Inevitably one furrows a brow (or two) at a jumped-up subtitle promising an “incredible true story,” but David Junk delivers the goods in “Rockin’ the Kremlin,” a jaunty, picaresque memoir by the man who claims to have introduced the first American record label into post- Soviet Russia.

Junk, a tractor-driving farm boy from London, Ohio, was a Pink Floyd fan who got rock-and-roll religion at Roger Waters’s famous concert in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz in 1990, eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At that show, Cyndi Lauper sang “Another Brick in the Wall” to an audience of half a million. Van Morrison played, backed up by the East German Air Force Band. “It was a great, celebratory night for being free,” Junk remembers (writer Fred Bronson helps him tell the story). “We could see the world coming together at last.”

After a brief stint unknowingly peddling “dirty diamonds” for a shadowy Russian purveyor, Junk got a job as the Moscow-based financial controller for PolyGram Records. When Universal acquired PolyGram in 1998, he lucked into a list of clients that Young Russians were thirsting for. When Junk naively pitched MTV Russia on the Irish boy band Boyzone, the response was: “Our kids want to hear Dr. Dre.” Soon, Junk remembers, “we were selling massive quantities of albums by Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, 2Pac, the Game, and 50 Cent.”

To be fair, post-Stalinist Russia had always known how to rock-and-roll. Timothy Ryback’s memorable book “Rock Around the Bloc” recounted how Elton John famously shook Moscow way back in 1979, playing “Back in the USSR” despite being expressly told not to. Just over a decade later, while the Soviet Union was falling apart, Metallica played one of the largest rock concerts of all time before 1.6 million fans at a military airfield in Moscow.

Junk does tell some incredible and apparently true stories. He spent many of his years in Moscow combating piracy. He estimates that 90 percent of the CDs sold in Russia were pressed illegally, sometimes by mafia operations protected by the Russian military. Out of the blue, one Russian gangster approached Junk with the idea of releasing some legitimate CDs, paying Universal for its copyrights. Not long after, this prospective partner turned up dead outside his Moscow office, shot three times in the head. After that, “it was back to 90 percent piracy and criminal control of the music market — business as usual in Russia,” Junk writes.

Eager to climb the corporate ladder, Junk understood that promoting local talent would enhance his stature within Universal. He landed his two-girl band t.A.T.u. on NBC’s “Tonight Show” in 2003. The teenage pair, Julia Volkova and Lena Katina, had agreed not to kiss onstage during the performance, but they did anyway — take that, Sir Elton! Only after the show did numerous Russian viewers inform NBC that the girls were also wearing T-shirts that proclaimed an obscenity in Cyrillic. (The phrase was criticizing America’s war in Iraq.) NBC blackballed the duo, but its album sales “skyrocketed,” Junk says.

The book ends with a where-are-they-now coda explaining how various Russian pop stars responded to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. One talent Junk had tried to sign, the Brezhnev-era warhorse Alla Pugacheva (whose status he compares to Barbra Streisand), condemned the invasion and left Russia for Israel. Another carryover from the Soviet era, Andrey Makarevich of Time Machine, wrote a song called “My Country Has Gone Insane,” and was promptly banned from TV and had his concerts canceled.

They and a few others willing to risk their careers were exceptional, Junk writes; “most have been silent.”

Junk occasionally veers into gee-whiz mode, but it’s more often affecting than off-putting. When he gets written up in Billboard, he gushes: “I had finally made it after leaving the farm in Ohio.” While rubbing shoulders with “Romanian celebrities” at the Golden Stag Festival in Transylvania, he says, “It was the moments like this that made me realize I had one of the greatest jobs in the world.”

Traveling in Western Ukraine last year, Junk heard a Russian propaganda broadcast that claimed young people were hiding from the military draft “because of thirty years of Western pop music and culture.” “I was overcome with vindication,” Junk writes. “At that moment I realized that what I had done for the past thirty years in Russia had mattered. ... I was able to plant the seeds that will lead Russian youth to rise up, stop the war, and take their country back from the Kremlin.”

