Mikhail Suvorov, a former industrial worker and activist in the discotheque movement in the closed city of Dniepropetrovsk^[1] during the 1970s, noted:

“Everybody, including us, working class kids, idealized everything that came from the capitalist West – jeans, cigarettes, music, films. Paradoxically, even our literature – books and journals, became connected to our “invented and magical West.” Western movies about cowboys and Indians, French historical films about musketeers triggered our interest in old adventure books by Cooper and Dumas and vice versa. Through a strange chain of cultural association, Western spy films such as Strike First, Freddie! or Magnificent linked our images of the West, which we had already created listening to the Beatles or Eric Clapton, or reading mystery stories by Agatha Christie and articles about Western mass culture in Rovesnik and Sovetskii Ekran. Moreover, in a closed city such as Dniepropetrovsk, this growing interest in the “invented West” produced an unexpected result – an unprecedented expansion of the black market practices that united trade in music products with books.”^[2]

Vitalii Pidgaetskii, a student and then a professor of history at Dniepropetrovsk University during the Brezhnev era, also mentioned the role of the imaginary West in the identity formation of local youth:

“Living in the closed city under Brezhnev, we had more restrictions than did Muscovites or people from other Soviet open cities. That is why we worshipped any cultural product that came from the magical West. For us, the West was a kind of symbolic mirror. Looking into this mirror, we tried to invent our own identity and understand what we were living for. To some extent we constructed ourselves looking into this magic mirror of the forbidden and censored capitalist West. Sounds of Western popular music or images from Western films and stories from Western adventure novels intertwined with our Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish cultural forms and produced a strange mental mixture in our heads, which was cemented by our dominant Soviet cultural stereotypes. We constructed our identity by comparing this mental mixture with the mirror of the West that we had already discovered in rock music, disco clubs, forbidden books, adventure novels, and Western movies. However, construction of our identity depended also on reading two major Soviet magazines in the Russian language, Rovesnik and Inostrannaia literatura. Besides official television and radio, these popular journals became the main available official channels of information, providing us with images and stories of Western capitalist culture. This kind of reading shaped us today and contributed to the regional Russified identity of post-Soviet Ukraine. We called this “Westernization” and “Russification” through reading.”^[3]

Many contemporaries noted similar connections between reading practices and Westernization and Russification in eastern Ukraine during the Brezhnev era.^[4] KGB officers also emphasized that the consumption of Western cultural products, including Western adventure novels and youth magazines such as Rovesnik, influenced Soviet youth culture, and that Soviet ideologists failed to protect the Soviet cultural identity from the polluting influences of Western mass culture. Soviet officials noted that by the end of the 1970s, more than 90% of all songs in the Dniepropetrovsk city disco clubs and restaurants were of Western origin. In 1966, 40% of all movies shown in Ukrainian provincial cities like Dniepropetrovsk were of foreign origin, 50% of which were films from the West. Ten years later in 1976, almost 90% of the films were foreign movies, and almost 80% of them were Western.^[5] As one KGB officer noted, eventually, all efforts to protect young people from “Westernization” failed in Dniepropetrovsk:

“We lost the entire young generation. Instead of loyal Soviet Ukrainian patriots we now had Westernized imbeciles who had forgotten their national roots and who were ready to exchange their Soviet motherland for Western cultural products, through reading stupid adventure books, watching primitive Westerns, and listening to degenerate music. The trading of books and music products on the black market transformed these young imbeciles into capitalist businessmen and businesswomen. Even more dangerous, this Westernization happened in the most strategically important Soviet city, which became a symbol for the entire period of Brezhnev’s rule in the USSR. Dniepropetrovsk, which was closed to foreigners, became ideologically polluted by anti-Soviet bourgeois influences as early as the 1970s. If this, the most secret and closed center of Soviet military industry and politics experienced such ideological anti-Soviet pollution so early, it was a bad omen for the entire Soviet system.”^[6]

And he added:

“Moreover, our Komsomol members created the most efficient black market in Eastern Ukraine here in the closed city, trading not only Western music records but also books. By the 1980s, more than 60 percent of all new books in personal libraries in Dniepropetrovsk came from the black market. Only 40 percent of such books reached our homes through official channels: 20 percent from official bookstores and 20 percent in exchange for makulatura (paper for recycling).”^[7]

How did book consumption and the reading practices of youth in one industrial Ukrainian city become related to both the Westernization and Russification of its local youth culture? How did this consumption affect the construction of local identity in Dniepropetrovsk, the Soviet city that was closed to foreigners? How did this consumption contribute to new business activities among Soviet youth? This essay will try to answer these questions and explore the reasons for the failed ideological attempts to stop Westernization in Dniepropetrovsk, the “most strategically important” region of Soviet Ukraine, during the peak of consumption of Western cultural products before perestroika.

