Back in The U.S.S.R. - Overview

Overview

The song opens and closes with the sounds of a jet aircraft flying overhead and refers to a "dreadful" flight back to the U.S.S.R. from Miami Beach in the United States, on board a B.O.A.C. aeroplane. Propelled throughout by McCartney's uptempo piano playing and lead guitar riffs, the lyrics tell of the singer's great happiness on returning home, where "the Ukraine girls really knock me out" and the "Moscow girls make me sing and shout" (and are invited to "Come and keep your comrade warm"). He also looks forward to hearing the sound of "balalaikas ringing out".

Paul McCartney wrote this song while The Beatles were in Rishikesh, India, learning Transcendental Meditation. The title of the song is a tribute to Chuck Berry's "Back in the U.S.A." while the chorus and background vocals pay homage to the Beach Boys' "California Girls". Mike Love of the Beach Boys also attended the retreat in Rishikesh at the same time; he has stated in interviews that, in order to make the song sound more like a Beach Boys number, he encouraged McCartney to "talk about the girls all around Russia, the Ukraine and Georgia" in the lyrics. The song also contains a pun on Hoagy Carmichael's and Stuart Gorrell's "Georgia on My Mind". McCartney sings about the female population of the Soviet Republic of Georgia ("and Georgia's always on my mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mind") right after "the Ukraine girls" and "Moscow girls." McCartney thought that when he listened to the Beach Boys, it sounded like California, so he decided to write a song that "sounded" like the U.S.S.R. The title was inspired in part by the I'm Backing Britain campaign that had been endorsed by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It has been suggested that McCartney twisted that into "I'm back in (backin') the U.S.S.R."

In his 1984 interview with Playboy, McCartney said:

I wrote that as a kind of Beach Boys parody. And "Back in the USA" was a Chuck Berry song, so it kinda took off from there. I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California, you know? It was also hands across the water, which I'm still conscious of. 'Cause they like us out there, even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not. The kids from there do. And that to me is very important for the future of the race.

"Back in the U.S.S.R." was released by Parlophone as a single in the UK in 1976. It featured the song "Twist and Shout" on Side B. It has since been released as a single backed with "Don't Pass Me By".

During the 1960s, The Beatles were officially derided in the USSR as the "belch of Western culture" and in the 1980s McCartney was refused permission to play there. According to The Moscow Times, when McCartney finally got to play the song at his concert in Moscow's Red Square in May 2003 at the age of 60 "the crowd went wild". When asked about the song before the concert McCartney said he had known little about the Soviet Union when he wrote it. "It was a mystical land then," he said. "It's nice to see the reality. I always suspected that people had big hearts. Now I know that's true." "Finally we got to do that one here," he said after the song.