Soundtracking Sovietness: Daily life, labor, and the power of song in Russia, 1920-1980
Abosch, Elizabeth
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124700
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.
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