Twenty years after the release of the song Back in the USSR by the Beatles, ex Beatle Paul McCartney created an album under the same name as a present to the Sovjet Union. The superpower was experimenting with a new form of openness under Gorbachev’s reign. It gave a series of western artist a chance to find a new audience, and of course it was a new market for the record companies.
In 1988 this was a record that was exclusively pressed by Melodiya in Moscow. Those 1988 pressings were only meant for the Russian market, but fans found out soon enough, and the next year bootlegs began to appear. In 1991 it led EMI to release it everywhere else. This copy is either a bootleg or a Russian original. I’m more inclined towards the bootleg.