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

In this groundbreaking volume, Zhuk substantially advances our understanding of the late Soviet Union by exploring the fascinating relationships between youth identity, “western” popular culture, and the Party-state in Dniepropetrovsk. This eastern Ukrainian city, crucial to Soviet rocket production and thus closed to foreigners from 1959, serves as the central case study for this book. The author, who grew up in Dniepropetrovsk, draws on a network of valuable private sources, including interviews and diaries, as well as archival documents and contemporaneous publications. Using these documents, Zhuk argues that Soviet control organs proved unsuccessful in preventing increasingly large segments of young urbanite eastern Ukrainians from rejecting official popular culture and the prescribed youth identity in favor of embracing “western” popular culture and a regionally-informed identity.

The first part of the book examines what the author calls the “beating” 1960s. In this period, the police, Communist Party, and the Komsomol—the mass youth organization—expressed much concern over the cultural consumption of rock’n’roll and “western” films, as well as nationalist Ukrainian literature. Ironically, as Zhuk demonstrates, these phenomena resulted from the post-Stalin leadership’s policies. For the latter, the revelations of Stalin’s efforts in the early 1920s to promote Russian supremacy in the USSR served as a springboard for a national revival among some young intelligentsia. As for “western” popular culture, the opening to the “west” after Stalin’s death resulted in cultural consumption goods such as music records spreading throughout the Soviet Union, and even reaching the closed city of Dniepropetrovsk via L’viv and Moscow. Moreover, while rock’n’roll remained largely unacceptable to officialdom in the 1960s, Komsomol officials in the 1960s “sponsored the spread of jazz as an alternative to the new forms of cultural consumption” (70). Zhuk argues that during the 1960s, cultural consumption of any “western” music, whether jazz or rock’n’-roll, largely involved male intelligentsia.

The second section investigates the “hard-rocking” early 1970s. In this era, “western” music spread to young workers and women of all social groups as British hard-rock bands, especially Deep Purple, appealed to youth masses. In addition, “western” adventure stories and movies increasingly captured the imagination of Dniepropetrovsk youth. The fascination with “western” music led to a turn toward religiosity among a segment of youth who followed the Beatles into East Asian religions or became interested in Christianity due to the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Dniepropetrovsk youth fascinated with “western” popular culture had to acquire their information in Russian, which led to “a gradual Russification of popular culture” (209). The central organs allowed the formation of official Soviet rock groups from the late 1960s with an ideologized repertoire and permitted a limited release of records by “western” bands perceived as sympathetic to the USSR. In the process, they overruled the reluctance of orthodox Dniepropetrovsk bureaucrats to adopt these measures, causing consternation among the latter and a distancing from Moscow. Zhuk posits that a similar distancing occurred among local youth, as despite their Russification, continuing ideological restrictions on cultural consumption coming from Moscow, combined with envy of varied consumption products in the capital, resulted in an increasingly regionalized youth identity.

In the final part of the volume, the lens turns toward disco and punk rock. In the later 1970s, central Komsomol organs sponsored the discotheque movement in an effort to manage youth cultural consumption. These discotheques combined lectures with a mix of “western” music in an attempt to combine entertainment with communist ideology and cultural uplift. However, Komsomol and trade union officials had to get “western” music on the black market, forcing them to act illegally to satisfy demands from above. This proved the springboard for increasingly lucrative connections between black market traders and officials that resulted in a growing cynicism and entrepreneurialism among the latter, who eventually became the founders of prominent Dniepropetrovsk capitalist enterprises, including Yulia Tymoshenko’s...