The Beatles, the Beatles Generation, and the End of the Cold War

Abstract

An effort to rationalize history brought the Western world to perceive the “velvet,”“bloodless” revolutions that swept Eastern Europe as arising from the fact that people there had become painfully aware of the conditions in which they lived and the shortcomings of the system they had built. The author of this article argues instead that it was those young East Europeans who early in childhood failed to fall in love with the social system in large numbers who, when they finally came of age, put an end to the Cold War, and not because they were dissatisfied with the economic conditions, but because they wanted to put an end to the world’s East-West division. But how could people with “different” minds grow up inside the communist system, and how could they miss going through the standard process of communist socialization? To answer these questions, the author explores the hypothesis that Beatlemania, along with The Beatles themselves, may have contributed in a significant way to the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe.