THE SOCIOLOGY OF BOOK CONSUMPTION IN DNIEPROPETROVSK

In 1975 a large proportion of the books in demand at city libraries corresponded to trends noted by Gusar and Vadimov. Almost 40% of the books checked out that year from the main Dniepropetrovsk library were written by foreign authors, 25% were by prerevolutionary Russian and Ukrainian authors, and 35% were by Soviet Russian and Ukrainian writers. Almost 70% of all of these books were in Russian and 30% in Ukrainian.^[1] To some extent, these numbers correspond to the library statistics of other regions of the Soviet Union during the 1970s.^[2] In 1977, in the city libraries of Dniepropetrovsk more than 98% of all readers checked out fiction books (khudozhestvennaia literatura), 65% of all readers borrowed foreign fiction in Russian, 25% – Russian classic literature, 20% – books in Ukrainian, and 80% of all readers read Soviet Russian literature on regular basis.^[3]
After 1975, the situation in the book market and library records changed. During the late 1970s, new book consumers asked for more foreign literature in Russian translation and for fewer books in Ukrainian. By 1984, the leaders in Dniepropetrovsk book consumption (both on the black market and in public libraries) were books written by Western authors who were traditionally popular among the Soviet reading audience through the 1960s and 1970s. Alexander Dumas, Mayne Reid, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jules Verne, now with the addition of George Sand, Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and Somerset Maugham were the most-read foreign authors among Dniepropetrovsk readers. The proportion of foreign books among all books checked out in the central city library increased from 42% in 1979 to almost 60% in 1984. At the same time the proportion of Ukrainian books checked out plummeted from 30% to less than 8%.^[4]
During 1980–84, popular books in Ukrainian (including those by forbidden Ukrainian writers Hrushevsky, Bilyk, and others) disappeared from the Dniepropetrovsk black market because they had become less profitable for local book dealers. More than 60% of all books read in 1980 in Dniepropetrovsk came from private collections and the black market. A majority of private book collectors ignored literature in Ukrainian. They preferred to buy only books in Russian.^[5] According to many contemporaries, the books that people still read and checked out in Ukrainian were mainly representative of programnaia literature – books required in the schools as obligatory reading according to the existing Soviet curriculum. These books included works by classical Ukrainian writers such as Taras Shevchenko and Panas Myrnyi, or Soviet Ukrainian writers such as Mykola Bazhan and Pavlo Tychyna. In many cases local high school students did not read the original works of these writers. They visited the city libraries, and took notes, and summarized literary criticism on the Ukrainian literature that they were supposed to be studying. The students used these notes and summaries for their school papers and tests in Ukrainian literature.^[6]
One Dniepropetrovsk librarian, Evgen D. Prudchenko, emphasized that in contrast to the 1960s and 1970s when young readers loved to read books in Ukrainian, in the 1980s an overwhelming majority of Dniepropetrovsk youth stopped reading books in Ukrainian.^[7] As Vitalii Pidgaetskii, a former professor of history at Dniepropetrovsk University noted, by the end of the Brezhnev era in Dniepropetrovsk an overwhelming majority of local readers had lost interest in Ukrainian history and books. According to Pidgaetskii, it became unfashionable among local intellectuals in the 1980s to read Ukrainian literature:

“Everyone boasted about what book of a new Western author he or she was reading. People were reading the Soviet magazine Innostrannaia literatura [Foreign Literature – in Russian] and the books of fashionable writers from the West. They forgot the Ukrainian literature. The Western authors, American, French, German, and Italian, ousted all of the Ukrainian writers from local book consumption. Of course, all of the new Western books were published in Russian translation. I think that the mass popularity of foreign literature contributed to the gradual replacement of Ukrainian by Russian in the Dniepropetrovsk book market. To some extent this popularity of Western literature became a factor in the growing Russification of the local reading audience in Dniepropetrovsk.”^[8]

