The Battle for the Soul of Soviet Youth

Bone records are one of the unintended consequences of a monumental social experiment.

The Soviet Union was that experiment, an experiment in controlling the economy, controlling ideas, and controlling people. These intentions first coalesced in the 1920s, with the big idea of creating a New Soviet Wo/Man, someone who thought, felt, and dressed how the Party wanted. Apart from the fact that this was always changing, there was always a problem that was never solved - the kids. Pretty much from day one, the state was in a crazy, endless fight with its own youth.

These were the very people who were supposed to be the biggest believers. Instead, many were pushing back, not with a political revolution, but by fighting for their own cultural space in a war for the imagination. The battlefields of this war were music, fashion and personal identity. The state had its weapons - censorship and persecution, but the kids had theirs: smuggled goods, a sense of irony, and a powerful dream of the "Imaginary West".

Desparing parents, wasted youth - from Krokodil magazine

This cultural conflict was separate from the much more dangerous business of political opposition. In places like Ukraine, there were secret groups like the Ukrainian Worker-Peasant Union (UWPU) that were talking about real independence and social-democratic reforms. The state's response was brutal - prison or even execution, but that wasn't the path for most young people. Their rebellion was "softer," but it was just as important, perhaps more effective in many ways. It was a cultural, "I'm not playing your game" protest, a protest of non-participation. And in the long run, that quiet countercultural non-conformity did more to unravel the state's authority than any overt political stance ever could.

But do terms such as counterculture, subculture, and youth culture even apply in the history of the Soviet Union’s conflict with its own? In the West, they describe movements in varying relationships to mainstream society. Broadly, countercultures reject dominant values outright, positioning themselves outside the social order, while subcultures express distinct identities—through politics, style, or sexuality—yet remain within it. Yet these labels are unstable, overlapping, and continually redefined, both by those who coin them and those who wear them as badges of defiance.

In the Soviet Union, these distinctions took on a unique resonance. As my friend Artemy Troitsky explores in his book Subkultura, Russian and Soviet history has seen successive waves of youth-driven movements—ideological radicals, mystical sects, hedonistic trend-followers, hippies of the 1970s, perestroika-era rockers, and today’s political activists such as Pussy Riot. The nineteenth-century examples Artemyi identifies—the raznochintsy (intellectual outsiders), the Narodniks (populists who “went to the people”), and religious sects such as the Dukhobors—all expressed different forms of subcultural identity. Brief moments of avant-garde freedom, like in the St Petersburg cafés of 1910-1915, nurtured the Futurists, whose radical rejection of convention was an early echo of later countercultures. David Burliuk’s anarchic verse— “The soul is a pub, The sky – a rag. Beauty is blasphemous crap, and poetry – a worn-out slag.” — even captured a punk spirit decades before its time. But despite their initial support for the Bolsheviks, the Futurists and other avant-gardists were soon suppressed under Stalin’s cultural orthodoxy. The early Bolsheviks, themselves, though they began as fiery countercultural revolutionaries, quickly became the new mainstream and crushed the very forms of non-conformity they once embodied. From the 1930s to the late war years, the space for youthful rebellion had all but vanished, surviving only in the small, secret circles of idealists who dared to dream of freedom.

American Zoot Suiters

Soviet Stilyagi

The First Rebels: The Stilyagi and the War on Being Different.

As I have written previously, the first youth group to really make the authorities nervous were the Stilyagi, the "style-hunters", the followers of (western) fashion, back in the 40s and 50s. These were city kids, a lot of them from the elite, who couldn't stand the drab, military-style conformity of Stalinist life. Their rebellion was audiovisual. They'd seen American trophy films (movies captured from Germany) and would imitate what diplomats' kids were wearing - they'd create their own bricolage, mix-and-match styles, including "orange jackets and pea-green pants". They copied Western zoot suit jackets with huge shoulders, super-narrow "pipe" trousers, and shoes with the thick soles they called "semolina." Their music was, firstly, American jazz, and later rock’n’roll, both of which the officials hated. This obsession with Western pop culture style wasn't political; they weren't trying to be dissidents; they were just a messy, ambiguous bunch who set their own rules on what looked good. Wild dancing featured heavily. The state's overreaction was one of moral panic. The regime was obsessed with what Jan Plamper calls "abolishing ambiguity"—it wanted everything to have one agreed, correct, official meaning. And the Stilyagi, with their crazy clothes and unpredictable foreign music, were the embodiment of "ambiguous". The official satirical magazine, Krokodil, lampooned their cartoonish style and pursued them ruthlessly, painting them as folk devils—lazy, parasitic "monkeys", narcissistic spongers, and dangerous "weeds", corrupting the socialist garden. They were bullied, harassed, and could even be prosecuted for khuliganizm ("hooliganism"). This was a catch-all, legal offence: a vague law that pretty much let the state arrest anyone for any kind of deviance.

Dreaming of the West

The Stilyagi—and the subcultures that came after, right up until perestroika, got much of their energy from the "Imaginary West", a place that Alexei Yurchak calls a fantasy realm "simultaneously knowable and unattainable." It was everything the Soviet system wasn't - colourful, free, and full of cool stuff. It wasn't a political fantasy, but a cultural one that was realised mainly through fartsovka, black-market smuggling. Soviet sailors, foreign tourists, and diplomats were the main suppliers of contraband, the sacred goods of youth culture: jackets, jeans, T-shirts, style magazines, chewing gum - and vinyl records, the ultimate prize.

Western records cost a fortune, so in the era of Bone Music, bootleggers such as The Golden Dog Gang were the prime source for the distribution of illicit music, and at times, other Western goods. Later, the cost of records created whole new social circles - a bunch of friends would pool their money to buy one and then spend all night making tape-to-tape copies for everyone. Some enterprising bootleggers, such as my interviewee Rudy Fuchs, who had once been imprisoned for his illicit activities selling bone records, made money by renting out his extensive record collection by the hour for home taping.

Radio was hugely inspirational too. Subsequent to the closing of the Iron Curtain, it became impossible to see the American trophy films, but listening to foreign broadcasts became a crucial form of underground consumption. Some daring individuals even built their own transmitters to broadcast rock’n’toll. Sergei Zhuk says that in the closed city of Dniepropetrovsk, where missiles were built, the KGB was in a panic over such "radio hooliganism." For many others, listening to the BBC and Voice of America was a rite of passage. The result was generations of kids whose cultural imagination was completely alien to, and alienated from, their own government.

Moscow youth cafe late 60s

The State Fights Back

Faced with this massive and unstoppable demand for Western culture, the state had to change its approach. The hard-line Stalinist way had been to erase things. In Estonia, they banned the word "jazz." The state-run "Eesti Raadio džässorkester" (Jazz Orchestra) had its name changed to "Estrada Orchestra." The band was "reformed" by firing the saxophone players or drowning them out with a wall of strings (the saxophone, a Belgian invention, was seen to represent the very worst of American influence).

It didn't work. By the time Khrushchev came to power in the 50s and 60s,  the state had to shift from repression to co-option. Faced with the kids voting with their feet for Western-style fun, the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) decided to sponsor its own "socialist fun." They opened state-run youth cafés and clubs that gave the kids some space to meet and mingle, but they were always a partial concession; the authorities still wanted to control the playlist - and the dancing.

