The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953

Strange Young Men in Stalin's Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953

Author(s): Mark Edele

Source: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas , 2002, Neue Folge, Bd. 50, H. 1 (2002), pp. 37-61

Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41050842

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Mark Edele, Chicago

Strange Young Men in Stalin's Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953*

Ich würde nur an einen Gott glauben, der zu tanzen verstünde.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra1

Introduction

"Soviet youth is the most progressive, the most highly principled youth [of the world]. It is educated by the party in the spirit of socialist ideology. [...] But we cannot close our eyes to the fact that survivals of the damned capitalist past are still alive in the consciousness of a certain part of youth. [...] To our shame people still exist among Soviet youth, who are infected by the vices of the past, spongers, who live an idle, parasitic life. On the central streets of Moscow, Leningrad, Tbilisi, Erevan, and several other cities loiter young men with Tarzan haircuts (tarzan 'ie pricheski), dressed up like parrots, so-called stiliagi. They do not work anywhere, they do not study, [but] spend their nights in restaurants, [and] pester girls. What kind of people are they?"2

The stiliagi who so worried and ashamed the secretary of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) A. N. Shelepin in 1954 were a product of late Stalinism not, as he suggested, of the "damned capitalist past." The subculture emerged in the years following the Second World War and remained part of the Soviet urban landscape despite the Cold War and the anti-cosmopolitanist terror of the last years of Stalin's dictatorship. How was this possible given the state's preoccupation with and surveillance of youth? How could members of a generation, who had never had any exposure to the "damned capitalist past" and who never knew anything other than "Stalinist Civilization" behave in such a blatantly un-Soviet manner?3

This article describes the evolution of stiliazhnichestvo ("stylish-ness" or "stiliagi-ness"), explores the environment which made this evolution possible, and develops a hypothesis to explain it. The preconditions for the emergence were threefold: the existence of a group of young men who had the necessary resources for a lifestyle based on consumption and leisure;

* Without the support of many people I might never have written this paper. I want to thank Elena Zubkova for her enthusiasm for stiliagi and her generous sharing of knowledge; Dietrich Beyrau for finding this project worthwhile; June Farris, the Slavic bibliographer at the University of Chicago, for help with sources; the members of the Russian Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago for an enjoyably tough discussion; Alan Barenberg and Brian LaPierre for bringing key sources to my attention; Richard Hellie for interest in the term chuvak; Moira Hinderer for eliminating needless words; and Kirill Tomoff for sharing the findings of his dissertation while it was still a work in progress. I am especially in dept to Paul Ross, Andrew Oppenheimer, Leora Auslander, and Sheila Fitzpatrick for the time and effort they invested in detailed criticisms of several earlier drafts.

1 "I would only believe in a god who could dance." FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Werke in drei Bänden. Köln 1994. Vol. 2, S. 127.

2 A. N. Shelepin Otchet TsK VLKSM XII s"ezdu. Doklad sekretaria TsK VLKSM, in: Komso- mol' skaia pravda March 20, 1954, p. 3.

3 On Stalinism as a "Civilization" see Stephen Kotkin Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civiliza- tion. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1995.

Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 50 (2002) H. 1 © Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, Sitz Stuttgart/Germany



38 Mark Edele

a public sphere which was not completely subsumed under the ideological imperatives of the communist youth program;4 and the availability of non-Soviet elements of style and information.5 Possibility, of course, does not mean actuality - nothing ensures that a phenomenon which is in principle possible in a given environment will also actually emerge. What moti- vated young men to invest time, money, and emotions to create and maintain a lifestyle which was subject to negative sanctions not only from the regime, but also from society at large? In this article, I will suggest that problems of class, generation, and gender in a postwar setting led to the emergence of stiliazhnichestvo. Postwar societies, I argue, often give rise to hedonistic lifestyles, and the Soviet Union was no exception to that rule. The stiliagi are in this respect part of the global history of industrialized countries in the twentieth century. Though a small group and not representative

of the majority, the strange young men in "Tarzan haircuts" exemplify in an extremely con- densed and radical way what had a much wider currency in postwar Stalinism: interest in things foreign and the desire to live a version of the good life which did not necessarily conform to the role expectations promoted by the state. Furthermore, social location played a role. Stiliazhnichestvo was a style developed by sons of the privileged classes of late Stalin- ism - what I call "middle class" and "golden" youth throughout this paper.6 Thus, to some extent we can understand the development of the style as part of the embourgoisement of the Stalinist elite.7 In behavior, lifestyle, and dress the sons of the elite set themselves apart from the sons of the lower status groups of society.8 The decidedly un-Soviet manner in which they chose to difference themselves, however, requires further explanation. After all, they could have fashioned themselves as the loyal sons of the Stalinist elite, the future vanguard in the building of Socialism. Instead, their self-fashioning stressed leisure, Western-ness, and a distinctive and original stylishness as the basis of self-representation and self-understanding. This choice can only be understood if we consider the unique psychological pressures these young men experienced as they sought a secure sense of gendered self. In the Soviet Union participation in the war not only established claims to a dominant position in postwar

