In the years after World War II, the Soviet Union tightly controlled what music its citizens could listen to. State radio only played approved music, and Western songs, especially jazz and rock and roll, were treated as a threat to socialist values.
In Leningrad, a small group of resourceful music fans found a workaround. They built homemade recording machines and used discarded X-ray films to make copies of smuggled records. This quietly spread banned sounds across the country for nearly two decades.
This gallery traces the history of these forbidden records and the risks involved for those making and trading them. Click to learn more.