THE “CLOSED CITY” OF DNIEPROPETROVSK IN THE USSR

The consumption of Western cultural products, including books and magazines about Western culture, by Dniepropetrovsk youth was particularly worrisome for Soviet ideologists because the city was strategically important to the entire Soviet regime – it was the site of the biggest missile factory in the Soviet Union. Built in 1951 to produce the Soviet military-industrial complex’s most powerful rocket engines, the factory’s sensitive role prompted the KGB to close the city to foreigners in 1959. Following that, Dniepropetrovsk became one among many so-called closed cities where major industrial factories of the Soviet military complex were located.^[8]
In addition to its strategic significance, Dniepropetrovsk also played an important role in Soviet politics of the time. It became the launching ground for the political careers of many Soviet politicians in Moscow because of its close association with the Brezhnev clan. And it also played an important role in Ukraine’s political life: before perestroika more than 53 percent of all political leaders in Kyiv had come from Dniepropetrovsk; by 1996 some 80 percent of post-Soviet Ukrainian politicians had begun their careers in this city. The overwhelming majority of these representatives of the “Dniepropetrovsk Family” (including Leonid Kuchma, a former president of post-Soviet Ukraine, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a heroine of the Orange Revolution in 2004) started their careers during late socialism in the factories of the closed city’s military-industrial complex. All of these post-Soviet politicians were active consumers of Western cultural products during the Brezhnev era.^[9]
This essay is an attempt to explore the connections between cultural consumption, ideology, and the identity formation in Dniepropetrovsk during the Brezhnev era (1964–82). Given its closed, sheltered existence, Dniepropetrovsk became a unique Soviet social and cultural laboratory in which various patterns of late socialism collided with new Western cultural influences. Using archival documents, periodicals, personal diaries, and interviews as historical sources, this essay focuses on how different instances of book consumption among the youth of the “closed city” contributed to various forms of cultural identification, which eventually became elements of post-Soviet Ukrainian national identity. Modern post-Soviet Ukrainian politics now depends on politicians and businessmen (or businesswomen) who came from this “closed” city. In order to understand the current post-Soviet political situation it is necessary to know more about the cultural influences that shaped the identities of those politicians.
This essay will also explore the phenomenon of the unmaking of Soviet civilization before perestroika. Recent studies about post-Stalin socialism in the Soviet Union have explored various forms of cultural production and consumption along with their interaction with ideology and politics. Yet the overwhelming majority of these studies by authors such as Svetlana Boym, Hilary Pilkington, Thomas Cushman, Alexei Yurchak, William J. Risch, and Vladislav Zubok are based on material from the Westernized “open” cities of the USSR (Moscow, Leningrad, and L’viv), which were exposed to direct Western influences through foreign tourists and journalists.^[10] As a result, the history of cultural consumption, including consumption and the reading of books, in “closed” Soviet provincial cities and villages is missing from the analysis. It is difficult to generalize about the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union when the focus is only on Moscow and Leningrad.^[11] Therefore, by bringing forgotten “provincial” cities such as Dniepropetrovsk into the historical debate, this essay provides new material and new directions to the study of Soviet politics and cultural consumption. The closed city of Dniepropetrovsk is a microhistorical model for the analysis of “closed” Soviet society and nascent post-Soviet society.
During perestroika and following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian history and the evolution of Ukrainian politics have also been studied by various Ukrainian and Western historians, anthropologists, and political scientists.^[12] Missing from this literature is a concrete detailed historical analysis of cultural consumption and the identity formation in Dniepropetrovsk, one of the most influential regions in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine.^[13] Despite a few general works about book consumption in the Soviet Union, recent historiography includes no special studies about book consumption and reading practices in “closed cities” such as Dniepropetrovsk.

