Where’s the Soviet Funny Bone? : Pop Culture Tells the Tale of National Character

Whenever I tell friends that I am going to Moscow in a few months to finish a book on Soviet popular culture, they generally raise their eyebrows in disbelief. “Is there such a thing?” they seem to ask. “If so, why would anyone waste time on such junk?”

Why indeed? The study of our own popular culture has become a minor industry in the United States. Sometimes it descends into trivia and cheap exploitation of nostalgia. But serious writers have shown that there is hardly a better way to pull the present generation into the recent past than to introduce them to the songs, movies, dances and even reading habits of their ancestors.

Popular culture is part of history because it is as much a human experience as war, slavery, revolution and work. It is what most people create and consume in their spare time. Looking at its themes and styles is the best way to uncover values held by millions of people about life, love, friendship, success and the outer world.

The same holds for Soviet Russians. Urban Russians have been immersed in popular culture since the dawn of this century when it emerged between the clearly marked boundaries of peasant folk culture and the high culture--opera, ballet, literature--of the educated elite. In those long-gone days, Russian city folk displayed a madness for the tango, Gypsy singers, pulp serials and silent films of adventure, romance, melodrama and crime. For about a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a time of relative cultural pluralism, the masses bypassed the motion pictures of Eisenstein and Vertov and voted with their feet and their ticket money for those of Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks and their Russian counterparts.

In the Stalin years, a politicized “mass culture” of optimism, heroism, ideology and moralizing was fed to the people: factory songs, Cossack operettas and epic plays and novels of revolution. Part of it was an art of escape best embodied in the musical comedies of the 1930s, which starred the blonde bombshell Luybov Orlova, still a household name in Soviet society. She sang and danced her way through a decade of terror and mass executions.

These cultural products dealt in fantasy and radiant visions of a community of happy and productive people. Millions of Soviet people consumed this culture and most of them probably loved it--just as most people actually loved and revered Stalin as the all-seeing and all-powerful father who stood guard over their great land. The bond between people and leader was cemented during “the Great Patriotic War” of 1941-45 by the sheer emotionality of that hideous experience.

The tight controls on popular culture were partially loosened after Stalin’s death, though the regime continued to pump out and promote its own brand of socialist and patriotic kitsch for the masses on radio and television, in the circus arena and music hall, and in the printed word. But until the emergence of glasnost, the loosening was never enough for those who wanted to define their own tastes: the fans of Glenn Miller, the lovers of Tarzan (the young Mikhail Gorbachev among them) and James Cagney movies. The emulators of the zoot-suit generation felt the suffocation of 1940s and’50s conformity. Jazz finally won its place in the sun by the mid-1960s, only to decline in popularity. Rock took its place among the young.

These cultural rebellions arose again and again not out of disloyalty or political dissidence or even blind worship of the West; they signified a quest for identity and just plain fun and an exhaustion with official values and the heavy-handed sermonizing of the older generation.

Now, almost anything goes. Hundreds of thousands of rock groups are blasting off at high-decibel levels in restaurants, discos, workers’ clubs, student hostels and army barracks from Tbilisi to Vladivostok. Movies display nude bodies locked in erotic embrace to gasps and cheers from the audience. Sex novels and detective stories are crowding out Soviet classics. Underground theater has surfaced onto public stages.

American understanding of all this has always been weak. Those who know Soviet culture at all tend to know names like Solzhenitsyn, Rostropovich and the Bolshoi. Familiarity with such names betokens “culture” but adds almost nothing to our understanding of the Soviet scene or the Russian people, just as Leonard Bernstein’s conducting Beethoven in Moscow adds nothing to the mutual understanding of the two peoples.

Soviet-American exchange has been largely an exchange of elites doing elite culture (here I include jazz, which has become a concert art form in both countries). We Americans know something of Russian high culture past and present, though they know much less about ours--Hemingway, London and Dreiser have been the American authors to them for decades. Conversely, we know almost nothing about their popular culture while they revel in ours--and have done so in varying degrees since the 1920s. Maybe that is why so many Americans still believe that Russians are humorless, unhappy robots, while the Russians, even when the flow of real information about us was thin, were certain that the American people (as distinct from our government) were and are a dynamic, good-humored people.