Pidgaetskii’s observations about the role of book consumption in Russification in Dniepropetrovsk demonstrate the ties between cultural consumption and social and ethnodemographic developments in Eastern Ukraine. Even the official Soviet scholars of reading and book consumption noted that the popularity of foreign books in Russian translation and Soviet Russian literature among non-Russian readers in national republics such as Ukraine led to the replacement of national languages by Russian in everyday book consumption.^[9]

ROVESNIK, WESTERN MUSIC, AND RUSSIFICATION

Soviet popular magazines such as Rovesnik, also became objects of cultural consumption among Dniepropetrovsk youth. Besides a few editions of Polish, Czech, East German, Hungarian, and Bulgarian youth magazines, which came through official channels of distribution for Soviet mass media, and the rare issues of British, French, and West German music magazines, which came through the black market, young residents of Dniepropetrovsk relied mainly on Soviet youth newspapers and magazines to get information about Western popular culture. These editions included both All-Union titles, such as Komsomol’skaia pravda, Iunost’, Sovetskii Ekran, and Smena, and Ukrainian republican periodicals, such as Molod’ Ukrainy, Novyny Kinoekranu, and Ranok. Traditionally, the Ukrainian editions were more cautious and conservative than the Moscow central ones. Therefore, young readers in Dniepropetrovsk preferred the central periodicals from Moscow. According to contemporaries and librarians’ statistics, the most popular publication among Dniepropetrovsk consumers of popular music was the Soviet youth journal Rovesnik (Contemporary, or Person of the Same Age, in English), which was established in 1962 by the All-Union Komsomol to cover major problems of international youth culture and politics. Rovesnik published important information about Western popular culture in the Russian language. By 1982, in 211 trade union libraries the absolute favorite magazine among young readers was Rovesnik. During the 1970s and 1980s, young readers between the ages of 15 and 21 preferred this journal to any other Komsomol publications. The beginning of the mass popularity of Rovesnik coincided with the peak of the discotheque movement in the region.^[10] Young readers were looking not only for more information about music but also for public approval from official sources. Rovesnik became the most reliable official source of this information because it used foreign publications and covered popular topics of youth culture abroad.^[11] Even local Komsomol ideologists who were in charge of the disco club movement in the region acknowledged this fact. Mikhail Suvorov noted that Komsomol supervisors always checked the content of disk jockeys’ comments about Western music using information from Rovesnik.^[12] This journal became an important and officially sanctioned source of information for both young pop music consumers and their local Komsomol ideologists. Rovesnik also reflected the central Komsomol officials’ reactions to new music and youth fashions from the West. It is difficult to understand the peculiarities of local cultural consumption in the closed provincial Soviet cities, such as Dniepropetrovsk, without referring to this magazine.
Contemporaries noted that the mass reading of this magazine also contributed to the Russification of Ukrainian youth culture in Dniepropetrovsk. This process was related to the origins and sources of information about new music consumed by local youth. During the 1970s, all of the official Soviet recordings of Western music were released on the state-owned label Melodia with comments in Russian only. All of the best radio shows about rock music were of foreign or Russian origin.^[13] Young consumers of Western popular music from Dniepropetrovsk also relied on Russian periodicals because, as mentioned above, the Ukrainian editions were more cautious and conservative than the Moscow central ones. The Ukrainian Komsomol magazine Ranok always published awkwardly written articles with incompetent criticism of developments in Western youth culture. Sometimes local readers were appalled by the ignorance and incompetence of Kyiv journalists. “I am tired of reading this mixture of lies and fantasy in Ranok,” wrote one young fan of rock music, “these guys from Kyiv invented the story that American hippies were a satanic sect made up of a mixture of palmistry, astrology, and black magic, and that hippies were looking for a virgin girl for their devilish black mass ritual and couldn’t find such girls among themselves. I would rather read a boring Feofanov book about rock music than Kyiv’s magazines.” Because of this disappointment he stopped reading the Ukrainian youth periodicals as early as 1974, and read only Rovesnik.^[14] Many Ukrainian rock fans preferred Rovesnik as well. As a result, the most popular youth magazine among the local rock music fans was the Russian language journal Rovesnik.
