Here’s a reminder not only of how much communism sucked but of why it was appropriate to call the anti-communist uprising in Czechoslovakia “The Velvet Revolution.”
Sometime between 1967 and 1968, [Václav] Havel visited the U.S., and scored a copy of a record by the Velvet Underground, the band founded by [Lou] Reed and championed by Andy Warhol. (It’s not clear which album Havel got—some accounts say it was their debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico; others, including Crooks, say it was White Light/White Heat.)
The band’s liberating, experimental sound proved a sensation in the Czech artist community, as music writer Rob Jovanovic once explained: “Havel took it home, along with Frank Zappa’s debut, and managed to smuggle it through Customs. Soon it was being copied and passed around the Prague underground, influencing the avant-garde set to play secretive gigs around the capital.”
One of the people who picked up the album was Milan “Mejla” Hlavsa, who played in a band called the Plastic People of the Universe. Along with Zappa and Captain Beefheart tunes, the Plastic People of the Universe began incorporating Velvet Underground songs into their sets.
In August 1968 the Soviet Union invaded Prague, and the repression that followed prevented the Plastic People of the Universe from playing in public. Eventually, they were formally banned. But they continued to play on underground circuits. Finally, in 1976, its leaders were arrested, their music deemed anti-social. Lots of other artists were rounded up too, and their trial ended up giving birth on Jan. 1, 1977, to Charter 77, a dissident movement formed to protect human rights. Havel was the leader.
It took another 12 years, but eventually the Charter 77 movement brought about the fall of the Czech Communist regime. Crooks tweeted the main lesson of the saga: “Proof that art does not have to be didactic to be political. White Light/White Heat has no message, just a vision of freedom.”
The New York Times wrote about the Plastic People in 2009.
I think it was in ’77 or ’78, my Aunt had some of our relatives from Russia come to visit her in Queens. When they came to our house Upstate NY, and saw my album collection, they asked me to make some tapes for their teenage son.
Well, when they came back a week later, I had recorded about 25-30 hours of R&R, R&B, Soul, Punk, and New Wave on cassettes, and they were beyond overjoyed.
I was happy to have helped use music as a unifying force between our two countries – or, so I told myself.
Well, so much for a unifying force.
They got busted coming into Russia with all of that decadent capitalist propaganda, and their son never got my week’s worth of labor (of love).
I felt awful!
They were punished – but not too, too severely. From what I remember, they had some rations cut, and any advances at work, were either delayed or postponed. And their son had to go to some 2nd rate University, instead of the one he wanted to go to.
I’m glad that era is over. But the current Russian government is still finding ways to be assholes to artists and musicians – see Pussy Riot.
I was living in Munich as Charter 77 was born and a couple of Czechs became friends at the school I was attending. They had high spirits every day I can recall. They were exuberant about what was happening in Czechoslovakia. Jimmy Carter won election and on his campaign had announced a “revolutionary” tie of human rights concerns to international policies. So it was a sense of a wider concern that just within Czech borders.
But why can’t we call it the Zappa Revolution?
Today, Plastic People of the Universe would get a cease-and-desist letter from the record label, be labeled as “pirates” for daring to copy Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa without paying royalties, and be arrested, and fined.
For Soviet Communism, it was the ideas that were feared. For global capitalism, it is the imitation and duplication and expansion of the supply.
This.
From the few Russians I’ve been acquainted with, it’s not such a yes or no. No one remembers Stalin’s time in power, but people got places to live and healthcare. I think the operative line of thinking was that in the old USSR they knew the government lied, as opposed to the US where a large segment of the population doesn’t realize that the finer-tuned mighty Wurlitzer lies through the many private voices in the media.
I think I overcomplicated the explanation. The old Soviets didn’t lie as well as the Americans in charge of what you think.