Rock and roll and th.. - Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University

ROCK AND ROLL AND THE END OF SOVIET SOCIALISMSergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City. The West, Identity and Ideology in SovietDniepropetrovsk, 1960-85 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010).Peter RutlandTransitions Online, 11 April 2011.There is a striking scene in John Reed‟s classic account of the October revolution, Ten Days That Shookthe World. Reed is headed towards the main post office, the site of a last-ditch defense by anti-Bolshevikmilitary cadets. As he turns into Pochtamskaya street off Nevsky Prospect, he notices a line of people bythe side of the road. What were they doing? Queuing to see the latest Charlie Chaplin comedy.The relationship between „historic‟ events and popular culture is something that historians struggle tocalibrate. Political scientists still pay almost no attention to the impact of popular culture on politicalchange, apart from speculation about say “Twitter revolutions.”Sergei Zhuk‟s innovative book, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, opens up a whole new field of enquiry,one that raises fundamental questions about what we really know about how the Soviet Union worked.There have been worthy studies of rock music in the Soviet Union in the past, but what distinguishesZhuk‟s account is the breath of material he has been able to assemble in documenting the deep rootswhich the rock culture sunk into the society of “developed socialism.”Zhuk sets out to track the spread of Western pop and rock music in the 1960s-80s, based on the case studyof Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine – the city in which he grew up, before emigrating to the US in the1990s. He combines personal recollections with archival research and over 100 interviews withparticipants in the city‟s rock sub-culture. The archival materials tapped include not only the records ofthe local KGB, tasked with keeping the phenomenon under control, but also half-a-dozen diaries kept byschoolchildren at the time. (Some were written, for example, when their teachers made them keep arecord of what books they read and movies they watched over the summer.)Dnipropetrovsk is a particularly interesting case for such a study. A city of a million people, it was thesite of the Soviet Union‟s main rocket factory, Yuzhmash, and was closed to foreigners after 1957. It ismore representative of the vast Soviet hinterland than the privileged cities of Moscow and Leningrad,home to most Russian intellectuals writing about cultural history, and the places best known to Westernhistorians. At the same time, because Dnipropetrovsk was a vibrant urban center with a highconcentration of educated professionals and students, it had the critical mass to create a vibrant youth subcultureof its own.The picture that emerges is of a Soviet society much more dynamic than the drab regimentation andprivation captured by „stagnation,‟ the term usually used to describe the years 1964-82 when LeonidBrezhnev was Communist Party general secretary. Zhuk impishly suggests that the „stagnation‟ term wasdeliberately deployed by Mikhail Gorbachev‟s propaganda machine to suggest that nothing much washappening until he came to power. (p. 11) Zhuk contrasts his approach with the recent influential work ofAlexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).Whereas Yurchak tends to portray Soviet people as passivelyconforming, leading to a widening gap between daily life and official ideology, Zhuk argues that theimpact of rock culture was more directly transformatory. (p. 13) It served to reshape the very character ofSoviet life and directly forged a new young business elite, one that would lead the charge to capitalismonce given the window of opportunity by Mikhail Gorbachev‟s perestroika.