In the more open climate of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, a sort of counterculture emerged in the ‘Sixties Generation’ of intellectual artists who had been rather dismissive of the superficial interests of the Stilyagi, Flmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky, poets Joseph Brodsky and Bella Akhmadulina and ‘Bard’ musicians Alexander Galich and Vladimir Vysotsky,  attempted to create a culture that was both independent and unique. They were perhaps the last Russian intellectuals to have any sympathy with communism - singer-songwriter Bulat Okudzhava was quoted as saying that the task of his contemporaries was not to destroy the regime but to humanise it.

Soviet Hippies

The Next Wave: Hippies and the Generation of Janitors

By the 1970s, during the Era of Stagnation under Brezhnev, a new generation of nonconformists showed up: the khippovniki, or hippies. Their protest was still not about overtly fighting the system, but involved a much more active non-participation. They wanted to be ‘vnye’—both inside and outside the system at the same time - in other words, a subculture. This generation created a loose network of bohemians, artists, and spiritual seekers who. like their Western peers, were all about love, freedom, and sincerity. Their resistance was social escapism. They famously became the generation of street cleaners and gatekeepers. Smart, educated kids from good families would refuse to join the Komsomol or get a professional job. Instead, they'd get work as janitors, night watchmen, or boiler-room operators because these jobs demanded zero ideological loyalty and left them with free time for their real lives: writing, art, relationships, philosophy, and, of course, music. Their soundtrack was no longer jazz or the songs of the bards but the homegrown Russian rock made by bands like Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine). Aquarium, Auktyion, and later, Kino, all of whom were to become underground stars, via massive distribution of bootleg tapes. Their lyrics weren't attacking the state; they were singing about personal life—sincerity, love, loneliness. In an official culture built on heroic, public statements, celebrating collective ideals, just being honest about your feelings was a radical act.

Boris Grebenchikov at an Aquarium apartment concert

Victor Tsoi of Kino at an apartment concert

Right back to the post-Stalin years, musical gatherings were happening in secret. The stilyagi held clandestine dance parties in empty flats, and low-key, intimate ‘apartment’ concerts became increasingly popular through the 60s, 70s and 80s. The state, for its part, tried to control this by forcing the rock bands into the official system, which just created a split between official rock and the real underground.

The Komsomol list of banned rock bands

Things Get Weird

The 70s and 80s saw an opening up to foreign pop music, often with unintended consequences. The rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar became popular because Ian Gillan of Deep Purple sang Jesus’s part. Largely apolitical rock kids started wearing crosses and reading the Bible, grabbing onto any identity the communist project had explicitly rejected. Official and semi-official deals between the state Record company Melodiya and Western labels introduced the delights of ABBA, Boney M and various other unthreatening pop acts to the Soviet public. But the floodgates were definitely not wide open. Sergei Zhuk's study of the closed city of Dniepropetrovsk describes how the KGB, terrified of ideological pollution near their missile factory, went completely overboard. During their anti-fascist panic in the 80s, Komsomol officials handed out blacklists of Western bands, banning groups like AC/DC and Kiss on the basis that the lightning-bolt logos were covert Nazi SS symbols (given the monumental tragedy of the Second World War, accusations of Nazism were, and remain, a perennial way of defining an enemy). It completely backfired. The bans just made the bands seem even cooler, and showed the kids that the authorities were clueless.

By the 1980s, the last Soviet generation, as Alexei Yurchak describes it, had perfected a cultural response to this bizarre world: stiob, a complex, in-the-know irony, a deliberate overidentification with official symbols, to mimic the system so perfectly that no one could distinguish a loyal supporter from a total subversive, a sophisticated response to a system that demanded loyalty but didn't seem to care if it was sincere.

Ravers at The Gagarin party

The Final Act: Ironic Ravers and the Gagarin Party

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, it left a void. The communist, socialist cultural story was over and the official vs. underground dynamic that rock music had depended on vanished, throwing the scene into confusion. The birth of post-Soviet youth culture rose from those ashes. Perhaps the perfect symbol of this was the "Gagarin Party" of 1991. This legendary rave organised by veterans of the old underground art scene, was held in the "Cosmos Pavilion," a holy shrine to Soviet technology. As thousands of kids danced to imported Western techno, the organisers projected a giant image of Yury Gagarin over the crowd, the ultimate act of stiob. They weren't making fun of Gagarin but “freeing the symbolic meanings" of the past. The last Soviet generation was, in effect, "sampling" the Soviet project. They tossed out the boring ideology but reclaimed the heroic, cool parts—like the image of Gagarin—as their own, mixing it in with global Western culture.

From the stilyagi's crazy orange jackets all the way to the Gagarin Party, the story of Soviet youth culture is one of non-stop, creative adaptation. The state's big plan to build a perfectly unambiguous world failed because ultimately culture cannot be controlled, can't be limited to one meaning. The kids' obsession with Bone Music, Western fashion and wild dancing wasn't some big political plot. It was just being human. It was a desire for identity, for style, for fun - borrowed and adapted until the time came when it could become homegrown.

In the end, the system wasn't brought down by an army. It was hollowed out from the inside, one smuggled record, one pair of blue jeans, and one dance party at a time.

Further Reading:

Stephen Coates: Bone Music

Artemyi Troitsky: Subkultura

Alexei Yurchak: Everything was Forever Until it was No More

Julia Furst: Stalin’s Last Generation

Sergei Zhuk: Rock and Roll in the Rocket City

Post Script

As I have noted elsewhere, I see the true ‘Bone Music’, the forbidden songs cut on x-ray records, not just to be American and British Jazz and Rock’n’Roll, but Russian music - the songs of emigres and underground singers. That was enjoyed by many ‘ordinary’ citizens, who would not have defined themselves as Stilyagi or of any particular subculture, and who were of all ages.

Dark is the Night

It’s easy to drop into the idea that because a lot of music and songs were censored, restricted or forbidden in the USSR, those that were not were somehow inferior. Many were wonderful. Others enjoyed official approval and public popularity for a while, but later came under critical fire for a variety of reasons.

An example was the truly beautiful, touching, and haunting - Dark is the Night sung by Mark Bernes in the 1943 battlefield--romance movie Two Soldiers. Bernes’s character, a soldier in the Second World War (The Great Patriotic War as it was known in Russia) sings a poignant tribute to his wife at night in a dugout with an audience of his fellow soldiers.

The music was by Nikita Bogoslovskii with lyrics by V. Agatov

Understandably, the song became a symbol of the war years for millions of people in the Soviet Union. But in the post-war cultural purge, it was denounced by officials for its ‘escapism’ and ‘tavern melancholy’, with the composer, Bogoslovsky, accused of promoting sentimental tunes.

Needless to say, that didn’t stop the public from loving it. It appears on bone records in various versions, and underground singers adapted it with new lyrics.

Dark is the Night.

Bullets whistle across the steppe
Only the wind hums in the wires, the stars flicker dimly
In the dark night, my love, I know, you are not sleeping
And by the baby's crib, you sadly wipe away a tear

How I love the depth of your gentle eyes
How I want to press my lips to them
The dark night separates us, my love
And the anxious black steppe lies between us

I believe in you, in my love
This faith has kеpt me from a bullet on a dark night
I am happy, I am calm in the heat of battle
I know you will greet mе with love, no matter what happens to me

Death is not so terrible; we have met it more than once in the steppe
And though it is circling above me
You are waiting for me, and you don't sleep by the crib
And that's why I know - nothing will happen to me

Jazz: The Most Important Art Form of the 20th Century?

