Hollywood, Music should not leave Russia

If you read some of my stories, you’d know I’m passionate about two things — running and pop music.

Even in the 1980s, when the Iron Curtain still firmly separated the Soviet Union from anything “West”, there was a lot of Western music, in my family anyway.

My earliest childhood memories — from the early 1980—have a soundtrack to them, consisting of Queen, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and many others. We worshipped Lenin and everything Soviet (his mummified body by the way still lies at the heart of Moscow) in the streets and classrooms but in our kitchens and tiny living rooms listened to the voices of Western rock stars, some mellow and smoothing, some fast and rebellious.

It was all forbidden fruit, but the music was the bridge that always stayed, the invisible connection to the free, fun, mysterious Western world. Well, we didn’t think it was “free”, but it was mysterious and fun. There is a famous pedestrian street in central Moscow, Old Arbat. On this street, in its less visible passages, there were kiosks that sold tapes. That’s where we got our music. The quality was often crap, as the music was recorded over and over again, but it was listenable. We came home and played them on our magnetophon in the living room. It was some Soviet brand tape recorder and it was pretty good. It had a digital screen with green lines moving, in an oscillating rhythm, with the music.