Back in the U.S.S.R.

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  "Back in the U.S.S.R." opens The Beatles' 1968 double album with the sound of a turboprop aircraft landing on a runway. Before a single lyric is sung, the listener is placed inside a scene. Then Paul McCartney's voice arrives, and it is singing about the Soviet Union. The year was 1968. The Warsaw Pact had just invaded Czechoslovakia. The Cold War was at a friction point. And the Beatles chose to open their most ambitious record by celebrating the joys of coming home to the USSR.

  How did a song that began as a joke about British patriotism become a Cold War flashpoint, a peace offering, and eventually an anthem that lasted longer than the country it named? The answers run through an Indian ashram, a recording studio where Ringo Starr walked out in protest, and a Moscow stadium where Paul McCartney finally got to play it thirty-five years after writing it.

• 2. From Britain to the USSR

  ›

  McCartney started writing the song as "I'm Backing the UK", drawn from the "I'm Backing Britain" campaign that had swept the country in January 1968. A month after that campaign caught fire, the Beatles left for India to study Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

  According to author Ian MacDonald, McCartney shifted the title step by step: first to "I'm Backing the USSR", then, drawing on Chuck Berry's 1959 hit "Back in the U.S.A.", arrived at the song's final form. The Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan, who joined the Beatles at the ashram, remembered McCartney playing it as one of the "funny little ditties" he regularly performed. Donovan noted that "melodious ballads just poured out of him" during that period.

  Mike Love of the Beach Boys was also studying at the retreat in Rishikesh. He recalled McCartney playing "Back in the U.S.S.R." on acoustic guitar over breakfast, and it was Love who suggested that the bridge section should focus on Russian girls, styled after the Beach Boys' "California Girls". That breakfast conversation became one of the song's defining structural choices.

  In a November 1968 interview for Radio Luxembourg, McCartney described the character in the song as a Russian spy returning home after an extended mission in the United States. In his 1984 interview with Playboy, he said he "just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California." He wanted the song to transpose the patriotism of Berry's original into a Soviet context, intending it as a spoof on the American traveller's insistence that things are always better back home.

• 3. The Day Ringo Left

  ›

  On the 22nd of August 1968, while rehearsing the song at EMI Studios in London, Ringo Starr had enough. McCartney had been criticising his drumming on the track, and the general atmosphere during the White Album sessions had grown sour. Starr walked out, intending to quit the group entirely.

  The remaining three Beatles did not stop work. Recording engineer Ken Scott later recalled that they assembled a "composite drum track of bits and pieces" across multiple takes with Starr absent. Five takes of the basic track were recorded, with McCartney on drums, George Harrison on electric guitar, and John Lennon on Fender Bass VI. Take 5 was selected as the best.

  The overdubbing continued the following day, the 23rd of August. McCartney and Harrison added bass parts and additional lead guitar. The first overdubs included piano by McCartney, drums by Harrison replacing Lennon's bass part from the day before, and another electric guitar part. After these were mixed down to a single track, McCartney sang a lead vocal using what he called his "Jerry Lee Lewis voice". Lennon, Harrison, and McCartney then added Beach Boys-style harmonies over the bridges, along with handclaps.

  Harrison played the guitar solo in the instrumental break. McCartney contributed a high-pitched, single-note solo over the final verse. Scott created the aircraft sounds from a tape loop of a Viscount turboprop recording stored in EMI's library. Author Ian MacDonald described the completed arrangement as a "thunderous wall of sound".

  Starr returned to the group on the 4th of September, having been persuaded by the other Beatles. He came back to take part in filming a promotional clip for "Hey Jude". During a break in that filming, Marc Sinden, who appears in the film, recalls Lennon playing a song on acoustic guitar. Sinden remembered that "everyone went 'Wow'" before filming resumed. Only when it was later released did they realise what they had heard.

• 4. Political Fire

  ›

  Apple Records released The Beatles on the 22nd of November 1968, with the song sequenced first. Three months earlier, the Soviet Army had rolled into Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring. The timing was not lost on critics or political groups.

  Author Ian MacDonald called the song "a rather tactless jest" given those events. Some members of the New Left criticised the Beatles for the gesture. On the American right, the John Birch Society's magazine cited it as further evidence of the Beatles' supposed pro-Soviet sympathies. The line "You don't know how lucky you are, boys" left anti-communist groups stunned. During the 1960s, the Soviet authorities had officially dismissed the Beatles as the "belch of Western culture". David Noebel, a longstanding critic of the band's influence on Western youth, observed that the lyrics had left "even the Reds speechless".

  The song's politics were more slippery than either side acknowledged. Writing for the website Russia Beyond, Tommy O'Callaghan described it as a "parody that became a peace offering", arguing that it mocked both the anti-Soviet narrative of McCarthyism and the romantic pro-Soviet leanings of the New Left. The references to Russian girls, in O'Callaghan's reading, sent up the perceived unsexiness of Soviet culture. The song's true satirical target, he argued, was the idea that Americans and Russians were fundamentally unlike each other.

