Soviet Youth Culture

Author : William Jay Risch
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739178237
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc written by William Jay Risch and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union’s capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.

Author : James Riordan
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 134919932X
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Soviet Youth Culture written by James Riordan and published by Springer. This book was released on 1989-05-19 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet youth behaviour and contemporary problems are discussed, including culture and pop music, gangs and drug addicts, delinquents and deviants, providing an insight into their life and attitudes, and an opportunity to understand youth problems in another society and the ways they are dealt with.

Author : Gleb Tsipursky
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822981254
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Socialist Fun written by Gleb Tsipursky and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most narratives depict Soviet Cold War cultural activities and youth groups as drab and dreary, militant and politicized. In this study Gleb Tsipursky challenges these stereotypes in a revealing portrayal of Soviet youth and state-sponsored popular culture. The primary local venues for Soviet culture were the tens of thousands of klubs where young people found entertainment, leisure, social life, and romance. Here sports, dance, film, theater, music, lectures, and political meetings became vehicles to disseminate a socialist version of modernity. The Soviet way of life was dutifully presented and perceived as the most progressive and advanced, in an attempt to stave off Western influences. In effect, socialist fun became very serious business. As Tsipursky shows, however, Western culture did infiltrate these activities, particularly at local levels, where participants and organizers deceptively cloaked their offerings to appeal to their own audiences. Thus, Soviet modernity evolved as a complex and multivalent ideological device. Tsipursky provides a fresh and original examination of the Kremlin’s paramount effort to shape young lives, consumption, popular culture, and to build an emotional community—all against the backdrop of Cold War struggles to win hearts and minds both at home and abroad.

Author : Hilary Pilkington
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134876432
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Russia's Youth and its Culture written by Hilary Pilkington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the political whirlwinds of the mid-1980s and the fall of communism in 1991, Russia has undergone dramatic social change, much of which has escaped the attention of Western media. In her new book, Hilary Pilkington applies the methods of cultural studies research to the study of Russian youth. She does this by `deconstructing' the social discourses within which Russian youth has been constructed and by providing an alternative reading of youth cultural activity, based on an ethnographic study of Moscow youth culture at the end of the 1980s. The book also charts the passage of western youth cultural studies in the twentieth century and suggests some new ways forward in the light of the Russian experience. Hilary Pilkington traces the cultural themes of youth culture in the Anglo-American tradition and within the Soviet Union, before examining the impact of perestroika on the media and its ramifications for the discussion of youth. The book ends with a study of young people in Moscow and youth cultural groups; the product of field work and interviews in the city.

Author : Matthias Neumann
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136717927
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917-1932 written by Matthias Neumann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of Soviet youth has long lagged behind the comprehensive research conducted on Western European youth culture. In an era that saw the emergence of youth movements of all sorts across Europe, the Soviet Komsomol was the first state-sponsored youth organization, in the first communist country. Born out of an autonomous youth movement that emerged in 1917, the Komsomol eventually became the last link in a chain of Soviet socializing agencies which organized the young. Based on extensive archival research and building upon recent research on Soviet youth, this book broadens our understanding of the social and political dimension of Komsomol membership during the momentous period 1917–1932. It sheds light on the complicated interchange between ideology, policy and reality in the league's evolution, highlighting the important role ordinary members played. The transformation of the country shaped Komsomol members and their league's social identity, institutional structure and social psychology, and vice versa, the organization itself became a crucial force in the dramatic changes of that time. The book investigates the complex dialogue between the Communist Youth League and the regime, unravelling the intricate process that transformed the Komsomol into a mere institution for political socialization serving the regime's quest for social engineering and control.

Author : Seth Bernstein
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501712020
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Raised under Stalin written by Seth Bernstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Raised under Stalin, Seth Bernstein shows how Stalin’s regime provided young people with opportunities as members of the Young Communist League or Komsomol even as it surrounded them with violence, shaping socialist youth culture and socialism more broadly through the threat and experience of war. Informed by declassified materials from post-Soviet archives, as well as films, memoirs, and diaries by and about youth, Raised under Stalin explains the divided status of youth for the Bolsheviks: they were the "new people" who would someday build communism, the potential soldiers who would defend the USSR, and the hooligans who might undermine it from within. Bernstein explains how, although Soviet revolutionary youth culture began as the preserve of proletarian activists, the Komsomol transformed under Stalin to become a mass organization of moral education; youth became the targets of state repression even as Stalin’s regime offered them the opportunity to participate in political culture. Raised under Stalin follows Stalinist youth into their ultimate test, World War II. Even as the war against Germany decimated the ranks of Young Communists, Bernstein finds evidence that it cemented Stalinist youth culture as a core part of socialism.

Author : James Riordan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 34 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Soviet Youth Culture written by James Riordan and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Hilary Pilkington
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271021861
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Looking West? written by Hilary Pilkington and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian youth culture has been a subject of great interest to researchers since 1991, but most studies to date have failed to consider the global context. Looking West? engages theories of cultural globalization to chart how post-Soviet Russia&’s opening up to the West has been reflected in the cultural practices of its young people. Visitors to Russia&’s cities often interpret the presence of designer clothes shops, Internet caf&és, and a vibrant club scene as evidence of the &"Westernization&" of Russian youth. As Looking West? shows, however, the younger generation has adopted a &"pick and mix&" strategy with regard to Western cultural commodities that reflects a receptiveness to the global alongside a precious guarding of the local. The authors show us how young people perceive Russia to be positioned in current global flows of cultural exchange, what their sense of Russia&’s place in the new global order is, and how they manage to &"live with the West&" on a daily basis. Looking West? represents an important landmark in Russian-Western collaborative research. Hilary Pilkington and Elena Omel&’chenko have been at the heart of an eight-year collaboration between the University of Birmingham (U.K.) and Ul&’ianovsk State University (Russia). This book was written by Pilkington and Omel&’chenko with the team of researchers on the project&—Moya Flynn, Ul&’iana Bliudina, and Elena Starkova.

Author : Anne E. Gorsuch
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780253337665
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Youth in Revolutionary Russia written by Anne E. Gorsuch and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were the consequences if prerevolutionary and "bourgeois" culture and social relations could not be transformed into new socialist forms of behavior and belief?".

Author : Irina Rodríguez
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 147667759X
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My Soviet Youth written by Irina Rodríguez and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Putting on gas masks and learning how to shoot Kalashnikov rifles in grade school made Soviet children fear possible attack by Cold War enemies. But a more prosaic invasion of Colorado beetles in the 1980s turned out to be a far more real threat to Soviet families. Many had to master farming when the state, near its demise, no longer had the finances to pay salaries. One of the last generation of Soviet teenagers who tasted the political restrictions and propaganda, and the benefits and deficits of the communist state, the author recalls her early years in a Soviet school, a Young Pioneer inauguration ceremony, work on a collective farm, her family's plot of land and their fights against invasive insects, and her first breaths of post-Soviet freedom, which brought economic havoc and bitter disappointments, along with new hopes.