The “city in speech” constructed in Plato’s Republic is characterized in part by the censorship of music. Music, Socrates persuades his interlocuters, can powerfully stir the passions and thereby exert a profound effect on each citizen’s character. “Musical innovation,” he explains, “is full of danger to the state, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them.” 

Officials of the Soviet Union reached a similar conclusion, wielding a pitiless cultural eraser to protect their interests. Yet the power of every state is subject to limits, and the story of Soviet-era “bone music” provides inspiring testimony to the human spirit’s courage and ingenuity in resisting such oppression.

Soviet Censorship

In 1953, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia received a replacement page, one of many examples of Soviet attempts to rewrite history to suit the ruling Communist party’s interests. The page in question extended the article on idealist philosopher George Berkeley, after whom Berkeley, California, is named. The page it replaced contained an article on Lavrentiy Beria, one of Stalin’s longest-serving secret police chiefs. After a successful coup led by rival Nikita Krushchev that same year, Beria was arrested, tried as a “traitor and capitalist agent,” and executed, the historical record of his existence having become a matter of embarrassment to those in power.

It is hard for the inhabitants of a free nation such as the United States, with its First Amendment protections for free speech, to appreciate the pervasiveness of state censorship within the Soviet Union. Accounts of such varying events as the starvation of Moscow’s population during the October Revolution, defeats of the Red Army, the civility and generosity of Westerners, and the advanced state of technology and high Western living standards were all rigorously repressed. Likewise, photos were doctored to remove repressed persons, films were edited to promote Soviet ideals, and newspapers and broadcast media were all subject to strict state control.

Penalties for defying censors were often severe. Until 1929, artistic expression enjoyed a relatively high degree of freedom, but with the rise of Stalin, a doctrine of “Soviet realism” arose, which sought to extol communist values such as the emancipation of the Proletariat while vigorously repressing opposing views. The music of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky was denounced and prohibited, and writers such as Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel were imprisoned, ultimately executed, or allowed to die of starvation. The Russian physician-novelist Mikhal Bulgakov dared not publish his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, during his life, and it was only 25 years after his death that a censored version first appeared.

Inevitably, efforts to circumvent the censors, undertaken at great personal risk, sprang up. One of the best-known examples is samizdat, the self-publishing of books using copying machines. The word samizdat is a portmanteau composed of sam, meaning self, and izdat, for publishing. The 1957 novel Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year, was rejected by censors and circulated only in samizdat. The same was true of the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, who was charged with “social parasitism” but eventually received the Nobel Prize in 1987. The dissident Vladimir Bukovsky wrote, “I write it myself, I publish it myself, I distribute myself, and I sit in jail for myself.” 

Bone Music

One of the most intriguing means of thwarting the censors was known as roentgenizdat, sometimes referred to as “bone music.” “Roentgen” was Wilhelm Röntgen, the German physicist who received the first Nobel Prize in Physics for the 1895 discovery of x-rays. Medical x-ray film represented a relatively inexpensive and widely available medium onto which such audio recordings could be etched, enabling the production of homemade phonograph records. Three basic ingredients were required: the original audio of a live performance, a recording lathe, and a piece of x-ray film, onto which a circle could be traced using a compass, with a hole cut in the middle. Running at 78 rpm, most such discs could hold three to four minutes of material, enough to capture many of the most popular songs of the day.

Living as we do in a time and place where essentially all music is immediately and freely available, it is hard to believe the extremities to which Soviet audiophiles would go to obtain a recording. Musical genres such as jazz and rock ’n’ roll were strictly prohibited, and such Western music was regarded by censors as something approaching a public health threat. Music seemed to them a sort of virus that could transmit decadent capitalist values. On the opposite side were the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which broadcast American music into the Soviet Union. In response, Soviet officials erected radio jamming stations. 