The Russian language became the major language of local rock bands. From the mid-seventies, the repertoire of student concerts changed dramatically. In fact, the Russian language ousted Ukrainian at major concerts organized in Dniepropetrovsk during the 1970s. In June 1982, during the traditional music festival Student Spring in Dniepropetrovsk, all of the college rock bands performed songs in Russian. Even the Ukrainian folk-rock band Dniepriane performed fewer songs in Ukrainian than usual. One journalist complained about the lack of national Ukrainian songs in the repertoire of the student bands in comparison with previous music festivals during the 1970s.^[15] During the 1980s more local college rock bands switched from Ukrainian to Russian.^[16] Local Komsomol periodicals also emphasized that in the early 1980s, disco clubs stopped playing Ukrainian music.^[17] Some Ukrainian-speaking fans of rock music by the end of the 1970s began speaking Russian and replaced their native language with Russian. As Gusar explained in his journal in August 1976, the language of the young rocker should be English or Russian, rather than Ukrainian. That is why he switched to Russian.^[18]
We can argue that (besides the official policy) new forms of cultural consumption such as reading youth magazines during the 1970s led to Russification as the main trend in the cultural development of the region, especially in the city of Dniepropetrovsk.^[19] The search for the authentic West deeply impacted the process of identity formation for millions of young Soviet consumers of Western cultural products. In the closed city of Dniepropetrovsk, these consumers tried to identify themselves only with the West or its legitimate substitutes, and by the end of the 1970s, they had lost any connections with Soviet Ukrainian culture. In the imagination of these consumers, official Soviet Ukrainian culture represented all of the most conservative, backward, and anti-Western elements in their life. “Only idiots and peasants listen to Ukrainian Estrada and read idiotic Ranok and Novyny Kinoekranu, the normal razvitye (smart, intelligent) people listen to real rock music from the real West and read Rovesnik and Sovetskii Ekran,” wrote Andrei Vadimov, a future activist of the discotheque movement in the city of Dniepropetrovsk, in September 1976. The same year Aleksandr Gusar, the future organizer of a dorm disco club at Dniepropetrovsk University, noted in his high school journal, “You have to be stupid to say that Ukrainian Estrada songs are better than Western rock music. Ukrainian music exists only for bumpkins. All intelligent youth now listens to classic rock from the West .”^[20]
By accepting the real West as part of their identity, these young rock music fans and discotheque activists who read Rovesnik rejected the official Soviet version of their own ethnic identity. This process of identification with the West also affected the Komsomol ideologists who eagerly participated in the consumption of Western cultural products during the Brezhnev era and followed recommendations from Rovesnik. In contrast to their official denial of the corruptive influences of the capitalist West, these apparatchiks preferred Western cultural products to Soviet ones. Their music preferences, fashions, and dance parties demonstrated the surprising Westernization of young ideologists in the closed city of Soviet Ukraine. They consumed more Western cultural products than the products of the Soviet Ukrainian culture. This preference was especially obvious at the beginning of the 1980s. Eventually this process of identification with the real West leveled national cultural differences among the active consumers of Western mass culture and contributed to what some scholars called a homogenization of Soviet culture, which meant the mass Russification of youth culture in eastern Ukraine during the 1970s.^[21]

SUMMING UP: “BETWEEN MOSCOW AND L’VIV” – THE CLOSED CITY AS AN IDEOLOGICAL FAILURE OF LATE SOCIALISM

During the Brezhnev era, the KGB discovered that mass rock/disco music consumption and reading practices related to old Western adventure stories and material about Western mass culture among Soviet youth involved the Komsomol and trade union apparatchiks. International tourism and discotheque enthusiasts provided these apparatchiks with important books, music, and video material for entertainment businesses. Without these relationships, it is impossible to imagine the development of post-Soviet capitalism. The Dniepropetrovsk discotheque and book mafia – a network of rock music fans, black marketeers, Komsomol ideologists, entertainers, and representatives of the Soviet tourist agencies – contributed directly to business activities during and after perestroika. After 1991, people from the discotheque mafia organized nine out of ten capitalist corporations in Dniepropetrovsk, including Yulia Tymoshenko’s business. Despite KGB efforts to suppress the dangerous consumption of Western capitalist cultural products, this cultural consumption influenced capitalist entrepreneurship in post-Soviet Ukraine. Moreover, the business activities of the new Komsomol “entrepreneurs” in the 1980s contributed to regional identity in the former Soviet closed city. Many of these “entrepreneurs” who were not ethnic Ukrainians (Yulia Tymoshenko, Viktor Pinchuk, Serhiy Tihipko, Aleksandr Balashov, Mikhail Suvorov, etc.) became active participants in the Ukrainian independence movement in 1988–91, attempting to protect their regional business interests rather than their national cultural interests. In the 1990s, as former members of the Dniepropetrovsk discotheque mafia, they became an integral part of the business and political life of independent Ukraine, and openly opposed Moscow in politics.
Communist ideologists and KGB officers who controlled cultural consumption in Dniepropetrovsk created a confusing and disorienting ideological situation for the local youth. They promoted Western forms of entertainment such as the discotheque, and at the same time, they tried to limit the influence of capitalist culture by popularizing expressions of Soviet nationalism, including Ukrainian music and history. They feared the rise of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism and tried to suppress any extreme enthusiasm for Ukrainian poetry and history, yet, the entire system of Soviet education was designed to promote the progressive cultural models of socialist nations in contrast to the “degenerate capitalist culture” of imperialist nations. As a result, young members of the mature socialist society in Dniepropetrovsk adopted elements of Western mass culture as well as the controversial ideas of Shevchenko and images of Zaporizhian Cossacks as part of their cultural identification.
