(Credits: Far Out)
Tue 17 February 2026 13:00, UK
Unfortunately for the country’s music fans, Russia’s always had a thorny reception with the West’s rock and pop.
Not that there’s no presence. Ever since the USSR’s fall in 1991, music has flooded into the newly formed Russian Federation, with today’s youth gobbling up all kinds of indie, dance/EDM, rock and metal, and hip hop via Spotify and YouTube as much as any other part of the world, often forming new bands and outfits with a uniquely Russian twist.
But geopolitics has always stood in the way. While many of the world’s biggest stars played Moscow across the early 21st Century, the Ukrainian invasion has placed a shattering boycott around Russia, only broken by the dregs like Xzibit or Akon. Even during the days of the Soviet Union, rarely was a Western star able to crack the Iron Curtain’s impregnable fortress until the late 1980s’ Perestroika era; only Cliff Richard, Boney M, and Elton John ever toured the socialist superstate before Mikhail Gorbachev’s premiership.
Such a fraught relationship with music has meant reliable records on unit sales are impossible to verify. Not that Russia wasn’t in receipt of plentiful records. In fact, the state-owned Melodiya label and distributor reportedly shipped as many as 200million claimed records across the 1970s and ‘80s, the Soviet authorities finally relenting after years of suppressing the West’s rock and pop pollutants.
Due to the secrecy of the Soviet state, a lax attitude to copyright, and no real efforts to index their stock until the 1970s, any definitive effort to collate data on pop’s big sellers is just not possible. However, the team at ChartMasters made a gallant effort. With the help of Discogs, thousands of scans were made of the vinyl shipment codes and a decent estimate as to how many copies were sold.
Via this meticulous process, several Platinum sellers were deduced across Lady Gaga, French disco band Space, Bee Gees, and Philly soul trio The Three Degrees, likely scoring as the country’s mammoth Platinum single seller. One curious entry, however, came from a minor hit of a titanic artist who shares a special relationship with the old Soviet state.
So, what was the only classic rock song to go platinum in Russia?
For years, The Beatles were viewed suspiciously as vehicles of corrupting Western decadence by the Soviet authorities, resulting in a complete clampdown on Beatlemania and triggering the famous Samizdat black market for Fab Four LPs printed illegally on X-ray prints.
Years later, Paul McCartney’s successor band, Wings, would drop the frothy ‘Silly Love Songs’, a wry riposte at the music critics and old Beatle John Lennon’s lambast at his supposed twee songwriting. The throwaway number sold a hefty 489,000 copies in Russia, although which version is unclear.
Dated 1983, it could be that the version beloved by so many Russians could be the re-recording on the Give My Regards to Broad Street feature over the original 1976 version from Wings at the Speed of Sound. With McCartney’s musical flop released in 1984, the exact version remains a mystery.
Memorably, McCartney would play several dates in Russia across the early 2000s, naturally treating the Red Square crowd to ‘Back in the USSR’.