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Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970. By Gleb Tsipursky. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. x + 366 pp. Paper $29.95.
The title of Gleb Tsipursky's new study neatly encapsulates what may at first sound like an oxymoron. Where, one could indeed ask, was the place of "fun" in a culture committed to self-sacrificing heroism and the dignity of labor? But as Tsipursky demonstrates, even in the first years of Soviet history, work with young people, despite pressure from "militants" committed to Communist orthodoxy, was to a considerable extent driven by a sense of pragmatic populism. It was simply much easier, and indeed more profitable, to recruit participants in dance evenings than at lectures about the international situation. During the post-Stalin era (with which the book is mainly concerned-five out of its eight chapters deal with the period after 1953), the revival of "enthusiasm" and of ideological fervor did not impede an increasing commitment to the provision of "socialist fun" in the networks of youth clubs and other state-sponsored venues for licensed youth leisure. "The new Soviet leadership . . . regarded pursuit of a wide variety of interests as legitimate and as part of a greatly broadened path towards communism" (151). Despite occasional reassertion of the hard line...