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.

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 :)

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