THE IMAGINARY WEST

The first serious attempt to explore the ideological aspects of everyday life during late socialism (especially the Brezhnev era) in the USSR was a study by an anthropologist, Alexei Yurchak. Yurchak tried to investigate “internal shifts that were emerging within the Soviet system during late socialism at the level of discourse, ideology, and knowledge but that became apparent for what they were only much later, when the system collapsed.”^[14] He primarily used material from his hometown, Leningrad, to show how the different forms of cultural production and consumption of late socialism, especially rock music and Western fashions, influenced Soviet youth, including Komsomol activists and officials. According to Yurchak, “rock and roll culture” became a part of “nonofficial discourses and practices in late socialism.” In contrast to authors such as Thomas Cushman, who insisted on the countercultural character of rock music in the Soviet Union, Yurchak argued, that nonofficial practices (such as listening to and playing rock and roll) “involved not so much countering, resisting, or opposing state power as simply avoiding it and carving out symbolically meaningful spaces and identities away from it. This avoidance included passive conformity to state power, pretense of supporting it, obliviousness to its ideological messages, and simultaneous involvement in completely incongruent practices and meanings behind its back.” Yurchak explained the reasons for the existence of unofficial practices such as rock music. From the Brezhnev era until the collapse of communism, “state power depended less and less on Soviet citizens’ belief in the communist ideology, and more and more on their simulation of that belief.”^[15]
As Yurchak argued, the obsession with Western cultural products became the most important feature of cultural consumption in the closed socialist society of the post-Stalin era. Yurchak especially focused on the cultural and discursive phenomenon known among social scientists as the “Imaginary West.”^[16] According to Yurchak, the “Imaginary West” is “a local cultural construct and imaginary that was based on the forms of knowledge and aesthetics associated with the ‘West,’ but does not necessarily refer to any ‘real’ West, and that also contributed to ‘deterritorializing’ the world of everyday socialism from within.”^[17] Yurchak rejects the confrontational/countercultural character of the “imaginary West” in Soviet cultural consumption. He offers a consensual/conformist interpretation of this metaphor. Using the ideas of the Russian cultural critic Tatyana Cherednichenko, Yurchak tries to show how Western music (as a part of “the Imaginary West”) contributed to “the production of a whole generational identity” for the past Soviet generation. At the same time, he ignores the problems of regional, national and religious identities that were shaped by the consumption of Western cultural products in various parts of the Soviet Union. Yurchak discarded connections between Soviet dissidents and the idea of the West, which was very important for the practice of political dissent in the USSR. Yurchak’s interpretation exaggerates the role of discursive practices. In this interpretation, visual elements, especially Western films and images of adventure books lost their role in influencing both ideological discourse and the local identity of Soviet consumers. The main problem with Yurchak’s study is its concentration only on Leningrad, from which he collected most of his materials and conducted interviews. Moreover, a majority of his material and information came from the educated elite of this city, loyal representatives of the Soviet middle and upper classes, and conformist Soviet intellectuals from Leningrad. He entirely ignores working class youth, the main consumers of heavy metal and adventure films in Soviet society. Another problem with Yurchak’s study is his uncritical attitude toward interviews. He interviewed people during the very difficult time of Russian society’s transition to the post-Soviet “capitalist” stage (1994–98). Many of Yurchak’s interviewees tended to idealize or exaggerate their “socialist experience” as being without conflict in contrast to the brutal reality of “bandit capitalism” during the Yeltsin era. In many cases, using his “speech acts” approach, Yurchak took his interviewees’ information at face value, uncritically, without checking archival sources.^[18] Therefore, he interprets Soviet society during late socialism as one devoid of any serious social problems or conflicts. His study ignores the prevalent problems of this period, which include the involvement of Soviet officials in black market activities, Russification, street-gang culture, popular religiosity, nationalism, and anti-Semitism. Yurchak also underestimated the importance of the KGB and police interference in the cultural consumption of late socialism, which especially affected the provincial cities, where the majority of Soviet youth lived.^[19]
My research project will add significantly to Yurchak’s study on socialist cultural consumption by giving the official version (from KGB and party archival documents) of the events alongside narratives from diaries and oral history. Using archival materials and interviews with people of various social backgrounds from the provincial “closed” Soviet city, my research will also consider common problems related to cultural consumption such as Russification, nationalism, anti-Semitism, popular religiosity, and so on, which were overlooked by Yurchak.^[20]