“You hate jazz. You fear jazz”

Couldn’t resist :)

The Rise and Fall of RAPM

Bone records and jazz on X-rays started to appear in Soviet Russia just after the Second World War, but the musical restrictions and censorship they were made in response to had started over twenty years earlier.  

In the tumultuous times following the Russian Revolution,  cultural experimentation, innovation, and even improvisation had been celebrated, but very quickly, a cultural squeeze began. Among the many efforts to reshape art in the service of ideology, none was more ambitious—or ultimately tragic—than the attempt to create 'proletarian’ music by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, RAPM.

Founded in 1923, RAPM was an organisation of composers, theorists, and musicians dedicated to creating music that aligned with the goals of the Communist Party. Its leaders— Lev Shulgin and Aleksei Sergeev—rejected what they saw as the elitism of both classical traditions and modernist experimentation. For them, the future of music lay not in the concert hall, but in the factory, the kolkhoz collective farm, and the workers’ club. 

By the late 1920s, they had become the dominant force in Soviet music policy and were given positions of influence in cultural institutions. Other groups who favoured experimentation or musicians such as Prokofiev who were open to Western influences were brutally dismissed as bourgeois, decadent, and detached from the people, which increasingly put them in danger of persecution. 

Léonide Massine and Alexandra Danilova during a production of Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier in London.

Jazz in particular, and some very specific jazzy elements like syncopation and minor sixth and seventh chords, were criticised as a threat to Soviet cultural values. By 1928, the importing of foreign records was banned, and public dances were patrolled by Komsomol members to prevent infringements.

RAPM’s mission was to develop simple compositions that could be sung collectively by workers and peasants. These songs were often inspired by folk traditions, military marches, or choral hymns and carried overtly political messages to educate, unify, and mobilise the proletariat.

Shulgin’s 'Song About the Party' (“Песня о Партии”), widely performed in the 1930s and creepily,  though probably sincerely, sycophantic, is a classic:

'Free children of the unprecedented country,
Today we sing a proud song
About the most powerful Party in the world,
About our greatest leader.

You are the people’s pride, you are the people’s wisdom,
You are the people’s heart and its conscience.

Covered with glory, united by will,
Grow stronger and thrive for all centuries—
Lenin’s Party, Stalin’s Party—
The wise Party of the Bolsheviks! 

Not very Rock’n' Roll

Isaac Dunayevsky’s “March of the Enthusiasts” (“Марш энтузиастов” ) came later but completely embodied the spirit of RAPM 

On working days of the great construction sites,
In cheerful rumble, in fires and ringing,—
Hello, country of heroes,
Country of dreamers, country of scientists!

There are no obstacles for us, neither on sea nor on land,
Neither ice nor clouds scare us.
The flame of our soul, the banner of our country,
We will carry through worlds and ages’

That was composed in 1940, the very same year that Duke Ellington knocked out  “Cotton Tail” and “In a Mellow Tone” —and when jazz was advancing towards bebop 

For a time, RAPM enjoyed political favour. But by the early 1930s, in a classic Orwellian twist, its rigid doctrine—called “vulgar sociologism” by critics—was declared out of step with the evolving Soviet cultural policy. The idea that art should be reduced solely to class struggle was deemed simplistic and harmful.  While Socialist Realism still demanded ideological purity, it also emphasised aesthetic value, craftsmanship, and emotional resonance. The new Party line was that:

“Art must be ideologically correct but also artistically valuable.”

Jazz even had a brief reprieve, and in 1932, RAPM was dissolved. Many leading members were at first absorbed into new Soviet cultural institutions, but then, during the Great Terror of 1936–1939, were arrested, imprisoned, or executed. Those who survived, recanted or were forced into silence. The very system they helped build turned on them.

But Dunayevsky rose to fame. Though he had not been a RAPM member, he shared their goals, but his music was both ideologically sound and sophisticated and tuneful. His “Song of the Motherland” (Pesnya o Rodine) from the film Jolly Fellows managed to be both propaganda and popular. Here is an English version:

Popular perhaps, but you can see why after young Soviets got a taste of jazz during the war, they were keen to get something with a bit more swing.

Dunayevsky managed to navigate the Stalinist system successfully, earning prizes and wide acclaim and became the leading composer for Soviet cinema in the 1930s and 1940s.

Lev Shulgin’s fate was tragic given his lifelong dedication to the Soviet project and grimly ironic given his own repressive actions whilst leading RAPM. He was arrested in 1937 during the NKVD purges, accused of counter-revolutionary activities and executed. This was a man who had sought to use music as a revolutionary force, only to be destroyed by the very revolution he helped shape.

'Roentgenizdat - The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone' documentary

I’m very pleased to make our award-winning documentary ‘Roentgenizdat - The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone’ publically available.

Leningrad 1946, the Cold War: All culture is subject to the brutal control of a totalitarian state censor. But music-mad bootleggers devise an incredible and risky way to listen to and share the music they love, copying forbidden songs onto used X-ray film and creating their own records"

Enjoy

Featuring interviews with Soviet-era X-Ray bootleggers, musicians, commentators and extraordinary archive footage telling the story of one of the strangest eras in vinyl, music, forbidden culture and cold war history.

Written and presented by Stephen Coates, filmed by Paul Heartfield, edited by Jason Reid

The Birth of Cool

Bone Records were not just made in the USSR. They were also made in Hungary before the war (in fact, my theory is that this is where the culture began), though not as bootlegs of forbidden music, but as an amateur archivist activity.

In the Soviet states, the jazz and rock’n’roll the records often contained, was usually associated with youth culture and the birth of the teenager, just as it was in the West (see the ‘Rock Around the Bloc’ post below). Apart from their love for the energy and excitement of this new music, the Eastern Bloc cold war kids were highly influenced by glimpses they got of the look and attitude of their Western peers in smuggled magazines - particularly of the British Teds and the American Rock and Rollers.

The Teds also ran into problems with the authorities and the media of the day, though not of course with the same level of risk. I recently recorded an interview with the author Max Decharne on this subject for my Bureau of Lost Culture show.

You can listen here:

London Teddy Boys - Image © Chris Steele-Perkins | Magnum photos. Click image for more

Rock around the Bloc

The very first bone record I found (in a St Petersburg flea market) contained the Bill Haley & His Comets’ 1954 hit Rock Around the Clock - often credited as the song that ignited the rock and roll revolution. While it wasn’t the first rock song, it was the one that broke through to mainstream audiences, changing youth culture forever. Its energetic rhythm, rebellious undertones, and association with teenage identity resonated deeply with young people in the West. But its impact extended far beyond the United States and Europe reaching youth in the Eastern Bloc, where rock and roll became both a symbol of resistance and a forbidden fruit.

Ther is a terrific moment in Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film Cold War (a personal favourite) that evokes this perfectlly. The scene is a Paris nighclub in the 50s rather than the Soviet Union, but Zula, one of the two lovers who have escaped from the Eastern Bloc, suddenly wakes up to the raw power of the tune -

The song exploded onto the global scene when it was featured in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle, a gritty drama about juvenile delinquency in American high schools. The film’s opening credits, accompanied by the song’s pounding beat, electrified audiences and signaled a shift in youth culture. Teenagers embraced rock and roll as their own, in stark contrast to the swing and crooner music favored by their parents. The song’s success helped establish rock and roll as a defining cultural force, setting the stage for artists like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard.

