“Socialist fun was serious business,” (221) Gleb Tsipursky writes in the conclusion to his original and impressively researched study, which convincingly demonstrates that socialist fun was, in being such serious business, a site of significant and exciting history. Tsipursky's account focuses largely on official clubs, which hosted amateur cultural activities, including musical, dance, and theatrical performances, as well as lectures, celebrations, and social events that were organized primarily for, and sometimes by, young people. Based on archival sources drawn from Moscow and Saratov as well as oral interviews, which he treats with a judicious hand, Tsipursky studies both Soviet cultural policy and the cultural lives not only of elites, whom historians have tended to celebrate exclusively for their counter-cultural tastes, but also of ordinary Soviet young people in the postwar period.
Tsipursky's sensitivity to the heterogeneity of Soviet youth and to their diverse ways of engaging with popular culture is a consistent strength of his book. His account begins with Stalin's anti-cosmopolitan campaign, whose state-sponsored cultural activities remained highly politicized and were enjoyed thoroughly by ideologically committed youth who exercised what Tsipursky usefully terms “conformist agency” in their “conscious and willing decision, stemming primarily from one's internal motivations and desires, to act in ways that closely follow top-level guidelines” (8). Other young people, who might have been skeptical of songs praising Stalin or disliked plays about agricultural collectivization, also exercised their own conformist agency by taking pleasure in the opportunities to exercise their talents and socialize with friends that club activities nevertheless afforded. Still others made use of official cultural spaces to undertake proscribed cultural activities, such as dancing in western styles and playing prohibited jazz songs, at times with the sanction of local cadres eager to satisfy youth preferences, as was unexpectedly the case in Saratov, more so than in Moscow, even during the Stalin period.
After 1953, the post-Stalin leadership more consistently sought to satisfy youth demands by emphasizing fun and entertainment over ideological instruction and by inviting young people to organize club activities themselves. This policy itself underwent the familiar reversals that characterize the Thaw era, and Tsipursky carefully tracks the “policy zigzags” (223) from liberal cultural reform to conservative retrenchment and back again. He attributes these shifts to the longstanding tension in Soviet cultural policy between spontaneity versus consciousness and to the competing imperatives that bedeviled club administrators who “functioned at the uncomfortable intersection of carrying out top-level cultural mandates while organizing artistic activities that had wide popularity among the citizenry” (4). Tsipursky concludes his account with a fascinating description of a more stable cultural policy that emerged under Leonid Brenzhnev. Drawing on elements of both Stalin-era and Khrushchev-era precedents, cultural officials limited grassroots youth initiatives within club organizations, while also expanding clubs' entertainment offerings, which even came to include examples of western popular culture that had been proscribed during the Thaw.
Throughout, Tsipursky makes good on his promise to tell “the story of how the Soviet authorities attempted to construct an appealing version of socialist popular culture as an alternative to the predominant ‘western’ model that had such enormous worldwide allure” (2). Yet when they did manage to offer up official cultural activities that were genuinely popular among youth—activities such as singing bard songs, dancing the twist, listening to jazz, or chatting among friends at a “youth café”—it remains unclear what was “socialist” or even all that “alternative” about this model. The “socialist” versions of popular culture, modernity, youth, and fun that, according to Tsipursky, Soviet authorities generated seemed to be socialist alternatives only insofar as they were generated by Soviet authorities, staged in official settings, and enjoyed by Soviet youth.
One of Tsipursky's achievements in this book is to bring his research to bear on a breathtaking range of historiographical and methodological questions. Though Tsipursky admirably privileges history over historiography throughout his narrative, he does amend, extend, and think through existing scholarship on such topics as, to name merely a few: the Soviet Union as “gardening state” (a model to which he adds a cultural dimension); the boundaries between the Soviet public and private spheres and between official and unofficial cultures (which he argues have been too strictly drawn); and the utility of positing “emotional communities” as sites for historical analysis (which he amply and very innovatively demonstrates).
Tsipursky's book will be of interest to students and scholars of Soviet culture, youth culture, and the Cold War period, as well as to any reader eager to encounter an exemplary work of historical research, interpretation, and historiographical analysis.