4 The term "public sphere" as used in this paper refers to the universe of spaces and institutions which make the circulation of discourses about the identity, interests and needs of an interactive community (a "public") possible. This is a much broader definition than the one used by Jürgen Habermas The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Transi, by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA 1989. 5 Cf. Jeffrey Brooks Thank You Comrade Stalin. Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War. Princeton, NJ 2000, p. 195. 6 "Class" is used here in a Weberian sense, and denotes a group of people with an approximately even distribution of access to and possession of cultural, social, and material resources. See Max Weber Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. 5th rev. ed. Tübingen 1990, p. 177. "Golden Youth" (zolotaia molodezh ') is a term used by contemporaries to describe the children of the absolute top of Stalinist society. 7 Social stratification and the creation of a new elite within Stalinist society was first analyzed by LEON TROTSKY The Revolution Betrayed. What is the Soviet Union and where is it going? New York, London 1972 [1937], and elaborated by Milovan Djilas The New Class. An Analysis of the Commu- nist System. New York, Washington 1957. The attainment of seemingly "bourgeois" markers of respec- tability ("embourgeoisement") by this elite has famously been analyzed by Vera Dunham In Stalin's Time. Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction. Enlarged and Updated ed. Durham, London 1990 [1976]. 8 For a classical analysis of this process of cultural solidification of social distinctions see Pierre Bourdieu Distinctions. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Transi, by Richard Nice. Cam- bridge, MA 1984.



The Birth and the Life of Stiliagi, 1945-1953 39

society,9 but was also represented in a strongly gendered way. The connection of frontline experience with masculinity, and of home front service with femininity not only silenced the

war experiences of those who did not fit this pattern - men who stayed behind, or women who served at the front -,10 but also robbed men too young to have fought at the front of an important source of masculine identity. In the environment of higher educational institutions, middle class and Golden Youth of the generation too young to fight in the war were confronted with self-assertive veterans for whom a man was first of all afrontovik. The younger men could not imitate the core of the self-fashioning of veterans - wartime exploits. What they could imitate was Western clothing, which many veterans had brought back from the West. They thus imitated the part of the dominant form of masculinity, which they could imitate - stylish dress - and radicalized it to such an extent that it became the core of an alternative form of manliness. Sovietness and participation in the war were so tightly inter- connected in the postwar Soviet Union, that lack of the latter was best counteracted by refusing the former. And in the context of the Cold War this meant embracing "Western- ness." In their struggle to find a positive sense of gendered self in the absence of the defining trait of postwar masculinity - wartime heroism - would-be stiliagi thus logically reached for an imaginary West as a source of legitimacy and inspiration.

"Mumochka! Let 's Stomp! "

"A literature evening was held in the student club. As the working part was over and the dance started, a youth appeared at the door. He looked amazingly absurd: the back of his jacket was bright orange but the sleeves and flaps were green; I have not seen such wide trousers of canary- pea green color even in the years of the famous flared trousers (klesh); his shoes seemed to be a complicated combination of black patent leather and red suede. The youth leaned at the door-post and with a certain uncommonly free and easy movement crossed the right foot over the left, which displayed his socks, that were apparently made of pieces of an American flag - so bright were they. [...] [A little later] a girl appeared in the hall, who looked as if she had fluttered from the cover of a fashion magazine. The youth shouted for the whole hall to hear 'Muma! Mumochka! Puss-puss-puss!' He beckoned her with his finger. Not at all embarrassed by this treatment, the girl fluttered towards him. 'Shall we stomp (topnem), Muma?' 'With pleasure, little stiliaga (stiliagochkd)V They went dancing ..."

This is how the readers of the satirical journal Krokodil first learned about the stiliagi in 1949. The phenomenon was not yet widely known, for the author, D. Beliaev, had to explic- itly introduce the term:

"'What a strange young man," I said to the student sitting next to me. "And he has a strange name: Stiliaga - this is the first time that I hear such a name." My neighbor started to laugh. "But this is not a name. Stiliagi is what such types call themselves in their jargon (ptich 'yi iazyk). They, you see, have worked out their particular style (stiV) of clothing, talk, and man- ners. Most important for them is style - not to resemble ordinary people ..."

9 Elena Zubkova Russia After the War. Hopes, Illusions, and Dissappointments, 1945-1957. Transi, and ed. by Hugh Ragsdale. Armonk, New York, London 1998, pp. 20-30; Elena Zubkova Poslevoen- noe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost' 1945-1953. Moskva 2000, pp. 28-54; and Amir Weiner Making Sense of War. The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton, Oxford 2000.

10 On female veterans see Barbara Alpern Engel The Womanly Face of War. Soviet Women Remember World War II, in: Women and War in the Twentieth Century. Enlisted with or without Consent. Ed. by Nicole A. Dombrowski. New York, London 1999, pp. 138-159; Anna Krylova 'Healers of Wounded Souls': The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944-46, in: The Journal of Modern History (June 2001).

