What was the first classic rock song to go to number one in Russia?
You can tell a lot about a nation from the songs that populate its singles charts, so it is fitting that, during the age of Cold War secrecy, the Soviet Union had no official chart standing; after all, celebrating the sales figures of certain records is exactly the kind of capitalist imperialism that the USSR was rallying against.
That is not to say, however, that the Soviet Union was without its musical obsessives or pop stars. Even under the authoritarian rule of Stalin’s heyday, the more enterprising music fans found covert methods of getting their hands on certain rock and pop records, smuggled in from the other side of the Iron Curtain, creating an unofficial chart in the process.
Unsurprisingly, when rock and roll first exploded onto the airwaves back in the 1950s, it was immediately subdued by Soviet censors. During the age of Cold War politics, anything that represented American society and capitalist values was embargoed by the Soviet state, and rock music was quickly identified as a threat to the fabric of communist society.
The likes of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry might have been dominating the Western singles charts, but you had to go to some extreme lengths to even hear them in the USSR.
Seemingly, though, even the watchful eye of the Soviet state could not totally disrupt the emergence of rock and roll. Before too long, an extensive network of smugglers and bootleggers had sprung up to meet the mounting demand for rock and roll records.
So, although you weren’t likely to hear Jerry Lee Lewis on the Soviet state-owned record label, Melodiya, you could hear the sounds emerging from the west via lo-fi ‘Magnitizdat’ tape recordings, or homemade flexi-discs printed onto postcards or x-ray scans. If you were particularly daring, you could even try to smuggle official records from the West to the East and sell them on the black market.
Eventually, the musical black market became so unavoidable within Soviet society that even the state itself had to admit defeat, spurred on by the inescapable popularity of The Beatles back in the 1960s, leading Melodiya to press a select few Beatles records for official release. Even before the Fab Four hit the scene, though, another classic rock anthem topped the unofficial charts conjured up by Soviet bootleggers.
Bill Haley’s finest hour came in 1954 when ‘Rock Around The Clock’ became the first rock and roll single to top the charts in both the US and the UK, thus cementing the bold new realm of rock and roll on a transatlantic basis. Seemingly, though, the popularity of that single was so great that even those living life under Soviet rule caught wind of it.
Officially, of course, ‘Rock Around The Clock’ was banned in the USSR, but it didn’t take long for the nation’s teenage rebels to get hold of the track and bootleg it extensively. In fact, the song was such a landmark moment for Soviet society that it is often credited with establishing the realm of Soviet bootleg music in general, particularly those x-ray film recordings, adding entirely new layers of rebellious appeal to Haley’s rock anthem.
So, although Soviet-era Russia had no official singles chart – and even if it did, the bootlegged rock and roll records adored by its youth would not have counted towards the official standings – it is fair to say that Bill Haley’s landmark 1954 release was the first rock and roll song to really make an impact behind the Iron Curtain, topping the proverbial charts for young people across the entirety of the Soviet Union.
