NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

AAASS Conference Panel Series: Rocking the Bloc: Rock Music and Youth Identities in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Gleb Tsipursky, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Youth led alternative lifestyles in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe as well as western Europe and America, a fact increasingly apparent in a cresting wave of ongoing investigations on this topic. A three-part panel series at the 40^th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, organized by Kate Transchel and William J. Risch, illustrated some of the promising research on the intersection between youth identities, rock music, and government policies in these regions.

The first panel united three papers straddling the geographical space of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1965-1985 period. Venelin I. Ganev explored the borsa, a surprisingly public black market for hard rock in the streets of Sofia, Bulgaria in the 1980s. He made the point that the participants of the borsa deliberately rejected communist ideology and adopted an alternative hierarchy of status and mores. Nonetheless, the police did not repress the black market because they focused on other targets, as well as the opportunity for bribes from rock music sellers. In his presentation on rock music in the 1970s-80s Soviet Russia, Christoper J. Ward focused on the young workers constructing the monumental Baikal-Amur Mainline railway. The Soviet state strove to provide engaging youth leisure to these builders via investing into state-sponsored, and controlled, musical groups and concert venues. Still, plenty of youth preferred “western” rock songs to Soviet home-grown varieties, which Ward posits highlights the Brezhnev years as an “Era of Stagnation.” William J. Risch compared the hippie scene in Lviv and Wroclaw, 1965-1980, spanning the divide between the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. The paper carefully highlighted regional differences, showing that hippies in Lviv had a harder time in practicing their lifestyle due to state-imposed limitations. Still, Risch argues that the youth who turned to hippism to deal with social alienation remained a product of late socialist society and coexisted with it in both Ukraine and Poland.

In the second part of this series, panelists shed a light on the post-Soviet transition by tracing breaks and continuities of alternative youth lifestyles from the 1980s to the present. Presenting on the general evolution of such lifestyles, Gregory R. Kveberg argued that the image of the “West” served as a crucial reference point. After the Soviet demise, groups like the goths who had clear models to follow in a “western” context, easily took advantage of the new openness to link to the international goth scene. Some other alternative lifestyles, which contained more native Russian elements, had to determine a new, more complex relationship to the “West,” characterized by ambivalence and occasionally outright rejection. Stephen Amico traced the career of Zhanna Aguzarova, the first female star in the male-dominated rock scene of the early 1980s, who eventually reached widespread fame after 1991. The presenter highlighted the transgressive elements of the singer's style – her eclectic musical styles, outrageous clothing, unbalanced psychological state, ambiguous sexual identity – and suggested that it was exactly such transgression which made Aguzarova beloved among the Russian gay community, a group on the margins of Russian society.

The final panel turned back the clock to the 1945-65 period, and again reached across geographical boundaries. Looking at Poland and East Germany, David G. Tompkins analyzed the government's efforts to offer “socialist” music as a means of distracting youth away from the escalating popularity of western European and American music in these years. Though starting in the late 1940s, these initiatives really took off after Stalin's death in 1953. In addition to opposing “western” music, “socialist” music set the goal of improving the taste and level of culture of its audience, with intermittent success. My own contribution illuminated the Soviet state's campaign against “westernized” youth, stiliagi, launched in 1954/55. This policy contained significant coercive elements,  such as Komsomol patrols, groups of ideology committed young volunteers who surveilled youth everyday life behavior, denouncing and beating up stiliagi. Contemporaneously, the state providing engaging youth leisure, including clubs, amateur artistic creativity, sports, and tourism as a means of instilling communist morals and attracting young people away from “western” popular youth culture. Finally, Dean Vuletic considered the case of Yugoslavia, where by 1951, after the break with the USSR, the government began to turn toward a more tolerant approach to “western” music as a means of finding its own distinct, and popular, path toward communism. The Yugoslav Party, despite a continuing disparagement of such music as overly sexualized, decentralized decision-making on cultural issues from 1952 onwards, leaving itself an advisory position and placing more power in the hands of local radio stations, which played a great deal of jazz and later rock.

One of the strongest aspects of the panel series is that it “provincializes” western Europe and America by exploring rock music and hippies in eastern Europe. In parallel, the papers illuminate the specifically local context of the rock music and hippie movement, and correctly underline the fact that a fully homogeneous experience did not unite all rock fans and hippies throughout the world. A series of panelists engaged with Alexei Yurchak's thesis that one can both love Lenin and Led Zeppelin. While some adamantly opposed this claim, others expressed ambiguity towards it, and even found that their sources supported Yurchak's argument: perhaps we should draw the conclusion that in at least certain geographical and chronological contexts of the Eastern Bloc, one indeed could both identify with communism and rock music. Finally, the papers re-evaluated and deepened our understanding of the image of the “West” in Soviet and eastern European eyes. This concept, significant as both the image of the opponent of communist ideology and as the object of attraction for youth, turned out to be surprisingly multi-layered and multi-dimensional; its experience and expression relied heavily on the perspectives of the internal cultures of alternative lifestyle groups.

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