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

Abstract

REVIEWS 583 Tsipursky, Gleb. Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1945–1970. Pitt Series in Russian and EastEuropeanStudies.UniversityofPittsburghPress,Pittsburgh,PA,2016. x + 366 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $26.95 (paperback). Gleb Tsipursky’s Socialist Fun examines the changing face of Soviet youth mass culture after World War Two and shows how, in response to changing political and social norms and a cultural onslaught from the West, the Soviet authorities attempted to create new popular cultural forms that would promote socialist values while keeping at bay the capitalist threat. Focusing on the period from the end of World War Two to the aftermath of the Prague Spring, Tsipursky shows how official youth culture changed over a quarter of a century that saw the Stalinist obsession with vigilance and ideological conformity give way to more heterogeneous mass cultural forms under Khrushchev. However, as Tsipursky shows, in a period of often violent ideological swings, the creation of a coherent and mobilizing policy proved to be a challenging task. Following an introductory chapter which discusses the state’s role in youth culture from the revolution until 1946, the following seven chapters take us from the aftermath of World War Two up to 1970. Recurring themes are the contested role of Western culture in Soviet life (those interested in Soviet jazz will find plenty of interest in this volume), and the Komsomol’s role in creating forms of mass culture which would provide outlets for young people’s creative energies while channelling them in socially useful directions. To this end, Tsipursky analyses the development of a number of ‘clubs’ that aimed to ignite citizen energies from below, as well as the ‘youth café’ initiative of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which sought to create spaces for sociability. Within these chapters, the many twists and turns of Party and Komsomol policy are placed at the fore, and they illustrate the difficulties encountered by the authorities in attempting to loosen cultural restrictions while maintaining Soviet culture’s activist direction. Based on extensive archival research, from the Komsomol Committee of the Saratov Third State Ball-Bearing Factory to the Central Committee of the Communist party, and several dozen interviews, Socialist Fun’s originality lies in its focus on the cultural mainstream of lectures and debates, Komsomolsponsored dances, and civic activities, rather than the ‘alternative’ youth practices on which recent scholarship has predominantly focused. Tsipursky does a sterling job of assessing the Komsomol’s changing priorities, placing these within the broader context of young people’s concrete practices and the changing goals of central government. Of particular interest is Tsipursky’s discussion of schemes for promoting grassroots agency through Komsomol clubs, a subject which broadens scholarly understanding of the state’s attempts to create new forms of civic life after Stalin’s death. SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 584 Tsipursky coins the term ‘socialist time’ to describe the Komsomol’s goal of having its members spend as much time as possible participating in the organization’s own activities, but his primary interest is the nexus of socialist time and socialist space. In other words, Tsipursky’s interest is in those activities — whether lectures, theatre performances, or dances — that saw individuals having ‘socialist fun’ within public spaces. However — and perhaps my own scholarly interests are coming to the fore here — in a period where broadcast media was emerging as a powerful cultural force and the popular press was rapidly expanding its readership, it is a shame that the study does not consider the role of mass media in embodying and promoting new forms of state-sponsored leisure and allowing individuals to spend ‘socialist time’ in other spaces. Doing so would have allowed for a more nuanced understanding of ‘state-sponsored leisure’ and of the ideological mechanisms that governed individual behaviours within socialist space. Beyond the story of state policies, Socialist Fun seeks to describe the changing ‘emotional regimes’ of the post-Stalin period. However, emotion appears to be rather peripheral to the book’s concerns, and is referred to fitfully across the book’s eight chapters. While Tsipursky is able to draw on an extensive range of interviews, he elicits...