11 D. Beliaev Stiliaga, in: Krokodil, March 10, 1949, p. 10.



40 Mark Edele

Although this description was meant as a biting satire of a negative phenomenon, Beliaev captured the most important traits of the new subculture. "The main method to stand out from

the crowd," the stiliaga and later saxophone god Aleksei Kozlov remembers about the early 1950s, "was at that time considered to be 'stylish' {byt' stU'nym): in the clothes, the haircut, in the manner of walking, in the ability to dance 'with style', in the ability to talk in one's jargon."12

A memo of the KGB Moscow to the Central Committee of the party in 1958 further confirms this picture. It describes the formation of the stiliagi "in the postwar years" when "a certain part" of Moscow's youth began to show the following "traits and inclinations":

"a scornful relation to work, a longing for an idle, beautiful life, vulgarity (poshlost '), amorality, lack of principle, evasion of social life (pbshchestvennaia zhizn '), unpolitical-ness, overestima- tion of their personality, the wish to stand out with something (clothes, behavior, jargon, manner of thinking) from the surrounding gray, in their expression, masses of Soviet people."13

Earlier mentions of the phenomenon of fashion-conscious youth in the pages of Krokodil allow a glimpse into the formation of this new way of being a young man in the Soviet Union. In a cartoon from 1945, two dandies who sit on a couch and talk about love already have many of the attributes of the later stiliaga: pomaded hair, suits, a big and colorful tie.14 A caricature from 1946 is captured with a text full of youthful jargon: "I yanked a world class suit - swell, the tie - groovy, and the shoes make you dizzy! Now I'm cultured - wow!"15 Like the stiliaga quoted above, this dandy wears a broad-shouldered jacket and extremely wide trousers. Another satirical piece from the same year also resonates with the later •s/z/zaga-description. It makes fun of a certain type of man who spent a lot of time, money, and

effort on dress, hung out in the Cocktail Hall (Kokteil khall, or simply Kok khalt) on Gor'kii street, danced until 2 a.m. "around the radiola," and owned the latest fox-trot records. The

person described in this piece wears a chrysanthemum-colored pullover, an "impossible" hat, a big ring, and a watch so complicated one cannot read the time off it.16 While this is not yet a stiliaga, there are many similarities: the dance mania, the preoccupation with fashion, the complete absorption with attire and leisure, the strange colors, even the green trousers.

The characteristic style of the stiliagi evolved as a result of a complex process involv- ing imitation of Western models, the appropriation of the style by more youngsters, and the subsequent refashioning of the original stiliagi, who needed new markers of difference as their style became a more widespread phenomenon. Adaptations to social pressure and state repression also played a role in this development.17 Dances and clothes are two elements of style which allow the reconstruction of this process. The stiliaga portrayed in 1949 knows such anti-Soviet dances as the fox-trot, the tango, the rumba, the lindy-hop, or a self-made

12 Aleksei Kozlov Kozel na sakse - i tak vsiu zhizn' [...]. Moskva 1998, p. 72. 13 V. Belokonev Spravka. [Memo of the nachal'nik upravleniia komiteta gosbezopasnosti pri Sovete

Ministrov to the TsK KPSS October 23, 1958]. Ed. by O. Marinin, in: Rodina 1 1-12 (1992) pp. 62-64, here p. 62 [memo of the head of the administration of the SovMin Committee of State Security Beloko- nev to the Central Committee, October 23, 1958].

14 S. KOSTIN Muki liubvi, in: Krokodil, November 20, 1945, p. 5. 15 Iu. Ganf Na vse sto, in: Krokodil, July 10, 1946, p. 5. Many thanks to Anna Krylova who helped

me understand this not-so-common Russian: "Kostiumchik otorval mirovetskii, galstuk - na iat' botinochki - zakachaesh'sia! ... Teper' ia kuPturnyi - vo! [...] "

16 Emil' Krotki Montifom. Lakirovannyi kogot', in: Krokodil, March 10, 1946, p. 4. 17 To some extent this process resembles the dynamics of subcultural style in capitalist environments.

The main difference is that the innovative style is not appropriated by a larger audience through commo- dification by a culture industry, but through direct imitation. See DICK HEBDIGE Subculture. The Meaning of Style. London, New York 1979.



The Birth and the Life of Stiliagi, 1 945-1 953 4 1

dance called the "stiliaga tse-dri" which consisted of "terribly complex and ridiculous move- ments" and (according to the stiliaga) "stylishly (shikarno) combines the rhythm of the body with the expression of the eyes."18 Up to the early 1950s, according to historian of Soviet jazz S. Frederick Starr, when "the jitterbug made its tentative debut," the stiliaga "danced with his right food planted firmly on the ground, a cigarette in his lips."19 At a party of Golden Youth students in 1952 Moscow the nineteen year old Vasilii Aksenov watched with amaze- ment how the skirt of a KGB boss's daughter flew up and down in a wild boogie-woogie.20 In 1953 a stiliaga is portrayed in Krokodil not only as a "master of fox-trots" but also as knowing the boogie-woogie.21

Most stiliagi did not have access to Western fashions available to the children of the absolute top of Stalinist society. But sons of the middle class could socialize with Golden Youth, and imitate what they saw - elements of Western style.22 Haircuts could easily be copied, trousers could be reworked to approach the look of those the stiliagi wore, shirts could be home-made from colorful fabrics produced for other ends, "stylish" shoes could be improvised with the help of a shoemaker. The most complicated thing, according to art historian Raisa Kirsanova, was to obtain the necessary colorful tie.23 Mannerisms, jargon, and dance styles were even more easily copied.24 Consequently, what filtered through to most stiliagi (or soon-to-become stiliagi) were adaptations of adaptations, peculiarly Sovietized forms of originally Western models.