WESTERN ADVENTURE STORIES AND SOVIET YOUTH

The Brezhnev era in Dniepropetrovsk was a period of the “mass Westernization” of local youth. This mass Westernization included the consumption of books written by Western writers, movies from the West, and especially music from the West, hard rock, which influenced not only youth fashions but also popular religiosity in the region. By 1976, mass consumption of Western cultural products had contributed to the homogenization of local youth culture and Russification. This process began with the mass popularity of Western adventure classics among local middle and high school students. In contrast to the traditionally didactic and boring stories of Soviet books that were obligatory for children’s reading, Soviet students found the adventure, detective, and science fiction stories more exciting and interesting. Ironically, the old Western adventure classics of the nineteenth century, which represented all of these genres, were recommended in the Soviet middle/high school curriculum for “extracurricular reading” during school breaks. In this way, Western adventure books became available to and tremendously popular among the youth of Dniepropetrovsk.
In June 1964, a twelve-year-old middle school student from the town of Sinel’nikovo, near Dniepropetrovsk, wrote in his summer diary:

“Now we have summer break until the end of August. The first thing I did today was to visit the City Children’s Library and borrow the first volume of Mayne Reid’s works that includes my favorite novels, The White Chief and The Quadroon. I will start my holidays with these Mayne Reid masterpieces. Then I will continue with The Leatherstocking Saga, James Fenimore Cooper’s novels about Indians and Nathaniel Bumpo. And I will finish with my favorite fantasy and mystery stories by Edgar Allan Poe.”^[21]

Seven years later, another middle school student from the city of Dniepropetrovsk set up his reading plans for summer break in 1971:

“All spring I dreamed about those six rose-colored volumes of my Mayne Reid that are waiting for me on our living room book shelves. Of course I will start again with The White Chief and The Quadroon in the first volume. My plan is to finish all of Mayne Reid’s volumes, especially the one with The Headless Horseman during June. I had already read these novels during my winter break. Now I need to read all of the volumes one by one. Then in July and August I plan to read three books that my parents presented to me as birthday’s gifts, The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas, The Last of Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. If I have time, I will also finish ten volumes of Jules Verne that my mother strongly recommended that I read. But, of course, I must read Dumas and Conan Doyle first. Mom told me that it was very difficult to get (dostat’) these books. She bought them in the “downtown book market” to make me happy and she paid the local black marketeers a fantastic price for these books.”^[22]

Similar themes appeared in the summer school diary of another middle school student from a neighboring industrial town. At the end of May 1973, he celebrated the beginning of his summer break by reading The Headless Horseman by Mayne Reid. This fourteen-year-old student noted:

“I am glad to be finished with all of these boring studies and readings for my class. Now I can read what I like. I will go to our town library to borrow volumes of Mayne Reid. Then I will read The Hound of Baskervilles by Conan Doyle, a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, Louis Boussenard’s Captain Daredevil [Le Capitaine Casse-Cou], and The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas, which my father bought from the black marketeers in Dniepropetrovsk last month. I also plan to read a collection of Jack London’s stories, all six volumes of James Fenimore Cooper, and my favorite novels of Walter Scott, Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward.”^[23]

