Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Soviet version)

In the Soviet Union, The Beatles were banned. Owning an original album could mean expulsion from university, losing the right to travel, or even imprisonment. And yet millions of young Soviets listened to them — through smuggling, through X-rays with music pressed onto them, through cassette tapes copied hundreds of times.

Then came Andrei Tropillo, a producer from Leningrad who created his own pirate record label: Antrop. Tropillo released unofficial versions of Western albums with covers completely redesigned in Cyrillic in order to bypass copyright laws.

On the Soviet cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, Tropillo did something extraordinary: he placed his own face among the crowd of famous figures behind the Beatles. Next to himself, he added the face of Kolya Vasin, the band’s most famous Russian fan. Karl Marx was replaced with Vasin. All the song titles were translated into Russian.

It was an act of piracy disguised as an act of love. A tribute to a band your government hated, signed with your own face on their album cover.

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