It is difficult to overstate the outcry of Soviet officials and their propagandists against musical genres such as jazz, rumba, and rock ’n’ roll. One Soviet censor’s 1960 article, excerpted by Stephen Coates in his book, Bone Music, offers a caustic critique of a roentgenizdat producer of bootleg recordings, Rudy Fuchs:

In his authoritative opinion, our young people need new spiritual food. No, he’s not afraid to leave a mark. This is what his album, a kind of rock ’n’ roll gospel, is all about. There’s a naked woman on the title page in a flesh pink undershirt. There are black barefoot prints on her back. The album contains clips from newspapers and magazines about the fans of a dance that combines epileptic jerking with jiu-jitsu techniques. Fuchs, savoring it, re-reads stories about how English Teddy Boys uprooted the seating and ecstatically threw beer bottles during a movie about rock ’n’ roll. He is delighted to know that in one of the concert halls of Holland, demon-possessed dancers smashed gilded furniture into pieces, and how in Oslo, fans broke shop windows and threw stones at passing buses—all to the rhythms of rock ’n’ roll.

Such fears were not entirely out of bounds, at least concerning the potential for such music to exert far-reaching cultural effects. For example, Coates recounts the extraordinary influence of the Beatles in Soviet Culture. Although John, Paul, George, and Ringo came along at the end of bone music’s heyday, it was inevitable that the most successful group in the history of recorded music would achieve worldwide influence. They even released their own Beach Boys-inspired parody of Soviet life, 1968’s “Back in the USSR.” The group:

had a transformational effect on music and counterculture in the West, but it didn’t compare with the scale of their influence on the eastern bloc. [One authority] claims they had more impact on undermining the Soviet system than all the Cold War cultural strategies and propaganda broadcasts combined. As far as young people were concerned, the wonderful power of their melodies, their lyrics, their madcap energy and their mystique revealed the claims of authorities about life in the west to be a lie. The hunger for their music … was a tidal wave of desire that could not be stopped, particularly when many of the intelligentsia, and even apparatchiks, became fans too. This music was a connection to a better world … while making them feel “strangers in their own land.”

Some bootlegging audiophiles, like Fuchs, went to prison—in his case, for three years. But most were just members of an underground culture, who bought, sold, and shared their skeletal discs, often gathering at clandestine “music and coffee parties.” Today, the rise of once-forgotten analog vinyl recordings is being paralleled by a resurgence of interest in this largely unknown form of music, partly fueled by amazement at its ingenuity and technical details, but even more by an appreciation for the enduring human passions for music and freedom of expression.

The Future of Bone Music

In the 1960s, magnetic reel-to-reel tapes, known as magnitizdat, began to replace x-ray film. Such machines required less ingenuity than the recording lathes used to produce roentgenizdat, while also offering the advantage of being able to record more readily from broadcasts and live performances. Thanks to this increased ease of production, the number of illicit recordings on tape vastly outnumbered those on x-ray film, and instead of making purchases from street vendors or in back alleys, the widespread availability of tape recorders made it possible for citizens to produce them independently. Anyone’s apartment could become a recording studio or audio reproduction facility.

In one sense, bone music has no future. Such technology is completely obsolete. But in another sense, it must not be allowed to fade from memory. Instead, it should be kept alive in the hearts of as many freedom lovers as possible. For to hold a “rib record” in one’s hand is a remarkable experience. On a piece of x-ray film depicting a skull fracture, a bullet wound, or cracked ribs—the sorts of injuries a totalitarian state might inflict on its citizens—is recorded music that liberates and inspires. In pointing out the subversive effects of music, the ironic Socrates was not defending totalitarianism but seeking to rouse in his young conversation partners a deeper appreciation for the power of the arts to engage and draw out what is best in human beings. At every turn, he is hoping that they will wake up and pose objections to his “city in speech,” which, in its monomaniacal dedication to a version of justice, represents a tyranny under which no good person would choose to live.

Words are powerful. Images are powerful. Music is powerful. When such power is wielded by the rulers of a state in defense of their own power, arts that should enrich and elevate the character of citizens, families, and communities begin to suppress and distort them. As Tocqueville and others have long pointed out, the greatest threat to our democracy is not foreign conquest but internal complacency, a failure on the part of citizens to jealously guard civil rights such as free speech. Keeping alive in memory the stories of bone music and similar acts of rebellion against state censorship, even though they were never a part of free societies, represents a vital mission of every citizen. Should we come to take for granted what we must in fact earn anew with each generation, we leave the gates that shield us from tyranny unattended.