In the West, the song symbolized fun, rebellion, and a break from the stuffy social norms of the post war ‘50s. Young people began adopting new fashions, hairstyles, and attitudes that distanced them from the older generation. Dance halls, jukeboxes, and record stores became spaces where kids could gather, forging a new cultural identity around music.

In the Eastern Bloc, where communist regimes sought to control cultural expression, Rock Around the Clock had a different but equally powerful impact. While the song and the broader rock and roll movement were officially condemned as symbols of Western decadence and capitalist corruption, they still found their way to young listeners.

Through smuggled records, clandestine radio broadcasts from Radio Free Europe, and bootleg copies recorded on X-ray, Rock Around the Clock became an underground anthem of defiance. The song’s energy and rebellious spirit gave Eastern Bloc youth a taste of freedom, even if only for a few minutes at a time.

“Put your glad rags on and join me, hon

We’ll have some fun when the clock strikes one

We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight

We’re gonna rock, rock, rock ‘til the braad dayight…”

The lyrics might not sound perticularly revolutionary, but the injunction to ‘F*ck everything else, let’s party all night’ were deeply countercultural in countries where young people were supposed to be concentrating on serious striving for a common goal- and to be up early in the morning to achieve it.

Governments saw rock and roll as a threat, fearing that it could undermine socialist values and encourage Western-style individualism. Authorities banned rock concerts, arrested musicians, and restricted the import of Western records. Yet, despite these efforts, the music continued to spread. Secret dance parties, illegal listening sessions, and self-taught rock bands emerged, creating a subculture that challenged state control.

I have written elsewhere about the Russian Stilyagi youth subculture who clendestinely enjoyed jazz’n’rock and roll on Bone records, but there were similar groups through the eastern bloc - in Hungary, the Jampecek took Western influence to the dance floor with dancing competitions and underground concerts; the Polish Bikiniarze were the most flamboyant dressers of all; in Czechoslovakia, the Potápky developed coded phrases to identify fellow members while avoiding police attention; Romania’s Malagambişti had the closest ties to working-class youth, rather than middle-class intellectuals. Operating under the most repressive regimes in the Eastern Bloc, they had to be extremely cautious, as any perceived association with Western culture could bring severe punishment.

Though each of these groups had its own style and emphasis—whether it was music, dance, or fashion—they were all connected by a shared desire for individuality and self-expression in a world that demanded conformity. Their Western counterparts, the Teds and Rock’n’Rollers, might have been more focused on rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but for the youth of the Eastern Bloc, every dance step, every pomaded hairstyle, and every Bone record was an act of quiet resistance.

And Rock Around the Clock, probably more than any other anthem, provide them with a soundtrack.

Rock Around the Clock on x-ray - the Bone Record that started it all off for me.

Dancing Around The Censor

Ingenious Soviets always found ways of circumventing the control of their cultural warders - either directly via illegal means such such making and playing x-ray bootlegs or indirectly by ‘hiding in plain sight’. The banned film maker Mikhail Khalik told me that he would place very obvious controversial elements in the screenplays he submitted to the film censor knowing they would draw attention and be rejected, allowing more subtle things to sneak though unnoticed. Even mainstream movies such as The Irony of Fate took subtle ironical pokes as the oppressive uniformity of the the Brezhnev era - the plot revolves around the drunk protagonist mistaking Leningrad for Moscow because each city has an identical apartment in an identical block with exactly the same street address, number and door key. The audiences got these references though the censor might not. Even Shostakovich was able to insert jazz and cabaret music into his scores on the basis of parodying what ‘the bad guys’ were listening to in underground speakeasies.

Stilyagi dancing in Krokodil magazine

Censorship didn’t just apply to movies, music and literature. Dancing always drew the attention of the authorities - especially if it was wild and western. Dancing at official youth events was supervised and patrolled by Komsomol members to stop infringements. Various propaganda news reels and satirical magazines like Krokodil regularly lampooned the Stilyagi and other kids who wanted to spend their nights boogieing to swing and rock’n’roll. Even Khruschev, who was credited with ushering in an era of relative liberality, was withering about The Twist:

”What is this dance called? The Whistle? the Whist? The Twist? Well, what is it? They say they dance to a frenzy, you know. Then they fall down. And this is a dance? Why should we give up our folk dances? I’m not just talking about Russian and Ukrainian dances; take Uzbek, Kazakh, any peoples’ dance - it is smooth and beautiful. And this, this is indecent! Such gestures with certain parts of the body. It is offensive to society… think, comrades, let’s stand up for the old days. Yes, for the old days and not to succumb to this decadence..”

But disapproval by the old men of the revolution didn’t work. Nureyev claimed he danced to jazz on bone records and the stilyagi kids met to twist and and to jive to rock’n’roll on x-rays in private - there were even some establishment figures who managed to get away with jazzy dance moves in public - again on the pretence of parody.

In the early 60s, the choreographer Igor Moiseev took his celebrated folk dance ensemble on an international tour - part of the culture exchange of the Khruschev years. To show off their versatility - and in the spirit of detente - they prepared a dance specific to the music of each country they visited - and what could be more American in America but rock’n’roll? After returning from the tour, they performed the very same rock’n’roll routine at the end of their program in the Tchaikovsky Hall. It was now called "Back to the Monkey” (a title with pretty obvious racist overtones) and described as a parody to illustrate the complete cultural decay of the West.

Needless to say Audiences loved it.

Lev Golovanov and the Moiseev Ensemble on the stage of the Concert Hall. Tchaikovsky. Courtesy Nikita Golovanov

A recent conversation prompted me to reflect on how significant the authorities fear of uncontrolled dancing really was. One aspect of the prohibition of the emigre singers was the flamboyant Russian or ‘Gypsy’ tango they performed and I wrote HERE about Gorky’s inflamed condemnation of Jazz as the music of the degenerate - much of which appear to be based upon its ability to make ‘fleshy hips sway’

Then there was the ‘affair of the foxtrot’, a purge which swept a whole group of young people into prison on the basis of their affection for what seems to us a very old-fashioned, harmless dance form. But the significant thing about the foxtrot is that it has a couple dancing ‘cheek to cheek’ - in this intimate private space, the state is excluded, ideology is absent - it is a kind of proto ‘sex crime’ in Orwellian terms.

In the ultimate totalitarian mindset, it is not just the mind and the emotions which must be policed but the autonomy of the individual body. It is not that the minutely choreographed official displays of co-ordinated collective folk dancing and gymnastics didn’t have a power and a beauty of their own - they did - but wild dancing, the joyful outward physical expression of inner individuality was a threat, just as the spontaneous improvisation of jazz soloists was.

How To Make a Bone Record (In 1950s America)

I was delighted to come across this little guide in a US magazine called Popular Mechanics. Publications with variations on this name proliferated across the world from the 1930s onwards, reflecting a huge growing fascination with radio, telecommunications and science amongst so-called amateurs (often extremely ingenious, skilled and technically innovative enthusiasts).

Unlike many of the super nerdy instructions for DIY science accompanied by complex technical diagrams, this guide is cool - you can do it in your living room, with your boyfriend girlfriend, whilst looking stylish.

