New York, Jun. 2 (ANI): A former spy has revealed that John Lennon and Paul McCartney promoted a cultural revolution among the Soviet youth, which played a part in the demolition of communism in the USSR.
The Beatles were utterly forbidden behind the Iron Curtain but the band's songs were able to get through to the communist nation with the help of VOX.
Leslie Woodhead, who became a cameraman for the Granada Television station in Manchester, England after his espionage escapades, said in his new book 'How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin' that had the band's songs penetrated the USSR a few years earlier, they would have fallen on far less fertile ground.
Among the kids, in the late '50s and early '60s, it was believed that it was cool to be a Communist and this was the time when First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev named the electric guitar an enemy for the citizens of the USSR and later Leonid Brezhnev ousted rock music and other creativity's that was not state approved.
But Beatlemania hit at precisely this time and the kids traded Lenin for Lennon.
The state's officials fearing the Band, started an anti-Beatle campaign that called them bugs.
However, after Mikhail Gorbachev took power, it became possible for Woodhead to shoot documentary films within the USSR and a widely held fantasy that he heard over and over again was that the Beatles landed in the USSR to play an impromptu concert on the wing of their tour airplane on their way to Japan.
The city changed in each telling but people started believing that this undocumented performance happened.
Soon enough, though, the USSR government followed suit and somewhat inexplicably started celebrating John Lennon's legacy after his death in 1980. (ANI)
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