Kozlov, for example, who was socialized into the stiliagi-cuitme in the early 1950s, remembers three "stylish dances" {stiVnye tantsy): the "atom" dance (atomnyi), the "Cana- dian" (kanadskii), and the "triple Hamburg" (troinoi gamburgskii). The first two were adaptations of jitterbug, lindy hop, and boogie-woogie, and the last one resembled a very sensualized, narrow and slow fox-trot.25 Like the dances, the appearance of the stiliagi changed in a process of innovation and imitation. Only Golden Youth could afford real Western clothes in the late 1940s. Kozlov, the son of an academic teacher, and his friends initially "had almost nothing from abroad. Everything [...] was home-made, and it was a real event each time a successful new outfit appeared."26 Remembering a self-made shoe, weigh- ing 2.5 kilos, he muses that "in the West, nobody wore anything like it, this was clearly our invention."27 In the early incarnation of the style bright colors played an important role, because they stood out among drab Soviet clothes. Later the trend shifted towards more minimalism. In the early 1950s, only the tie remained colorful, the rest was dark and white: thick-soled shoes, narrow trousers with big cuffs, a long jacket with patch pockets and a cut,

18 Beliaev Stiliaga. 19 S. Frederick Starr Red and Hot. The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917-1980. New York,

Oxford 1983, p. 241. Based on oral history material. 20 Vasilii Aksenov V poiskakh grustnogo bebi. Kniga ob Amerike. Moskva 1991, p. 13. 21 BORIS Timofeev Garri, in: Krokodil, December 20, 1953, p. 5. 22 In an interview given in the 1980s, Kozlov claimed that while he "didn't like what was going on

with those people" he "couldn't refuse to associate with them" because of their privileged "access to information." Artemy Troitsky Back in the USSR. The True Story of Rock in Russia. Boston, London 1987, p. 17.

23 Raisa Kirsanova Stiliagi. Zapadnaia moda v SSSR 40-50kh godov, in: Rodina 8 (1998) p. 73. 24 The authorities were clearly worried about this process of cultural dissemination. See Beliaev

Stiliaga; Belokonev Spravka p. 63. 25 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 72. 26 Troitzky Back in the USSR p. 14. 27 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 84.



42 Mark Edele

a long, light-colored raincoat, a long white silk scarf, topped by a wide-brimmed hat in summer or a fur hat in winter.28

This disappearance of color had several causes. For one, Soviet clothing started to become slightly more colorful which diminished the shock-factor of color to some extent.29 More importantly, as more youth were drawn to the style, it lost its exclusivity. Those socially better situated at the core of the style reacted by wrinkling their noses at the imitators and remade themselves into what they called shtatniki ("United State-niks").30 They diminished color, and tried to emulate more closely American fashion which had moved from wide trousers to a lean look.31 Aksenov met such a crowd of "Americanophile" sons of the Stalinist elite at the above mentioned party. They stressed openly their "love" of the US and their "hatred" towards the Soviet Union, and no longer tried to be "stylish" (stil'no) but to be "American" (po-shtatski). This meant thick-soled shoes and narrow black trousers, while the jackets remained broad-shouldered as in the earlier stiliagi outfit. They smoked Pall Mall and Camel (or, at least, cigarettes put into Pall Mall and Camel packets),32 and peppered their conversation with English words such as "darling", "baby," and "let's drink." Aksenov, the stiliaga, was full of admiration. But when he told the friend who had brought him to the party that this crowd were "real" stiliagi with a lot of "class" he got the arrogant reply: "We're not stiliagi [...]. We're shtatniki:' Since the stiliagi started to copy their style, details became important in identifying a shtatnik. If a shirt button had two or three holes instead of four this

was not po-shtatskii. This refinement was a long way from the home-made sweaters with pictures of deer or the ties with cactuses, cowboys, spider webs, palm trees, monkeys, and girls in bathing suits which earlier stiliagi had taken to be American fashion.33 However, they

quickly adapted. By the Khrushchev era, stiliagi resembled the shtatniki from 1952.34 This remaking of the style was accelerated by outside pressure on the colorful stiliagi crowd. By 1955 Komsomol patrols hunted down stiliagi, "hooligans," and other "anti-Soviet elements."35 The Komsomol may have raided "semi-underground jazz parties" (polupodpol'nye, dzhasovye vechera) before 1953, leading to fistfights (draki) with the stiliagi.36 In any case, Beliaev's article marked the beginning of a campaign of Party and Komsomol against the un-Soviet phenomenon of stylish youngsters, who came under the suspicion of being "rootless cosmopolitanists." Stiliagi were confronted, criticized, and shamed at Komsomol meetings, some were excluded from the youth organization, from their institute, or university, while others ended up in court for "parasitism." And the organized vigilantes were not alone in exerting social pressure on stiliagi. Parents, teachers, and "most importantly" the "so-called ordinary Soviet people" engaged in surveillance of public behav-

