Rock and Roll, Disco Mafia, and the Collapse of Communism

This paper will explore in detail how the official Soviet policy of détente contributed to mass westernisation of the youth culture in provincial towns of Soviet Ukraine during the 1970s. Concentrating on popular music and films, and using archival documents, periodicals, personal diaries and interviews as historical sources, it will focus on how different moments of cultural consumption among the youth of the Soviet Ukraine (mainly in provincial cities which were closed to foreigners) contributed to various forms of cultural identification, which eventually became elements of post-Soviet Ukrainian national identity. All these questions are directly connected to the issues of the socialist industrial modernity [sovremennost’], a new style of modern behaviour and reasoning which even Soviet officials noted in their observations about westernisation of the Soviet youth during the 1970s. The 1970s became a critical period in this process which revealed how the elements of western (capitalist) modernity (through consumption) threatened to replace the socialist modernity not only in imagination but also in reality of the Soviet youth’s everyday experience. Paradoxically, by legitimizing consumption of Western cultural products, the official Soviet policy of détente justified an incorporation of various elements of Western modernity (from the new fashions to a commercialisation of popular culture) into Soviet ideological practices of the 1970s that increased a disorientation and confusion of both local ideologists and local youth.