Elton John’s mini-tour was profound. In his DeCouto’s book Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the ’70s, he claims the British Embassy in Moscow declared it “the single most important step forward in East-West relationships since Khruschev had visited Hollywood back in ’59”.
John would return to the Soviet Union 16 years later, four years after the fall of Soviet Russia, where he would have no doubt seen the hallmarks of his influence scattered on the newly governed streets.
In a 2013 statement, John confirmed this experience’s profound political impact on him, saying, “I love this country. I want to show them and the world that I care and that I don’t believe in isolating people. Music is a very powerful thing. It brings people together, irrespective of their age, their race, their sexuality or their religion. It does not discriminate.”
