J Lennon and V Lenin
As the world gears up for the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death on Thursday, it is worth looking back at the lost world of those days. One of the treasures of the Rainy Day library is "The Lennon Companion" and on page 219 it contains a gem that appeared on 12 December 1980 in the pages of Sotsialisticheskaya industria and authored by one M. Beglov. The tone was critical from the get go: "J. Lennon, to whom America had paid almost no attention in recent years, is now being elevated virtually to the rank of a spiritual leader of several generations of Western youth." After that warm up, M. Beglov went all Cold War:
"However, what lies behind the furore that the American press has whipped up over Lennon's murder is clearly nothing but an elementary desire to profit from his death. Interest in the records made by Lennon and other members of the long-disbanded Beatles, records for which there has been little demand in the US in recent years, has been artificially inflated to incredible proportions......During the 1960s, American show business squeezed everything it could out of the rapid rise of John Lennon and his comrades. John Lennon's life is a typical example of the cruel exploitation of talented Western musicians who rise to the apex of success. First comes frenzied popularity, kindled by noisy advertising, contracts for many millions of dollars, and exhausting concerts. The come narcotics, disillusionment with life, and feverish attempts to stay atop the wave of popularity."
How true. If only those "Western musicians" had thrown in their lot with the hammer and sickle crowd instead. Think of it: there would have been no exploitation, no narcotics and none of the distractions that eventually prevented Messrs Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Springsteen & Co. from writing about the heroes of Tractor Collective No. 97. All that those of us on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain got were ballads about feverish tambourine men who were born to run — from noisy advertising, naturally.
What's especially uncanny about our apparatchik's article is the conclusion that he draws from the murder of Lennon: "He is merely the 701st victim of an armed assault in New York this year. In the US as a whole, 10,700 people died from gunshot wounds last year. They were all victims of the cult of violence that is flourishing in the US, and of the unrestricted sale of firearms." Open any European paper or magazine and you'll see the very same boilerplate today. M. Beglov would have no problem getting bylines in Paris, Berlin, London, Madrid or Rome.
But, the best bit comes right at the end. Comrade Beglov compares the death of The Beatle to that of The King: "Like Lennon, today, he was then a candidate for 'sainthood', but it wasn't three years before the name of E. Presley had been consigned to oblivion. After making millions of dollars on his death, the bosses of American show business relegated him to the archives."
The hilarious thing about this is that it was M. Beglov's empire that was "consigned to oblivion", and in less than a decade after Lennon's death, too, and it was Lenin and Stalin, Marx and Engels and M. Beglov who were relegated to the archives. And E. Presley? He and Johnny Cash were seen shopping in Moscow at the weekend in this store.