28 KOZLOV Kozel na sakse d. 79.

29 Penelope Sassoon Penelope in Moscow. London 1953, pp. 23, 102; Ralph Parker Moscow Correspondent. New York 1949, pp. 257-258. 30 V. Slavkin Pamiatnik neizvestnomu stiliage. Moskva 1996, p. 75. 31 Lucy Rollin Twentieth Century Teen Culture by the Decades. A Reference Guide. Westport, CO, London 1999, pp. 122-125, 170. 32 The practice of putting cheap Russian cigarettes into Western packets was common among the Rock and Punk crowd in St. Petersburg in the mid-1990s. I assume that the shtatniki and stiliagi also knew this simple trick to combine prestige with economy. 33 Aksenov V poiskakh grustnogo bebi pp. 12-13; Troitzky Back in the USSR p. 14; Slavkin Pamiatnik neizvestnomu stiliage p. 75. 34 See the description in: Starr Red and Hot p. 237. Based on oral history testimony. 35 Allen Kassof The Soviet Youth Program. Regimentation and Rebellion. Cambridge, MA 1965, pp. 118-119. 36 Aksenov V poiskakh grustnogo bebi p. 17.



The Birth and the Life of Stiliagi, 1 945-1 953 43

ior and style.37 "As soon as I entered the tram," Kozlov remembers the public shaming he constantly had to endure, "everyone there would begin discussing and condemning me: 'Ooh, dressed up like a peacock!' or 'Young man, aren't you ashamed of yourself, walking around looking like a parakeet?' or 'Look, some kind of monkey!' I always stood red-faced.'68 This kind of reaction made it "most frightening" for Viktor Slavkin, an engineering student who later became an author, to leave his home in full regalia.39 The remaking of the style into the shtatniki outfit got the fashion-conscious out of this immediate line of fire. The change from

color to Western clothes as a symbol of group affiliation allowed them to evade some of the pressure without loosing their self-definition. Western suits did not look so different from the

Chinese produced ones sold in Soviet stores around 1953. "To be fashionable," as a result, "became considerably easier."40 As the KGB observed in the second half of the 1950s: "Real 'stiliagi' are now hard to distinguish on the street from foreigners."41

In the Krokodil satire quoted at the beginning of this section, the term stiliagi does not refer to the couple as a whole, but only to the young man. Similarly, the secretary of the Komsomol, in the quotation at the beginning of this article, clearly treats stiliazhnichestvo as a male phenomenon: they are "young men" who "pester girls." This reflects actual gender relations within the subculture. The stiliagi were a predominantly homosocial (though hetero- sexual) group, and women moved only at its fringes. Young men dressed up primarily for each other, and spent their time predominantly in male company. While there was a very small group of young fashionable women, they were neither referred to as stiliagi, nor were they integrated into the subculture itself. They were "lonely figures," Kozlov remembers, often ignored even by stiliagi'. "At dances we rarely danced with them; we danced with each other."42 It was prestigious for a stiliaga to find a fashionable girlfriend, a chuvikha, but while he might parade her at public dances as the stiliaga did in the Krokodil satire, these women were not integrated into everyday group activities. Interaction between the sexes mainly happened at private dance parties, to which stiliagi "recruited" female "cadres." They ex- pected sexual favors in return for such invitations, but often chuvikhi managed to sneak away from the party once things became more intimate.43 Thus, in stark contrast to the jazz subcul-

ture of the 1920s, or the stiliaga revival of the 1980s, where women played an important role, stiliazhnichestvo in late Stalinism was a male phenomenon.44

37 Kozlov Kozel na sakse pp. 76-77; Zubkova Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo pp. 152-53; Slavkin Pamiatnik neizvestnomu stiliage p. 8; Starr Red and Hot p. 240. For a detailed discussion of these practices and their importance in Stalinist and post-Stalinist society, see Oleg Kharkhordin The Collective and the Individual in Russia. A Study of Practices. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1999.

38 Troitzky Back in the USSR p. 15. 39 Slavkin Pamiatnik neizvestnomu stiliage p. 74. For biographical information see Wolfgang

Kasack Lexikon der Russischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Vom Beginn des Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende der Sowietära. 2nd rev. ed. München 1992. dd. 1 174-1 176.

40 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 98. 41 Belokonev Soravka d. 63.

42 TROITSKY Back in the USSR pp. 14-15 (quotation: p. 15). See also Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 86. 43 Kozlov Kozel na sakse pp. 86-89. 44 Anne E. GORSUCH Youth in Revolutionary Russia. Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents. Bloo-

mington, Indianapolis 2000, pp. 116-138; Hilary Pilkington Russia's Youth and Its Culture. A nation's constructors and constructed. London, New York 1994, pp. 276-284.



