Magnitizdat (USSR)

Magnitizdat was the unofficial practice of (re-)recording uncensored music or speech onto cassette tapes, which were then redistributed throughout the Soviet Union. The term Magnitizdat is etymologically composed of two words – magnit (derived from Russian magnitifon [tape-recorder]) and izdat (meaning ‘to publish’) and was exploited in the early 1960s onwards to record avtorskaia pesnia (poetic songs by Bards) and later, rock music. Alongside the growing consumerist culture and technological developments within the Soviet Union, Magnitizdat became the natural replacement of Roentgenizdat – the adequately cheap x-ray disks and temporary solution to unofficial post-war music recording. As Kolya Vasin suggests - ‘Enterprising young guys ran around the streets of our town with show boxes filled with recordings ‘on the bones,’ but their time would not last long […] the era of tape recorders began.’

The first tape recorders (the EL’fa-6, the Dnepr-3 and the Spais) slowly emerged into the market by the late 1950s, but ‘their production was limited.’ Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was steadily increasing the production of tape recorders throughout the 1960s; 128,000 cassette recorders were in circulation by 1960, which had risen to 4.7 million by 1985. While an estimated fifty million Soviet citizens bought these Soviet-made tape recorders, many thousands of Japanese recorders were equally smuggled into the Soviet Union by Soviet sailors and were either sold in second hand shops or passed on through informal networks. However, with the sudden increase of tape recorder sales and the influx of foreign tourists, these products were soon being exploited to re-record and multiply unofficial Western music records or songs by Soviet bards (singer-songwriters such as Aleksandr Galich, Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vyisotskii, and others who used poetry and music to express political commentary), which allowed artists and other amateur enthusiasts to become more accessible to a larger audience. Their music, which was initially restricted to small numbers gathering in private apartments, was now being circulated via underground networks to an increasing number of listeners. As Timothy Ryback states:

A vast underground culture developed around Magnitizdat. Tapes were collected, recorded, and passed on. Although sound quality dissipated with each re-taping, the recordings evoked what one observer called the ‘romance of the forbidden.’ Through the hiss of surface noise, one heard not only the voice of the singer but also the presence of the audience: chairs scraping across the floor, a bottle knocking against glasses, muted laughter or quiet applause, the rattle of a tram on the street below […] From these underground recordings, legends emerged, faceless legends, recognisable only by their voices, their music, and their lyrics.

Regarding the reproduction of imported western music, Artemy Troitsky illustrates that where original albums would be expensive to buy, around 50-70 roubles on the black market [average monthly wage: 120-150 roubles], a tape recording he bought of a Beatles track (Sgt. Pepper) from a friend, would cost just 60 kopecks! Purchasing the Beatles’ White Album for one rouble, Troitsky admits that he was ‘pleased to find on it Glass Onion, which [he had] previously heard on a disc on the bones.’ It is clear that just like the x-ray disks in the previous decade; the demand for the tape cassette was primarily strengthened by the earlier demand for Roentgenizdat music, which thus conferred ‘significant symbolic capital upon its owner.’ By the start of the 1980s, Magnitizdat was being fully exploited for recording rock music. Paul Easton argues that this phenomenon caused a decline in attendees at official concerts and the reduction of album sales, which eventually helped provoke Goskontsert (the state concert organisation) to promote the unofficial Soviet rock group Time Machine [Mashina Vremeni] to ‘professional status’. Nevertheless, rock fans could surpass the official system through use of informal suppliers (known as the fatsovshchiki), who were well known in closed circles for providing unofficial tape records and westernised clothing (e.g. blue jeans). Hanging around Western-tourist holiday hotels and popular tourist destinations, the fatsovshchiki would barter with tourists for marketable goods, which could then be passed on and sold through informal networks. While the Militia attempted to wage war against the fatsovshchiki, their attempts were futile as countless numbers ‘continued to ply the trade’.

While much of the official press attacked the cassette tape recordings for ‘spreading faster than a flu virus,’ and buying, selling or owning unofficial music tapes still carried up to a three year prison sentence, Magnitizdat was highly evasive. Martin Daughtry explains the story of Soviet musicologist Vladimir Frumkin, who on 20 March 1974 was attempting to fly from Leningrad to the United States with a selection of cassette tape recordings of his bard-friend Bulat Okudzhava. The tapes were processed by Soviet customs officials and then handed back to him, but upon arriving in the United States Frumkin discovered that his magnetic-tape recordings had been ‘demagnetised’. Although these recordings had been erased, they were probably not fully checked - often avtorskaia pesnia could be secreted amongst ‘other less provocative songs’. Nevertheless, hundreds, if not thousands, of the same recording were already in unofficial circulation, locked into personal and private distribution networks. By the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was apparent that the Soviet authorities had failed to control or limit the unstoppable Magnitizdat production.

As a phenomenon, Magnitizdat shares many qualities with Roentgenizdat, primarily as both practices helped surpass the state-authorised music distribution channels. The core difference was that while Roentgenizdat was a cheap imitation of vinyl disks in short supply, Magnitizdat used authentically produced magnetic tapes which eventually made x-ray disks technologically redundant (cassette tapes had a longer duration and better audio quality). These authentically produced tapes and tape recorders were also permitted in every household, compared to the strictly illegal paper copying devices of Samizdat, and therefore came with less risk of being arrested. The ‘Frumkin’ case, for example, indeed highlights the ‘difference in the regime’s attitudes towards magnitizdat and samizdat’. The fact that Frumkin had considered it a worthwhile attempt to emigrate with several ‘magnitizdat’ tapes – something unthinkable with the forbidden works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – is testament to the ambiguity of policy around cassette tapes. Nevertheless, just like Roentgenizdat became the medium for unofficial jazz music, Magnitizdat became the medium for unofficial avtorskaia pesnia and later rock music, helping return artistic choice and freedom to the masses by breaking the Soviet government’s monopoly on information.