Search Results

This chapter discusses the musical repercussions of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia by focusing on an “unofficial” concert that took place in 1970 featuring two compositions, one of which was Edison Denisov's Laments (Plachi, 1966), the other a collectively composed work usually credited to Andrey Volkonsky called Rejoinder (Replika). Rejoinder in particular encapsulates many of the shifts that 1968 signaled even as it illuminates the ambiguous possibilities for resistance at a pivotal moment in “unofficial” Soviet music. By looking more closely at both Laments and Rejoinder, this chapter helps pinpoint the most important artistic and social changes that were occurring around 1970, near the end of the “Thaw” and the beginnings of both “Stagnation” and Yurchak's “late socialism.” These two works help further define the “paradox” of the 1970s simultaneous “immutability” and “displacement” that anthropologist Alexei Yurchak so provocatively proposes in his work. Edison Denisov Laments (Plachi) Andrey Volkonsky Rejoinder (Replika) 1968 Czechoslovakia resistance Alexei Yurchak Stagnation late socialism

This chapter examines European state socialism, which emerged in the Russian Revolution of 1917. It has two roots, the social democratic labour movement and specific problems of underdeveloped, peripheral capitalist societies. While generally relying on Marx, the Bolsheviks invented the doctrine of the ‘new type of party’. After the conquest and stabilization of power, they built in Russia the institutions of classical state socialism and led the country on a specific path of modernization. After 1945, there was a second wave of state-socialist transformation in eight states of East Central and South East Europe. In all countries except Yugoslavia, the formal institutions of the Soviet model were established but the informal practices between countries differed considerably. At the end of the chapter, the blind spots and desiderata of three scholarly interpretations of state socialism are discussed.

This chapter investigates how the onset of late socialism gave rise to a discourse of lateness. As the GDR stagnated, its foundation myths were deconstructed by disillusioned artists. They contested the hegemony of Enlightenment ideals, and challenged the emphasis on revolutionary heroism and progress in the ruling discourse. Beethoven emerged as a focal point for this dissent. In the years surrounding his bicentenary in 1970, artists rejected the construct of the heroic composer, which had become synonymous with the authoritarian state, and turned instead towards Adorno’s late Beethoven, finding parallels with their own political impotence in this alienated model. The chapter explores official attempts to deal with the growing preoccupation with lateness, and analyzes alternative readings of Beethoven in artworks of the period. Works examined include Kunze’s “Die bringer Beethovens,” Bredemeyer’s Bagatellen für B, and Seemann’s and Kunert’s Beethoven—Tage aus einem Leben.

This chapter gives a brief history of and defines the term “elemental materialism” as a culturally rooted recognition of the power of matter and things to shape human bodies and selves, which is a prominent feature in the Soviet system of signification that regulated the production of meanings on a daily basis. The chapter raises the question on the place of elemental materialism in the ideological landscape of late socialism. It explains that a focus on things, on their ability to organize society, communities, and human bodies and selves can account for a more complex understanding of historical change in modern societies in general. The chapter discusses approaches to the study of material objects, and previous studies that have been done for body and material culture. It talks about studies done by Bronislaw Malinowski and Igor Kopytoff, Pierre Bourdieu and Daniel Miller, and Sergei Tretiakov and Viktor Shklovsky. Finally, it discusses materiality as an integral part of the study of Soviet politics.

This book introduces a population that, until now, has been un-theorized and under-described, despite their importance for any full understanding of contemporary Cuba. This group is called unsatisfied citizen-consumers. The book argues that they are a shadow public whose activity illuminates the cultural shifts and social and economic transformations taking place in Cuba in an era of late socialism. Scholars have argued that Cubans accept material scarcity as part of a revolutionary sacrifice; that the absence of ideal public spheres, elections, or freedom of assembly provides an alternative landscape upon which to explore agency. However, the Cuba described in this book, highlights the importance of purposeful obscurity, rather than activism, as a coping mechanism during the liminal years of a prolonged Special Period. Rather than sidelining consumer desire as superficial or apolitical, the book places it at the center of significant social change and citizen-state relationships.

This chapter introduces the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ (Plamennye revoliutsionery) series of over 150 biographies and historical novels, published by Politizdat throughout late socialism until the Soviet collapse. It contextualizes the decision to create the series, and to target sophisticated literary and historical writers regardless of their ‘official’ reputations, within the party’s urgent and persistent post-Stalinist demands for more emotionally and intellectually engaging revolutionary propaganda. At the same time, it suggests that this ‘historical turn’ was not just a top-down initiative, by highlighting the passionate interest in historical investigation and reflection shared by many post-Stalinist writers and ordinary Soviet readers. It also introduces key conceptual frameworks to understand the series’ operations within Politizdat, Soviet publishing, and the Soviet (and unofficial) literary worlds: ‘niches’ and ‘oases’ within official institutions; ‘in between’ and ‘grey zone’ literature; and the complex ‘circuit’ of Soviet writing, publishing, and reading.

