"When Paul visited Moscow in May 2003, to perform a concert in Red Square, he had an audience with President Putin, who told him that hearing the Beatles as a boy growing up in the Soviet Union..."

"... was 'like a gulp of freedom.' On the same visit, former president Gorbachev told Paul: 'I do believe the music of the Beatles taught the young people of the Soviet Union that there is another life.'"From Craig Brown's "150 Glimpses of the Beatles." Also:Mikhail Safonov was a schoolboy in Leningrad when Soviet radio played ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ as an example of a capitalist song about the