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.

About the Author
Gleb Tsipursky is assistant professor of history at The Ohio State University.

Reviews
...this monograph provides a remarkable contribution to the new scholarship on Cold War history in terms of both theory and empirics. It is compulsory reading for anyone interested in the everyday life of young people in the Soviet Union and beyond, but can also be recommended for students and scholars of contemporary state-youth interaction in the former Soviet Union. After all, winning hearts and minds at home and abroad is just as important today as it was during the Cold War." - Europe-Asia Studies



Book Information
ISBN 9780822963967
Author Gleb Tsipursky
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint University of Pittsburgh Press
Publisher University of Pittsburgh Press