The Beatles in Ukraine: How ‘Beatlemania’ Survived Censorship, and Still Continues Today

How the Beatles phenomenon took shape in Ukrainian society.

The British band the Beatles, from Liverpool, was active from 1960 to 1970, and total album sales have surpassed 600 million copies. In November 2023, the Beatles' final single came out, titled 'Now and Then,' partly completed with the help of artificial intelligence. In doing so, the band broke its own record — topping the UK charts for the 18th time.

In the 1970s, the Beatles had such a powerful influence on music culture in Britain and around the world that in October 1963, the newspaper The Daily Mirror coined the term 'Beatlemania.' The word described excessive fan devotion to the four young men from Liverpool. The phenomenon didn't skip over the countries that were then part of the Soviet Union — including Ukraine.

On what Ukrainian 'Beatlemania' looked like, and what it led to — read on in this DeTalks article.

From 'Silver Beetles' to Jesus

The Beatles formed around John Lennon (vocals, guitar) and Paul McCartney (vocals, bass), who were later joined by George Harrison (guitar) and Ringo Starr (drums). The first two originally performed under the name 'The Quarrymen,' after their school. They later changed it to 'The Silver Beetles,' and finally, to 'The Beatles.'

According to some theories, the name comes from combining the English words 'beetles' and 'beat,' with the idea of an insect name borrowed from the then-popular band The Crickets, led by Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash a year before the Beatles formed.

The first performance under the new name took place on February 9, 1961, at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England. Over the next two years, the band played there 292 times. Exactly a year after their debut performance, the band met their future producer, George Martin, unofficially known as the 'fifth Beatle.' Just three years after their first performance, the band gave a live performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, watched by 73 million viewers. A two-week tour of the United States followed, kicking off total 'Beatlemania' in America.

The Museum of Youth Culture has described this 'mania' as girls screaming with devotion wherever the Beatles played or simply appeared, noting that women responded strongly to the Merseybeat rock and roll style and found the band members' gentle charm impossible to resist, adding that they were drawn to the 'mop top' hairstyle and the heavy Cuban boots the boys wore,reads an article from the Museum of Youth Culture.

The Guardian's Dorian Lynskey compares the fan 'mania' around the Beatles to the earlier devotion shown to Frank Sinatra, Cliff Richard, and Elvis Presley.

The journalist attributes the scale of the band's popularity to the post-World War II baby boom.

Lynskey has described the 'baby boom' as meaning there were now more teenagers, with more money in their pockets and a persistent sense that society was changing, noting that loving the Beatles in the 1960s meant embracing modernity.

John Lennon has described Christianity as something that would fade away and shrink, saying he had no doubt about this and was certain of it, adding that the band was now more popular than Jesus, and that he wasn't even sure which would go first — Christianity or rock and roll,said John Lennon in an interview for the London Evening Standard, at the height of Beatlemania.

How 'Beatlemania' Reached Ukraine

In the Soviet Union, no one was concerned about disrespect toward religion — the problem was something else entirely. Rock music was seen as an example of 'hostile bourgeois Western' culture. This kind of 'boundless freedom' posed an ideological threat to the totalitarian regime.

Serhii Zhuk, professor of history at Ball State University (Indiana, USA), has wryly noted that for Soviet scholars, the band the Beatles was no less destructive than the miniskirt, or Nabokov.ironizes Serhii Zhuk, professor of history at Ball State University (Indiana, USA).

The only way to 'break through the Iron Curtain' and listen to contemporary rock was to use foreign radio stations or audio recordings smuggled in illegally from abroad.

In physical form, on records or cassette tapes, the band's albums could only be obtained through smuggling, carried out by athletes and sailors — almost the only people who could cross the border. In a comment for one outlet, Lviv 'Beatles fan' Volodymyr Savelyovych also notes that free access to Western music was mostly limited to 'the privileged' — the children of KGB officers and the party elite.

At the time, the company Melodiya held a monopoly on releasing records, and it first released a Beatles song, 'Girl,' in a 1967 compilation album. Whole official albums, meanwhile, only came out 20 years after the label got its license, in 1986. Even today, on online marketplaces and at so-called flea markets, you can find a record bearing the Liverpudlians' faces with the title 'Vecher Trudnogo Dnya' (a literal translation of the album A Hard Day's Night).