Cultural consumption also depended on the changing demographic situation of the 1960s and 1970s. The constant migration of non-Ukrainian ethnic groups, combined with ideological pressures, led to Russification as a major trend in the cultural development of the region, especially in the city of Dniepropetrovsk. Employment at Yuzhmash, a rocket manufacturing factory, a high priority for KGB officials, also contributed to the city’s growing Russification.^[22] Moreover, the Ukrainian language was steadily losing ground to Russian during the 1970s and 1980s. An overwhelming majority of non-Ukrainian ethnic groups preferred Russian to Ukrainian, and more Ukrainians chose Russian as their native language. In 1979, 12.6% of all Ukrainians in the region claimed that Russian was their native language. By 1989 this proportion had grown to 15.2%, and in the cities it had increased from 16.4% to 18.9%.^[23]
Reading books and popular magazines, watching movies (especially Western ones), listening and dancing to popular music (including Western rock and roll and disco) became the major elements of intensive cultural consumption among Soviet youth. Young people in Dniepropetrovsk not only consumed but also produced new cultural forms that challenged the traditional notions and ideological discourse of local apparatchiks. Moreover, local ideologists tried to use different forms of entertainment, such as discotheque, for Communist (especially anticapitalist and antireligious) propaganda. The use of Western music as propaganda made it legitimate for everyday ideological activities and justified its immense popularity. KGB and party ideologists tried to neutralize this popularity by promoting Soviet and Ukrainian cultural models. The prevailing ideological discourse, and the changing demographic situation, emphasized the cultural role of only one language, Russian. At the same time, the young generation was urged to respect certain heroes of national Ukrainian history, such as Cossack rebels, Bohdan Khmel’nytsky, or Taras Shevchenko and related aspects of Ukrainian culture.^[24] After many years of such indoctrination, this generation was ready, in the period of Ukrainian independence, to consume the familiar forms of Ukrainian culture as legitimate symbols connecting their former Soviet ideological discourse to the new, post-Soviet one. Because of the ideological confusion of late Soviet socialism, these symbols became intermixed with various forms of both Soviet and Western popular culture. Such a situation created very particular, regional types of identity formation among local youth.
The Dniepropetrovsk version of cultural identification differed significantly from Ukrainian forms of the version associated with less Russified regions of Ukraine. The last generation of late socialism in Dniepropetrovsk developed its national identity through a dual process of (1) seeing themselves as the cultural descendants of late Soviet civilization with some elements of Western mass culture and Ukrainian national forms, and (2) opposing the extreme Westernization and Ukrainization associated with western Ukrainian cities such as L’viv. During the Brezhnev era, L’viv played an ambiguous role in Dniepropetrovsk’s identity formation. L’viv provided the closed city not only with Ukrainian national ideas but also with Western cultural products, which became the most desirable objects of cultural consumption. At the same time, Moscow was always identified as the political and ideological center of Soviet civilization. For the people of Dniepropetrovsk, Moscow acted as an ideological supervisor that, on the one hand, set certain cultural standards and fashionable trends for the Soviet provinces, including the Dniepropetrovsk region, and, on the other, interfered in and limited the local forms of cultural consumption. By the 1980s, Moscow had become an object of “cultural envy” for millions of consumers in the Dniepropetrovsk region. Traditionally, the capital city of the USSR had better access to and distribution of consumer goods, including Western cultural products, than did provincial cities like Dniepropetrovsk. During the Brezhnev era, local consumers (both ruling elites and ordinary citizens) began identifying themselves with their regional interests and ideas rather than with those of Moscow. By the beginning of perestroika even the Russian-speaking population of Dniepropetrovsk had distanced themselves from Moscow and tried to protect their own regional interests and local sources of consumption from Moscow’s control.
As some contemporaries noted during the Brezhnev era, the Dniepropetrovsk youth created their own regional, Russified version of Ukrainian Soviet identity as a result of living in the closed city, “with hypertrophied emphasis on the consumption of forbidden, but desired Western cultural products.”^[25] The search for the authentic West was an important part of the process of identity formation for millions of young Soviet consumers of Western cultural products. In the closed city of Dniepropetrovsk, consumers tried to identify themselves only with the West or its legitimate substitutes, resulting, by the end of the 1970s, in their disconnection from Soviet Ukrainian culture. In the imagination of these consumers, official Soviet Ukrainian culture represented the most conservative, backward, and anti-Western elements of their life. Therefore, by accepting the real West as a part of their identity, they rejected the official Soviet version of their ethnic identity. Eventually, this process of identification with the real West leveled out and concealed national cultural differences among the active consumers of Western mass culture and contributed to what some scholars called the homogenization of Soviet culture, which meant the mass Russification of youth culture in Eastern Ukraine during the 1970s.
