Soundtracking Sovietness: Daily life, labor, and the power of song in Russia, 1920-1980

Abosch, Elizabeth

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Description

Title

Soundtracking Sovietness: Daily life, labor, and the power of song in Russia, 1920-1980

Author(s)

Abosch, Elizabeth

Issue Date

2024-04-25

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Steinberg, Mark

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Steinberg, Mark

Committee Member(s)

• Randolph, John
• Buchanan, Donna
• Chaplin, Tamara

Department of Study

History

Discipline

History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Soviet
• Russia
• History
• Song
• Songs
• Popular Music
• Leonid Utesov
• Rapm
• Arkadii Severnyi
• Folksong
• Folklore
• State Power
• Soviet Culture
• Popular Culture

Language

eng

Abstract

This dissertation examines the creation of the sound of “Sovietness” through the development of mass song and ideological campaigns against unsanctioned popular music in the Soviet Union from 1920-1980, focusing primarily on Russia. It analyzes narratives in public discourse about the effects and experience of singing and listening in newspapers and journals, film, music, literature, song collections, and the personal archives of artists and arts organizations in Moscow. In publicizing this experience and discourse, I argue that Soviet people engaged with, negotiated, and rejected the Soviet identity with words and their own listening habits. Histories of Soviet music have previously concerned the struggles and bonds between composers, bureaucrats, and state power. A focus on the concept of song reveals how ideologues, officials, and the public understood music to influence emotion and behavior. Through filling and saturating Soviet spaces, song was able to manifest an ideal atmosphere of socialist construction or, alternatively, drag listeners and singers to the backwardness of the past. The USSR emerged alongside the radio and gramophone and collapsed parallel to the birth of tape recorders and other technologies of individualized listening; technologies of recorded and broadcast sound had a significant role in the promotion and fragmentation of collective culture. This study of the discourse about the life of songs in Soviet society was more than a matter of public taste. It was about how individuals, groups, peoples, and spaces should sound Soviet, and the risk to the socialist project in sounding otherwise.

Graduation Semester

2024-05

Type of Resource

Text

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124700

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Elizabeth Abosch

Owning Collections