No need for heroes: Politics and the poet in the Soviet Union

Abstract

Abstract The underground dissident balladeer Vladimir Vysotsky resisted, through verse and song, the terrorism and structural violence of the state. He enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, despite the lack of official recognition from Soviet authorities. In an age of made‐to‐order socialist realism, he countered the hypocrisy of approved and widely published writers and the mass media with honest confrontation of the real issues facing his people. In so doing, he became one of the greatest political communicators of the century in the Soviet Union, cutting through the state's impressive propaganda machinery to communicate directly with Soviet citizens from all walks of life. In an ironic twist of fate, the machinery of state has since his death made of Vysotsky, the people's hero, a national icon of open communication and glasnost, using his charisma and mass appeal to lend credibility to its own call for changes in the system.