Authors

Discussion

Discos or “diskoteki” in the Soviet Union were dancing events for young people. Arriving from the West at the beginning of the 1970s, the phenomenon’s incorporation into Soviet reality may be seen as the one of a string of popular cultural borrowings from the West. As with similar phenomena preceding and succeeding it, this was a complex transplant operation: in adapting to a new social environment, both the new “organ” and the “host body” were modified. While such events in the USSR included elements of the music and dance phenomena associated with the term “disco” in the West, they also incorporated many other elements that would have surprised Western disco attendees. As a result of the paternalistic interventions of Soviet authorities, in the discos of the USSR, political speeches were made, a range of audiovisual materials was used, choreography productions were performed, and classical music was played. In typical Soviet DIY fashion, young people responded to the constraints of Soviet social life and political propriety by creating decorations and music with improvised means, skillfully concealing references to foreign performers in the names of disco clubs, and listening to the obligatory minimum of classical music while waiting in line at the checkroom. In sum, something fundamentally new emerged inside the shell of the borrowed Western phenomenon. The case of Soviet discos is one of the many examples of how Western culture has been perceived and received in Soviet space. Soviet disco gatherings were supposed to articulate a compromise between the Komsomol and Soviet youth and function as recreational events where popular music was played. Yet instead, they became fora for highly “Soviet” forms of social experience overall, as was expressed variously in various Soviet republics. Drawing on Alexei Yurchak’s living “vnye” and Juliana Fürst’s ‘dropping out of socialism’ conceptual apparatus on a par with archival sources and oral interviews with the former disco attendees and DJs, the paper argues that apart from adhering to the Soviet state agenda, discos became a platform for expressing local national and ethnic identity for the youth either in Leningrad, Riga or Novosibirsk.