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Bob Dylan’s Cold War

Bob Dylan’s Cold War

Dylan’s influence on the domestic rock scene in the USSR is unmatched.

The new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown shows the young musician breaking away from the conventions of the socialist Folkies. Although the film, directed by James Mangold and starring Timothee Chalamet, tells the story of the emergence of classic rock in the U.S., Dylan should be credited with exerting American soft power to end the USSR more than any other cultural figure.

Along with Hollywood movies, rock-n-roll is often cited as the creative force that upended the Soviet empire. The 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia was named after the  Velvet Underground, the band beloved by the Prague counterculture. Apart from them, British bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and a myriad of metal bands were enormously popular among the Soviet youth.

But Dylan’s influence on the domestic rock scene in the USSR is unmatched.

The vocalist of the band Aquarium, Boris Grebenshchikov is considered the founder of Soviet and Russian rock, the towering figure of the genre. Aquarium was formed in 1972 by two teenage college students in Leningrad. At the time, underground Soviet bands either covered Western artists or — at most — imitated them. Grebenshchikov figured out how to write Russian lyrics and started a cultural revolution.

The songwriter says he first heard Dylan on The Voice of America broadcast, which left him wondering how people could listen to that. He later tracked down some people who owned the vinyl — behind the iron wall, one had to be cued into the right circles to access Western recordings — and eventually bought a secondhand book of his lyrics. Reading that book, he says, was a clarifying moment. He felt that The Beatles were remote like gods; the American performer was relatable, and his lyrical themes — approachable.

Dylan’s influence on Grebenshchikov is well documented. At the beginning of his musical adventure, he called himself Bob, and he more recently recorded with Dylan’s The Band. When Aquarium was formed in 1972 with Grebenshchikov as the lyricist, his goal was to develop the language for rock-n-roll in Russian, and he took Dylan as his gold standard. His songs absorbed the American’s metaphors and carry traces of his verbiage. He free translated some of the texts, reinterpreting them for Soviet and Russian life, developed some of the themes and occasionally composed songs under the same title. For instance, he adopted Dylan’s angry young man pathos and wording reminiscent of Positively 4th Street for his song about censorship and what we would call canceling The Rain Theft.

The founder of Russian rock is frequently accused of ripping off British and American musicians whose work may not be familiar to the Eastern European public, mostly due to the language barrier. He picked up themes from Bowie, Patti Smith, Tommy Tutone, and others. But it’s not just that he lifted from Dylan more prodigiously. He learned from him the dark, enigmatic, metaphor-laden style typical of rock verses that endeared him to generations of fans. He wasn’t merely copying but adding his own vision, and the result was strange — like nothing we, in the USSR, had heard before — but it wasn’t unnatural. It was poignant and relevant.

Grebenshchikov was not the only Russian drawing inspiration from Dylan. Another notable figure was his close friend Mike Naumenko, who was part of the band Zoopark. Naumenko, who had an excellent working knowledge of English, composed songs that were more faithful adaptations of Dylan but, without a doubt, his own creation. For instance, he lifted the melody of Subterranean Homesick Blues for his Countryside Blues, infusing it with Russian characters and remade Desolation Row, substituting Einstein, Robyn Hood, and jealous monk combo of the original for Gogol, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky.

Grebenshchikov, however, was more influential and multifaceted. His objects of interest, too, were Dylanesque. One was spiritual yearnings. His prototype is notoriously evasive about confession, but he did have a late 70’s born-again Christian phase, after which he hung out with Chabad and had his son’s bar mitzvah at the Western Wall. All of it bore expression in his songs, from gospel hymns to the Zionist track Neighborhood Bully. In the USSR, faith was forced underground which naturally attracted rock-n-rollers. Grebenshchikov was driven by both his Orthodox faith and eastern philosophies. Buddhism permeates all of his work but it’s most unabashed in his 1994 album Kostroma Mom Amour.

