A Glimpse of My Soviet Self in a YouTube Video

Back in May, apropos of nothing in particular, I posted on Facebook a striking photograph by Terry O’Neill of an ecstatic Elton John at Dodger Stadium in 1975, and accompanied it with this note: “Did I ever mention that I was at Elton John’s—and broader, any major Western rock star’s—very first concert in the Soviet Union? I was. The Grand Oktyabr’sky Concert Hall, Leningrad, May 21, 1979. I should write about this, someday.” And, indeed, in our minds—mine and those of countless other young Soviet people of my generation—Elton John certainly was the greatest Western star of rock music ever to visit the Soviet Union. The next morning, my old friend Jeff Parker left a comment on the post, accompanied by a link to a YouTube video: “Is that by any chance you at the 2:24 mark here?” I clicked on the link, checked out the time mark, and, indeed, it was an almost impossibly young me. (My face, half-obscured by the hairdo of someone sitting in front of me, comes into focus at the 2:23, not 2:24, mark.)

This remarkable find sparked a lot of discussion, causing Jeff to elaborate: “I had insomnia and so was up in the middle of the night, clicked through your post about the concert and watched the first clip, transfixed by this young Elton John and watching him through my eyes in 2021 and the eyes of you all in Leningrad in 1979. When I saw they were panning the audience, I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to see Misha, but that of course would never happen. Too coincidental. And just a few clips later, there you were! I know next to nothing about EJ in this era, but it’s pretty clear by the sound of this performance, the look in his eyes, and the look in the eyes of all of you watching him, that this was one hell of a concert. . . .”

And so, there I am, caught in a single moment of my distant past, in another lifetime, approximately a billion and a half heartbeats ago, immured in posterity like an antediluvian insect in a hardened pool of prehistoric resin. Who am I there? An ordinary, insignificant young Leningrad Jew, a recent college graduate and decidedly unremarkable newfangled junior engineer at a secret submarine-research institute, dreamer of impossible dreams of an impossible literary future.

There I am, sitting with bated breath in the hushed darkness of the city’s most upscale and Westernized concert venue, staring with utmost intensity at the surprisingly youthful and unostentatious-looking (despite his decadent flowing shapeless clothes and rather inexplicable high heels) idol of rock up on the brightly lit stage a stone’s throw away from me. With my heart beating rapidly, I am filled with the heady sense of this evening’s singular momentousness in my humdrum existence as some sort of mental portal into an entirely unimaginable, boundless and joyous non-Soviet world. This concert could—and, normally, would, of course—be happening in New York, or London, or Paris, or any number of such exotic, teeming metropolises—not in Leningrad at all. And yet, here we are, and here he is, and here I am. It is simply mind-boggling.

I still cannot fully believe, sitting there, just how lucky I am! The vast majority of tickets to the unprecedented event never went on sale for the general public, having been distributed instead among the regional Party nomenklatura and the top tier of the city’s cultural establishment. The only reason I am where I am tonight is that my father’s postdoctoral student is in some nebulous way connected to one (or both) of those rarefied coteries and, wouldn’t you know it, happens to be under the seriously erroneous notion (from which, much to my shame, I have done nothing to disabuse him) that currying favor with his son could mitigate the less than stellar progress of his research project.

Nor can I quite believe, sitting there, that this evening is actually happening in the first place; that they—the collective them (the senescent Brezhnev, the obscurantist anti-Semite Grigory Romanov, the head of the Leningrad Regional Party organization, and all the rest of their ilk)—haven’t called off the concert at the last moment, like they did ten months earlier, when the great American guitar player Carlos Santana had his performance, in Palace Square on America’s Independence Day, cancelled abruptly, with little warning. Thousands of young people, unaware that it had been called off, assembled in breathless anticipation in front of the Winter Palace and around the Alexander Column. Bitterly disappointed, they proceeded to march up the Nevsky Prospect, chanting “Santana! Santana!” and to brandish their clenched fists at the low-slung boreal sky, while being doused with cold water from police-operated street-cleaning trucks, until finally, a few blocks farther along, dozens of them were arrested, grabbed off the street at random.

But no: this is actually happening. Elton John is singing. No one can stop him now. Truth be told, I am feeling a twinge of disappointment, too, now that the evening is under way. Once begun, it will have to come to an end, inevitably. Anticipation, mounting for weeks, was a sweeter, keener part of this whole experience. But what can one do? No single moment can last forever.

His voice is beautiful—soaring, floating, darkly golden, molten. Even though, obviously, it can never be heard on the Soviet radio, and his songs are not sold in any music store in the country, I, like millions of others among the Western-oriented Soviet youth, am familiar with it. I’ve been listening to Elton John since the second year of college, at least, on an endlessly re-redubbed magnetic-tape recording of his “Captain Fantastic” album. “Someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear. . . .” Sugar bear?

He’s not performing that song this evening. Right now, he is singing something about someone named Daniel. “Daniel . . . tonight . . . plane . . . can see . . . goodbye . . . Daniel . . . eyes . . . been . . . seen . . . Daniel . . . ” My largely self-taught English, adequate as it may be to the task of reading uncomplicated, preferably abridged narrative texts with a dictionary, is not nearly sufficient for making out the lyrics of his or anyone else’s songs. My oral comprehension of English is zilch. I’ve never spoken with any native speaker of English. I’ve never met any, either. Even if, somehow, improbably, I were to manage to strike up a conversation with some Anglophone tourist on the Nevsky, I probably would be paralyzed into silence by my awareness that what I was doing would constitute a severe violation of the conditions of my employment at the aforementioned secret submarine-research institute. The consequences would be dire and everlasting. I am not permitted to be in direct contact with citizens of capitalist countries, period. I am not supposed to knowingly share an enclosed space with any of them. I am supposed to report any such unfortunate accidental occurrence the very next day to the K.G.B. representative at my research institute’s Department One.

But, tonight, I am knowingly sharing an enclosed space with Elton John. Eat your shrivelled heart out, my God-damned Motherland. And Elton sure as hell is not interested in the electromagnetic properties of our hopelessly outmoded submarines. The woman sitting next to me on the right is middle-aged, dressed like a typical Soviet school principal, and she has been half smiling pleasantly since she took her seat a few minutes before the concert began. If my young self were to guess—and, frankly, she is just about the remotest person from my mind at the moment—I’d say she’d much rather be taking in popular Soviet singers such as Alla Pugacheva or Muslim Magomayev, or maybe even Lyudmila Zykina, than this one. Elton John is not her cup of tea. But, still, here she is, with that soft, bemused half smile of hers, at this strange foreign celebrity’s concert, owing to the fact of her likely being a mother or wife or close relative of some Party or K.G.B. bigwig. She has been told that this is an unmissable thing; she had to go.

She does look good-natured, but just a little later, a bit farther along into the evening, the percussionist Ray Cooper appears onstage in clouds of sulphuric smoke with his devilish, carnivorous smile and the show really gets going full throttle, finally emboldening a smattering of the most uninhibited among the young folks in the audience to jump up to their feet, rush toward the stage, and start dancing in the aisles with wild un-Soviet abandon to “Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting)” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and, especially, “Crocodile Rock.” At that point her features suddenly will harden, develop angry sharp angles, her eyes will narrow dangerously, and she will hiss hatefully off into space: “Disgusting! Why aren’t they stopping this outrage? Arrest that trash!” But right now it’s the mellow “Daniel” that Elton John is singing, and she is at peace with the world.