The alacrity with which English-language viral news websites have recirculated the list of bands ‘banned in the USSR in 1985’ (or rather proscribed by the Komsomol of Mykolaiv oblast in Ukraine, informing its district and city committees about the ‘ideologically harmful compositions’ of 38 Western bands), originally reproduced in Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: the Last Soviet Generation (Reference Yurchak2006, p. 215), demonstrates the typical associations drawn in the West between popular music, youth culture and state socialism in the Soviet bloc: the picture of rock music as an ideological threat and capitalist import liable to repression and even comical overestimation by bumbling Communist authorities. In contrast, as a useful historiographical conclusion by Jonathyne Briggs in this volume makes explicit, the emphasis in studies of Western youth culture has often been on matters of ‘leisure and style’ (p. 267). Following the lead of scholars such as Yurchak and Uta Poiger, whose Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Reference Poiger2000) is another of the most cited works across the volume, Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc challenges the notions that rock and roll represented a unified culture of youth rebellion against state socialism or that rock and Communism were incompatible. Russia, Ukraine, Poland and East Germany receive most coverage, although two chapters deal with Hungary and Yugoslavia. William Jay Risch and his contributors apply a theoretical framework based on Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu and Sarah Thornton – all firmly established points of reference in popular music studies – to emphasise that ‘young listeners to Deep Purple’ – or any other musical subculture such as disco or punk – ‘may have been influenced by Westernisation, but that did not necessarily mean that they were resisting the state’ (p. 11).
Against the conclusions of the first works on rock and state socialism, which viewed rock chiefly as an expression of youth discontent and precursor of democratisation, this volume argues instead that musicians, Party officials and young people under state socialism were highly capable of conceiving forms of rock and other youth-oriented genres of popular music with a ‘socialist beat’ (p. 8) – even though this led to awkward negotiations between ideological factions, such as the 1980 conference on Soviet diskoteki on which Gregory Kveberg's chapter reports. Indeed, the cultural politics of the first country to be covered in the volume – Yugoslavia, ejected from the Soviet bloc in 1948 and ideologically ‘swinging between East and West’ (p. 25) from then on – are revealed in Dean Vuletić’s account of Yugoslav Communist debates over jazz to have anticipated disputes that would later open up in states within the Soviet bloc when their authorities too started following the Yugoslav example and accommodating youth culture and other signifiers of consumerism to what remained a contested extent. Yugoslavia for its own part, meanwhile, would stand for one 16-year-old high-school diarist in Dnipropetrovsk quoted by Sergei Zhuk as the very place where more fortunate tourists than himself could ‘go … and see how the West lives!’ (p. 139).
‘Westernisation’, in these studies, should be thought of as an active process of localisation, in which multiple layers of identity could be implicated. Yurchak's notion of the ‘imaginary West’ informs several chapters, and the complex effects of ‘Westernisation’ on cultural identities are particularly striking in Zhuk's argument that the appeal of Western rock music led to Russian displacing Ukrainian within the rock culture of 1970s Dnipropetrovsk: something more than simply a ‘Western’/‘Soviet’ binary of identity was clearly at work here. Yet by the end of that same decade in western Ukraine, Risch's chapter on Lviv suggests, a Ukrainian-speaking hippie subculture (newer than the Russian-speaking hippie milieu of the early 1970s) would have been starting to emerge. Risch's observation that ‘differences in urban identities had an impact on who became hippies and what kinds of rock music they produced’ serves to call for a locally nuanced approach to youth cultures and state socialism within as well as between countries. An even finer-grained approach to the (micro)politics of space, meanwhile, appears in Polly McMichael's chapter on the domestic-apartment performances of the cult Leningrad rock band Akvarium.
Questions of consumption, youth and domesticity emerge not only from the works on rock music under state socialism with which this volume most frequently engages, but also from the growing amount of research on everyday life and ‘socialist consumerism’ in eastern Europe and the USSR that has been undertaken in the past decade and a half, especially though not exclusively by gender historians: the contestations exposed throughout this volume would resonate with the tensions depicted in works such as Małgorzata Fidelis's Women, Communism and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Reference Fidelis2010) or Shana Penn and Jill Massino's Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe collection (Reference Penn and Massino2009), and several chapters begin to open up the gender politics of jazz, hippiedom and disco. While the volume might be less concerned than current Popular Music Studies in rethinking the very concept of subculture, its primary interest is in reframing the approach to subcultures and the state when compared with the literature it defines itself against, and in stressing that (as Briggs puts it) ‘historians should not be distracted from the continuities of rock and roll that traversed the Iron Curtain’ (p. 268).
However, what of musical continuities and routes that pointed South? A globalised cultural history of the Cold War, following the so-called ‘Second World–Third World’ connections that historians increasingly strive to trace, would not be complete without attention to the racial politics within which Western popular music genres were produced and the racialised receptions that music, dance styles and musicians received when they travelled internationally. Nodes in such networks are dotted throughout the volume, such as the racist 1950s East German dismissal of Western popular culture as ‘Affenkultur’ or ‘apes’ culture’ (p. 48), the cultural translations enacted by Polish reggae musicians and Rastafarians in the 1980s (pp. 241–3), the ‘calypso-styled’ but desexualised Lipsi dance with which East German authorities hoped to replace the Twist (p. 283), or the effect of participation in the Non-Aligned Movement on Yugoslav ideas about race and jazz (p. 29). The introduction briefly suggests one way of globalising the volume's topic by comparing its theme of ‘the limits of the impact of the Western capitalist world on global events’ to Dipesh Chakrabarty's ‘probing the limits of Europe's influence on colonial subjects’ (p. 11), although the text somehow attributes this probing to Partha Chatterjee (yet it is Chakrabarty who appears in the citation and the volume bibliography). The content of the chapters would in fact equip this volume to make a more expansive contribution to the cultural history of state socialism than it claims to make. Nevertheless, and especially for its core region from the inner German border to Moscow, this is a well-integrated collection with a clear central message that should interest any historian of youth cultures and the Cold War.
