Memories of a Different Planet: Roentgenizdat

From Wikipedia, photo by Dmitry Rozhkov of display “Rock on bones” in Gallery “Vinzavod”, Moscow (2008)

My father Vladimir was remarking yesterday about an item from his youth in the USSR: People wanted to hear Western music (such as jazz and rock), but the Soviet authorities wouldn’t allow it to be distributed. One could sometimes hear it on foreign shortwave broadcasts, but how to record it? And if one could get a smuggled foreign LP, how to duplicate it? Consumer tape recorders were generally unavailable. People had record players, and some people managed to cobble together recording machines for LPs. But the standard recording medium—vinyl—wasn’t available to ordinary consumers.

So people would record instead on used X-rays, such as the ones you can see above. The story made its way into the West some time ago; there’s a recent book on the subject, Bone Music: Soviet X-Ray Audio, and an accompanying web site. Here’s an excerpt from the site:

The bootleggers’ first technical problem, that of obtaining a machine to record with was relatively straightforward. Literature existed explaining audio recording techniques (say in case a righteous citizen wanted to copy the speeches of Comrade Stalin) and various recording machines had been brought back from Germany as trophies after the second world war. These could be adapted or copied, but a further problem existed. The State completely controlled the means of manufacturing records. You couldn’t just go and buy the vinyl or shellac or lacquer needed in a store somewhere.

But at some point, some enterprising music lover hit on a genius idea. An alternative source of raw materials was available – used X-ray plates obtained from local hospitals. And that is where this story really begins. For many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing strange vinyl type discs when they were young.

The discs had partial images of skeletons on them and were called ‘Bones’ or ‘Ribs’ and they contained wonderful music, music that was forbidden. The practice of copying and recording music onto X-rays really got going in St Petersburg, a port where it was … easier to obtain illicit records from abroad. But it spread, first to Moscow and then to most major conurbations throughout the states of the Soviet Union.

The term “Roentgenizdat” is of course cognate to “samizdat.” “Samizdat” was a combination of “self-” (“sam”) and the first two syllables of “publishing house” (“izdatel’stvo”). The “sam” was replaced by “Рентген,” often anglicized as “Roentgen,” which is the root for all things X-ray in Russian (after the discoverer of X-rays, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen).