Ohio State University

Faculty Member, History

Assistant Professor

Arts and Sciences, Newark

Thesis Title: Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Cold War Soviet Union, 1945-1970

About

While mainstream narratives portray official Soviet cultural activities as drab and dreary, I challenge this vision by exploring an untold story of how Soviet authorities tried to build communism and fight the Cold War through state-sponsored entertainment. This included dances, concerts, and shows, held in cultural institutions called clubs, all with mass amateur participation. These clubs provided key public spaces for youth entertainment, socializing, leisure, and romance, thereby constituting a crucial site of everyday life and construction of personal meaning for young people. The Communist Party intended organized cultural events to satisfy youth demands for fun and pleasure, thus fostering its own social legitimacy. Simultaneously, the Party wanted to shape youth cultural consumption desires, aesthetic tastes, and leisure conduct, as a means of transforming young people into model communists. Nonetheless, divergent visions of what constituted appropriately socialist fun inspired struggles over club activities, both within the bureaucracy and between officials and ordinary youth. While a large number of young people expressed a predilection for western popular culture, such as jazz, rock and roll, and western dances, many hard-line officials perceived such western cultural genres as subverting the Cold War’s domestic cultural front. Yet, despite the tensions caused by such differing viewpoints on what constituted truly socialist fun, I argue that Soviet authorities had some success in using club events both to attract and to shape young people. In turn, my research shows that youth found much pleasure in clubs, even while they sometimes adapted official cultural provision to meet their own values and desires.

An investigation of the top-level policy shifts on club activities from 1945 to 1968 forms one key component of my study. In the late 1940s, the Kremlin launched the anticosmopolitan campaign, a hard-line initiative demanding ideological militancy. This policy called on clubs to purge jazz and western dances from their offerings in order to marshal the populace for the Cold War. With V. I. Stalin’s death in 1953 and the beginning of a period known as the Thaw, the new Soviet leaders under N. S. Khrushchev introduced a less militant cultural policy, approving a limited degree of jazz and western dancing. At the same time, officials clashed over how much western cultural influence a truly communist culture could bear. An inquiry into these struggles further erodes traditional assumptions of a static official Soviet culture and a unified officialdom. My findings also suggest that the Thaw-era Soviet state sought to build a socialist alternative to a western modern consumer society as a means of constructing communism and fighting the Cold War on the domestic cultural front. This model of a socialist consumer society aimed not only to satisfy cultural and material consumption desires, but also to shape mass consumer tastes and mobilize grassroots activism for building the communist future.

By grounding the Party’s cultural guidelines in the everyday experience of the clubs, I illuminate the challenges in enacting top-level policies in the Soviet context. Most intriguing is the gap between the Kremlin’s intentions and ground-level actions in limiting western culture during periods of hard-line militancy. Western cultural forms enjoyed immense popularity among Soviet youth. Consequently, club managers had a strong incentive to host western music and dancing, as selling tickets to these activities enabled clubs to fulfill the obligatory financial plans. My work, therefore, underlines the contradictions between ideology and consumption within the Soviet system of official cultural production. Furthermore, my close comparison of Moscow with Saratov, a mid-size provincial Russian city, reveals surprising insights. During periods when western popular culture faced attacks from the Kremlin, urbanites in the provinces often had greater access to jazz, rock’n’roll, and western dancing, since ideological control institutions functioned more efficiently in the center and had a weaker reach in the provinces.

Finally, I explore actual youth cultural practices in the club network, which illustrates the variety of youth identities and cultural tastes in the USSR. Many young people enthusiastically participated in organized cultural activities, both as amateur performers and as event organizers. Of these, a large number enjoyed non-controversial club events, such as traditional folk dances and patriotic songs. At the same time, many young fans of jazz, rock’n’roll, and western dances stood on the front lines of the struggle to advance these cultural forms in the face of conservative opposition. My findings show how both conformist and more daring youth maneuvered to satisfy their own personal cultural desires and engage in pleasurable entertainment, underlining the space available both for youth fun and for popular agency in official Soviet contexts. Furthermore, by positing that enthusiastic youth participation in conformist club activities constituted a form of agency, my study departs from scholarship that equates agency with resistance. I therefore argue for the need to look closely at the elements of agency in the behavior of the large number of young people who did not depart from the Soviet cultural mainstream.

My project draws on a wide variety of original sources, many previously untapped by historians. To get at the Kremlin’s guidelines for club activities, I mined Russia central archives and national newspapers. Regional archives, city-level papers, and other local publications in Saratov and Moscow revealed the implementation of top-level policies. In analyzing the perspectives of young people themselves, I used memoirs, diaries, letters to the press, and also conducted fifty-seven interviews with former youth on their experiences in club activities.

This study evolved out of my dissertation, entitled “Power, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Communism: Youth and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Early Cold War Soviet Union, 1945-1968.” In revising my dissertation into a monograph, I plan to make my book more relevant to a broader audience of scholars and educated general readers interested in the Cold War. For instance, I intend to trace how specific American and western European foreign policies impacted the effectiveness of western propaganda in the USSR. Likewise, I want to tease out the channels of mutual cultural interaction and impact between US and western European youth and Soviet youth, including youth festivals, music group tours, and other types of cultural exchanges. This would make my book more appealing to those interested in US and western European cultural history. I plan to put a broader emphasis on the role of emotions such as joy and enthusiasm involved in organized cultural activities, to speak to the growing body of scholarship on the history of emotions. Finally, my book will devote more attention to youth romance within the context of official cultural activities, and thus engage with gender and sexuality studies.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: “Ideology, Enlightenment, and Entertainment: State-Sponsored Culture, 1917-46”
Chapter 2: “The Anticosmopolitan Campaign, 1947-53: Part 1, Ideologizing the Repertoire”
Chapter 3: “The Anticosmopolitan Campaign, 1947-53: Part 2, Purging the Repertoire”
Chapter 4: “The Campaign for State-Sponsored Culture in the Early Thaw, 1953-56”
Chapter 5: “Youth Initiative and Youth Initiative Clubs in the Thaw, 1953-64”
Chapter 6: “The Hard-Line Shift and the Aesthetic Upbringing Campaign, 1956-1958”
Chapter 7: “Organized Cultural Activities during the Socialist Sixties, 1958-1968”

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