  McCartney himself said he intended the Soviet traveller to be "every bit as proud" of his home country as an American would be of theirs, despite the absence of luxuries. Author Michael Gray described the song as the Beatles' sardonic comment on Berry's idealised Americana, which had become "deeply unfashionable" by the late 1960s. And Billy Bragg, writing for Mojo in 2006, called 1968 the year when "our love affair with all things American began to turn sour", pointing to US conduct in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and Richard Nixon's election.

• 5. Elton, Billy, and Red Square

  ›

  Elton John was permitted to tour the Soviet Union in 1979, which Billboard magazine described as the first such visit by an "out-and-out rock artist". He sang "Back in the U.S.S.R." as his closing number throughout the tour, ignoring an official request after his opening show that he drop it from the setlist. Footage from those concerts appeared in the documentary film To Russia with Elton.

  In 1987, Billy Joel covered the song on Kohuept, his live album recorded in the Soviet Union. Released as a single, Joel's version reached number 33 in Australia and number 44 in New Zealand. McCartney said in 1997 that Joel's use of the song in his Russian concert tours had helped elevate what he called a "jokey" song into "a bit of an anthem now".

  McCartney himself had been refused permission to perform in the USSR during the 1980s. In Barry Miles' 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, McCartney said that playing "Back in the U.S.S.R." was "probably my single most important reason for going to Russia". He finally got the chance on his Back in the World tour, when he played Moscow's Red Square in May 2003. According to The Moscow Times, "the crowd went wild". Before the concert, McCartney reflected that the Soviet Union had been "a mystical land" when he wrote the song. "It's nice to see the reality," he said. "I always suspected that people had big hearts. Now I know that's true."

  Mike Love's verdict on the song, written in his autobiography Good Vibrations, was brief and precise: "'Back in the U.S.S.R.' was a helluva song, and it's lasted longer than the country."

  On the 4th of July 1984, the Beach Boys played the song during their Fourth of July concerts in Washington, DC, and Miami, with Starr joining them as a special guest. Love recalled that the irony of an Englishman participating in American independence celebrations "was not lost on Ringo". Starr told a reporter: "Happy Birthday America... Sorry we lost."

• 6. Critical Reversal

  ›

  Early reviews of the White Album were divided on the song. Alan Smith of the NME called it "a fantastic piece of screaming excitement. Great opener." A reviewer for Record Mirror noted the "wild Harrison guitar" and described the track as "rock based, falsetto backed". A second Record Mirror writer, David Griffiths, argued that the opening worked precisely because it "disorientated" listeners, both politically and socially, leaving them "more receptive" to what followed.

  Not everyone agreed. Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone pushed back against treating the track as simple parody. He called it the "perfect example" of the Beatles' ability to quote from other artists and "expand the idiom" in ways that recent satirical albums by the Turtles and Frank Zappa had failed to achieve. In the same publication, Wenner argued it "operates on more levels than that: it is fine contemporary rock and roll" as well as a commentary on the United States and a parody simultaneously.

  Geoffrey Cannon, writing in Partisan Review, was less impressed, grouping it with "Birthday" and "Helter Skelter" as songs where the Beatles managed to "kick out the jams" but criticising their eclecticism for making them "evanescent". Nik Cohn of The New York Times found the Beach Boys tribute in the middle section "half-hearted and limp".

  Over time, critical opinion shifted upward. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked the song at number 85 on its list of the 100 Greatest Beatles Songs. Mojo placed it at number 64 in a similar list compiled in 2006. David Quantick, writing in his book on the White Album, argued that in lesser hands the track "could have been a rotten comedy song", but that McCartney's confidence made it "something amazing". Tim Riley described the result as "Brian Wilson with sex appeal".

• 7. Ukraine and the Final Silence

  ›

  In 2022, the song that McCartney had called an anthem quietly disappeared from his concert setlists. The Spokesman-Review and The Dallas Morning News both noted its absence from the Got Back tour, attributing the change to Russia's invasion of Ukraine that year.

  In place of the song, McCartney and his bandmates began performing a flag ritual at each concert's encore. They returned to the stage carrying the flag of the United Kingdom, the flag of whatever country they were performing in, an LGBT pride flag, and, in 2022, the flag of Ukraine. At shows in the United States, they also carried the state flag of wherever they were playing: the Texas flag in Fort Worth, the Florida flag in Hollywood.

  A song born partly from McCartney's curiosity about a place he admitted knowing little about had become too freighted to sing without implicating something. What had started as a parody of an American patriotic anthem, written at an Indian ashram after a suggestion over breakfast, now carried the weight of an actual war. The British Phonographic Industry awarded the recording a silver certification in September 2022 for sales and streaming figures exceeding 200,000 units, in the same year it vanished from the stage.