Rock and roll seeped into the Soviet Union through Western radio broadcasts beginning in the 1950s.Technological changes, notably reel-to-reel and then cassette recorders, accelerated the pace ofdissemination in the 1960s. Zhuk also notes the pivotal early role of booths in music stores that enabledpeople to cut their own short records – initially intended for birthday greetings. (p. 82) There was athriving black market in albums bought from foreign tourists or on trips abroad to socialist bloc countrieslike Hungary. East Germany actually released its own Beatles compilation in 1965. Later, localenthusiasts even created their own radio stations to broadcast rock music to their neighborhood. By theearly 1970s KGB records indicate that there were 500 cases per year of rebroadcast rock inDnipropetrovsk alone. (p. 67)In 2009 the BBC released an endearing documentary by Leslie Woodhead called How the Beatles Rockedthe Kremlin. The Beatles were certainly widely listened to, and dissecting Beatles lyrics was atransformational experience for many young Russians. (Vladimir Putin‟s favorite Beatles number,apparently, was Yesterday – p. 346.) However, Zhuk argues that the main driver of the rock culture wasnot the Beatles, still less balladeers such as Bob Dylan, but dance music. This included hard rock groupslike Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple (President Dmitri Medvedev‟s own personal favorite) and British andEuropean disco groups of still more questionable taste, such as Slade and Boney M. Jesus ChristSuperstar was an underground hit, stimulating an interest in reading the Gospels. Part of its appeal wasthe fact that Jesus was sung by Deep Purple‟s Ian Gillan. (p. 203) The Lord does indeed move inmysterious ways.The1970s saw a democratization of rock culture as music moved into dance clubs run by colleges andfactories, including proletarian technical schools (PTUs). (p. 176) By 1972 there were 50 palaces ofculture in Dnipropetrovsk, each with it own rock band playing covers of Western hits. The first disco waslaunched at Moscow State University in 1972. The initial format, copied elsewhere, was a one hourlecture about the featured musicians, in order to qualify as a socialist educational program, followed bythree hours of dance music. (p. 215) By 1978 there were 187 discos in Moscow alone. Latvia became aleader in the disco sub-culture, organizing a national DJ contest in 1976. In both Riga andDnipropetrovsk, it was major defense industry plants (VEF and Yuzhmash respectively) that took the leadin establishing disco clubs – since they had the requisite financial and technical resources, and a degree ofpolitical autonomy. (p. 223) Again, note how Zhuk‟s research potentially turns conventional wisdom onits head. The Soviet defense complex (the VPK) was not simply a reactionary force, an obstacle to Sovietdevelopment, but also a crucible of social change.Zhuk also discusses the impact of Western rock on efforts by intellectuals to revive Ukrainian culture.There were some efforts at syncretism – such as a Ukrainian language version of the Dutch disco hitVenus, with lyrics about Cossacks killing Turks. (p. 93) But in general Zhuk argues that at least in eastUkraine Russification increased as a by-product of this Westernization, since many of the discs camefrom Moscow or the Baltics, and the few discussions about Western singers that were available on theradio or in music magazines were published in the Russian language, such as Rovesnik magazine. (ch.13)Zhuk extends the discussion of popular culture beyond music to include literature and movies. Chapter 7review the “book boom” – the typical Soviet family would own 100 volumes, with Western authors suchas James Fenimore Cooper being among the favorites. (p. 113) The profound impact of Western movies isdiscussed in Chapter 8. Soviet censors severely limited the number of Western movies approved forgeneral release, confining their selection to movies with a politically correct plot, such as Spartacus. (p.161) Westerns such as the Magnificent Seven and Mckenna’s Gold were big hits, while one Japanese judosaga was so popular, stimulating a surge of copy-cat youth gangs, that it led to a ban on karate clubs in the1970s. A Danish gangster comedy, Freddy, triggered scuffles among customers queuing to buy tickets in1969. (p 151) Also popular were French farces featuring the Fantomas character. (It‟s probably fair to saythat most American or British readers have never heard of Freddy or Fantomas.) Soviet historical epics

were boring in comparison with racy French epics. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines wasa wild success and its sequel, The Great Race, sold an astonishing 76 million tickets in the Soviet Union.By 1966 50 percent of the films shown in Dnipropetrovsk came from the West, rising to an astonishing 80percent in 1975. Why did the Soviet Union open the door to Western „subversion‟ in this way? One factorwas simple economics. Movie theaters were losing customers to Soviet television – but Soviet TV nevershowed Western movies. So theaters loaded up on Western films in order to fill seats and meet their salesplan targets. Try as it might, the centrally planned economy just could not suppress consumer desires andthe logic of supply and demand.The kind of West portrayed in French farces and Hollywood Westerns bore only a tangential relationshipto Western reality. But that was not the point. Soviet youth invented their own imaginary West andincorporated it into their daily lives – from the posters on their walls to the games they played in thecourtyards. (p. 169) Western culture was attractive not so much because of the lavish creature comforts ondisplay, but because of the easy, carefree daily life that was reflected in movies and songs of the era. TheAndropov period (1982-84) saw a crackdown on punk on the (mistaken) grounds that it was a fascistmovement. (ch 14) By then rock and roll had been joined in Soviet popular consciousness by anotherWestern import – human rights. Zhuk cites the case of a KISS collector invoking his human rights underthe Helsinki Accords. (p. 277)One important factor behind the spread of the rock culture was the fact that official organizations like theYoung Communist League could make serious money from operating dance clubs. The leading club inDnipropetrovsk, Melodiya, was making 60,000 rubles profit per month by the 1980s (equal to $60,000 atthe official exchange rate, maybe $10,000 at the black market rate). (p. 229) There developed a curioussynergy between official youth organizations and the black market, with the latter supplying records forthe former. (p. 256) This synergy grew up over several decades, and provided the foundation for the takeoffinto capitalism that began under Gorbachev. In Dnipropetrovsk, Zhuk reports, nine out of 10 of thecity‟s top businessmen of the 1990s came out of the Komsomol disco network, including future primeminister Yulia Tymoshenko.Zhuk‟s work reveals that the Soviet Union was a dynamic and developing society in which manyindividuals sought opportunities to assert their individuality and pursue their interests. The Iron Curtainwas a serious barrier to the physical movement of goods and people, but it was porous to the electromagneticspectrum and to the ideas carried therein. Moreover, the network of social institutions wassufficiently complex to allow some collective action in pursuit of these interests. Soviet ideology lost itsgrip over Soviet society, and over Soviet elites, because its empty categories belonged to an abstract, 19thcentury world – a world that looked less attractive than the imaginary West conjured up by teenagers intheir bedrooms and clubs, listening to rock music and watching Western movies.