By Yianis Ponos

After the Second World War, Russian leader Josef Stalin banned the possession and playing of any Western music. The music that was permitted had to be by Russian composers.

Imagine the privations endured during the war, the tragedy, and the immense losses of life. After the war, the rebuilding begins, and a sense of optimism and hope can bloom after the losses. Mass communication is developing throughout the world in the mid-twentieth century, and television, which in Russia had begun just before the war, was interrupted in 1941 (until 1945) by Nazi Germany’s invasion. It resumed after the war.

Early Russian television promoted mostly Russian life, culture, and sport. However, there must have been references to other countries and cultures, if only to boast about a Russian sports victory over the West or how Russian artists were vastly superior to their Western counterparts. Couple this with the popularity of cinema and radio, and it’s obvious that there were references, albeit brief, to the art, culture, and music of many other countries.

I’m not sure if Russian citizens were mostly restricted from traveling to other countries immediately after World War Two, but they certainly were by the start of the Cold War in the mid-1950s. Based on the rise of these mass communications, and the restrictions in travel, it’s easy to imagine a yearning, a dreaming and a longing for what you’ve been repressively denied. The forbidden often has an added excitement, an added expectation and ultimately, an added value.

It’s inevitable that black markets will operate underground, smugglers will obtain banned foreign goods and the trade in these goods will flourish, despite obvious risks and huge expense. Opportunists will always be present. Young people will rebel; those of Russia in the mid-1950s will have heard jazz, rhythm-and-blues, country and eventually rock and roll. Presumably, they and older people wanted much more forbidden music.

A Novice’s Guide to X-Ray Bootlegs

The definitive written work on the subject is the Stephen Coates book Bone Music.

During a 2023 interview with ABC radio here in Australia, Coates told how he was touring with his band The Real Tuesday Weld in 2013, when he discovered morbid-looking discs at a flea market in Russia. He held one of the discs up to the light, only to be revealed an image of two hand bones. The market stall owner wasn’t sure what to make of the X-ray and there were no markings to identify what appeared to be a recording. Coates’ intellectual curiosity was piqued, so he bought the disc.

When he got back to his home in the UK, he was surprised to hear the disc included a very familiar tune, Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock. He had to find out more about these discs and so his mammoth research task began.

He later reflected that had he bought the X-ray bootleg at the time it was produced, he would have committed an offence that would’ve earned him gaol time.

Coates identifies Hungarian sound engineer Istvan Makai as the person most likely to have created the technique for making audio recordings on X-rays. The National Library in Budapest has an archive of many X-ray recordings made in the 1930s. Perhaps Makai thought X-ray recordings had a greater value than other recording methods available at the time?

Although originating in Hungary in the 1930s, X-ray bootlegs found their way into Russia after World War Two. X-rays were produced in enormous numbers in Russia in the mid-twentieth century due to mass testing for tuberculosis. They contained a nitrate substance that made them a tremendous fire hazard. Russian authorities were often urging hospital staff to dispose of them, especially after several fatal hospital fires.

Bootleggers were grateful to obtain them from any source, often scouring through hospital refuse, in search of precious X-rays. They used recording equipment to produce music from non-Russian artists, as well as from Russian dissidents who had produced music overseas that was banned.

Coates tells of a gang called the Golden Dog Gang who took great pride in the quality of their bootlegging work. While some consumers were at times ripped off by bootleggers, and due to the underground nature of the trade consumers were never quite sure to get what they’d paid for, the gang became renowned for the quality of their audio reproduction and the relative longevity of their discs.

The Golden Dog Gang, who apparently all spent various times in prison for their bootlegging, appear to have been motivated more by the act of rebellion, the act of subversion, the act of providing a unique way of recording and distributing forbidden music than by profit alone.

As well as X-ray bootlegs, Russian authorities were dealing with a rise in pirate radio and they referred to the operators as ‘radio hooligans’. The excellent Bone Music blog contains a terrific story of one such radio hooligan. In the 1950s and 1960s, Russian patrols were set up in trucks and were able to locate ‘radio hooligan’ transmitters. One operator became suspicious of a truck that had driven by his house several times and then panic set in when the truck turned into his driveway. Fortunately, his wife had been preparing a huge pot of borscht (vegetable soup) and amid the chaos, the radio transmitter was dumped into the soup.

Despite an otherwise thorough search of the entire premises, no radio transmitter was located by the authorities. The radio hooligans were spared detection and punishment and hopefully went on to further broadcasts.

By the late 1960s, tape-to-tape recorders became available in Russia and the X-ray bootleg became redundant.

Conclusions

I can only admire the acts of rebellion and subversion that helped to make music available during
times of suppression and times of great personal risk.

I’m a timid, conservative bloke. I greatly value my freedom and my ability to listen to music, both recorded and live. If I was a Russian during those times when Western music was banned, would I have taken such risks? Probably not, but if I was deprived of music, maybe I would…

If I was forced to listen exclusively to Russian music, life would obviously be very different. Maybe
Russia has a Little Richard, a Sounds Like Sunset, a Chris Whitley, an Otoboke Beaver, a Maurice
Ravel, a Mike Nock, or a Mary Gauthier that I’ve never heard of and could admire just as much.
Perhaps.

I know very little about Russian music other than a nodding acquaintance with Stravinsky, of the vast and unequivocal music of Shostakovich, and that the Mary Hopkin 1960s hit single Those Were The Days is based on an old Russian folk tune. Coincidentally, this Mary Hopkin song is one of the first songs I can recall from my childhood. To this day, when it comes on I can’t help but stop what I’m doing, so as to concentrate again on the melody and the lush, yet exotic, instrumentation.

Pop songs with balalaikas should do that to everyone, I reckon.

I’ve never seen an X-ray bootleg, but I imagine they’re similar to a flexi-disk. I have a flexi-disk from an English fanzine (an amateur magazine made affordable by volunteers writing and producing the articles, usually on photocopy paper) that I bought in the 1980s. It’s by The Church, called Warm Spell.

I discovered the intriguing concept of X-rays being used to bootleg records from a Facebook post, shared by Eve Elliott in 2020, on musician Marty Willson-Piper’s page. It was shared from a post by a British record label called Ripple Music. I acknowledge my references to the ABC radio story on Stephen Coates, the Bone Music blog, and I’ve ordered a copy of Stephen Coates’ book Bone Music, which I very much look forward to reading.

Yianis loves old Japanese films, recorded and live music that’s usually independent of the music industry, and his local Australian Rules Women’s and Men’s teams, the Inner West Magpies.

He’s pedantic, especially regarding the use by Australians of Australian English rather than American English, and his motto is Kindness Always.