Svetlana Kunetsina was twenty-eight and you could just still see where the tall, gawky teenager had evolved into this butterfly. She had beautiful manners, she was a passionate feminist, itself a rebellion in a country so brutal towards its women it was enough just to survive; and she was systemically incapable of being on the take, which amounted to a kind of dysfunction in Moscow.
This made her different from everyone else. To some it made her seem haughty. Westerners loved her. Every Westerner who met Svetlana fell for her, perhaps because she was so un-Russian. Or maybe it was just her legs.
In the hotel, she removed her coat and gave it to the woman in the cloakroom. Svetlana was wearing a shocking pink Gianfranco Ferre suit with a miniskirt and the thigh-high boots. Because she was a fashion journalist, she knew how to get designer clothes in various markets, or how to have them copied; sometimes she found vintage couture clothes and remade them.
We went to the ground-floor restaurant, where most of the things on the menu were unavailable; Svetlana, who knew her way around these problems, suggested borscht and baked sturgeon. She was pleased that there was white bread available because she liked it better than the usual coarse black stuff.
"You may want, but you may not get," I had been told and I quickly learned that it was a lifetime of not getting, in a country where almost nobody got. This big, rich country that stretched across eleven time zones was reduced for most people to a tiny plan, to twenty square meters in a shoddy apartment block, to a school where everyone wore the same clothing and a job where everyone did the same chores.
"We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us," the saying went.
We ordered another bottle of red wine - young people like Art and Svetlana drank wine much more often than vodka if they could get it and they did it because they liked the wine but also as a statement. It said we are different, more sophisticated, more European. But everything different, unconventional, rebellious was always a statement in the Soviet Union, nothing more so than rock and roll.
No one understood rock in the USSR better than Troitsky; he had just published a terrific book on it called, naturally enough, Back in the USSR. From Art and from his book, I learned about pop culture and its roots in the USSR, and what made the country so ripe for Dean Reed when he arrived, when he seemed to fill a void. The longing for rock and roll and the West were a kind of mute rebellion among young people. This was Art's territory: he had invented it, and he talked about it fluently.
"In the Soviet Union, even the rednecks, I mean, you know, the peasants, were obsessed with America. Because of that, Dean Reed was no ordinary foreign musical visitor to their country. He was American. He had this image of being a rock and roll singer. He had moderately long hair, flared jeans, and all those things. So it's quite natural that the unsophisticated part of the young audience really fell for Dean Reed." Art finished his glass of wine and added, "No living Western performer of rock and roll ever came to the Soviet Union. Dean Reed was young. He played guitar. He was American. We believed."
In the 1950s, the Soviet Union's passion for America began with the movies and the records that the Red Army had captured in Berlin after the War. Johnny Weissmuller, the first and the best Tarzan, and the ice-skating star Sonja Henie captured the hearts of postwar Moscow. Among the films the army brought home was Sun Valley Serenade, a kitsch caper that featured Sonja in an ermine cap doing sit-spins on an ice-rink in the Idaho resort. But it was because the picture had a soundtrack by Glenn Miller - Miller debuted "Chattanooga Choo Choo" in it - that the stilyagi adored it.
The stilyagi - the style hunters - ruled Moscow's street corners in those days and they only cared for clothes and for dancing. In platform shoes, zoot suits, and fat ties painted with Hawaiian palms, they wore their hair in duck's asses, slicked back with loads of grease. Officials who caught them, shoved them up against the wall and cut their hair off, but the stilyagi persevered and they held cocktail hours and listened to jazz. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were heroes, but, above all, they adored Glenn Miller. "Chattanooga Choo Choo" was their anthem.
The stilyagi were Art's nostalgia heroes. For his mother, who had been at Moscow University in the 1950s, they had had no charm at all. She despised them because they had no spiritual values. They were empty, stupid, and superficial. They only wanted to dance the bugiwugi.
Interestingly, this was exactly how American folkies, usually left-wing kids, had felt about the blue-collar rockers like Elvis and at almost exactly the same time. How the old folkies had despised rock and roll!
"I've heard rumors that the KGB house-band's favorite tune these days is 'In the Mood'," said Art suddenly at the National Hotel, where we were finishing lunch.
For Art, the 1950s in the USSR and its nascent youth subculture had the charm of kitsch. The taste for kitsch went deep with Art. On that trip in February, 1988, I realised that kitsch was a rebellion. If you couldn't get anything good - and there wasn't much that was good to get - you settled for what was lousy and made it into a style. Kitsch was a put-on, a parody, a form of survival. "Up yours," it said to conventional taste and the clothes and furniture of officialdom. Moscow humor was tough, urban, and seditious. The more freedom there was in Moscow in the late 1980s, the more inclined its rock bands were to dress up in old KGB uniforms.
Pouring himself another drink, Art talked some more about the 1950s, in America, in the USSR, about the music and cars, the big pastel Harley Earl cars with acres of chrome and tail fins poised for flight.
Many Muscovites remembered those cars from the brochures they took home from the American exhibition in 1959.
At the exhibition, where Nixon and Khrushchev faced off in an American model kitchen among the Frigidaires and the Mix-o-Matics, Coca Cola was served in plastic glasses by pretty girls who smiled at you.
Lining up to sample the drink, many people said it tasted like shoe polish, then, still sneering, lined up for another glass. And the plastic glasses! And the smiling girls! Who had ever heard of or imagined such a wonderful thing? And the cars, of course. Lovely cars, in many pretty colors, with musical names. Cars that went with rock and roll music. Carrying away the brochures with the pictures of those cars, people studied them in secret, for years, as if they were art.
With these glimpses of the magical West, the taste for rock and roll grew. Paul Anka and Pat Boone were hot in Moscow, so was "Love Potion Number Nine." Electric guitars came in through Czechoslovakia and a group called the Revengers played Little Richard covers. It was all unofficial, of course. Kids strung telephone wires across a table and called it a guitar; they made themselves into bands through sheer willpower, ripping off telephones for the wires whenever they could, so that, in one period, not a single public telephone in Moscow worked.
The production of records required similar ingenuity, which was how Records on Ribs were invented. You stole X-ray plates, which were made of a thick plastic material, rounded out the edges with a pair of scissors, cut a hole in the middle, and recorded on top of them. In the underground, rock music was produced on pictures of somebody's lungs. I saw them, these incredible artifacts, and you could actually see the ribs while the needle went around and around. Young hustlers who sold them on the street secreted the records in their coat sleeves because the X-ray material was pliable and you could fold it over.