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Youth and rock in the soviet bloc
Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations.
Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union's capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.
eBook
The Ukrainian West : culture and the fate of empire in Soviet Lviv
In 1990, months before crowds in Moscow and other major cities dismantled their monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire inadvertently shaped this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.
Lviv's borderlands identity was defined by complicated relationships with its Polish neighbor, its imperial Soviet occupier, and the real and imagined West. The city's intellectuals—working through compromise rather than overt opposition—strained the limits of censorship in order to achieve greater public use of Ukrainian language and literary expression, and challenged state-sanctioned histories with their collective memory of the recent past. Lviv's post–Stalin-generation youth, to which Risch pays particular attention, forged alternative social spaces where their enthusiasm for high culture, politics, soccer, music, and film could be shared.
The Ukrainian West enriches our understanding not only of the Soviet Union's postwar evolution but also of the role urban spaces, cosmopolitan identities, and border regions play in the development of nations and empires. And it calls into question many of our assumptions about the regional divisions that have characterized politics in Ukraine. Risch shines a bright light on the political, social, and cultural history that turned this once-peripheral city into a Soviet window on the West.
eBook
The Ukrainian West
Months before crowds in Moscow dismantled monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire created this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.
eBook
Soviet 'Flower Children'. Hippies and the Youth Counter-Culture in 1970s L'viv
This article examines the emergence of the 'hippie' movement and responses to it in the western Ukrainian city of L'viv. Hippies in L'viv, like their counterparts in the capitalist West, created alternative social spaces in response to a sense of alienation in the modern industrialized world. Yet this sense of alienation and responses to it significantly differed, due to the postwar transformation of L'viv, efforts by the Communist Party to control all aspects of the public sphere, and national and regional tensions in western Ukraine. As a result, Soviet 'hippies', in rebelling against Soviet society, mirrored many of its features, and to an extent they became associated with elements of national and regional resistance in postwar L'viv. Persecution of hippies and negative perceptions of them furthermore reveal official attitudes toward the 'hippie' movement and certain assumptions about gender roles and the social order in 1970s Soviet society.
Journal Article
Mass Culture and Counterculture
Despite living in a so-called Banderite town, young Lvivians acted on other categories besides the nation. They felt the vibrations of changes throughout the postwar world. Roman Ivanychuk identifies the ferment of the 1960s with the Ukrainian last names of Drach, Dziuba, and Vinhranovskyi. For others, the 1960s were associated with John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Amateur rock artist and later radio producer Ilya Lemko described, with tremendous enthusiasm, the influence the rock music of the Beatles had on him and his school classmates.¹ Global countercultures, including those of hippies, bikers, and by the early 1980s punks, appeared on Lviv’s
Book Chapter
Lviv and Postwar Soviet Politics
The collapse of Communism and Soviet rule in Lviv was not inevitable. It was unexpected. One poet captured the shock and confusion the evening after Lenin’s statue came down. Rushing into a Writers’ Union party, a friend of his announced, “Lenin’s bust is on the ground!” He was greeted with “dead silence.”¹ As they momentarily held their alcohol and sandwiches, these writers and their guests must have thought they were dreaming. Their response suggests Soviet rule, far from being destined to collapse, had created a sense of power and legitimacy very difficult to dispel. Union-wide policies of coercion compelled compliance,
Book Chapter