44 Mark Edele

The Most Progressive Youth of the World

The young men who invented the new style during the late Stalin years were students from the middle- and upper-classes.45 There were several reasons for this. Becoming a stiliaga presupposed disposable income. Even as the postwar crisis started to ease in 1948 and average non-agricultural households recovered their prewar purchasing power, this change permitted only "an extremely spartan lifestyle."46 According to a foreign observer, it was only "since 1949 that the average Russian, thanks to the abolition of rationing and to successive price cuts, has been able to buy clothing and to restock the wardrobe that was decimated by the war years."47 Clearly, young workers as well as the vast majority of students who lived on their meager stipends and struggled to make ends meet had neither the required financial means, nor the connections necessary to obtain jazz records, thick-soled shoes, fancy ties, and broad-shouldered jackets.48 Sons of affluent parents, by contrast, could use their stipends as well as their privileged access to scarce goods for their personal enjoyment and outfit.49 Further, the sons of the better off moved in a sphere less tightly controlled by the "Soviet

Youth Program." As part of the Bolshevik project of surveillance, this "program" was de- signed both to collect information and to guide and remake Soviet youth into the New People of the Future.50 The Komsomol claimed the right to regulate even the most intimate aspects of its members' lives, and hoped "to influence backward individuals by means of social pressure."51 Students were among the most closely monitored groups of Soviet society, had a higher percentage of Komsomol membership than any other group and were of special

45 Cf. Beliaev Stiliaga; Sassoon Penelope in Moscow p. 39; Aksenov V poiskakh grustnogo bebi pp. 12-13; Timofeev Garri p. 5; Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 80; Zubkova Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo pp. 152-153; Starr Red and Hot p. 238. 46 Donald Filtzer The Standard of Living of Soviet Industrial Workers in the Immediate Postwar Period, 1945-1948. European-Asia Studies 51 (1999) no. 6, pp. 1013-1038, here p. 1016. 47 Michel Gordey Visa to Moscow. Transi, from the French by Katherine Woods. New York 1952, p. 69. This does not mean that there was no interest in Western fashion among less well-to-do people. Cf. Sassoon Penelope in Moscow pp. 12-13; Tracey Phillips The Russians Have no Word for Her, in: As We See Russia by Members of the Overseas Press Club of America. New York 1948, pp. 146-147.

48 The miserable material situation of most students is a common theme in literature and memoirs

about the period. See lURll Bondarev Silence. Novel. Transi, by Elisaveta Fen. Boston, Cambridge 1966, pp. 32-33, 156-157; Mikhail Gorbachev Zhizn' i reformy. Moskva 1995, vol. 1, pp. 60-61; Raissa M. Gorbacheva la nadeius'... Moskva 1991, pp. 68-71; lURll Trifonov Dom na naberezhnoi, in: Druzhba narodov (1976) no. 1, pp. Ill, 114; VLADIMIR TENDRIAKOV Die Jagd, in: WLADIMIR Tendrjakow Auf der seligen Insel des Kommunismus. Erzählungen. Transi, by Annelore Nitschke. Frankfurt a.M. 1990, pp. 115-180 (orig.: Okhota, in: Znamia [1988], kniga 9, pp. 87-124); and Vladi- mir Gusarov Moi papa ubil Mikhoelsa. Frankfurt a.M. 1978, p. 90.

49 Examples include the group of students portrayed in: B. Protopopov, I. Shatunovskii Plesen'. FePeton, in: KomsomoPskaia pravda, Nov. 19, 1953, p. 3; Gusarov Moi papa ubil Mikhoelsa; Victor Velsky My Apologia, in: Survey (aut. 1970) no. 77, pp. 146-174; Slavkin Pamiatnik neizvestnomu stiliage; Kozlov's friends, and Kozlov himself, Kozlov Kozel na sakse pp. 80-81. On jazz records as items owned by the elite see Starr Red and Hot p. 223. On the need for connections to obtain clothes see Kozlov Kozel na sakse pp. 80-81. On "obtaining" clothes through "papa's" connections see Trifonov Dom na naberezhnoi p. 107. On the culture of connections in the Soviet Union see Alena V. Ledenova Russia's Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. New York, Cambridge 1998.

50 KASSOF The Soviet Youth Program, and Ralph Talcott Fisher Pattern for Soviet Youth. A Study of the Congresses of the Komsomol, 1918-1954. New York 1959. On surveillance see PETER HOLQUIST 'Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work4: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context, in: The Journal of Modern History 69 (September 1997) pp. 415-450.

51 Komsomol'skaia rabota v VUZe (1953). Quoted in KASSOF The Soviet Youth Program p. 103.




interest to the state.52 In the official order of things, the studenchestvo existed solely to create

loyal specialists for the state, and after the war it was "object of attention number one."53 However, this massive control of the daily worlds of students was wishful thinking on the

part of authorities, more totalitarian aspiration than social reality. The league had to remind its members again and again of their "obligations" - a clear indication that they were all too easily forgotten.54 Complaints in Komsomol' skaia pravda about the lack of communication within the Komsomol hierarchy, "shortcomings" (nedostatki) in all sectors of Komsomol work, and even outright contestations of the right of the league to regulate the private life of its members were common.55 Guidance of Komsomol members was far from what the author-

ities wished it to be.56 Moreover, not all students were members of the youth league. According to Merle Fainsod, who quotes the first secretary of the organization, 75 percent

of university students were members of the Komsomol by February 1951 - after a massive membership drive.57 Ralph T. Fisher quotes Komsomol* skaia pravda and Pravda articles to the effect that in September 1952 82 percent of students in vuzy across the country, and 93.4

percent of students at Moscow institutions of higher education were members.58 This leaves 25, 18, and 6.6 percent of students, respectively, who were outside the immediate reach of the institution. Between 1945 and 1950 this percentage must have been considerably higher. In 1947 for example, only 47 percent of the capital's 200,000 students of vuzy and technical highschools (tekhnikumy) were members.59 According to a KosomoV skaia pravda article from 1949 only about half of all students of higher educational institutions (vuzy) were in

52 Susan Morrissey Heralds of Revolution. Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism. New York, Oxford 1998, p. 234; Peter KONECNY Builders and Deserters. Students, State, and Commu- nity in Leningrad, 1917-1941. Montreal, London, Ithaca 1999, p. 101.

