Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Distortion (New York, 1950), 20–2.
46 I. Ilf and E. Petrov, trans., G. Malamuth, Little Golden America: Two famous Soviet
Humourists Survey the United States (London, 1944).
Introduction xxix
However, this unanimity concerning the evils of capitalist exploita- tion did not extend to the cultural and technological products of Western society. In the utopian atmosphere of the Revolution, educa- tionalists such as Stanislav Shatsky and playwrights such as Platon Kerzhentsev were allowed to draw upon ideas they had gathered from overseas and put them to the test in the USSR. 47 These early post- Revolutionary years were the high point of Soviet internationalism, when foreign research and innovations were most welcome in the USSR. Nonetheless, official attitudes towards foreign civilization did not decline in a steady and linear manner. As new entertainment media such as radio and cinema became increasingly prominent, the attitude of the Soviet government towards capitalist culture wandered uncer- tainly between the ‘Slavophile’ and ‘Westernizer’ poles within nine- teenth-century thinking.
The fate of capitalist cinema reflects that uncertain journey. Of the films screened in the early 1920s in the USSR, 87 per cent were from overseas. 48 Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford were major stars in the Soviet Union. 49 However, the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the late 1920s and early 1930s saw a shift away from foreign-produced entertainment. 50 By 1932 there was not a single overseas film showing in the USSR, and only a small number were shown between then and
1939. 51 Domestic fare dominated the screen in the 1930s including such light-hearted homemade hits as The Happy Go Lucky Guys . 52
This model of importation and experimentation followed by rejec- tion was mirrored to some extent in the fate of Soviet jazz. Jazz was always regarded as a non-domestic product in the pre-war USSR. During the 1920s Soviet musicians gathered sheet music overseas, and
     
47 W. Partlett, ‘Breaching Cultural Worlds with the Village School: Educational Visions, Local Initiative, and Rural Experience at S. T. Shatskii’s Kaluga School System, 1919–1932’, The Slavonic and East European Review , 82. 4 (2004), 847–85. On Kerzhentsev, who was adamantly anti-Western but inspired by some of the models of public theatre he had seen there, see: R. Russell, Russian Drama of the Revolutionary Period (New York, 1988), 29–30.
48 J. Brooks, ‘Official Xenophobia and Popular Cosmopolitanism in Early Soviet
Russia’, American Historical Review, 97.5 (1992), 1443.
49 Ball, Imagining America, 79–81.
50 On the concept of ‘Cultural Revolution’, see: M. David-Fox, ‘What is Cultural Revolution?’ and S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Cultural Revolution Revisited’, Russian Review, 58.1 (1999), 181–209.
51 Ball, Imagining America , 104–5.
52 P. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin
(London, 2001), 114–64.
xxx Being Soviet
jazz was performed as an example of African-American folk music. It was legitimate because it was the tunes and rhythms of an oppressed people. 53 Nonetheless, jazz always had its critics within the musical academy and amongst some Bolshevik ideologues, who regarded its Western provenance as a symptom of bourgeois degeneracy. 54 Gorky’s 1928 Pravda article ‘The Music of the Gross’ was a sign of the changing times, and jazz, like foreign film, faded in the face of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the late 1920s. 55 Unlike foreign cinema, however, jazz returned in the mid 1930s, and achieved its greatest extent of pre-war popularity. 56 In 1936 Leonid Utesov, the USSR’s leading jazzmaster played the lead in the hit film The Happy Go Lucky Guys , which also spawned the jazz-influenced hit song, The March of the Happy Go Lucky Guys. The same year saw the launch of his State Jazz Orchestra. By the late 1930s Leningrad radio stations were playing whole evenings of jazz from