These summer diaries demonstrate some similarities in book consumption among the school children of the region during summer breaks in 1964, 1971, and 1973.
The books most desirable to middle school students were the adventure stories of old Western authors.^[24] In their diaries, children never mentioned books by Soviet authors or Ukrainian literature as objects of their book consumption. Often, parents also grew up reading the same “Western adventure classics” that they suggested to their children. More than 100 people interviewed during 1989–2007 confirmed that Western adventure literature was immensely popular in the Brezhnev era. People from different backgrounds, for example, librarian Evgen Prudchenko and historian Yurii Mytsyk, who were adolescents during the 1960s and 1970s, fell in love with adventure books by Mayne Reid, Louis Boussenard, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Alexander Dumas. Foreign literature dominated their list of favorite books. In interviews they could only recall a few Ukrainian or Russian adventure and detective stories that captivated their imagination. As Evgen Prudchenko recalled “nine out of each ten books I read in my childhood belonged to [the genre of] Western adventure classics.” It is noteworthy that both Mytsyk and Prudchenko recalled that a majority of Western adventure classics were published in the Ukrainian language. In the 1960s and early 1970s the most popular adventure books were available to Dniepropetrovsk children in Ukrainian rather than Russian translation. Prudchenko read his first Mayne Reid’s book in Ukrainian, when he was ten years old in 1970. Mytsyk recalled that the first adventure book in his life was “Treasure Island” by Stevenson in Ukrainian translation.^[25] However, because of the immense popularity of Western adventure classics among Dniepropetrovsk book consumers, even Ukrainian translations had disappeared from the bookstores by the end of the 1970s. According to diary accounts, the Dniepropetrovsk black market accommodated growing reader demand.^[26]
Traditional Soviet locations for children’s book consumption, such as libraries and bookstores, were not able to satisfy this growing demand for books. The black market gradually became the most important source for book consumers under late socialism. According to school diaries, the majority of the books in young people’s households came from the black market in downtown Dniepropetrovsk during their final school years in 1975–76.^[27] Other contemporaries confirmed the growth of black market trade in books in the region beginning in the late 1960s.^[28] In Dniepropetrovsk, the book and music markets merged in the mid-seventies. The same fartsovshchiki (black marketeers) offered their clients The Three Musketeers by Dumas, or Abbey Road by the Beatles, or a pair of Levi’s jeans. Entire dynasties of black marketers, such as Sergei Fedin’s family, combined a lucrative trade in books, records, and other goods that were popular among the local consumers. The Soviet administration, the police, and Communist ideologists tried to stop the growth of illegal trade in books and records – but they failed.^[29] According to Mikhail Suvorov, who worked in Dniepropetrovsk’s central disco club from 1978 to 1985, by 1975, representatives of the so-called music mafia who sold various Western music products on the city black market had established their control over trade in books, especially Western adventure classics. These fartsovshchiki had connections not only with all of the major disco clubs and restaurants in the city but also with the major official book supply centers (knigobaza). As another contemporary noted, “these people, later known as discotheque mafia, had supporters and regular customers among local Soviet officials who obtained all of their rare books and records through these music mafia connections. Moreover, using their Komsomol connections the representatives of this mafia built their first businesses even before perestroika. We cannot understand the rise of stars of post-Soviet business such as Yulia Tymoshenko, Viktor Pinchuk, and Aleksandr Balashov without these connections from the book/music mafia of the 1980s.”^[30]
According to Stephen Lovell, a British historian of book consumption in the Soviet Union during late socialism, “until the mid-1950s, mass reading was library-based, and the masses could thus be directed towards the appropriate books. By the end of the 1950s, however, private collections started to catch up with libraries; the demands of readers became more varied, and the unwieldy publishing system was unable and unwilling to respond.”^[31] As many Soviet and Western scholars argued, during the urbanizing “revolution” in the Soviet Union in the 1960s people “became better educated, migrated to the cities, moved out of communal flats, and gained slightly more disposable income.” Soviet researchers also called this period “the book boom.”^[32] During the 1960s and 1970s, “recent migrants to the city were inclined to regard books as a means of symbolic adaptation to the ‘higher’ urban culture.” As a result, “the size of workers’ private collections had doubled over 10–15 years” and “there were in 1985 ten times more books in homes than in libraries.”^[33]
The development of book consumption in Dniepropetrovsk followed the All-Union patterns. It was prestigious among Soviet industrial workers to have an extensive book collection at home. In some regions the number of industrial workers who had over 100 volumes at home increased from 16% in 1966 to more than 45% in 1978.^[34] This “book boom” stimulated black market connections all over the Soviet Union.^[35] Stephen Lovell gave an excellent explanation of mass book consumption in Soviet society:

“Books were so sought-after in the late Soviet period not just because of an atavistic Russian hunger for the Word; a more crucial factor was the lack of alternative sources of entertainment and social or material status symbols. It is surely the case that any commodity beyond the basic material necessities acquires symbolic value under the conditions of the kul’tura defitsita. In the absence of a market, the fetishization of culture replaces that of money and exchange value.”^[36]

Dniepropetrovsk’s problems with book consumption were not solely the result of its being a closed city – these problems were typical throughout the Soviet Union. But at the same time Dniepropetrovsk demonstrated local peculiarities. A comparison of the libraries’ records with private school diaries provides us with important information about the evolution of book reading and consumption, especially among young readers.

