Starting in 1984, aspiring American rock singer Joanna Stingray (1960-) began smuggling recording equipment into Leningrad's rock community, orchestrating the first-ever Western release of Soviet rock music—the double album Red Wave (1986).

A clip from one of many perestroika-era televised conversations between American and Soviet "regular people," in which they find common ground with the help of longtime Soviet propagandist and future star of liberal post-Soviet TV, Vladimir Pozner (1934-).

This 1988 televised performance of Nautilus Pompilius's “Last Letter” captures the band’s cultural disillusionment with Western ideals, prefiguring post-Soviet anti-Americanism. 

In 1992, the Beatles superfan and rock-and-roll activist Kolia Vasin (1945-2018) petitioned the St. Petersburg authorities to establish a public “John Lennon Temple of Rock-n-Roll.”