1989 Reports

Soviet Popular Culture in the Gorbachev Era

Stites, Richard

What does popular culture reveal about a society? It charts the different ways that people enjoy themselves in their free time in space of their own choosing — home, at friends’, on the street, or in places of public relaxation. Its genres and media can uncover deeper values, the “solutions” in life about order, romance, family, deviance, friendship, and work. The reordering of popular culture now occurring in the USSR opens up this assortment of problems and solutions to full scrutiny and free discourse, with sometimes surprising revelations. Recent movements and shifts in reading habits, show attendance, film and television viewing, musical tastes, and non-structured leisure indicate a rapid growth of amateur culture — performance art, music, graphics, and hobbies. These changes also reflect a decentralization of cultural life through the spread of electronic media, especially video players, and an emerging recognition by the authorities of the legitimacy of spontaneously generated culture from below. And they demonstrate an accompanying “system” of alliances, friendships, networks, partnerships, patronage relations, and celebrity interlock that links “stars” of popular culture with the other arts and with influential leaders of Soviet society, journalism, and politics.