That’s a lot of historical freight to load on a guy who once arranged for an oil oligarch’s daughter to record a duet with Enrique Iglesias — but they say it isn’t bragging if you’ve done it.

Music industry executive and cultural ambassador David Junk, and veteran music journalist Fred Bronson, have combined their talents to write a fast-moving, information-rich narrative about the intersections between politics and pop culture behind the Iron Curtain.
Their book will probably appeal to readers who want a behind the scenes look at the music industry in Putin’s Russia and a rare view of the powerful forces that spawn and prohibit the birth and proliferation of singers, songwriters, and their fans in a nation where freedom of expression and the First Amendment are not taken for granted.
He ends his book with the “hope” that by bringing “Western pop culture to the former Soviet Union,” he was “able to plant the seeds that will lead Russian youth to rise up, stop the war, and take their country back from the Kremlin.

What’s the link between an American record label executive and the war in Ukraine? In this book, Junk, the former head of Universal Music Russia, ponders that question as he returns from a visit to Ukraine following the 2022 Russian invasion. This intriguing memoir, written with the help of journalist Bronson (The Jacksons), details a peculiarly capitalistic adventure in Russia following the fall of the USSR, from the heady early days of American corporations exploring a veritable gold rush of new markets through the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Some readers may view Junk’s lens as somewhat narrow, yet it’s wider than one might think due to his having to deal with both the Russian government and the criminal underworld just to do business. Junk’s successes include mitigating music piracy in Russia, the international breakout of pop stars t.A.T.u, and helping to establish a distinctly Ukrainian music industry. How much difference these made will be for history to decide.
VERDICT An absorbing illustration of the mutuality of music and politics. For musicians, business people in the music industry, and readers interested in the intersection of politics and art.

Junk, former CEO of Universal Music in Moscow, collaborated with music journalist Bronson to create a fascinating, nicely paced memoir charting the rise and, sadly, eventual fall, of Junk’s fortunes in Russia's music industry as he attempted to open the doors to international music acts (Elton John, Mariah Carey, Bon Jovi) and open world markets for Russian acts following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Junk’s journey from idealistic, young American rock 'n' roller to hard-tested music industry vet is peppered with encounters with myriad shady characters. When Junk began working in Russia in the early 1990s, he writes, the country was as “chaotic, corrupt, and dangerous [as] Chicago was in the 1930s.” Still, Junk scores a number of notable successes, introducing hip hop to Russia, convincing rising Russian pop star Alsou to go to the Eurovision Song Contest, and nurturing t.A.T.u., an act that attained international fame and became the biggest-selling Russian artists of their time. Putin, his increasingly authoritarian rule, and Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine cast a shadow, yet Junk’s accomplishments inspired hopes of what might be again in some future, freer Russia.

Music industry veteran Junk debuts with an energetic chronicle of his crusade to bring popular Western music to post-Soviet Russia. Inspired by the end of the Cold War, the author moved to Moscow in the early 1990s aiming to topple “the old Soviet music industry” in favor of one befitting the “new Russia.” At Polygram Records and then Universal Music Russia (where he eventually became CEO), Junk dealt with “gangster capitalism”; rampant music piracy; powerful oligarchs; and the Russian Orthodox Church’s antagonism toward pro-LGBTQ musical acts, most notably the Russian girl group t.A.T.u. Along the way, he scoured the radio, music competitions, and MTV Russia to discover top-selling talent including Alsou and Smash!! (Russia’s boy band answer to Wham!). Despite overselling things a bit when he implies that hip-hop’s rise in the aughts ushered in the “sounding defeat of communism by free market principles and business know-how,” Junk draws sharp insights into the musical traditions that coincided with the development of Russian rap, including the country’s electronic dance scene. It’s an exciting and colorful look at a dynamic period in Russia’s cultural history.

“I led an American pop music invasion… to Russia. It was too loud and brash, like rock ’n’ roll—these words from David Junk impressed and inspired me. He tries to find meaning behind the cause to which he devoted over three decades of his life—bringing America and Russia closer together after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Visiting my homeland, Ukraine, David questions if dedicating these thirty years was in vain. His story is captivating.”