The Beatles shaped and united young people who craved exactly the kind of freedom of self-expression the Soviet authorities feared so much. Serhii Zhuk has written that the Beatles were their quiet way of rejecting 'the system, writes Serhii Zhuk.

Volodymyr Savelyovych has recalled that the 1970s were already the era of 'hippies,' but even then, the Liverpool foursome's music remained popular among the underground youth, describing how they wore flowery shirts and East German or Indian jeans and grew their hair out a little, which was already seen as defiant, recounting how they were once grabbed off the street by so-called 'druzhynnyky' (volunteer militia), taken to a police station, and had a few strands of hair deliberately, clumsily cut off, before being given six kopecks (the price of a buzz cut) and sent to a barbershop, recalls Volodymyr Savelyovych.

There's no written evidence of the Beatles' work living in the minds of Soviet youth — nor could there have been, given press censorship. The only testimony to Ukrainians' fascination with rock and roll and the Beatles 40-50 years ago comes from the comments and memories of those whose youth fell during that era.

Vitalii Pidhaievskyi, professor of history at Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University, has described rock music, and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones especially, as being everywhere back then, in every room where students held parties, saying it was impossible to imagine dancing, dating, or making love without the Beatles' music in their student lives in the late '60s, tells Serhii Zhuk, Vitalii Pidhaievskyi, professor of history at Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University.

As the author writes, fascination with the band also showed up among Ukrainian politicians. Yulia Tymoshenko, for instance, wrote in a high school essay about her taste in rock and pop music, including the bands The Beatles, Manfred Mann, and Led Zeppelin, while politician and businessman Serhii Tihipko described it this way:

Tihipko has recalled that when he arrived in Dnipropetrovsk (now the city of Dnipro) after his school years in Chisinau, he found the same popular music there, and that most young people spent more time listening to Deep Purple and Pink Floyd than reading books.

Serhii Zhuk states that in May 1964, the first mention of the Beatles was published by 'Molod Ukrainy,' the main Ukrainian Komsomol newspaper.

The professor has noted that the brief item, beneath a blurry photo of the band, contained just three sentences, in which a Kyiv journalist described the Beatles as 'an English vocal quartet known for its silly haircuts and shouting that substituted for normal singing.'

As music salons appeared, where, for a fairly high price, you could record audio onto vinyl, young people gained more opportunity to draw inspiration from what had once been out of reach, while the authorities had less ability to ban anything. Serhii Zhuk has described in his book Rock and Roll in the Rocket City how, once young people started requesting 'beat music' recordings instead of Vysotsky's songs, record stores were forced to include Beatles songs in their available stock,describes Serhii Zhuk in his book Rock and Roll in the Rocket City.

'And I Love Her' and 'Can't Buy Me Love,' in particular, were the most requested for recording.

Paul McCartney in Ukraine — In Every Sense

On June 14, 2008, one of the Beatles, Sir Paul McCartney, gave a free concert on Independence Square as part of the 'Independence Concert' event. About 350,000 people attended the concert live, and more than 13.5 million watched the broadcast on Novyi Kanal. Two days later, the performer met with then-President Viktor Yushchenko, who gave the artist an embroidered vyshyvanka shirt.

Last year, Paul McCartney's song 'Back in the USSR,' written as a parody of Chuck Berry's 'Back in the USA,' turned 40. The song includes a line about the singer's admiration for Ukrainian women, contrasting them favorably with the West.

The song's line about Ukrainian women expresses that same sentiment in its original English lyrics.

In March 2022, after the start of the full-scale invasion, Paul McCartney posted a message on social media, adding the hashtag #StandWithUkraine.

McCartney recalled playing for their friends in Ukraine on Independence Square back in 2008, saying he was thinking of them during these difficult times and sending his love and support.

The Ukrainian Embassy in the United Kingdom has thanked Sir Paul McCartney on behalf of every Ukrainian, many of whom are his fans, adding that Ukraine is a proud nation that will never be 'Back in the USSR,'responded the Ukrainian Embassy in the United Kingdom, playing on the title of the song mentioned above.

Earlier, in 2017, the Lviv Philharmonic held the charity concert Kids Sing Beatles, a joint project by the arts center Fora and the Lviv Philharmonic aimed at supporting children with leukemia. After six months of preparation, the children performed the band's songs accompanied by a symphony orchestra.