Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970 by Gleb Tsipursky (review)

The title of Gleb Tsipursky’s new study neatly encapsulates what may at first sound like an oxymoron. Where, one could indeed ask, was the place of “fun” in a culture committed to self-sacrificing heroism and the dignity of labor? But as Tsipursky demonstrates, even in the first years of Soviet history, work with young people, despite pressure from “militants” committed to Communist orthodoxy, was to a considerable extent driven by a sense of pragmatic populism. It was simply much easier, and indeed more profitable, to recruit participants in dance evenings than at lectures about the international situation. During the post-Stalin era (with which the book is mainly concerned—five out of its eight chapters deal with the period after 1953), the revival of “enthusiasm” and of ideological fervor did not impede an increasing commitment to the provision of “socialist fun” in the networks of youth clubs and other state-sponsored venues for licensed youth leisure. “The new Soviet leadership. . . regarded pursuit of a wide variety of interests as legitimate and as part of a greatly broadened path towards communism” (151). Despite occasional reassertion of the hard line in 1957, 1962, and 1968, this strategy was broadly consistent, and, as Tsipursky suggests, was in many ways successful. According to his own interviews, enthusiasm for global, particularly American, popular culture proved compatible, at this phase of history, with Soviet patriotism: admiration at one and the same time for Yuri Gagarin and the Beatles did not cause internal conflicts or “cognitive dissonance.”

Youth culture in the Soviet Union is one of the better-researched areas in private life, and Tsipursky’s monograph follows on studies such as Hilary Pilkington’s Russia’s Youth and its Culture: A Nation’s Constructors and Constructed (1994); Anne Gorsuch’s Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (2000); Juliane Fürst’s Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism, 1945–56 (2010); Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever until it Was No More: The “Last” Soviet Generation (2006); and Sergei Zhuk’s Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk (2010), as well as work in Russian by Dmitrii Gromov, Elena Omel’chenko, and others. Tsipursky’s contribution, aside from the ambitious chronological spread, lies in his attention to the institutional work of the Komsomol and other Soviet agencies. Drawing extensively on archival documentation, he gives sustained attention to the club movement, always mentioned, but hitherto not extensively explored. He provides an informative discussion of the planning and realization of the International Festival of Youth in 1957, and discusses the official management of jazz in depth. Tsipursky employs the useful term “conformist agency” to suggest the manner in which young people took advantage of sponsorship, and managed to get their own tastes for, say, jazz music on the agenda of official clubs and “youth cafés,” maneuvering at the boundaries of state control. To sum up his argument, one might say that boundaries were “pushed” if not necessarily broken. Foxtrots and tangos could be gotten past moral arbiters if renamed “slow dances” and “fast dances,” but this was also, of course, a form of domestication; satires of “the twist” made Soviet young people familiar with the dance to begin with, but also conveyed that there was something faintly ridiculous about performing it.

If former studies were often concerned with youth subcultures first and foremost (for instance, the stiliagi in Fürst’s work) and tended to project a metropolitan perspective (Moscow in Fürst, Leningrad in Yurchak), Tsipursky’s book, like Zhuk’s, is valuable for its introduction of provincial material (particularly but not exclusively records from the large industrial city of Saratov). As well as chronological spread, there is a sense of geographical and social diversity here, and there is consideration...