Cultural consumption in Dniepropetrovsk also led to what KGB and Communist party officials considered deviant forms of youth activity. These activities were more than the “art of resisting the dominant political culture” and “strategies of the weak.”^[26] The new Soviet youth culture that originated in the Brezhnev period was more the result of the transformation and consumption of inside Soviet dominant cultural practices as well as new Western cultural influences. According to Michel de Certeau, in social systems such as the city of Dniepropetrovsk “the imposed knowledge and symbolisms become objects manipulated by practitioners who have not produced them.” Using de Certeau’s ideas, we can say that young people from Dniepropetrovsk subverted practices and representations that were imposed on them from within – not by rejecting them or by transforming them (though that occurred as well), but in many different ways. Young Soviet consumers of popular culture “metaphorized the dominant order: they made it function in another register. They remained other within the system which they assimilated and which assimilated them externally. They diverted it without leaving it.”^[27] They used the sphere of leisure as the main arena of their cultural transformation. Simultaneously, books, rock and disco music, dance halls (discothèques), and films became their alternatives, and transformed the dominant cultural practices during late socialism. At the same time, the tastes and activities of the new youth culture resulted in new values and demands for cultural consumption, which gradually replaced and transformed traditional Soviet values and Communist ideological practices, even among the young Komsomol elite of the late 1970s and 1980s.
During the Brezhnev era, through cultural consumption and tourism, people from the closed city developed their own hierarchy of the West. In their imagination, the authentic West was associated only with Western developed industrial countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, West Germany, and the Netherlands. The developing countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa took second place to the authentic West in this imaginary hierarchy. Dniepropetrovsk consumers put all European socialist countries in third position in this “hierarchy of the West.” They called these countries “substitutes for the West.” These socialist substitutes for the West had their own hierarchy. Yugoslavia held the highest position among all socialist substitutes. All Soviet consumers considered Yugoslavia the most authentic substitute for the “capitalist West.” Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia were next after Yugoslavia within this ranking of socialist substitutes for the West. Last position in this hierarchy belonged to Bulgaria and Romania. Finally, Dniepropetrovsk consumers also developed an idea of the “Soviet West,” which was less prestigious than the socialist substitutes for the West, but was more accessible and real to the cultural imagination of Dniepropetrovsk consumers. The Soviet West included the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and west Ukrainian cities such as L’viv.
“The West” became a constructive element in the identity formation of local youth during the Brezhnev era in the closed city. The association of “the West” with everything modern, progressive, and fashionable affected both Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking people. In various forms of cultural (Soviet, ethnic, religious, music, regional) identities in the region of Dniepropetrovsk, “the West” played a prominent role. Despite the Russification of the region, especially through mass cultural consumption, the local version of Ukrainian national identity also became connected to the idea of the West.
The most significant result of this “Westernization” of mass cultural consumption in the region was the involvement of young Communist apparatchiks in this process. Komsomol activists and local ideologists, who not only consumed Western cultural products such as popular music and films, but also were participating in the disco movement and tourism by the end of the Brezhnev era, promoted various forms of Western mass culture in Dniepropetrovsk. Eventually, these young Komsomol activists, such as Yulia Tymoshenko, Vladimir Pinchuk, and Serhiy Tihipko, realized that their favorite idea of “the West” could bring profits. For this reason, “the West” became the central element of the first business enterprises in Dniepropetrovsk during late socialism. By selling Western films and music and organizing tourist trips abroad, young Communist apparatchiks, many of whom came from the secret rocket factory, discarded the ideological limitations of developed socialism and incorporated values that were associated with “capitalist West.” The late Brezhnev era was the most important period in the spread of these values among Soviet youth. The story of reading practices and “Western mass culture” in Dniepropetrovsk during the Brezhnev era highlights the complete failure of Soviet ideologists and the KGB to protect the youth of this strategically important center of the Soviet military industrial complex from “ideological pollution” in the Cold War confrontation between the “capitalist West” and the socialist ideological system. At the same time, it shows how the tastes and activities of the new “Westernized” youth culture created new values and a demand for cultural consumption that gradually transformed and replaced traditional Soviet values and Communist ideological practices.
The mass consumption of Western cultural products in the closed society contributed to the spread of cynicism among young people. The oppressive ideological atmosphere of Dniepropetrovsk as a closed city contributed not only to ideological and cultural confusion but also to the moral issue of ideological cynicism. Dniepropetrovsk and other Russified regions of eastern Ukraine constantly dealt with this confusion and cynicism.^[28] As a result, the new, post-Soviet Ukrainian politicians who grew up in the region brought their ideological and cultural confusion and resulting cynicism into the new post-Soviet politics of Ukraine.