SCHOOL BOOK DIARIES, YULIA GRIGIAN (TELEGINA), AND BOOK CHOICE

During the 1960s and 1970s, Russian and Ukrainian language teachers encouraged their students to write personal diaries, especially during summer school breaks. Sometimes they suggested that the students write a “diary of books.” Teachers expected students to write brief summaries of each book they read. In some schools in the Dniepropetrovsk region students began these diaries in the fifth grade. Most students hated keeping reading lists. However, a few of these students continued writing these “book journals” for many years. These records are a unique source of information about book consumption among the youth of Dniepropetrovsk. Two of the most detailed book diaries were used in this study. They cover books read by the diarists from February 1970 until June 1975. The writers of these documents, Aleksandr Gusar, whose native language was Ukrainian, and Andrei Vadimov, an ethnic Russian, recorded all of the books they read from their fourth to ninth years in school. For a five-year period, they commented on a description of the plot, the language of the book, and the number of pages, and gave their evaluations of each book.
During the first year of their book diaries, in 1970, Gusar read 80 books and Vadimov read 78 books. Both students followed their teachers’ recommended reading list. In the centralized system of Soviet education and universal curriculum for all Soviet schools, teachers of Russian literature used the same lists of recommended reading during summer break. This is why Gusar and Vadimov often described the same books in their diaries. They read books by Russian classic writers, such as the novel of V. Korolenko, The Blind Musician, and by Soviet writers, such as the novel of Yu. Olesha, Three Fat Men, and the series of novels by V. Kataev, The Waves of the Black Sea, about revolutionary events in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa. The Soviet curriculum recommended all of these books for fifth-grade students. Both students also read a series of fairy tales written by A. Volkov who adapted The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Using an original American idea and plot for his first novel The Wizard of Emerald City, Volkov composed new stories that fit the official requirements for Soviet children’s books and wrote three new novels about the adventures of an American girl, Elly, from Kansas.^[37]
Adventure literature and science fiction by Western writers take a prominent place in these book diaries. Each of the students read adventure novels by Mayne Reid, James Fenimore Cooper, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and science fiction stories by H. G. Wells. Only a few books by classical Ukrainian writers were recorded in the book diaries for 1970. Both students read collections of stories by Marko Vovchok, a prominent female Ukrainian writer of the nineteenth century. Each of these students read at least one book every two months in Ukrainian. Usually these Ukrainian books were either adventure novels by Soviet Ukrainian writers such as N. Trublaini, Yu. Bedzyk, and Yu. Dol’d-Mykhailyk, or Ukrainian translations from Russian historical novels by Z. Shishova, or translations of Romanian detective novels by the writer T. Konstantin. On average, the twelve-year-olds read 20% of their books in Ukrainian (mostly Western adventure stories) and 80% of their books in the Russian language. Approximately 80% of the books they read represented Soviet literature, and less than 20%, foreign literature.^[38]
In 1971, Gusar read 60 and Vadimov read 56 books. Besides the obligatory Russian classical books such as Dubrovsky by Aleksandr Pushkin and Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol, foreign historical and adventure novels and science fiction obviously prevailed in their records (60% in Gusar’s diary and 53% in Vadimov’s diary). Both of them fell in love with “European medieval history” reading about the adventures of Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, heroes of Walter Scott, and heroes of The Black Arrow by Stevenson, of Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, and The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas. Gusar and Vadimov re-read Mayne Reid’s novels and began reading Jules Verne’s science fiction. Both of them re-read a collection of stories about detective Sherlock Holmes by Conan Doyle. Aleksandr Gusar left a note about Conan Doyle’s book on December 31, 1971: “I read this book for the fourth time .” In the sixth grade Gusar and Vadimov preferred only foreign or Soviet adventure and detective literature (either in Russian or Ukrainian). Overall, the number of Ukrainian books they read decreased. Only 15% of their books were in Ukrainian.^[39] In 1972, Gusar read 50 and Vadimov 46 books. More than 60% of all of their readings were foreign science fiction by Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke, detective stories by Conan Doyle, stories about the pirate Captain Blood by Raphael Sabatini, as well as novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Alexander Dumas. Almost 20% of all of the books represented Russian and Ukrainian classical literature (Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Nechui-Levytskyi). Less than 20% represented Soviet historical and detective stories. Only three books in both records (less than 6%) were in the Ukrainian language.^[40]
In 1973, their last year in middle school (eighth grade), the fifteen-year-old students read more classical Russian and Ukrainian literature as was required by the Soviet curriculum. Gusar read 70 books and Vadimov read 66 books. More than 23% of the books now included classical works by writers such as Denis Fonvizin, Aleksandr Griboedov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, and Taras Shevchenko. Despite this increased reading load, both students still read foreign books for leisure. More than 40% of the books in their records represented adventure novels by Alexander Dumas, science fiction by Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells, horror and mystery stories by Edgar Allan Poe, adventure stories by Bret Harte, and detective stories by Agatha Christie and George Simenon. Almost 26% of all of the books represented Soviet science fiction (mainly A. Beliaev’s novels) and Soviet historical and detective stories. Both of the students read more than 15% of all of the books mentioned in their diaries, including detective stories by Agatha Christie, in the Ukrainian language.^[41] A similar proportion of books – 40% of foreign literature (mainly adventures and science fiction), 30% of obligatory Russian and Ukrainian literature (Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorkii, Panas Myrnyi, Lesia Ukrainka, and Oles Honchar), and 30% of Soviet contemporary literature for entertainment – was recorded during 1974–76 in the book diaries. Almost 20% of all of the books, including foreign detective stories and obligatory (programnaia literature) books of Ukrainian classical literature, were in Ukrainian.^[42]
During the final grades in high school, both readers, Ukrainian speaker Gusar and Russian speaker Vadimov, began reading historical novels in Ukrainian about the Ukrainian past written by Soviet writers such as Skliarenko and Bilyk. Aleksandr Gusar, a sixteen-year-old high school student, who was always more interested in science (especially chemistry) than in the humanities was thrilled by Ivan Bilyk’s novel Mech Areia and decided to read all of the books about Ukrainian history, including those about the Kievan princes Sviatoslav and Volodymyr and about the legendary Zaporizhian Cossacks. In his summer diary, in June 1975, he wrote:

