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

Historians of late Soviet socialism are challenged to answer the question of why the Soviet system, full of paradoxes and hardships for the population, survived for such a long time. Following Alexei Yurchak, Kristin Roth-Ey, and other scholars who started to take a closer look at Soviet life under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Gleb Tsipursky points to the fact that the viability of the socialist state depended, not least, on its ability to mobilize young people in favor of the Soviet project. In this context, Socialist Fun highlights the key role of what the author calls "state-sponsored popular culture." The trade unions and the Komsomol managed a network of clubs all over the Soviet Union where youngsters were offered opportunities to develop their amateur artistic creativity (theater, dance, music), to practice sports, listen to lectures, make friends and "have fun." For the Soviet leadership, these clubs were a central venue for building the "New Soviet (Young) Person" (p. 7). Here, officially prescribed values and tastes could be promoted while convincing young people that the system was in line with their desires and interests.

The author scrutinizes the development of this club network from 1945 to 1970, focusing on the tension between the leadership's attempts to control young people, on the one hand, and to encourage grassroots initiatives, on the other. By contrasting the examples of Moscow and the provincial city of Saratov (which was closed to nonsocialist foreigners), the author analyzes how top-level youth policies were negotiated in the process of their implementation. He raises the question of autonomous agency for not only young urban club-goers, but also club managers who were supposed to both implement official cultural policies and offer an appealing program that entertained the audience and satisfied people's consumption desires, including that for elements of western popular culture.

The study draws on an impressive range of sources, such as documents from central and local archives, newspapers, memoirs, diaries and sixty interviews with former activists and functionaries conducted by the author himself. The eight chapters of the book follow a chronological order, showcasing shifts in Soviet cultural policies, significant influences (as manifested, for example, in the emergence of Soviet "Jazz enthusiasts"), or key events (such as the 1957 International Youth Festival in Moscow).

Within his investigation period, the author distinguishes between different regimes of official dealings with youth. During late Stalinism, club activities were strongly politicized, urging those who enjoyed them to express a high degree of "conformist agency" (p. 43). In contrast, post-Stalin authorities under Khrushchev put more emphasis on entertainment and encouraged young people to actively participate in shaping cultural life in the clubs. After the new sense of youth involvement and youth optimism had suffered setbacks already in several hardline turns since the late 1950s, the Brezhnev administration returned to stricter control and limited opportunities for grassroots initiatives. In doing so, it abandoned key aspects of the "Thaw-era model of socialist fun" (p. 223) and alienated the young generation from the system again. However, the authorities carried on with their attempts to satisfy popular desires, allowing even more western popular culture than under Khrushchev.

Based on his interest in "state-sponsored popular culture," the author claims to make a number of innovative historiographic interventions. One of them is to disrupt the traditional fixation on intellectual elites and nonconformist youth. Instead, the under-researched cultural practices of average young Soviet citizens are the centre of attention. This focus makes evident that a majority of young people did have fun within the socialist structures and enjoyed themselves in official institutions, even if exposed to political propaganda. It also becomes clear that many young people did not perceive their consumption of officially disparaged western music or western-like fashion as opposed to their communist commitment. Following recent scholarship, Tsipursky sheds additional light on the fact that...