How Used X-Rays Brought Banned US Music to the USSR

During the Cold War, the USSR condemned Western youth culture and people in the Soviet Union were denied the privilege of listening to Western jazz and rock but Russian youth like young people everywhere wanted to listen to groups such as the Beatles.

Bootleggers began pressing their own records as early as the 1930s but lacked materials so they sought creative materials on which to store the forbidden music. They discovered a material that was both free and readily available: discarded X-ray films fished from hospital dumpsters. 

Records were pressed onto one side of the X-rays and the sound quality was quite low. These homemade records became known as “bone music”. 

An underground network of bone music record distributors popped up, called the roentgenizdat, or X-Ray press. Like the samizdat that reproduced censored publications across the Soviet bloc, the roentgenizdat was soon distributing millions of Western records.

By 1958 the bootleg records were made illegal but photographer József Hajdú has photographed them to share the story of illegal bone music with the rest of the modern world.


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