BACK IN THE USSR

(…This entry was first jotted down ten years ago this day, right after Paul McCartney’s May 24, 2003, concert in Moscow’s Red Square, billed as the Back in the USSR tour. The singer was enthusiastically received by the Russian public, and personally by President Putin, who, in turn, gave him a private tour of the Kremlin, and fêted him in grand style. Publishing it today is a tribute to the tenth anniversary of that momentous event. But, of course, this entry is far larger than the specific event, except that the particular serves well, in this case as a symbol of the general.)

The fact that Russia may not want the old USSR back, at least not in its outmoded form, does not prevent the Russians from a nostalgic yearning for the return of the Soviet Union. It has become a symbol of those better old days, when lives and jobs were secure, when everything was cheap, and what was not cheap was free of charge altogether. Yes, there were a lot of blemishes and had they been granted their sincere wish to have the USSR back, all of them would have restarted grumbling about this thing and that thing, and about how much better life had to be elsewhere.

It is so much easier to idealize a symbol than to accept an always imperfect reality. But in Russia’s case her post-Soviet reality had, indeed, been horrific, and, in the old-regime French of my Grandmother Nadezhda, “insupportable, mauvais!”

Therefore, here comes the supreme irony of the unforgettable Paul McCartney’s Back in the USSR concert on Red Square. Should I ever want to write a special entry Russia and the Beatles assessing the exorbitant extent of the British group’s influence on the Soviet cultural scene, I shall not fail to mention their godlike status even among the most profound and aesthetically elitist Russian classical music lovers, and how that incredible and inexhaustible adulation of the Beatles was brought to Red Square, got even more fired up at the sight of Paul in his red shirt, to feed and magnify to the umpth degree their nostalgia for their red flag of old, for the oh-so-badly underappreciated delights of their old life, for those good things so carelessly taken for granted before they were gone, for the enormous pride and glory of their superpower nationhood, and, generally speaking, for their sparkling past, when they were so much younger and better. And the dazzling sparkles were lavishly provided to them by their Paul, both in the stage lighting effects and in the newsreels of erstwhile Soviet propaganda on a giant screen just as powerful on that day as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens must have felt for another nation at a different time and in a different place…