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

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Abosch, Elizabeth

Contributors dc:contributor

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

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

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Elizabeth Abosch

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124700