referencia ottawa

8/2/2019 referencia ottawa

1/3

You may know of him," says Pelyushonok, telling me the name of the Ottawa

band that the singer was, or is, in. Unable to recognize the name, I shake myhead and listen to the song. It is reminiscent of old Paul Simon with a dash of

the Monkees thrown in.

"I was thinking of Can't Buy Me Love when I wrote it," he says.

While in the West the Beatles stepped on all the rules

The '60s beat was echoing through all the Soviet schools.

Every Russian schoolboy wants to be a star

Playing Beatles music, making a guitar.

Teachers looked upon all this as if it were a sin,

We were building Communism but the Beatles butted in.

'Nyet!' to Beatles music. 'Da!' the students said.

Even Comrade Brezhnev sadly shook his head...

The song's lyrics pretty accurately sum up Pelyushonok's experiences growing

up in the '60s and '70s in the Soviet Union, where access to Western culturewas spare, and misinformation rampant.

"Being a Beatles fan in North America was easy," he says. "Not so in Russia.

In those days, he explains, it was illegal to bring a Beatles record into the

country and if you were found with one, it was usually confiscated. As a

member of the Soviet national fencing team, he witnessed the same airportroutine time and again: "If, say, a famous sportsman came back from a foreigncountry, the customs authorities would ask, 'Do you have a Beatles' record?"

"And if you did, they would put the record on this special device, scratch it,

and then return it to you as a souvenir."

Recordings that did manage to pass through the tight screen were as good asgold, he says. "Some diplomats, some famous, famous athletes, and some

sailors managed to smuggle in illicit records," he says. "Immediately, the

whole country would have copies of these on reel-to-reel tape."

Most of the Beatles music that Pelyushonok managed to listen to was, at best,

third- or fourth-generation copies.

"'Beatlyi' was the Russian word to describe things by the Beatles,"

Pelyushonok adds. "I remember hearing that word for the first time in 1964,when I was in Grade 1. Even then, I knew exactly what it meant.

"I don't know how it got around. It wasn't in the newspaper, it wasn't

anywhere. But it's like corruption; you just sense it."


2/3

Pelyushonok has recently published a book chronicling his experiences, titled,

Strings For A Beatle Bass: The Beatles Generation in the USSR. The bookexplains the Soviet opinion of the Beatles and the importance and prevalence

of the Fab Four in Russian cultural history.

According to Pelyushonok, it began as a small article, written when he

attended the 1995 Ottawa Beatles Convention at the National Museum ofScience and Technology. (He had emigrated to Canada in 1993, because of

political conditions in Russia. "I couldn't stay any longer.")

Pelyushonok, a doctor in the Soviet Union whose training isn't recognized as adoctor in Canada, got a job at Wal-Mart. At night, he began writing down hisstories of growing up and the connection to the Beatles.

"The youth of the Soviet Union do not need this cacophonous rubbish," statedSoviet leader Nikita Krushchev of the Beatles in the early 1960s. "It's just a

small step from saxophones to switchblades."

Yet the Soviet youth, claims Pelyushonok, did need the Beatles, and went to

enormous lengths to be more like them. Pelyushonok contends that the

Beatles, and not other bands of the time, were the single-most major factor inshaping pop culture behind the Iron Curtain.

"They were considered the big capitalist threat during the Cold War," he says.

"You could bring Rolling Stones albums into the country, later on, but not the

Beatles.

"You know why? I think it's because the Beatles were an event. The RollingStones were a rock band, but the Beatles were the cultural event of our

century.

"One-hundred out of 100 kids, if asked who invented the electrical guitar," he

continues, "would answer 'The Beatles.' Who invented rock-and-roll? The

Beatles.

"Every event has a master, and the master of modern music was the Beatles."

In his book, Pelyushonok describes the lengths that he and others went to in

order to build a guitar. For example, since only traditional seven-string

acoustic folk guitars were readily available then, and bass guitars wereunheard of, he built his own bass guitar, only to discover that bass strings

were impossible to get. The solution was to steal some from a school piano, anact that didn't go unnoticed at the next school assembly, nor one that went

unpunished. At the New Year's Eve concert that his newly-formed "beat-


3/3

band" played at, retribution was final, as the piano strings snapped his guitar

in half.

It seemed everyone was in a band then, says Pelyushonok, and they all playedBeatles' songs, whether they knew the words or not. Curiously, however, they

never performed Beatles' songs in public.

In the U.S.S.R., the Beatles were surrounded by such an aura of legend andfame," he writes in his book, "that no one dared to even approach them. Theword Beatles was almost sacred, just like the cow in India. To go out onto the

stage and imitate John Lennon would have been...like a faithful Catholicdressing up as Jesus Christ for Halloween."

Rolling through the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s, the book includes the death of

John Lennon, by which time the Soviet propaganda machine has turned 180degrees, contending that the American secret service had assassinated Lennon,

a proponent of peace and a friend of the Soviet Union's.

Recently, the book came to the attention of executives at ABC, whose Beatles

documentary, The Beatles Revolution, airs tonight at 8:00 p.m.

Pelyushonok was flown to New York last month, where he was interviewedfor hours for the show.

"It was us, listening to the Beatles," he says, "that became Russia's lostgeneration.

"And we grew up and became the deputies, and we became the officers, and

that's what changed the country.

"The Beatles brought this message about love and peace," he adds, "but therewas this thundering silence and fury. (The authorities) wouldn't listen. Theywouldn't pay attention. "But you know what the Beatles did? They allowed us

a little bit of a way to escape when there was no escape."

Pelyushonok bends over once more to play the tape. The lyrics again tell hisstory:

Each Comrade's child was in a band,

The yeah-yeah virus swept the land,

What could they do? What could they say?

A generation gone astray.

The yeah-yeah had them in its sway.

What could they do, what could they say? They walked away..."

http://beatles.ncf.ca/deachman.html
http://beatles.ncf.ca/deachman.htmlhttp://beatles.ncf.ca/deachman.htmlhttp://beatles.ncf.ca/deachman.html

Documents

referencia ottawa