Aesthetic Upbringing in the Soviet Union, 1957–64

This paper will investigate the campaign for aesthetic upbringing in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. This drive, which began in 1957, represented the response of the post-Stalin leadership to what it considered “excessive” youth fascination with “western” music and dancing. To deal with this, the Kremlin decided to launch a campaign for what the official discourse termed “aesthetic upbringing,” intended to mold young people’s aesthetic tastes and cultural consumption desires into those appropriate for model young communists. Besides the goal of reaching communism, the Cold War’s cultural competition for the hearts and minds of the population made the issue of struggling with “western” culture particularly crucial. Despite this, scholars have not paid much attention to the efforts of the post-Stalin regime to inculcate cultural norms. More broadly, by examining how the government endeavored to shape youth aesthetic tastes, I complicate the model of popular tastes presented by Pierre Bourdieu, who presented tastes as inherently linked to class.

My presentation empirically ground the top-level drive for aesthetic upbringing through looking at universities of culture, which were communities for learning about culture. Embodying the campaign for aesthetic upbringing, these new institutions strove to educate young people on what is cultured, beautiful, tasteful, and “appropriate.” Universities of culture involved free courses of several months in length, dealing with themes such as classical music, ball dancing, theater, opera, etc. The typical lesson featured a combination of a lecture on some topic of relevance to the course, combined with either a taped or live performance. Using evidence from archives and official publications, my paper traces the top-level policy discourse that led to the creation of these universities of culture and their institutionalization within the Soviet system of cultural production, while drawing out the broader implications of this development.