I had no idea this happened. Is it surprising the KGB manipulated this? Back in the US, Back in the US, Back in the USSR:
This is similar to what happens to China's thought criminals, millions of whom have been incarcerated in re-education camps. China still bans Western culture as was the case with the Soviet Union. The Soviet hippies were the sons or daughters of the privileged elite families, who had access to music from the capitalist world and to jeans. The ordinary Russians had never heard capitalist music like the Beatles until the late 1980s, when such tight cultural restrictions were dropped and musicians from the West were allowed to perform in Leningrad and Moscow, which eventually brought down the Soviet Union.