What was the first American album to be officially released in the USSR?
Communism versus capitalism, East versus West, the USSR versus the United States: the Cold War defined a huge portion of the 20th century. Although perceptions of the conflict are often, understandably, focused on the potential for a widespread nuclear holocaust, much of the war was fought in the cultural sector. The capitalist culture of the USA was routinely pitted against what was portrayed as the dark and repressive reality of life in the Eastern bloc. Music, in particular, was a focal point for the cultural side of the Cold War.
During the 1950s, as the Cold War began to heat up a considerable amount, the USA gave the world rock and roll music. This defiant and youth-orientated musical subculture completely redefined American popular culture, and it did not take long for the rest of the world to take notice. Inevitably, the Soviet state saw this bold new musical style as a threat to the totalitarian regime set up in the USSR, in addition to believing that it would make Russian citizens more sympathetic to core Western values of freedom and expression.
As such, rock music was placed under heavy surveillance by the USSR, with most, if not all, Western rock artists banned behind the Iron Curtain. Of course, the music still took hold in the USSR thanks to its prolific black market of bootlegged albums, usually recorded onto low-quality tape reels. The Beatles made significant strides in the USSR, with the intense popularity of their music seemingly immune to the authoritarianism of Brezhnev’s regime.
Recognising the increasing popularity of The Beatles in Russia, the state-owned record label Melodiya – usually concerned with releasing Russian classical music – was permitted to press certain Beatles albums, although often with certain songs edited or omitted if they took too strongly against the Soviet way of life. In fact, the Fab Four proved so popular in the USSR that, in 1988, Paul McCartney chose to release a solo album, CHOBA B CCCP, exclusively in the Soviet Union.
Although certain rock artists made it through the Soviet censors, either through bootleg records or the odd official release, the state still imposed harsh restrictions on music arriving from the United States. In fact, it took until 1988—three years before the collapse of communism—for the first official release of an American album in the USSR.
In a bizarre twist of fate, Bon Jovi’s glam metal triumph New Jersey was the very first American album to be officially released in the USSR. It is unclear why that specific album was chosen; perhaps it was a way for the Soviet state to tell its citizens, ‘Look, you’re not missing out on much.’ Either way, the record was issued by Melodiya in 1988, and Russian music fans flocked to buy it.
Bon Jovi helped to open the floodgates for American music to become more widespread throughout the USSR, with Melodiya issuing records by a wide range of artists, including the likes of Tina Turner and The Doors, as well as British rock groups like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull. It is unclear whether these releases made much of a difference to Soviet music obsessives, though, as the vast majority of those artists had already been bootlegged within an inch of their lives all across the Eastern bloc.
What was the first Russian album to be released in the USA?
On the other side of the Cold War, rock music from inside the Soviet Union was not an official release in the United States until 1986. Admittedly, there were no strict laws imposed on record labels to release exclusively American music; music fans in the USA simply had no interest in hearing Russian rock and roll when they had the real thing on their doorsteps. Nevertheless, the USSR was home to a wide range of talented musicians and artists, and during the 1970s and 1980s, many of those musicians were becoming increasingly infatuated with the world of punk and rock.
Releasing this, producer and vocalist Joanna Stingray travelled behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1980s to discover Russia’s untapped potential for underground rock and roll music. Recording four different groups during her travels to Leningrad–Aquarium, Kino, Alisa, and Strannye Igry–Stingray smuggled those recordings back to the US, where they were pressed onto vinyl by Big Time Records in 1986. As such, the compilation album Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR became the very first Russian rock record to be released in the United States.