53 Zubkova Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo p. 142; see also pp. 138-39. See e.g. ... i tvoi obiazannosti, in: Komsomolskaia pravda, July 17, 1946, p. 3; Kazhdyi

komsomolets-student obiazan ..., in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, May 31, 1946, p. 1; E. FEDOROV Vos- muzhavshaia iunost', in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, May 1, 1946, p. 2; Glavnoe delo studentov-komsomol'tsev, in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, September 21, 1952, 1; By-Laws of the Komsomol, April 6, 1949. Materials for the Study of the Soviet System. State and Party Constitutions, Laws, Decrees, Decisions and official Statements of the Leaders in Translation. Ed. by James Meisel and Edward S. Kozera. 2nd rev. and enlarged ed. Ann Arbor, MI 1953, p. 428.

55 E.g. Boevaia programma raboty komsomola, in: Pravda, April 16, 1949, p. 1; Obkom Partii ob- suzhdaet itogi oblastnoi komsomoFskoi konferentsii, in: KomsomoFskaia pravda, July 16, 1950, p. 2; Sobranie aktiva moskovskoi komsomol'skoi organizatsii, in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, September 20, 1950, p. 1; B. POLEVOI Molodezh strany sotsializma, in: Pravda, March 29, 1949, p. 2; K novomu pod"emu komsomol'skoi raboty, in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, July 14, 1950, p. 1; A. PlMENOV My zhdem vas, tovarishchi iz gorkoma (Pis'mo v redaktsiiu), in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, August 18, 1950, p. 3; Rabotât' tvorcheski, initsiativno, in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, August 19, 1950, p. 1; Apparat komsomol'skogo komiteta, August 24, 1950, p. 1; Ia. TIKHONIN Prodolzhaem razgovor, in: Komso- mol'skaia pravda, August 24, 1950, p. 2; A. PODIONOV O nastoichivosti i posledovatel'nosti, in: Komso- mol'skaia pravda, September 20, 1950, p. 2; V. RYKUNOV Vse sily molodezhi - liubimoi rodine, in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, September 21, 1950, p. 1; E. BORODIN Ne vykhodia iz kabineta, in: Komso- mol'skaia pravda, September 21, 1950, p. 2; K. P. Zhukov Vospityvat' kadry bol'shevistskom dukhe, in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, June 21, 1952, p. 2; Po povodu ,vechnykh' studentov, in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, June 22, 1952, p. 2; Iu. Filonovich Eto ne chastnoe delo. Otvet komsomol'tsam A. Bekhterevu i M. Aleksandrovu, in: Komsomol'skaia pravda, September 20, 1950, p. 3.

56 See the review of Komsomol work among Leningrad students in 1948 quoted in Zubkova Sovets- koe poslevoennoe obshchestvo pp. 143-144.

57 Fainsod How Russia is Ruled pp. 248, 529, n. 3 1 . 58 Fisher Pattern for Soviet Youth p. 265, 398, n. 102. See also Ocherki istorii moskovskoi organizat-

sii VLKSM. Moskva 1976, p. 472. 59 That is, 94 000 members. Ocherki istorii moskovskoi organizatsii VLKSM p. 469.



46 Mark Edele

the League.60 Even at Moscow State University in the fall of 1946 out of a total of 7938 students, 918 (or 12 percent) were party members and 3822 (or 48 percent) in the Komsomol. This leaves at least 40 percent of the students of the absolute top educational institution of the Soviet Union outside of the direct control of either organization.61 It might be argued that a totalitarian regime does not need full membership in its mass organizations. A hard core of activists, surrounded by circles of less radical members, which are again surrounded by the non-affiliated, would be enough to keep the radicals in control of the student "masses."62 Some evidence supports this model of a core of enthusiasts terror- izing their peers on a day-to-day basis.63 However, the effectiveness of what Oleg Kharkhordin has called "mutual horizontal surveillance among peers" should not be overem- phasized.64 The radical minority of activist Komsomol members did not succeed in politiciz- ing the majority of students.65 Moreover, a whole group lived entirely outside of the dormitories, at the fringes of Komsomol surveillance. "Of course," remembers Raisa Gorbacheva, "among us also studied young people whose parents were Stalin Prize Winners, meritorious (zasluzhennye), or simply very well-to-do (obespechennye) people [...]. These young people did not live in the dormitory. They lived under completely different conditions. They spent their free time differently, they dressed differently."66 While the life of students living in the dormitories revolved around their crowded rooms, the libraries, the student club, occasional

excursions to parks or cinemas, and strolls through the city,67 the universe of students from

the upper strata was constituted by very different spaces, such as bars, restaurants, private rooms, apartments, and dachas.68 It was this milieu which gave birth to the stiliaga.

