This list of bands is circling the internet, saying it’s the banned from the USSR list with the reasons. Why was Pink Floyd banned for interference in Afghanistan? The Talking Heads for myth of soviet aggression? The Village People for violence? Is it real? Any other insights on banned bands inUSSR?

by jackanapes8

The last one makes me laugh cause I just can’t picture the ymca leading to violence. Why not for homosexuality like the other band. What did Pink Floyd do in regards to Afghanistan? I know about the wall show at the Berlin Wall. Wouldn’t that be the reason? But now I want to know everything about the soviets banning bands List: http://imgur.com/c0II6Po Edit: I immediately regret the grammar in my title

hillsonghoods

I believe that the propagation of this list in the West arose from its publication in Alexei Yurchak's book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, a book that was about, amongst other things, the way that those who grew up in the last couple of decades of the USSR interacted with Western culture. You can see a scan of the original document in Spin's explanation of the internet meme.

For context, Yurchak's translation of the header before the list of artists is:

APPROVED COPY

Workers of the world unite!

ALL-UNION LENIN COMMUNIST UNION OF YOUTH NIKOLAYEV REGIONAL COMMOTTEE OF KOMSOMOL OF UKRAINE

For internal use only

To Secretaries of Gorkoms and Raikoms of Komsomol of Ukraine

The following is an approximate list of foreign music groups and artists whose repertoires contain ideologically harmful compositions.

This information is recommended for the purpose of intensifying control over the activities of discotheques.

This information must also be provided to all vocal instrument ensembles and youth discotheques in the region.

Secretary of the Obkom of Komsomol, P. Grishin.

According to Yurchak, this is a January 1985 directive sent by the party committee of the youth division of the Communist Party (which is what is meant by 'the Obkom of Komsomol') in an area of Ukraine; there may or may not have been similar 'internal use only' memos in other parts of the USSR.

The context of all of this is that with the rise of widespread use of tape machines (and thus home taping) amongst Soviet youths (which I discuss in more detail here), Soviet youths became more and more exposed to popular Western music which spread around as people dubbed copies of tapes for others. The irony, according to Yurchak, is that the young people of Russia basically didn't listen to the lyrics at all, and were therefore not really concerned about the problematic lyrical themes that the list focused on; instead, the danger of the music was that it increased the belief in a Mythical West, which Soviet youth only knew second-hand and could therefore fantasise about (much as the Beatles themselves had fantasised about America in the 1950s and early 1960s before they visited). Anyway, all of this concerned the party hierarchy, who would have preferred Soviet youth to be listening to healthy Communist-approved music, but politically the hierarchy clearly felt by the mid-1980s (after some years of Western acts performing in the USSR, like Boney M or Elton John) that they could not wholly restrict the consumption of Western music, but could instead only channel and direct it.

In terms of the specific artists you've questioned, or found humorous, generally I feel that this list is quite accurate in terms of the themes present in the music of the artists, from a Soviet perspective.

With Pink Floyd, the translation above is different to the one in Yurchak's book, which specifically says "Pink Floyd (1983): distortion of Soviet foreign policy ('Soviet aggression in Afghanistan')". This, more obviously, is a reference specifically to Pink Floyd's 1983 album The Final Cut, an anti-war concept album; in 'Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert', specifically, Waters sings the lyrics Brezhnev took Afghanistan, which presumably is not quite a Komsomol-approved spin on events, in which presumably the Afghan people took back their country from capitalist oppressors, helped by the generosity of the Russians.

And re: the Village People, that group's campness was not necessarily obvious to foreign observers, let alone many Americans (see my post here) - but I can imagine that the Soviets might have objected to 'In The Navy', a song that, well, advocated joining the American navy. Presumably joining the American navy in 1979 strongly increased your likelihood of being involved in violence against Soviets in particular, what with the Cold War and all. Perhaps 'Macho Man', too, could be taken as advocating a culture of physical violence, if one was missing the specific context of New York's gay scene.