The introduction provides an overview of the major arguments of the book. It discusses how the canon served both to legitimize the ruling discourse and as a site of dissent, and it offers parameters for the concepts of socialist modernism and late socialism. It addresses the question of why the bourgeois heritage was so feted in the GDR, discussing variously the status assigned to it in Marxist thought, the difficulties associated with it in the context of the Third Reich, and the role that Lukács’s theories of reflection and antifascism played in facilitating its appropriation after the War. It examines the GDR’s foundation myths, and demonstrates how art music was incorporated into the project of building a socialist state based on Enlightenment principles.

This chapter investigates Ruth Berghaus’s rethinking of the canon in her post-Brechtian stagings of Der Freischütz, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal. Invoking Brecht’s call for historicity, Berghaus exposed the totalizing romantic ideologies that underpinned both the socialist canon and the reception of opera in the twentieth century more generally. Rejecting coherence as a dominant principle, she separated text from author, she divested the canon of its positive heroes and unconflicted teleological narratives, and she shattered the myth of the total work of art. Her semiotic approach was symptomatic of the wider shift from content to form that Alexei Yurchak identifies as a defining characteristic of late socialism. As the chapter explores, her stagings had resonances beyond the GDR’s borders. Her Wagner productions at Oper Frankfurt offered audiences a theatrical experience that encoded the irony and alienation of late modernity.

This chapter explores the link between material objects and the different temporalities of post-Stalinist Soviet society. The chapter looks at the productivist language of late socialism as a discursive framework that inspired and produced Soviet elemental materialism and was itself inspired and reproduced by it. Productivist language linked a vision of the grand Soviet future with technological objects and sought a rational social organization along industrial production and scientific progress. It abducted the imagery of Soviet factories, machines, vehicles, and space rockets, immersed it into the hermetic space of visual and textual representations, and used it to define, for the Soviet symbolic order, the position of the USSR at the cutting edge of technological progress. In this discourse, technologies and technological objects secured the possession of the present and future of human history for Soviet society, as well as ensured the superiority of the USSR in its competition with the Western bloc. The perceived might and transformative agency of Soviet technological objects made them affective for the Soviet public, and they became translated into distinctive discursive practices — vernaculars of the Soviet Techno-Utopianism — that sought to transform the Soviet material world but instead represented rigorous forms of self-making. In addition to affect and its politics, the chapter introduces several other key themes that are discussed in the following chapters, including the idea of making oneself by making things, which Soviet educators and ideologists understood in terms of the development of creativity, and the performativity of objects.

After Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Soviet officials dealing with religion assessed the moderate line toward religion that had dominated the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the hard line that had animated Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign. They determined that both had been too extreme and opted to reconcile the two lines. In the 1970s and 1980s the restriction of religion thus became more omnipresent but less potent. A notable example concerned anti-religious propaganda, which was more widespread but less virulent than in the past. In this situation, SADUM struggled unsuccessfully to restore the power it had enjoyed during the 1940s and 1950s while quietly forming ties with “unregistered” Islamic scholars who enjoyed greater breathing room under Late Socialism. An important new development during the final Soviet decades was the appearance in the Valley of illegal study circles (hujras) questioning aspects of the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam practiced in Central Asia. The scholars leading these circles were rapidly labeled as Wahhabis by their detractors in the state and among the ‘ulama.

This chapter summarizes the observations pointed out in the book about the materiality of Soviet objects such as stairwells, weightlifting equipment, and television sets. It concludes that these were created by hybrid social creatures whose practices were influenced not only by ideology and language but also by things around them, and as a result, Soviet artifacts have their politics. The chapter describes elemental materialism as a part of the cultural logic of late socialism. It supplied officials and intellectuals with persistent and routinely reproduced metaphors that assessed people through their mastery of professional equipment, consumption practices, and hobbies. It also influenced the social topography of late socialism. The chapter talks about soviet objects and spaces, and how they interfered in the processes of subjectivation by suggesting forms of selfhood that fell out of the civilizing frameworks of the Soviet enlightenment project. It discusses soviet materiality and how it acquired its historical agency through the bodies of people who were fascinated with various material objects of late socialism and for whom these objects were instrumental in suggesting and objectifying their individual and collective selves. Material objects of late socialism encapsulated different and often conflicting visions of the past, present, and future, structured the social landscape, and suggested various forms of navigating through it. Examining the ways they did so makes it possible to better understand Soviet society as a complex historical phenomenon.

‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ was a major forum for experimentation with the Soviet historical novel, and fuelled the craze for historicist writing and thinking throughout late socialism. The series’ aim of revitalizing revolutionary myth chimed with the burgeoning historical and documentary interests of many late Soviet writers: this often persuaded them to join the series, and stimulated an enduring ‘historical turn’ within their careers. In turn, their works contributed to vibrant public debates about historical truth and documentary literature, and also about revolutionary selfhood, ethics, violence, and terror, extending and enriching the debates of the thaw. The second part of the chapter focuses in on the sophisticated, multi-faceted representation of the late nineteenth-century ‘People’s Will’ (Narodnaia volia) movement in the series’ texts, by writers including Iurii Davydov, Iurii Trifonov, and Vladimir Voinovich, which allowed them to pose complex questions about the origins of Bolshevism, as well as reflecting through ‘Aesopian’ poetics on late Soviet ‘stagnation’ and the dissident movement.

Hippies in the late Soviet Union appeared to many like creatures from a different star. Yet, a closer look reveals that the history of this movement has both short- and long-term precedents, which range from early revolutionary ideals to the generation of beatniks and Beatles fans, who were only slightly older than the wave of hippie youngsters that appeared in the late 1960s all across the Soviet Union. The introduction also situates the topic of Soviet hippies both within the history of the global hippie movement as well as in the context of late Soviet life and reality. A separate discussion is devoted to the methodology of oral history and the role of the subjective authorial voice. The introduction concludes with the overall argument of the book that the worlds of hippies and late socialism were not incompatible but in a bizarre way a good fit to each other that shaped the character of both.

The final chapter traces the emergence of a Soviet culture of connoisseurship in the 1970s and 1980s. It highlights efforts by Soviet vintners to improve the quality of their wines and to ween consumers from so-called bormotukha, low-quality wines sweetened with beet sugar and strengthened with grain alcohol that comprised the vast majority of Soviet production. Vintners were motivated by concerns that alcoholism was becoming a principal threat to public health, and that bormotukha, which often had an alcohol content as high as 19%, was contributing to the epidemic. The solution, in their view, was to encourage Soviet consumers to purchase conventional dry wine, which they presented in the press as a more cultured and refined drink than vodka and bormotukha.

This chapter looks at the mass housing program launched by the Soviet leadership in the late 1950s from the perspective of urban planning and management. It looks into the transit spaces of new socialist neighborhoods, focusing on the stairwells of Soviet apartment blocks. Designed as utilitarian spaces for the fast passage of people from home to work to leisure activities, they revealed an ability to accumulate people and connect them in various ways, which Soviet authorities and intellectuals often interpreted as threatening to the public good. The Soviet stairwell established different affective regimes of Soviet people's interactions with urban space and provoked some of the hidden social conflicts of late socialism that became reflected in socially dominant structures of the Soviet self. The communities discussed in the chapter are predominantly male. The material and social conditions of late socialism provoked different regimes and forms of masculinity, which is another important topic of this book.

This chapter traces the formation and evolution of the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ community in the Brezhnev era from three points of view: of writers as they decided whether and how to collaborate with it; editors, as they struggled to recruit writers and develop a distinctive culture for the series; and Politizdat’s managers and their party-state overseers, who were consistently suspicious of this unusual ‘niche’ and often interfered in it. Despite heavy censorship, political interference, and a large dose of conformist writing ‘to order’, the series sustained an ‘oasis’ or ‘niche’ within late Soviet literature, though this term fails to capture the effort involved in maintaining this sense of difference. In employing a very wide range of writers throughout late socialism, it also blurred the boundaries between Soviet and dissident literature, and compels us to reconsider the notion that ‘thaw’ writers, literary experimentation, and historical reflection migrated entirely into unofficial publishing after 1964 or 1968. Instead, such fragile niches kept late socialist literary identities and practices in flux throughout the Brezhnev period.

This chapter explores the Brezhnev-era ‘biography boom’, when biography was collected, consumed, and critiqued with extraordinary interest, thanks in part to ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ as one of the most prominent and prolific biographical series. This biography boom grew out of the post-Stalinist shift to more private forms of reading and more psychologically sophisticated literature, and was supported by developed socialism’s unprecedented ideological focus on the individual personality (lichnost′) as multi-faceted. The series served as a laboratory of different models of ‘revolutionary’ selfhood, and as a forum for novelistic experimentation with biographical narrative that often exceeded contemporary developments in the genre in the West (as well as in other types of Soviet biography). However, this experimentation endured onerous suspicion and interference. The series’ texts were caught between traditional views of revolutionary identity and more innovative, even subversive, explorations of psychology and ethics. This helps to explain why the series consistently produced a significant quotient of much more conventional biographies, especially of Bolsheviks, complicating its identity for writers, critics, and readers.