[Marxism] Article on Dean Reed--"Comrade Rockstar"(Guardian)

["Charlie Parks" <jcparks5550@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From the land of the free...
During the cold war, all-American boy Dean Reed was a huge rock'n'roll star
- behind the iron curtain. He was mobbed in Moscow; Yasser Arafat was a fan.
But in 1986, his body was found in a lake. Was it KGB? CIA? Or did Reed
simply feel he had no place in a post-glasnost world? Reggie Nadelson
reports

Reggie Nadelson
Friday October 29, 2004

The Guardian

In April 1986, I was at home in New York, half watching 60 Minutes, the CBS
news programme, when a piece came on, called The Defector. It was about a
pop star named Dean Reed. He was handsome. He was American. He was singing
Heartbreak Hotel and Tutti Frutti and he was doing it in the Soviet Union,
and this was only the earliest days of glasnost when rockers in Red Square
were not at all commonplace. I'd never even heard of him; I sat up.
It turned out that Reed - unknown in the west - had been a big star in the
Soviet Union and eastern Europe for two decades; he was called the Red
Elvis, the communist Johnny Cash, the man who brought rock 'n' roll to
Russia. He made films, "eastern" westerns, as a singing cowboy. If he was
American, and was he! - the gorgeous thick blond hair, the fabulous big
white teeth, the lithe lean body, the promiscuous smile - he spouted a nifty
Soviet party line. It was an astonishing performance. Six weeks later, he
was dead.

Reed's body was discovered in a lake in east Berlin near the house where he
lived in the suburb of Schmöckwitz. According to Russell Miller, who broke
the story in the Sunday Times, there was plenty of secrecy surrounding
Reed's death. The Berlin wall was still up; the Stasi still ruled the GDR;
news was suppressed and a trickle of fact became a stream of speculation.
Was Reed killed by the Stasi? The KGB? The CIA? Neo-Nazis? Accidental death
by drowning was the official verdict; no one really believed it.

full:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1337866,00.html



_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism