Spent much of last night watching the Paul McCartney in Red Square concert film/documentary, which I picked up via a Christmas gift card to record store FYE. Good stuff - the performances of his lesser-known tunes are better, mostly because you don’t expect them to sound a certain way, and aren’t disappointed when they don’t quite sound as good as you thought or hoped.

But perhaps most interesting was a quote included on the packaging, from Russian “cultural journalist” Artemy Troitsky:

“The Beatles, Paul, John, George and Ringo have done more for the fall of Communism than any other western institution.”

This isn’t the only time the claim has been made, and in one respect it seems kind of funny. Yeah, Yeah Yeah brings down the Berlin wall.

But in another way, it’s a completely subversive statement - and one that ought to give the culture warriors pause.

If it’s true that Western culture, as embodied by the Beatles, so appealed to Soviet kids that they stopped thinking of English-speaking people as the enemy, then the very licentiousness that the culture warriors have battled played as much or more of a role in bringing down the godless enemy than the guns, the nuclear warheads and the prayers.

In our popular mythology it was conservatism, as embodied by Ronald Reagan, that brought down the Soviet empire. And certainly, the Soviets couldn’t keep pace economically, couldn’t continue to keep up in terms of military spending. But at the same time, it may well have been liberalism that corroded the cultural pillars of the system; a cultural liberalism that the Soviet system simply could not keep out, and one that was destined to appeal to the young, anyway, particularly in a country where the freedom embodied in the Beatles was officially deemed the antithesis of the system. Given this, the system had to fall, as it did.

And it’s sort of reaffirming to think that it had less to do with ICBMs than it did with this.