Almost two decades before achieving worldwide status as ‘the new Hitler’ with the slaughter of civilians in neighboring Ukraine, Vladamir Putin had an interesting meeting with Paul McCartney.
The world-famous musician was invited by Putin back in 2003 to perform in Moscow’s Red Square on May 24th; an invitation McCartney accepted.
According to the BBC’s reporting of that day, “McCartney and his wife Heather took tea in the Kremlin with President Putin.”
Russian musician Sasha Lipnitsky said that The Beatles were the ‘first hole in the iron curtain.’
Putin, who was a KGB agent in east Berlin when The Beatles were top of the charts around the world, told McCartney that The Beatles had been ‘a breath of fresh air’ during Soviet times even though it was officially ‘considered propaganda of an alien ideology.’
While The Beatles’ music was not banned by the Communist regime, Putin revealed, he did comment to McCartney: “the fact that you were not allowed to play in Red Square in the 1980s says a lot.”
Afterwards, McCartney said he gave a private performance of The Beatles’ song “Let It Be” for Putin. (He probably wouldn’t do that today even though Putin should just ‘let it be’)
In the former Soviet Union, when Western music was banned and music, in general, was heavily regulated, Russians would go to extreme lengths to get their hands on records that were cleverly copied onto x-ray films.
In 2013, McCartney openly appealed to Putin to release six Brits who were imprisoned in Russia for taking part in a Greenpeace demonstration. Watch that report on YouTube.