Eastern religious tourism wasn’t taken by Dylan, who never strayed from Judeo-Christian monotheism and retained it, unlike Leonard Cohen, who was the persona of a rock-n-roll prophet. His Slavic pupil never rose to the level of prophesy but elaborated on the themes as a devotee or maybe a neutral observer. He developed the 1967 track Dear Landlord into Хозяин, or Landlord structured as a conversation with God in a godless age.

Grebenshchikov called the American musician his “portal into the domain of folk song.” Soviet authorities incorporated folklore into the socialist realist canon — it was believed to be an expression of the people’s creativity and, as such, carried revolutionary potential. They had rigid ideas about how it was to be performed — by classically trained professionals, preferably and often with an ideological patina. Grebenshchikov returned the folk-inspired popular performance to its surreal, apolitical prototype. In the late 80’s number, Ivan and Danilo are alluding to his difficulties with getting approval for his songwriting, replete with rock-n-roll exclamations like yeah, mmm, and ah, about the two feudal darling characters.

Through Grebenshchikov, Dylan showed Russian speakers how to write folk rock, which remains the most successful rock sub-genre in that part of the world. For one, in the 70s and 80s, Soviet underground musicians had limited access to electric instruments — Grebenshchikov had an electric guitar smuggled for him by the American Joanna Stingray. The acoustic aesthetic Dylan rejected, blended with his lyrical style, gave birth to the rock scene in the USSR. Later performers from the uberfem soloist of Belaya Gvardiya Zoya Yashchenko to oddball Otava Yo are working in that cultural space.

Moreover, the Russian language doesn’t lend itself easily to the rhythms of rock-n-roll. Heavy metal was enormously popular in the 80’s, for instance, but Russians had limited success emulating it. Folk rock, especially the acoustic folk rock which in many ways echoed the already flourishing singer-songwriter genre, was different.

Then there is the issue of social turmoil. Dylan was famously dissatisfied with his status as the premier writer of protest songs bestowed on him by his communist Greenwich Village comrades. Living under the Communist regime, Grebenshchikov embraced it. Like other homegrown rock musicians, he was on the forefront of the social change ushered in by Gorbachev. He turned Dylan’s Wheel’s on Fire into Train on Fire, lifting his master’s imagery for a very different track he self-consciously wrote as a perestroika anthem.

Dylan was never a Cold Warrior — and neither was Lou Reed for that matter — but his aesthetic and worldview informed the Soviet rock scene and showed the last generations born under the Communist regime that there are better, more authentic and more interesting ways to live. As such, he should be given due recognition for the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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Comments

I could not agree more!
When he went electric the world sat up and took notice.
The poor heckler that called him Judas had no idea of the fury that was unleashed when Dylan proclaimed him a liar and refused to believe his position.

While the cold war is an important event shouldn’t someone here cover the Israeli surrender in the Israel-Hamas War?

What about Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky. And Moscow concert audiences know when to applaud and when to keep silent.

Candid photo of Stravinsky taken by me personally
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhhardin/8549267605

Evgeny Kissin Prokofiev dance of the knights
https://youtu.be/aPBA0yLsENI?t=366

Russians ought to be natural allies.

    Suburban Farm Guy in reply to rhhardin. | January 15, 2025 at 9:41 am

    Ought to be. Were in WW II. But their falling for Socialism resulted, rightly or not, in our being mortal enemies. Then the Berlin Wall went down. USSR next. Seemed like a chance, but what did we do? Peeled off a lot of Russian territories and put Putin’s back to the the wall. We have generations and institutions dedicated to the conflict to boot.

ThePrimordialOrderedPair | January 14, 2025 at 10:52 pm

Along with Hollywood movies, rock-n-roll is often cited as the creative force that upended the Soviet empire.

Levis jeans often get cited for that.

As to rock-n-roll, that ended up as the Soviet Union fell as … “Pussy Riot” committing lewd acts in the churches and then whining about being put away for it.

ThePrimordialOrderedPair | January 14, 2025 at 10:58 pm

he was on the forefront of the social change ushered in by Gorbachev.

It needs to be mentioned that Gorbachev never intended anything that happened because of his moves. He was trying to save the USSR with glasnost and perestroika. He was just trying to do the minimum possible to relieve some of the pressure that was destroying the Soviet Union. Gorbachev is credited with having taken the USSR apart, but he was the last guy clinging to the old USSR as it crumbled around him. He would have gone right back to the worst of Stalin’s years if he could have and thought that it would save the state.