“My father criticizes me for reading in Ukrainian and reminds me that for my career and studies at Dniepropetrovsk University I will need a good knowledge of Russian. But I can’t stop reading Bilyk’s novel. My friend whose mother is a librarian gave me this copy in the Ukrainian language. He told me that it was forbidden to read this book and that the authorities had removed it from circulation. However, I am so impressed by what I read in Bilyk’s novel. It turned out that the leader of the Huns in the fourth century AD, the great Attila who controlled all of Eurasia, was our Ukrainian ancestor, prince Hatyla. It is unbelievable! We were a great and ancient nation even before Kievan Rus! And now we, Ukrainians, have been transformed into a nation of stupid and timid peasants.”^[43]

This entry is a good illustration of the role of Ukrainian historical novels in forming identity in the Dniepropetrovsk region. Gusar, who idealized Western rock music and whose native language was Ukrainian, under his parents’ influence, switched from writing in Ukrainian to writing in Russian in his diary in 1975. Nevertheless, in the same year, he continued reading his favorite Ukrainian books, and in his diary he expressed an obvious pride about the past achievements of the Ukrainian nation.
On the one hand, Aleksandr followed a typical path of Russification. He entered Dniepropetrovsk University where the language of instruction was Russian and he switched to Russian for communicating with his classmates. As Kenneth Farmer noted, “Official Soviet policies in the Ukraine have tended to reinforce the prestige of Russian over Ukrainian, and to encourage the adoption of Russian by Ukrainians seeking upward mobility.”^[44] Eventually, Gusar adopted the Russian language. He also publicly criticized the stupidity and incompetence of Ukrainian intellectuals and the Soviet conservatism of the local Ukrainian apparatchiks, whom he felt personified all of the reactionary moments of the Soviet reality. On the other hand, Gusar wanted to know more about the historical past of his nation. He read Ukrainian historical novels and idealized the glorious past of Ukraine, which he contrasted with backward, anti-Western elements in contemporary Soviet Ukrainian culture.^[45]
According to contemporaries, more high school students (both Ukrainian and Russian speaking) read Bilyk’s and Skliarenko’s novels.^[46] Vladimir Solodovnik, a Russian-speaking high school student who entered Dniepropetrovsk University in 1976, was also enthusiastic about Ukrainian historical novels by Skliarenko during the late 1960s and early 1970s.^[47] This information corresponds to Dniepropetrovsk public library records. According to these records, Ukrainian historical novels became the most popular books among young readers from fifteen to seventeen years old during 1970–75. Besides traditionally popular adventure and detective stories and science fiction by foreign authors, novels about Ukrainian history were in great demand in all central libraries of Dniepropetrovsk. Some contemporaries witnessed a growing demand for Ukrainian historical books even on the black market, where the most popular book in 1975–76 was Ivan Bilyk’s novel Mech Areia.^[48]
Another Dniepropetrovsk high school student, Yulia Grigian (Telegina), was also a book consumer in the closed city during the 1970s. Yulia Grigian, who in 1978 changed her last name to Tymoshenko after her marriage, became widely known in the 1990s as the “gas princess” of Ukraine and in 2004 as “Joan of Arc” of the Orange Revolution. Born in 1960, Yulia was the daughter of an Armenian taxi driver, Vladimir Grigian, and a Russian technical worker, Ludmila Telegina. As Yulia’s classmates recalled, she lived in a typical working-class neighborhood, in a typical khrushchevka apartment building on Kirov Avenue, not far from Yuzhmash jazz club.^[49] The building was known to the neighbors as the “taxi drivers’ house” because all of the inhabitants of this gray five-story building were employees of the Dniepropetrovsk city taxi depot. Yulia’s parents received their small apartment from their employer. After her parents’ divorce, as Yulia recalled later, her mother worked hard to support the entire family:

