Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (review)

Historian Sergei Zhuk’s often fascinating, thoroughly researched study of the “closed” Soviet city of Dniepropetrovsk makes a valuable contribution to the study of late Soviet society and culture. He opposes what he rightly identifies as the dominant Moscow and Leningrad bias of most scholars by examining an intriguing, and in many respects sui generis, “provincial” Soviet city. Located in eastern Ukraine, Dniepropetrovsk represented “the most important part of the Soviet military-industrial complex” (p. 18), as the missiles designed and manufactured at its Yuzhmash factory were used for both space exploration (Sputniks) and military purposes (nuclear weapons). Unlike Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, or other major Soviet cities, in 1959 it became “closed,” meaning it was off-limits to foreigners, including visitors from other socialist countries. Yuzhmash even had an official “cover”: manufacturing agricultural tractors and kitchen equipment (p. 21). Its citizenry operated under unusually comprehensive oversight and in many respects was more beholden to Moscow than to local Ukrainian governance. Yet, as Zhuk discusses in detail, Western influences— literature, film, and popular music— streamed in nonetheless through a variety of sources, among them foreign radio stations and a thriving black market linking Dniepro petrovsk with other nearby “open” cities, chief among them the Western (and “Westernized”) Ukrainian city of Lviv.

These cultural influences and their ramifications for national identity, religious practice, political beliefs, and changing tastes form Zhuk’s central subject. “The main goal of this book,” he writes, “is to show how an obsession with cultural products from the West revealed the most important trend in closed Soviet society—the Westernization of Soviet popular culture and Soviet ideological discourse not only in the capital cities but also in the provinces” (p. 9). He later elaborates upon the “book’s main themes” as “the construction of the local idea of the West through the consumption of Western cultural products, and the inclusion of this ideal in the identity formation of Dniepropetrovsk’s youth” (p. 16). In arguing his thesis, Zhuk addresses a range of cultural objects wider than his title suggests: popular music receives the most constant attention, but films and literature, including foreign fiction as well as Ukrainian nationalist writing, also receive focused attention. Beyond specialists in musicology and ethnomusicology the book will be of interest primarily to cultural historians and social scientists of the former USSR and its successor states, although scholars of global cold war culture will also benefit from the comparative possibilities Zhuk’s case study affords.

Zhuk examines the entire late Soviet period: his three larger sections move decade by decade from the Khrushchev Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s (part 1: The “Beating” 1960s) through Brezhnev’s Stagnation in the late 1960s and 1970s (part 2: The Hard-Rocking 1970s) to the beginning of Perestroika in 1985 (part 3: The “Disco Era”). Each section is subdivided into several relatively compact chapters, each of which focuses on a single medium (literature, film, popular music) and/or issue (nationalism, religion, tourism, human rights). The examples in these chapters are selected thoughtfully, and although often very meticulous and sometimes filled with dense statistics, the discussion never really becomes bogged down.

Zhuk’s richly textured account reveals not only the increasing Westernization and Russification of Dniepropetrovsk’s youth culture but also the near constant tensions between center and periphery—between local, republic, and all-Union factions— over the goings-on in the city. For example, informed by official musicological evaluations, local authorities waged a battle against Western popular music in the 1970s, only to be shocked by directives from Moscow near the end of the decade ordering official activities to include more rock music (pp. 103–04, see also pp. 256– 57). Similar discrepancies arose regarding literature (Honchar’s Sobor, pp. 53–60), punk music (“fascist punk,” p...