Abstract
Reviewed by: Robert Hornsby, University of Leeds, UK
With so much of the extant western literature on the Komsomol dating back at least several decades, and typically characterized by narratives of indoctrination, boredom and cynicism, Tsipursky’s Socialist Fun offers some valuable new perspectives on both the aims of the post-Stalin Soviet regime in regard to moulding Soviet youth and on the experiences of the many young people who participated in Komsomol life. Focusing in particular on the theme of Komsomol recreational activities aimed at Soviet youth, Tsipursky’s work discusses subjects ranging from the burgeoning popularity of jazz music, the rapid proliferation of youth clubs and cafés, the 1957 World Youth Festival, through to the shift from the Khrushchev-era emphasis on youth initiative and towards a much less free-wheeling and more militaristic approach to youth recreation under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev. In doing so, the author draws on an impressive array of archival research and interviews from both Moscow and the provincial Russian city of Saratov.
As Tsipursky argues throughout his work, the Soviet authorities after Stalin were (for a time) largely successful at creating an appealing state-sponsored popular culture, and a great many young people showed genuine enthusiasm for key elements of Komsomol recreation. While cultural Westernization has for some time dominated the scene in regard to research on youth tastes from the 1950s onwards, the author very convincingly concludes that young people typically wanted both this alluring foreign culture and the kinds of recreation offered up by the Komsomol. Countless numbers signed up for the photography clubs, musical ensembles and theatrical troupes that sprang up everywhere during the period, and long lines formed outside the doors of many youth cafés a good while before opening time.
Reflecting the extent to which the Soviet domestic scene changed after Stalin’s death is the author’s emphasis on the point that considerable effort was expended on making Komsomol recreation appealing to young people. Successful ‘upbringing work’ had to take at least some account of youth desires and tastes if it were to pull young people into the orbit of the Komsomol. Thus we see, for example, Komsomol officialdom eventually coming to accommodate and even embrace (if inconsistently) initially condemned foreign cultural influences like jazz music and dancing the twist. This is a point already raised in works by the likes of Sergei Zhuk but it is nonetheless usefully elaborated here, too. What the author does not do as explicitly as he might otherwise is to position this theme within the wider shift which the Komsomol went through across the period as it changed from an ideological ‘vanguard’ of Soviet youth to a mass organization for socializing young people in general. The focus on raising Soviet citizens’ sense of initiative as part of the renewed drive toward the final construction of communism is also discussed here as a key plank of Khrushchev-era youth work. This is surely a theme that has not yet had enough attention from the scholars working on the post-Stalin USSR, and Tsipursky lays some useful groundwork here for others to build upon.
As with most works touching upon Soviet cultural life during the period in question, the imagery of ‘thaw’ is present (almost) throughout. Another area in which the author takes a rather traditionalist line as regards historiography on the Khrushchev era is in his frequent recourse to notions of struggle between ‘soft-line’ and ‘hard-line’ actors as a key factor shaping policy. Although traditionally a lens through which the very highest levels of Soviet decision-making during the period have been viewed, Tsipursky makes the case that such divisions ran much deeper. Interestingly, though, he paints a picture in which, at moments during the Khrushchev era at least, both Komsomol and Party bosses and grassroots members were often broadly on the same side in their attempts to rejuvenate youth work, while mid-level officials were generally the ones seeking to impose more conservative and cautious approaches. The evidence proffered on this matter is in the main convincing, though we might perhaps ask whether such dichotomies between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches could be more nuanced at times, not least since the prevailing political winds of the Khrushchev era in particular changed course so often.
Among the greatest strengths of Socialist Fun is a, largely implicit, exploration of the sometimes unstable relationship between conformity and non-conformity in the cultural sphere. The bulk of Tsipursky’s interviewees, for example, profess themselves to have been loyal and (mostly) obedient Soviet citizens, even as some of them pushed hard at the borders of acceptable behaviour and evaded official prescriptions on proper and improper cultural activity. Similarly, the Soviet authorities liked to impress foreign visitors by showing off the most ‘liberal’ youth cafés and cultural troupes, even while looking askance at their domestic impact and placing fresh restrictions upon them.