A comparison would be the instructions from Radiofront - the very popular Soviet magazine, which also occasionally had useful intstructions on how to turn a balalaika into an electic guitar and how to build your own theremin (alongside some pretty heavy duty technical projects)

The first guide on the process of making a record on an x-ray I have come across is in a wonderful little book self-published by the Hungarian audio enginner and innovator Istvhan Makai in the late 1930s.

I have speculated that Makai may have been the ‘inventor’, (or at least the discoverer) of the technique - he certainly experimented with a lot of different materials when the commercially produced Decelith discs he had previously used became difficult to obtain - but it may be that, like many innovations, the idea arose simultaneously in several places when the time was right.

A few years back, when we held an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in Tel Aviv (in happier times), we produced our own guide

Slava's Story

Dushenko Nikolay Ivanovich

I have recently been in dialogue with Slava (Dushenko Vyacheslav Nikolaevich), a Ukrainian whose father built himself a recording lathe to cut x-ray records in the 1960s. Below is Slava’s story together with a film he made of his father’s beautiful machine in action - an absolute perfect tutorial of how to cut bone music.

“I live in the village of Shcherbinovka near Toretsk (the old name is Dzerzhinsk) in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. My father, Dushenko Nikolay Ivanovich, was born in 1938 and lived here all his life and worked as a precision machinist in a factory. He had a hobby of radio electronics and engineering and in 1961 when he was 23, he made an apparatus for making records on x-rays (a recording lathe).

It has two motors, an arm with a thread and a recording head with a cutting needle, I still have some needles -they looks like they have diamond heads (possibly sapphire) and there are home-made ones made of metal. The turntable rotates at 78rpm. The case is homemade, made by my grandfather, who was a carpenter.

My father made many records on x-ray with this hand made machine. Maybe some residents of the village still have records that he wrote. The machine is in excellent condition and has always been kept in our house.  We treat such things with extreme care. 

This is memory

At first father recorded music from the radio but then he began to seek out music that was forbidden and  played on the radio at night by the so called 'radio hooligans’ - people who made home-made radio transmitters, and were broadcasting illegally on the short wave (See below).

I have been fond of radio electronics since childhood and was always interested in such things so my father showed me how it was done, and told me how it used to be in the old days when a lot of music was banned and they could put you in jail for recording. You had to record in secret.

He didn’t do it for money, but for pleasure. Before he and my mother were married, he would make records for her and for friends. Schoolchildren would come before the holidays to order make greetings for their teachers on a record. First he would wash the surface of the x-ray film with acid to remove the image of bones then glue a picture or a photo that the children brought him under the film and punch a hole in the centre (for the spindle. People like my father, recorded either straight to x-ray film or first on a tape recorder, and then copy it onto x-ray (Note: this is how the ’sound letters' were made).

In those days, there was a shortage of tape on a tape recorder, so he made a lot of records for people in a department store, and they gave him reels of tape.

I started working with him at the age of 8 and we made several records together. He liked the songs of Leonid Utyosov like Mishka or The Black Cat, and some foreign songs. I don’t remember which forbidden songs we recorded but I was born in 1970 so I was interested to record new music. We recorded with a tape recorder, and then I made it into a record with his machine.”

The song Slava copied is ‘The Old Drivers Song’ by Leonid Utyesov (Песня старого извозчика - Леонид Утесов). He played it back on a Soviet blue Jubilee portable record player - a very popular model in the 1960s.

Slava went onto to tell me more about the ‘Radio Hooligans’ - we have written about these intrepid souls before:

“The so called ’radio hooligans’ were young people who broadcast on the radio without permission. I would tune into such broadcasts, I remember listening to the music they played and hear them talking -  they joked about what kind of music they would play - and they paid for it .. some were put in jail. 

Most of these hooligans are no longer alive, though one, Vasily, a friend of my father,  also lives in in our village. He is now a legitimate radio amateur but very old, and probably doesn’t go on the air now there is a war.

He had a very funny story about broadcasting songs on the air:
Patrols had been created to catch such ‘radio hooligans’ - they drove through the streets of the village in special cars equipped with a receiverand to track the house from where the transmission was being made. Vasily, who had the call sign “Solokha”, was broadcasting songs, and saw through the window that the patrol was entering his yard. He quickly disconnected the transmitter from his radio and ..... he threw it into a pot of borscht, which his wife was cooking on the stove. The patrol came in, searched the entire house, but no one  thought to look into the pot on the hot stove..”

Thank you so much Slava - it is absolutely wonderful to hear your story

Check out the gallery below for images of the recording lathe.

Nazi Era Flexi Discs

A few months ago I was contacted by American record collector in connection with a strange set of discs he had come by. He has since very generously allowed us to take them into our archive. Although they are not x-ray records, they are of the same family and are interesting for several reasons.

Firstly they are made of Decelith - this was a proprietary pvc based material produced by a German Company ECW that was used to make commercial flexible blanks for recording on before the war (the company still exists). The recording would have been done by using a recording lathe (see THIS POST for more details on how); they are examples of what we call ‘self-made discs’, recorded one by one in real time. They would have been recorded on Neuman or Telefunken lathes - the very machines that were brought back to the USSR after the war and were copied by Soviet bootleggers.

The lathe recording technique was used from the 1930s onwards in various ways: in recording studios to make test records and one-off recordings; in radio studios to make archive transcriptions of programs; in coin-operated booths to make souvenir recordings for the public; by journalists to make reports in the field; by amateurs to make home recordings - and of course by Soviet bootleggers to make x-ray discs.

The bootleggers and sound engineers in places like Hungary turned to x-ray as a recording medium because they could not obtain the Decelith blanks used by professionals.

The content of the discs Gregory found is also interesting. They were manufactured in the Third Reich during the early 1940s by the SONDERDIENST SEEHAUS, a communications hub used by the Germans during the war to monitor foreigh broadcasts. They are mainly recordings of American AM radio broadcasts of speeches by leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt but there are also some German broadcasts with speeches by Goebbels for instance. The discs are 10 inches in diameter, some are single, some are double sided and they play at 78rpm. All in good condition.

The story of how the collector came by the records is curious too. For three years around 2010, he managed all of the donations coming into a Brooklyn Goodwill thrift store where he got first chance at buying the books and records that came in.:

“One night, a couple came by with a van full of boxes. The husband's father had died and he was a true hoarder. He collected everything: toys, books, records, papers, magazines, and junk, Lots and lots of junk. So the couple were tasked with emptying the house. The first time, they dropped off maybe 35 boxes. I remember taking all the boxes in and starting the process of opening and investigating. Somewhere in the middle of my work, I find the first 10" German disc buried in a box. Just one. I was fascinated. I had no idea what it was but I knew it was something special. By the end of the night, I found two more. 

The couple came back two nights later with another 40 boxes. I asked them if there was any rhyme or reason to how they packed the boxes and they said no. they were literally just putting anything in and sealing it when it was full. That night, I found another 4 discs. Over the course of the next 2 weeks, I believe I acquired them all. (around 25) I would even come in on my nights off just in case the couple came back with more boxes. I never asked them about the discs because they both had such disdain for the father's hoarding that they treated it all as garbage and unwanted.”

As I found my first x-ray recording in a flea market (in St Petersburg) you can imagine that i enjoyed this story very much.

Thanks so much for this contribution

Roosevelt speech on Decelith

Digging up the Bones of Cultural Censorship

Cultural censorship is very much back on the menu in Russia and has intensified since the invasion of Ukraine.

What, if anything, has the history of Bone Music to say about it?

