| While the idea of socialism in the USSR readily brings to mind factories, military parades, and communist party bosses, it should evoke the world of culture equally well. From its inception, the Soviet regime promoted the notion that a distinctive and superior Soviet (or socialist) culture-the polar opposite of capitalist "mass culture"---was integral to everyday life and to the building of a communist future. Where "mass culture" was said to debauch and stupefy its consumers, Soviet culture proclaimed its devotion to healthy entertainment, moral and cultural uplift and, especially, to mass political mobilization. This dissertation analyzes the remaking of this Soviet cultural ideal in the 1950s and '60s. In this period, the Soviet regime was, for the first time in its history, materially capable of fulfilling its goal of making culture a part of daily life on a mass scale. What made this possible were major sociological shifts in the postwar era, such as mass urbanization, coupled with a vast expansion in the Soviet Union's cultural infrastructure. This dissertation explores the implications of the postwar mass-media explosion for the press, radio and television broadcasting, and popular cinema, and argues that it had the unintended consequence of transforming Soviet culture in both form and function. Not only did cultural consumption come to command an ever-larger presence in Soviet life, the nature of the culture itself grew more eclectic, immediate, and personal, as well as increasingly accommodating to imported, "mass culture" products. While culture remained officially committed to uplift and mobilization, Soviet mass media now offered a host of new experiences and ideas that drew its consumers far a field from its own lofty aims. The bonds between Soviet culture and the grand narrative of Soviet life---the construction of a communist society, including the enlightened communist cultural consumer---steadily unraveled, and Soviet mass-media culture grew to look more and more like its archrival, capitalist "mass culture." This dissertation argues that the success of mass-media culture in the USSR of the 1950s and '60s had the paradoxical effect of vitiating the authority of the Soviet cultural ideal and, ultimately, of the Soviet project overall. |
