Superstar

In May 1974 a fifteen-year-old high school student from Dnepropetrovsk, Andrei Vadimov, wrote in his diary about a trip his class had taken to the West Ukrainian city of L'viv:

We enjoyed our trip to this city very much! For us, it was like traveling to the real West. In contrast to our home town, L'viv is open to visits from foreigners. So on L'viv's streets we even met American and Canadian tourists who spoke their native language. For me, it was the first time in my life when I saw foreigners and heard them speaking real English, my favorite language, the tongue of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Deep Purple. The best result of our trip was the visit our entire class made (secretly) to L'viv's black market, where seven members of our tourist group, myself included, and our Komsomol ideologist Natasha, bought new British records of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar from Polish tourists. It was great because Ian Gillan, our favourite vocalist from the hard rock band Deep Purple, sings in this rock opera. The Polish tourists also recommended that we buy crosses because we were Gillan's fans, and Gillan sang the part of Christ in the opera.

A month later, after he had returned to Dnepropetrovsk, Andrei noted in his diary that he and his friends could not understand the opera's portrayal of events. They translated its lyrics into Russian and tried to find any information about Jesus Christ in Soviet atheistic literature. In July 1974, Andrei noted triumphantly that "today was a great day for us! My neighbor, Vasia, brought an old Russian Bible he found in his grandmother's room, and we read the Gospels and compared them to the opera lyrics." 

Andrei and his five friends spent all of August 1974 reading the religious text and listening to their favorite rock opera. Driven by curiosity and inspired by their favourite music, they decided to attend a worship meeting of a local Baptist group, where Vasia's grandmother was a member, and for the next year they attended these meetings on a regular basis. In December 1975, however, the police arrested them for participating in "unsanctioned" religious meetings. It turned out that the Baptists who organized these meetings were not registered officially. Only intervention by Andrei's parents saved him and his friends from scandal.