Back in the bad old days, songs and whole genres were forbidden for ideological reasons - because they were from the west, because the people who sang them were regarded as traitors, because of their lyrical content, or just because of their rhythms and style. Control of recorded and broadcast music was almost absolute.

In the bad new days, there doesn't appear to have been much attempt by President Putin to repeat the methods of his Soviet predecessors, although it is unlikely that any songs with critical content will be broadcast on official state media. Back in 2015. during my interview with a well-known Russian broadcaster and Putin critic, the phone rang. It was the boss of his radio station stating that they would no longer be playing any pro-Ukrainian bands. My interviewee was sacked from his radio show and University teaching post shortly afterwards and now lives in virtual exile in Lithuania.

Distributing forbidden tunes on x-ray was difficult, dangerous and time consuming, but sharing music online is easy, impossible to police and instantaneous. Though it is monitored, there has been no attempt yet to implement complete control over internet access - possibly because of the risk of inflaming the largely passive Russian youth who have grown up with it as their birthright.

Or perhaps Putin enjoys such popularity, that he does not believe he will have a problem with the country’s youth. In 2009, he handed out awards in the rap contest “Battle for Respect” saying that, even if rap, graffiti and break dancing, were not actually Russian, they should be appreciated regardless of their country of origin - if of course they were of "constructive content.” That last caveat may have been a harbinger of things to come - increasingly Russian hip-hop and rap concerts have been cancelled for being ‘immoral’.

But even rappers who have been pro government have been changing sides, and some who were previously apolitical, have started to voice protest. In the track ’12', by the hugely popular Morgenshtern, the voice of a Ukrainian woman (the mother of the rapper’s producer friend Palagin who had suffered Russian strikes in Odessa), is heard: ‘My dear son, here, right here, in the morning the roof was almost blown away / Right now we are sitting in the cellar, we have prepared a bomb shelter.”

“The big bosses will send you to the slaughterhouse,” Morgenshtern raps elsewhere in the song.

The track is not played on state controlled Russian radio, but millions have listened on YouTube.

Embed Block

Add an embed URL or code. Learn more

FACE, another rapper and a vocal critic of the Russian invasion, told Rolling Stone:“If democracy can win in Ukraine, then our people can fight for our own freedom, that’s one of the reasons right now that Russia invades Ukraine”

Both artists now live outside Russia and face designation as 'foreign agents’ along with many others - and it’s not just the young. Veteran Russian pop star Alla Pugacheva, 73, who has sold more than 250 million records, took a stand after her husband denounced the conflict:

“I am asking you to include me on the foreign agents list of my beloved country.

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and chief conductor Kirill Petrenko has issued statements condemning the invasion; opera star Anna Netrebko, who has past ties with Putin, has withdrawn from all engagements, stating: ’This is not a time for me to make music and perform.

Rock star Yury Shevchuk, the frontman of 1980s band DDT, already known for his verbal confrontations with the governing power, opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for anti-Kremlin activist collective Pussy Riot, was recently arrested after he criticized the Russian President at a concert:

“The motherland, my friends, is not the president’s ass that has to be slobbered and kissed all the time, the motherland is an impoverished babushka at the train station selling potatoes.”

He now stands charged with “discrediting” the Russian military. Russian authorities have launched more than 2,000 such cases. Over a hundred others face up to 15 years in prison under tougher criminal legislation that bans the spread of “fake news” about the military.

Many Russian musicians who have denounced the conflict had their shows cancelled or left the country and there is a wider collection of Russian artists and culture workers who are taking a stance. An open letter signed by over 17,000 states:
’We, artists, curators, architects, critics, art critics, art managers - representatives of the culture and art of the Russian Federation - express our absolute solidarity with the people of Ukraine and say resolutely “NO TO WAR!”. We demand an immediate stop to all hostilities, the withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine and the holding of peace talks.’

Many have been sacked or been unable to work. Kiril Serebrennikov one of Russia's leading theatre and cinema directors who is known for his liberal and LGBT-friendly stance had his ballet ‘Nureyev’ cancelled by The Bolshoi after he criticized the invasion

Even public use of the word ‘war’ comes with risk of detention.

Alas, the cultural effects are not just in Russia. It's possible to unequivocally condemn the invasion whilst acknowledging its origins are complex and the west has played more of a part in its causes than our mainstream media allows. It has also been very disappointing to witness ludicrous black and white thinking applied to ’Russians’ (millions of whom don’t support Putin and / or live abroad), and to Russian culture here in the UK. I was personally challenged about the appropriateness of promoting a show by Russian theremin player Lydia Kavina (a British resident of over 25 years). A friend who is living in semi-exile in Turkey and resolutely anti-war was ‘disinvited’ from a festival he had been booked for in Bournemouth because he was Russian. I even heard recently that a well-known hipster store in London has taken books with Russian content (such as Fuel’s ‘Russian Criminal Tattoos’ and ’Soviet Bus stops’) off its shelves.

My friend Alex Kan, the BBC’s Russian arts correspondent is devastated. Born in Soviet Ukraine, like many others, he relocated to Russia and has moved back and forth between the two countries and the UK since. He has family and friends in both and considers their cultures and languages completely intertwined - for him, this conflict is more like a civil war. He has spent his entire life promoting cultural connections between Russia and the west and now feels it is all in ruins. I have spent a lot of time in Russia, I have many Russian friends. The scale of what they are experimenting does not match what the people of Ukraine have faced but many have felt they have to leave, and those that can’t are living in fear and despair.

So, to go back to the start, what, if anything, has the history of Bone Music to say about what has happened?

The x-ray underground of the 40s, 50s and 60s was one of the few ways to express protest (even though that protest was usually non verbal). Whilst it would be way too dramatic to claim it had a pivotal role in the changes that were to come, it was certainly one of the Samizdat roots that eventually flowered into mass cultural disobedience, and it remains symbolic of the way that music can help bring about transformation.

That transformation took place over decades, but perhaps In our speeded-up world, it can happen much more quickly, especially if those to whom it matters the most - the young - believe that it can.

Culture is one of the most important things that connects us all - beyond, ideology, nationalism, politics and beyond conflict.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

I have just made an interview with the author John Higgs for my BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE radio show. John’s book ‘Stranger Than We Can Imagine - Making Sense of the 20th Century’ is a terrific read - it really provides a narrative to understand a radically changing world and the birth of the youth culture. We mainly talked about the emergence of the teenager in the post war years. John places ‘teenage year zero’ to the 1953 issue of ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard.

Tutti Frutti, along with Rock Around The Clock, ignited teenagers on both side of the iron curtain and one of the things that has been interesting in researching our new book Bone Music is seeing how the ‘youth quake’ of the US and the UK spread through the Eastern bloc powered by swing and rock’n’roll. It is also fascinating to realise that the X-Ray underground, which serviced those styles to young Soviets, was itself a teenage phenomena - particularly at the beginning.

Boris Taigin and Russian Bogaslovsky, started cutting Bone Music as the Leningrad bootleg outfit The Golden Dog Gang when they were only 18. Mikhail Farafanov, another of our interviewees, when he was just 17. Most of their customers were teenagers too. Kolya Vasin was barely 14 when he first came across Little Richard on an x-ray record. It blew him away. His friend came to his house after school and showed him a disc saying:

‘Look Kolya! This is American rock’n’roll!’

