Bob Dylan may be playing a concert in Russia this June, according to a report in the St. Petersburg Times (and it’s also listed at Bill Pagel’s tour guide). The article by Sergey Chernov also highlights some of the past history between Bob and Russia, so to speak.

Dylan received wide coverage in the Soviet press which developed his image as a protest singer and opponent of the Vietnam war, but the music itself was never really available either on Soviet records or on the radio. One 30-minute program which accidentally broadcast on local Leningrad radio in the late 1970s was an exception.

On top of that, rock fans tended to despise whatever was praised in the official Soviet press, so the articles hardly brought Dylan many new followers.

“You know you need a whole new beginning / Don’t have to go to Russia or Iran / Just surrender to God and He’ll move you right here where you stand, and Ye shall be changed, ye shall be changed,” sang Dylan in “Ye Shall Be Changed,” the song that he wrote in 1979 when he was exploring his new-born Christianity.

He did come to Russia in 1985, when it was still the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev had been leader for just two months. Little information is available, but the reports have it that he came to Moscow’s First International Poetry Festival following an invitation from Andrei Voznesensky.

According to reports, Dylan did perform but the concert was not advertised (of course) and the public was a selected bunch brought in on buses. Allegedly, the room was half-empty, the public was indifferent, and Dylan stopped after 30 minutes, deeply upset. He could be glimpsed on television news reports, however.

It’s interesting that Dylan was promoted by the Soviet press as an anti-Vietnam war singer, and that this, if anything, only turned off people who were otherwise hungry for Western popular music. We know that Dylan wasn’t singing songs about the Vietnam war, or particularly protesting about anything at all. (At least most of us know.) It’s something to add to the list of ironies. In a way, of-course, Dylan was also falsely promoted by the ideological bed-mates of the Soviet communists here in the U.S.A. (and elsewhere) as being an anti-war and anti-establishment protest singer. And that did have an impact on how the general public perceived him, and doubtless some kind of impact on the number of people who were willing to lend his music an ear. The very significant difference is that the U.S.A. was not and is not a totalitarian society, and people are able to just turn on the radio or buy a record and make up their own minds. Thank God.

A not-off-topic quote from Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles:

It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat — someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn’t the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer.

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