Risch William Jay - Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Youth and rock in the Soviet bloc : youth cultures, music, and the state in Russia and Eastern Europe / edited by William Jay Risch.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7391-6693-2 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-7823-2 (electronic)

1. Popular music--Political aspects--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. 2. Popular music--Social aspects--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. 3. Popular music--Political aspects--Soviet Union. 4. Popular music--Social aspects--Soviet Union. 5. Music and state--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. 6. Music and state--Soviet Union. 7. Youth--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. 8. Youth--Soviet Union. 9. Cold War--Music and the war. I. Risch, William Jay.

ML3917.E852Y68 2014

306.4'84260947--dc23

2014038910

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For our parents.

William Jay Risch

After 1945, the youth came to represent the hopes and anxieties of a world recovering from a devastating war. World War II had led to the deaths of around thirty-six million Europeans.

Young people soon became of crucial importance to the Cold War that emerged between the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. World War II had reinvigorated Soviet myths about the October Revolution. Defeating Nazism had given the Soviet project a new sense of purpose, as it demonstrated socialisms ability to counter the most aggressive forces of capitalism and imperialism. The youth were to be at the center of a new revolutionary struggle where building Communism had taken on a renewed global mission.

As youth developed into a social category of consumers, they became a source of great anxiety across the world. A 1960 United Nations report suggested the global scope of these concerns. A product of the Second United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, held in London, August 8 to 20, 1960, the report, New Forms of Juvenile Delinquency: Their Origin, Prevention and Treatment, described youth cultures throughout the world that posed a menace to society. It attributed rising standards of living and improvement in state welfare systems to new forms of juvenile delinquency such as car thefts by the young. The report suggested that new forms of juvenile delinquency that had emerged since World War II had led to new forms of expression by young people that could not be reduced to poverty, the impact of war, or needs for emotional fulfillment alone, but something else:

It is difficult to assess to what extent this deterioration [of young peoples morals and behavior] is the result of factors such as growing materialism, contradictory systems of values, one idealistic and the other for practical everyday use; a more or less generalized sense of distrust or insecurity in spite of greater material security; the reported increase of corruption in levels entrusted with functions of guidance, protection or security. It is interesting, in any case, that in quite a number of countries, juveniles, especially young adults, seem to assume in a variety of ways, even in clothing, an attitude of sometimes clearly rebellious distrust or protest against certain prevailing mores, principles and slogans. Usually, especially in highly developed countries, these young people enjoy material advantages, including good working conditions and opportunities of earning and spending money, which were never before available to this age group. No doubt such protests and rebellions among young people are not new. What is new is the way in which this attitude is at present affecting more young people than ever before.

Thus juvenile delinquency, for these United Nations experts, had become a different problem for places like postwar Europe and the United States. In Western Europe, the rise of the welfare state, postwar reconstruction, and greater economic ties with the United States during the Cold War by the beginning of the 1960s had fueled improved material conditions that made it possible for young people to engage in a culture of consumption and leisure not seen before. In the United States, which had not seen the level of carnage Europe had during World War II, these rising standards of living had affected young people a decade earlier, leading to the teenager as an important consumer and social category already by the mid-1950s. In Eastern Europe, centrally planned economies took more time to produce the amount of consumer goods in the West, but even here, by the 1960s, greater opportunities for leisure, and some of the basic guarantees of the welfare state, had arrived. Thus the 1960 United Nations report made clear that there was an essential difference in the new forms of juvenile delinquency emerging among more urban, industrialized societies like those in Europe and the United States: [I]n some highly developed countries juvenile delinquency is becoming more and more a problem of attitudes, while in the less developed countries, especially of Africa, Asia and Latin America, it can still be clearly linked with factors such as poverty, lack of education, poor health and urbanization.

The United Nations report listed numerous youth cultures linked to these problems with peoples attitudes. Groups and gangs on street corners, involving juveniles and adolescents committing mass rioting or other patterns of antisocial behavior, had emerged in a number of different parts of the world. They were called the Halbstarke or half-matured (West and East Germany), the Teddy Boys (Great Britain), the Blousons noirs (France), the vitelloni (Italy), hooligans (Poland and the Soviet Union), Tsotsio (South Africa), Bodgies (for boys) and Widgies (for girls) (Australia and New Zealand), and Mambo boys and girls (Japan).

Remarks like these by the United Nations illustrated how the values and behaviors of young people had greatly disappointed older generations a decade and a half after the end of World War II. Greater prosperity, or at least greater normalcy, had given the young an opportunity to make a better world, yet they were not living up to those standards. In France, by the end of the 1950s, a younger generation more oriented toward consumption and leisure threatened the values of political and cultural elites, despite the fact that their government had taken greater steps to look after the material and cultural needs of young people.