Fan's Life Devoted to Beatlemania
The most precious thing that Russia's "No. 1 Beatle fan" Kolya Vasin has in his life is a record and an autograph he received from John Lennon in 1970.
"This is the first thing I want to have with me when I die," Vasin said, kissing the record. "The Beatles are my life."
These days Vasin is in especially high spirits, just like thousands of other Russian Beatles fans, who are anxiously awaiting former Beatle Paul McCartney's first concert in St. Petersburg on Sunday.
Up to 50,000 people are expected to attend the concert in the city's central Palace Square in front of the State Hermitage Museum during St. Petersburg's famous White Nights.
McCartney will celebrate his 62nd birthday in the city on Friday.
For Vasin, who has dedicated his life to the Beatles, it's a dream come true.
Vasin, 59, has been a fan of The Beatles ever since he first heard them in 1964.
His friend secretly passed him a record and their freshness and freedom of their sound blew his mind.
"It's magical. It's like talking to a God," he said. "The words have something for everybody, but the music is even more important."
He found it hard to live in the regimented lifestyle of Soviet Russia and The Beatles let him escape its confines.
His love of the Fab Four is so great that it has substituted for almost everything in his life, including family, work and even money.
"I have almost never had long-term jobs and I never married because all my time and soul were dedicated to The Beatles," Vasin said, sitting in his richly decorated office at 10 Pushkinskaya Ulitsa in the center of St. Petersburg.
The office, which is also Vasin's apartment, is located in a decaying two-story old building. He calls it the office of John Lennon's Temple, which is what Vasin dreams of turning the building into one day.
The walls and ceilings of the tiny room are covered with posters and pictures of the four mop tops both in The Beatles era and afterward.
The shelves sag under the numerous records, tapes, books, and there are full-size cardboard figures of the boys from Liverpool standing on the floor.
Several models of Lennon's temple-to-be, a Lennon T-shirt, handmade ceramic mugs with Beatle symbols, and self-made fan albums filled with newspaper clippings, pictures, comments and lyrics add to the decor.
"Lennon's fan album is the biggest. It weighs 13 kilograms," Vasin says proudly as the sound of The Beatles hit "All My Loving" fills the air.
Vasin says discovering The Beatles was "a revelation."
"I'm sure it was God who sent them to us. They brought His message to the world - the message of peace, love and freedom," he said. "That message was aimed to unite all people on this planet."
In early 1970s, when the Beatlemania was at its peak, Vasin was a legend in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, because he had every record the Beatles had made.
In those days young people behind the Iron Curtain had to listen to The Beatles secretly.
"Let It Be," "Yesterday," and "Imagine" were branded the demoralizing music of the West, and people listened to them hiding in stranger's apartments and passing records to each other because they couldn't buy them anywhere.
However, in the U.S.S.R., Beatlemania was as strong as anywhere in the world, if not even stronger for being a forbidden fruit.
In 1966, Vasin was one of the first to open his informal The Beatles Club in a communal apartment where he lived with his parents. People came to see the club and him from throughout the Soviet Union.
"I was surprised and happy to have all that unexpected glory," he said.
Vasin said The Beatles changed his character.
"Like many of my compatriots, who lived in the oppressive Soviet atmosphere, I was kind of a scared person with many complexes," he said. "I never had friends.
"The Beatles knocked all that out of me.
"Their music taught me to enjoy life. And they brought many friends into my life."
Vasin said the happiest moment of his life was when he met and hugged his idol Paul McCartney, when the star visited St. Petersburg briefly last year.
"I remember every moment and every word of that meeting, though I couldn't even see him well at that moment. I was so nervous.
"His hug was like the touch of a god." Vasin said every year he and his friends, who are also devoted Beatles fans, celebrate the birthdays of all four Beatles.
"Oct. 9, which is Lennon's birthday, is a holy day for me," he said.
Lennon is his favorite Beatle.
"He is the smartest. He is the most magical one."
And Vasin does not believe that Lennon was assassinated in 1980.
"He lives in the north of Italy in a monastery," he says.
Tears fill his eyes and he refuses to say more.
Vasin, who is a trained architect, said he has almost never worked at a steady job, but has had a series of casual jobs.
"My main occupation was collecting Beatles records and listening to their music."
When there was nothing to eat he went to the fields of state farms and harvested cabbages, or friends helped him out financially, he said.
He never gets tired of listening to The Beatles, and today his passion for them is as strong as it was 40 years ago.
Vasin has about 800 songs recorded by The Beatles and the members of the group after it split up. He also has about 100 books on The Beatles.
Once he was about to bury his precious Lennon record in a forest for safekeeping. It was in Soviet times after the police arrested a friend in the band he played in for giving illegal concerts for money.
"I was afraid they'd get me, too, and wanted to hide the record that way. But then I worried it would get spoiled and hid it at a friend's apartment," he said.
In 1991 when hundreds lobbied for Leningrad's name to revert to St. Petersburg, Vasin put on his only suit and went to the city's toponymic commission and asked for a city street to be named after Lennon. But the authorities refused.
Nowadays Vasin's main purpose is to construct a temple named after Lennon and dedicated to all The Beatles.
The temple, which is to honor The Beatles and serve as a stage for other concerts, is to hold up to 3,000 people. Vasin wants it will be made of stone and have two big balls on the roof, which say "Love" and "Peace".
Former St. Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev gave permission for the construction of such a temple in Yuzhno-Primorsky Park, but Vasin does not have money for the construction.
Vasin said he is not the only big-time fan of The Beatles in the world.
"There are also people who write books about The Beatles all the time," he said.
On the eve McCartney's concert in St. Petersburg, Vasin is preparing to re cieve his idol as a guest, because according to his sources there is a good chance that Sir Paul will visit him.
"I already know what I will wear when he comes to visit me - it will be a T-shirt that says: 'Paul, Welcome Home!' And I already see the picture of how I will turn on a Beatles song and go to open the door of my temple to my dear guest," Vasin said with pride.
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