He took the record in his hands, looked at it through the light and saw the image of bones. Immediately, he was fascinated and, when he put the record on the gramophone and it started spinning, he heard wild singing. He was delighted by the ecstatic screaming voice, and fell back, stupefied.

‘Who is this!?’

His friend said it was Little Richard and the song was ‘Tutti Frutti’. Kolya immediately became a convert at the church of rock’n’roll.

I have written several times about the Stilyagi, the only real Soviet youth culture group according to Artemy Troitsky. These were kids who listened to rock’n’roll, jived, drank, tried to dress how they imagined American kids did, spoke in pseudo American slang and generally wanted to have fun. I discovered there were similar groups in most of the Eastern bloc countries: Hungary had the Jampecek, in Poland there were the Bikiniarze, in Czechoslovakia the Potapka and in Romania the Malagambisti. All dressed in an ersatz rock’n’roll style and aped US mannerisms.

Like their western counterparts, and the earlier French ‘Zazous’ and German ‘Swingjuden’ (swing kids), they all used music and clothes to distinguish themselves from the older generation and from their more conventional peers who reacted with shock and confusion. The media and the authorities were enraged - just at they were in the West at the British Teddy boys and the US rock’n’rollers.

The similarities across these various groups were remarkable. A pamphlet publicised by the British Anarchist Federation described how a fascist magazine in wartime France wrote of the the male Zazou

”Here is the specimen of Ul-tra Swing 1941: hair hanging down to the neck, teased up into an untidy quiff, little moustache a la Clark Gable,..... shoes with too thick soles, syncopated walk”.

Female Zazous wore their hair in curls down to their shoulders or in plats. Blonde was the preferred colour worn with bright red lipstick, and sun- glasses, jackets with extremely wide shoulders and short skirts. Stockings were striped or fishnet, worn over shoes with thick soles (see images)

It is virtually an exact description of the eastern bloc cold war kids - who were just a little later to the party. The fascist youth movement the Jeunnesse Populaire Française patrolled the streets with scissors, attacked zazous and forcibly cut their hair - just as the Soviet youth patrols Komsomols did to the Stilyagi, Even the satirical cartoons published by a disparaging media were a dead ringer. Yet all these groups were small in number - often just a few in any town.

But teenage styles change - and fast. The stilyagi fell behind the times, partly because fashions had moved on in the west and partly because they were growing up. New generations of teenagers caught the bug of clothes, dancing and cool music and in the more open climate of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ were forming their own youth culture, dismissive of the previous generations’ style - just as they always have been.

A fascist paramilitary forcibly cuts a Zazous’ hair.

"The Invisible Battle of the Cold War Airwaves’

I recently made a contribution about the x-ray audio project and the role that shortwave radio played in the story of the X-ray discs for a program for KMTS radio (Listen HERE) - a channel that is dedicated to short wave broadcasting (thanks to Pete Polanyk).

Up to 25 years ago, shortwave radio was a major source international news and media. The BBC World Service, Radio Moscow —the mouthpiece of Soviet propaganda, Voice of America —the mouthpiece of US propaganda, Radio Netherlands, Radio Berlin International, Radio Havana, Kol Yisrael, All India Radio and many more all broadcast their messages over vast distances via shortwave. The BBC estimated global listenership to be more than 120 million people weekly.

The advent of the internet brought a decline - many broadcasters decreased or stopped their shortwave transmissions altogether - the BBC World Service no longer transmits via shortwave to America and most of Europe - but there is still a lively community of shortwave enthusiasts, listening (SWling) clubs and technical hobbyists.

During the cold war, adapted and hacked shortwave radios were one of the main ways that Soviet youth could access Western jazz and rock’n’ roll’ in the 50s and 60s - and were an important source of tunes for bootleggers to cut bone discs.

"The Invisible Battle of the Cold War Airwaves’ an episode of my Bureau of Lost Culture show, explored three stories of cold war era radio in the USSR.

I met with Russian broadcaster Vladimir Raevsky to talk about radio jamming. As the East and West super powers squared up to each with nuclear weapons, a parallel invisible war was being fought on the airwaves. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on broadcasting propaganda and music into the USSR - and by the Soviet authorities.on attempting to block them from being heard by using electronic signals to interfere with the transmission.

We also hear about the strange story of the ‘Russian Woodpecker’, a dystopian broadcasting station near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor which allegedly attempted to 'brainwash the West' using radar. (In fact, it was more likely part of the Soviet early warning anti-nuclear defence system)

And BBC Russian Arts correspondant Alex Kan, sat with me in a London cafe to tell of the brave young ‘Radio hooligans' who broadcast their own individual pirate radio shows during his youth in the USSR.

You can listen below - or subscribe to all the Bureau’s transmissions HERE

Bureau of Lost Culture

The Lost World of The Self-Made Record

For several years i have been researching the wonderfully odd, lost culture of the coin-operated and domestic machines that allowed ordinary people to make a record of their voice long before the advent of tape or digital recording (Jack White has been using one, The Voice O Graph, recently to produce unique lo- fi caught-in-the-moment records, including an album with Neil Young).

These machines are broadly the same devices - recording lathes - the Soviet Bootleggers based their own home-made versions on and there were similar machines for public use in the USSR - although not in coin-operated booths.

One of the most poignant uses of the way of recording were the ‘Voices of the Forces’ records made by soldiers stationed abroad to send messages back home during the second world war - you can watch the short British Pathe film on those here.

In a recent Bureau of Lost Culture show on Soho Radio, we were joined by oral historian and broadcaster Alan Dein to hear a selection of recordings of strange, moving ghostly voices from his collection and learn how the public were able use these records to commemorate visits to tourist destinations or to capture the sounds of loved ones - or their own voices - in a way that had never been possible before.

You can listen below and to all the Bureau of Lost Culture shows HERE or at the major podcasts providers HERE

These records sit right at the junction of oral history and audio recording history. The audio contain is unique, on the verge of being lost and I am currently hoping to combine my research into them with new musical works.

An early test example is here:

Voices of the Forces: British Pathe 1945

Soviet Lathe Operator late 1930s

The Virus of X-Ray Bootlegging

Whatever side of the Covid lockdown and vaccination arguments you are on, it has been difficult not to chafe somewhat, not to feel an irrational slight sense of resentment at the restrictions that have been imposed for the collective good.. Over the last two years, at least here in the UK and in the US, there has been much novel debate about personal freedom versus public good, individual rights versus government control. yet in repressive cultures, these kind of contradictions and feelings were- or are - common and much more brutal.

The Soviet ideologues who sought to control the music that people could listen to, claimed they did so for the sake of those people - for the benefit of society at large. Perhaps they even believed that claim. For them, the Stilyagi who dressed in flashy western styles, or young people who professed a love for rock'n’ roll, wild dancing and individual expression, were hooligans, antisocial layabouts, an embarrassment to their industrious conventional peers, at best misguided, at worst ungrateful and disloyal to their mother country.

Stilyagi satirical cartoon

It's worth remembering that in the 50s and 60s, wild behaviour, individualism and youth culture came under attack in the west too . Elvis and The Beatles were banned briefly in a few places, rock'n' roll records were kept from some broadcast playlists and newspapers ran hysterical, outraged articles about the excesses of young tearaways.

Those who made or sold foreign goods, clothes and music on x-ray in the Soviet Union came in for much stronger criticism. They were spongers, wreckers, parasites, vultures feeding off the innocent - a hidden virus infecting and imperilling society. They should be shamed, forcibly re-educated, prosecuted, stamped out.

