Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985

by Sergei I. Zhuk

How did rock music and other products of Western culture come to pervade youth culture in Brezhnev-era Dniepropetrovsk, a Ukrainian city essentially closed to outsiders and heavily policed by the KGB? In Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, Sergei I. Zhuk assesses the impact of Westernization on the city’s youth, examining the degree to which the consumption of Western music, movies, and literature ultimately challenged the ideological control maintained by state officials. One among many of his stories is how the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar led Dniepropetrovsk's young people to embrace not just one, but two Soviet taboos: rock music and Christianity.

This book is the first historical study—in any language—of the everyday lives of Soviet urban youth during the Brezhnev era. A longtime student and resident of Dniepropetrovsk, Zhuk began research for this project in the 1990s. Weaving together diaries, interviews, oral histories, and KGB and party archival documents, he provides a vivid account of how Soviet cultural repression and unrest during the Brezhnev period laid the groundwork for a resurgent Ukrainian nationalism in the 1980s. In so doing, he demonstrates the influence of Western cultural consumption on the formation of a post-Soviet national identity.

Genres: Soviet Union, History

Paperback

First published April 29, 2010

Reviews

[Kasey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense, fascinating academic history of the consumption of Western cultural products, especially rock and roll, popular movies, and books, in a closed city in Ukraine. Here's my pitch: This should be adapted into a podcast or a documentary series so that it can include music and other audio clips. The content is all there and it would do well during this particular political moment, too. And then I'd know how to pronounce Dniepropetrovsk.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book although clearly with a very niche audience, this is an in-depth academic exploration of how Western cultural indicators penetrated and permeated the society of the closed Soviet Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk — including but not limited to the Beatles, Western popular films, British hard rock and heavy metal, and disco. Over the course of the four decades covered in the book, the Soviet Communist authorities tried and largely failed to navigate a difficult path, between banning Western influences altogether, allowing “ideologically trustworthy” music and popular culture, and eventually becoming complicit with the black market importers of smuggled vinyl and video cassettes because the local economy was reliant on discotheques. Many of those politically connected “discotheque mafia” businesspeople would later become the oligarchs of the future post-Soviet Ukraine, including Yulia Tynoshenko, whose childhood diaries provide a rich entree into the world of the music- and film-obsessed Ukrainian elite of the 1970s.

Because Dnipropetrovsk was the city in which the USSR built rockets for its space program and ICBMs, the Soviets had a great commitment to protecting its residents from ideologically suspect influence. It was a closed city, diplomatically, economically, and culturally. This, of course, made its young people desperately interested in even the smallest scraps of Western culture, whether years-old Western movies remade through Romanian or Czech copies, or sheet music from songs by Dylan or the Beatles that was deemed acceptable to be printed in Soviet magazines. Eventually the capitalist motives captured even the Komsomol members and leadership charged with arranging the wildly popular Soviet discotheques — Intended as sober ethnomusicological venues, they became drinking and dancing hotspots like anywhere else in the world, but with your old bootlegs by Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, and the inescapable ABBA. The personal diaries and journals kept by the young Communist activists enthralled with Western pop and rock and films are particularly interesting.

This is a great book in its way but it’s certainly not perfect. The editing is a bit clunky with too many repeated explanations and abbreviations in Russian and Ukrainian spelled out. The author falls into a classic academic condition of the post Soviet Union by using quantitative indicators for everything in long paragraphs of figures, when a simple chart or table would be more helpful. (I used to edit papers by Russian ichthyologists and it was insanely frustrating.) But his personal roots in Dnipropetrovsk and his knowledge of the cultural landscape is immensely valuable and he provides many personal photos of the lives of everyday people from that time period.

[b]

Incredibly detailed information on cultural consumption trends from Brezhnev to Perestroika.

Very interesting insights into the relations between Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, Moscow, Kyiv, and L'viv.

Really enjoyed the insight/ argument concerning the development of the discotheque mafia and the growing role of local apparatchiks in this business network and the critical foundation this provided for Dniepropetrovsk's transition from late Soviet to post Soviet capitalism.

[Anna Oldfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and written very accessibly. It is a great way to get into the history of the late USSR from the viewpoint of musical culture, and so interesting that it focuses on an industrial city in Ukraine rather than Moscow. And it has a sense of humor, which is rare in academic writing. And now I finally understand why my cousin in Rovno was obsessed with King Crimson and Genesis (Peter Gabriel era, of course). Great for anyone interested in music in the USSR.

[LaochWitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting look into how western media covertly entered the USSR and contributed to shifting attitudes

[Bryce Hatfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

He really said “Footloose, but make it Soviet Ukraine”. I love it.