Magnitizdat: Bootleg music versus the USSR
For as long as there has been authority, there has been a desire – nay, a need – to rebel against it. So, when the government of the Soviet Union became increasingly totalitarian, restricting the rights and freedoms of its citizens, there came a growing desire to rebel. Of course, battling against such a colossal power as the Soviet Union was no easy task, and numerous people ‘disappeared’ while protesting the authority of the state. However, if there is one thing that is more powerful than the Soviet Union, more powerful than any government, it is rock and roll.
Rock and roll was not an enemy that the Soviet Union expected to have to reckon with. After all, Little Richard had not even been born when Lenin and the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in 1917. Nevertheless, when the rock revolution exploded in the USA towards the back end of the 1950s, the Soviets saw the potential dissent it might cause, particularly among the union’s youth. If young people in the USSR were exposed to the revolutionary sounds that had captivated audiences in America and beyond, they may start to rise up against the oppressive power of the state or – worse still – become indoctrinated by American capitalist ideology.
Luckily for the Soviets, General Secretary Joseph Stalin had set a precedent for particularly totalitarian measures to be taken with regard to cultural imports into the USSR. Books, magazines, and music recordings, among many other things, were surveilled by the ever-present eyes of the Soviet state, and many publications were forbidden as a result. As a result of this, the black market in the USSR had become a particularly lucrative trade, with one of the most popular purchases being ‘samizdat’. This term refers to the distribution of banned reading material, usually through DIY or even hand-copied publications.
Of course, as more and more music became forbidden, and distant whispers about a revolutionary new music style known as ‘rock and roll’, there came a need for DIY music publication, too. During this period, most music around the world was being played on turntables, but this technology had not yet become widespread behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, most homes in the Soviet Union were equipped with reel-to-reel tape recorders. While the quality of these magnetic tapes was often scratchy and lo-fi, they did provide a way to make cheap and abundant recordings.
So began the curious world of magnitizdat—or magnetic tape publishing. From the earliest days of magnitizdat, these bootleg recordings made on lo-fi equipment in people’s homes provided an opportunity to share music that would not have been approved by the Soviet state. These recordings often featured folk tracks dealing with anti-authoritarianism and criticism of Stalin’s regime. As the market for magnitizdat developed, however, the scene became increasingly dominated by low-quality recordings of Western rock music.
Western groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and, later, hard rock outfits, including Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, were distributed throughout the USSR on bootleg tape recordings. The nature of the recording process meant that every subsequent recording produced was of a lower quality than the previous, but the scratchy sounds of Sgt. Pepper’s still succeeded in infecting the people of the Soviet Union – just as it had the rest of the world.
Even as the music world group became more varied, with the emergence of styles like punk, new wave and even disco, the magnitizdat scene remained. Soon, Soviet groups began to distribute their own music through the black market tape scene. Especially with punk groups, which the Soviet state saw as threatening to the nation’s youth, magnitizdat became an essential aspect of the music scene, introducing audiences to groundbreaking groups like Avtomaticheskie udovletvoriteli and Kino.
Magnitizdat and rock music as a whole helped to undermine the authority of the Soviet state and provided a peek into the Western world for those behind the Iron Curtain. Eventually, the state itself had to accept their attempts to shield citizens from rock and roll, even allowing a select few artists into the country during the 1970s and 1980s to perform concerts. Curiously, Cliff Richard was the first Western artist chosen to perform in the USSR – perhaps Brezhnev assumed that hearing ‘Summer Holiday’ would put audiences off rock music indefinitely. In the 1980s, the likes of The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Queen and even Iron Maiden made it into the Eastern bloc.
Despite their DIY beginnings, the recordings that made up the magnitizdat scene were so much more than simple bootleg records. The network of recordings helped to establish the defiant sounds of rock and roll within the Eastern bloc, leading to growing ideas of cultural revolution against the authoritarian regime that the Soviet state presided over. Magnitizdat represented humanity’s overwhelming need for freedom and, above all else, rock and roll.
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