They were regularly lambasted in the Soviet press, in publications like Pravda, Smena or Krokodil (where it has to be said the satirical cartoons were often rather stylish). Newsreels shown before the main feature in cinemas, poked fun at those who danced and dressed in western styles and excoriated the bootleggers and black marketeers.

Young men arrested for selling bootlegs n Shadows on the Pavement

In ‘Shadows on the pavement’, a film from 1957, bone bootleggers are portrayed as a hidden danger threatening to infect society. A concerned narrator intones over footage of young guys and a girl arrested and interrogated for selling bone music:

“These young men, who have swapped school for the back door of the GUM department store, are selling goods they made themselves - foxtrots on x-rays, the images on which symbolise the damaged anatomy of their spiritual misery ..

This is what we say to those who live their life in the backstreets and in the dark hallways. Whoever they are, these shadowy foreign clothes sellers or worshippers of rock and roll, these fully-grown slackers who don’t want to work – we put the mark of shame on them… We know how to condemn and pass judgments. We don't want dirty shadows to stain our pavements" 

Arrested Bootleggers Leningrad 1957 - thanks to Andrey Lukanin

It's heavy handed, strong stuff and feeds into our idea of the x-ray bootleg culture as being one of freedom fighters battling against a brutal repressive system. There is of course truth in that but it is only part of story. As the appetite for foreign music increased and as awareness there was money to be made spread. more and more unscrupulous characters, low-level criminal types and chancers got involved in the trade. Often they did not care about the quality of the records they sold, or even about their content, and the authorities condemnation was perhaps a little more understandable.

The entrepreneurial trajectory of western bootleggers followed a similar path. The first big vinyl bootlegs produced in the late 60s, such as Dylan's ‘Great White Wonder' were made by music fans who only came to realise their commercial potential later. The realisation of that potential prompted more organised, larger scale and less musically motivated operators to get involved.

Their activities attracted outrage - mainly from the big record labels - but unlike in the USSR, there was little chance that outrage would be followed by public shaming, sabotaged careers or imprisonment. While the Soviet authorities could at least claim their censorship was for the collective moral and cultural good, the big western labels' prosecution of bootleggers was obviously entirely commercial in intent - even when they pretended to be concerned about audio quality of bootlegs or the infringement of the artistic rights of musicians.

But in the the end, in the east or in the west, outrage, condemnation, legal action and even persecution made little difference, because when it comes to music, (if not to viruses), ideology, political and commercial interests rarely seem to get in the way of what ordinary people really care about.

I will leave you with a cheerful image as we leave 2021 and head into 2022 :)

Two Virgins John Lennon and Yoko Ono 1968

Get Back Sessions Beatles bootleg 1974

Ruslan Bogaslovsky's Criminal Record

Ruslan Bogaslovsky was one of the founders of The Golden Dog Gang, probably the best known of the Leningrad x-ray bootleggers. I detail some of his extraordinary story our upcoming BONE MUSIC book. Rudy Fuchs described him as the ‘hero of Soviet underground record production’, whilst his partner in crime Boris Taigin said:

‘Today, when we can have as much music as we like, we should still remember and bow low to the man who laid the first stone in the foundation of our musical freedom”

Bogoslovsky was technically ingenious, producing high quality bone discs, and even shellac based bootlegs, but was not good at avoiding the authorities, He served three prison sentences for bootlegging related activities in the fifties and early sixties.

I met his son Sergey Bogaslovsky in St Petersburg a couple of years back. It seems that even after the end of the x-ray era and after his various spells in prison, Ruslan led an extraordinary independent, anti-establishment life on the fringes of legality.

He died in 2003 at his family house on the shore of Lake Hepo-järvi. We have various drawings of the recording lathes he made and a homemade master disc for pressing records but sadly, a fire at the house in the 1990s destroyed most of his collection of records and equipment.

In our BONE MUSIC exhibition we have an installation: ‘The Bootlegger’s Room’ - the creation of an imagined scene where the bootlegger (Bogaslovky) has just been arrested.

For our Bone Music Berlin catalogue, the artist Silvia Righetti made a truly wonderful cartoon representation of this moment.

You can check out more of Silvia’s work HERE

Bone Music Berlin

Our exhibition in Berlin (in the old Stasi secret police district) finished this week.

It was amazing - particularly the live events with musicians who werepersecuted and imprisoned during the GDR era. More soon on that but I wanted to post this final image by Paul.

And a selection of others from the show

Forbidden! A Countercultural History of Censorship

Bone Music, amongst many other things, is a a story about censorship. The forbidding of people listening to the music they want to. As such it exists in a history of cultural repression for cultural, economic, class, aesthetic, ideological and religious reasons that is as old as language itself.

Songs, singers, rhythms, genres.music all instruments and dancing were all forbidden to different degrees at different times - along of course with books, films, poetry, paintings, theatre and artists of all types - for often burr reasons. Did any of it really work?

I recently had the pleasure to interview human rights lawyer ERIC BERKOWITZ about his epic new book 'Dangerous Ideas: A History of Censorship from Ancient Times to Fake News.

You can listen here:

The book is a thrilling read, full of sometimes comical, often alarming and always thought-provoking human stories - from that of the ancient Chinese emperor who destroyed any works implying there had ever been a better era than his own, to the current Chinese leader's attempts to have Winnie the Pooh banned (after his and the bear's resemblance was pointed out). The UK and the US don’t fare too well either.

We discuss the situation around the x-ray culture, the fear of dances that might around the passions of young people and the hypocrisy of the Soviet elite when it came to songs.

Why have books, films, images words and ideas always been censored by those in power? Are there times when they should be? Does censorship ever work?

Eric digs deep into the touchiness of tyrants, into our current issues around blame, shame and cancel culture and why he thinks that almost nothing should be censored. We explore why countercultural ideas are so necessary for the culture and why they are only really dangerous when denied expression.

For more on Eric and the book www.ericberkowitz.com

For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture www.bureauoflostculture.com

How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin

Cold War Spy meets The Fab Four in the USSR

The Beatles were one of the first (and few) British rock’n’Roll bands to appear on Bone records. Though I like their music, I am not a huge fan, so I’m fascinated by the gigantic global impact they had - on both the culture and the counterculture and on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It really is quite mysterious.

I recently interviewed the award winning filmmaker LESLIE WOODHEAD on the subject - specifically on the transformational effect the Fab Four had on young Russians in the 60s and 70s. I know from my own interviews with many of those who grew up on the 50s, 60s and even 70s how important they were. Actually, ‘Important’ doesn’t really cover it - some have claimed their effect to be more significant than all the cold war western cultural propaganda combined in helping to bring about perestroika

When Leslie was asked by Granada TV to film a new young music group in a club in Liverpool in 1962, he had no idea what he was in for - and neither had the rest of the world. He was witnessing the birth of a phenomenon. But by then he had already had some extraordinary experiences - serving a stint as a cold war spy, learning Russian on a remote Scottish pig farm and spending time eavesdropping on Soviet pilots from West Berlin.

These experiences continued to influence his life as a film maker, finally coalescing with his fascination with the Fab Four in the investigations that resulted in his terrific documentary ‘How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin’.

You can listen to our interview below.

To hear more oral testimony and tales from the underground Click HERE or on the image for the BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE podcast