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Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, & State-Sponsored Popular Culture in The Soviet Union, 1945-1970 . By Gleb Tsipursky . Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press , 2016. x, 366 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $29.95, paper.
Book Reviews
"Socialist fun was serious business," (221) Gleb Tsipursky writes in the conclusion to his original and impressively researched study, which convincingly demonstrates that socialist fun was, in being such serious business, a site of significant and exciting history. Tsipursky's account focuses largely on official clubs, which hosted amateur cultural activities, including musical, dance, and theatrical performances, as well as lectures, celebrations, and social events that were organized primarily for, and sometimes by, young people. Based on archival sources drawn from Moscow and Saratov as well as oral interviews, which he treats with a judicious hand, Tsipursky studies both Soviet cultural policy and the cultural lives not only of elites, whom historians have tended to celebrate exclusively for their counter-cultural tastes, but also of ordinary Soviet young people in the postwar period.
Tsipursky's sensitivity to the heterogeneity of Soviet youth and to their diverse ways of engaging with popular culture is a consistent strength of his book. His account...