“To earn more money, my mother worked extra hours and was in constant attendance at the taxi depot. She also had to support my grandmother and her sister’s family. Because of the conditions under which I grew up, I knew that it was very difficult to save an extra penny. We had to count only upon ourselves.”^[50]

According to her classmates, Yulia was a relatively good, but not an excellent student. Instead of studying hard at home preparing for classes, she preferred to spend her free time outside, watching movies and playing games with her friends. Yet, because of her good memory and quick-wittedness, she always got good grades in school. Yulia recalled, “During my childhood, I did not play girls’ games, did not have dolls, and avoided friendship with other girls. I preferred friendship with boys, who were more active and inventive than girls. I was not an aggressive child but I liked boys’ games, especially soccer.”^[51] Later, in a high school composition, she added: “I like music by Bach, Mozart, and Strauss. I also like modern rock bands such as the Beatles, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Led Zeppelin and others. I am also fond of sports, especially of ping pong, skating, and other sports such as volleyball and basketball.” During this period, Yulia entered a special city sports club and joined “a section of sports gymnastics” there. She became a professional female athlete and won the special high rank of “candidate for master of Soviet sports” in gymnastics. But during a training drill, she fell from the parallel bars and broke her collarbone.^[52]
After this accident she quit sports and spent more time at home. While recuperating Yulia began reading books. Her reading preferences were shaped by her friends and neighbors, predominantly local boys. Like many of her classmates, she preferred foreign literature in Russian translation. During the 1970s until her admission in 1978 as an undergraduate student to the Department of Economics at Dniepropetrovsk State University, Yulia Grigian read mostly Western adventure and science fiction stories. The most popular writer for her and her classmates was Alexander Dumas.^[53] After 1976, Yulia’s tastes were also influenced by “girls’ literature.” The female reading audience in Dniepropetrovsk voraciously read sentimental “love stories” by the nineteenth-century French author George Sand. Russian prerevolutionary classic writers of romantically themed stories, such as the “officially permitted” Ivan Turgenev and the “officially forbidden” Ivan Bunin, also influenced female audiences. At the end of the 1970s, even the romantic poetry of forbidden Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva circulated among the students of Dniepropetrovsk High School No. 75, from which Yulia Grigian graduated in 1978. No Ukrainian books or poetry were among the popular literature read by the students of this school where Russian was the official language of instruction. Even in special city school No. 9, where the official languages of instruction were Ukrainian and English, an overwhelming majority of students preferred to read books in Russian.^[54] Yulia Grigian became a typical representative of this Russian-speaking young generation of eastern Ukrainians in the 1970s. In post-Soviet times, this generation of Soviet youth would take part in building a new Ukrainian identity among those who never spoke Ukrainian during the 1970s.