Gorbachev massively underestimated the effects of his policies. If he had known he probably never would have done anything even close.

Any reference for associating the name Velvet Revolution with the band?

ThePrimordialOrderedPair | January 15, 2025 at 2:01 am

Personally, I’m not a big believer that music has such impacts on any society (I look at it just as the backdrop to other things happening, like a soundtrack in a movie) but along these lines there is an excellent movie about South Africa and the specific music that the moviemakers claim was instrumental in the political changes there (which have not proven to be very beneficial to anyone … but that’s a whole other discussion). It’s a great story (I don’t know how much of it is true) but they all loved this music from this Latino from Detroit, I think it was or maybe Chicago, who they thought was some big American superstar but he was really unknown in America. So this guy goes looking for him years later. It’s called “Searching For Sugar Man” and it is a great movie.

The musician’s name is Sixto Rodriguez and he has a very Dylan-like sound. I highly recommend the movie. His music is pretty good, too.

    Music had a huge impact on the USSR. It wasn’t a matter of choosing one genre over another or dressing like a part of a scene.
    Younger generations in the 70’s and 80’s were absolutely bored with the Soviet culture and were willing to take risks for American entertainment.

      ThePrimordialOrderedPair in reply to Katya Sedgwick. | January 15, 2025 at 2:31 am

      It might be. I just don’t subscribe to that idea.

      If that music hadn’t been available then it could very well have just been something else that the youth focused on. It might have just been any music that was different. After all, you don’t think that if Bob Dylan had gotten run over by a bus when he was 15, say, that the USSR would not have gone through pretty much the same events, all else being equal?

      Sometimes people love and attach themselves to things that are available … mostly because they are available. It’s not so much anything objective but just selecting among what there is. If the menu were different then people would just choose different things but still feel much the same way about them.

      You might be correct about this specific music having an impact because of some innate characteristic of the music or the musician … but I don’t happen to think so. I think that the music is, mostly, incidental. I include the lyrics in this as part of the music.

      ALso, I remember things from the 70s. People in the Soviet Union were willing to take risks for all sorts of things. We used to do something with the refuseniks – wear wristbands for them. They were Jews willing just to apply for exit visas, even when they knew it could get them sent to Siberia. And they were not young people. It was a big thing back in the early 70s.

    I’m inclined to agree that music isn’t as big a cultural lever to contemporary domestic & foreign policy as some would believe. But, when you brought up South Africa, I couldn’t help remember the songs ‘Biko’ and ‘Sun City’ in the 1980s. While they weren’t the definitive difference in shaping US policy towards towards Apartheid, I don’t think there’s much question about how those songs (and probably a few others) helped to bring the issue to the fore in American pop-culture. Probably a lot of teens in the 1980s who had no idea what Apartheid was until hearing those Peter Gabriel and Stevie Van Zandt’s songs.

I’ve read a couple of essays published after the release of the new Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” in which the authors posit that Dylan fell out of favor with American leftists, after he declined to assume the role that was being foisted upon him, of becoming yet another hectoring and sanctimonious folk singer “activist.” Everyone assumed after “Blowing in the Wind” that Dylan would walk that path with his folk singer peers, yet, to his credit, he refrained.

Whether Dylan is simply apolitical or leans to the right, it’s interesting to ponder.

https://unherd.com/2025/01/bob-dylan-fought-the-proto-woke/

https://www.thefp.com/p/truth-about-bob-dylan-pete-seeger-complete-unknown-timothee-chalamet-edward-norton

I’m a fair weather Dylan devotee from way back – some stuff is brilliant, some is crap, but I had no idea about Dylan’s global musical influence in eastern Europe. God bless Voice of America radio. Well done Sedgwick. Thank you.

And truth be told, outside the movie score for ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’, I had never heard of Leonard Cohen.

Martin Mull said throw thesaurus from moving window To get Dylan’s lyrics. Though two Nashville albums I enjoy