Pleasures of the City

Elena Zubkova first stressed the importance of "newly opened cafés, snack bars, and beer halls" as the institutional basis for the peculiar postwar phenomenon of "'tavern democracy" (shalmannaia demokratiia).69 These "blue Danubes," however were far from the only places to drink and socialize. For Soviet conditions Moscow also had a surprisingly thriving night- life. At the end of the war Moscow had "at least 25 clubs" and eight "commercial" restau-

60 Quoted in Fisher Pattern for Soviet Youth p. 382, n. 195. 61 GARF f. r-9396, op. 2, d. 34, 1.15. "At least" because Komsomol and party membership to some extent overlapped. 62 Cf. Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism. New ed. San Diego, New York, London 1979, pp. 364-388. 63 For example Fainsod How Russia is Ruled p. 258-259; P. Kruzhin The Youth Movement in the Soviet Union, in: Youth in the Soviet Union. A Collection of Articles. Munich 1959, pp. 6-7; Zubkova Sovetskoe poslevoennoe obshchestvo pp. 142-143; GORBACHEVA la nadeius ... p. 75; A. Pliushch Razgovora o kharaktere, in: KomsomoFskaia pravda, August 24, 1950, p. 3. 64 Kharkhordin The Collective and the Individual in Russia pp. 291, 355, and passim. For an example of incomplete surveillance of dormitory life see Zdenek Mlynarzh Moroz udaril iz Kremlia. Moskva 1992, pp. 18-19. For evasion of peer surveillance see Kozlov Kozel na Sakse p. 95. 65 Zubkova Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo pp. 142-143. 66 Gorbacheva la nadeius ... p. 73. 0/ Gorbacheva la nadeius ... pp. 59-89; Gorbachev Zhizn' i relormy pp. 59-76; mlynarzh Moroz udaril iz Kremlia pp. 13-22; Tendriakov Die Jagd; Pliushch Razgovora o kharaktere. 68 GUSAROV Moi papa ubil Mikhoelsa pp. 83-143; Velsky My Apologia pp. 146-174; VLADIMIR Kabo The Road to Australia. Memoirs. Transi, by Rosh Ireland and Kevin Windle. Canberra 1998, pp. 89-141; Protopopov, Shatunovskii Plesen'; Bondarev Silence; S. Nariniani Po stopam iaichnitsy. Fereton, in: KomsomoFskaia pravda, March 3, 1951, p. 3; Vladimir Feiertag Dzhaz ot Leningrada do Peterburga. S.-Peterburg 1999, pp. 68-71; KOZLOV Kozel na Sakse pp. 83-99. 69 Zubkova Russia After The War p. 27.




rants with bands.70 In 1953 the lights went out in restaurants at 3 a.m., but the "Cocktail Hall"

on Gor'kii street was open thereafter, until the wee morning hours.71 It locked its doors at 3 a.m., but patrons could stay until 5 a.m.72

Two of the top hang-outs in Moscow were the Aragvi restaurant and the Cocktail Hall {Kokteil khall, or simply Kok khall in Russian) on Gor'kii street.73 A British journalist described the former, a Georgian restaurant, in 1947 as "the smartest night-club in town," frequented by "Red Army officers with their rather shabby girl-friends."74 Another observer was "taken aback by the noise, smoke and that dreadful reek of burning fat which seemed a feature of all Soviet restaurants," and intrigued by the wild dancing at 2 a.m. "The scene," he adds, "in no way resembled a night club."75 Other accounts are more favorable. One journalist, who was a habitué in the restaurant between 1947 and 1949, describes it as "a delightful Caucasian restaurant with large mural paintings illustrating a Georgian epic poem" with a "Caucasian band in the musicians gallery above," which played "weird semi-Oriental music."76 Another visitor described the "lordly manner" of the head waiter, and a "strangely non-Communist atmosphere of excellent food and polite service" in the years between 1949 and 195 1.77 The Aragvi was the preferred watering hole of the shtatniki with whom Kozlov started hanging out in 1953.78

Before he remade himself from a stiliaga into a shtatnik, however, Kozlov was a regular at the other top spot of Moscow night life, the Cocktail Hall.79 It had opened "at the end of the war, on the crest of a wave of Soviet- American friendship,"80 and remained in existence despite anti-cosmopolitanism during the whole period under review here. During an anti- alcohol drive after Stalin's death, it was eventually closed down and turned into an ice-cream parlor (!).81 Immediately after the war it featured a jazz-combo, the "Syncopators,"82 but the quality of music declined due to the anti-jazz campaign which started in 1946. Harrison Salisbury, who was in Moscow for the New York Times between 1949 and 1954, recollected "tired strains of a four-piece string-and-accordion orchestra whose repertoire included a few pre-war American numbers."83 Kozlov describes a "weird group" of an accordion player, a saxophonist, and a violinist, adding that "they also played some weird music."84

70 Gregory M. Smith The Impact of World War II on Women, Family Life, and Mores in Moscow, 1941-1945. PhD diss., Stanford University 1990, p. 276. 71 Protopopov, Shatunovskii Plesen'. 72 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 91. 73 Smith The Impact of World War II p. 276. 74 Alexander Clifford, Jenny Nicholson The Sickle and the Stars. London 1948, p. 223. The

Aragvi still existed in 2002. It was opened, according to its doorman, in 1937.

75 Marius Adolphe Peltier Soviet Encounter. Transi, by T. C. Butler. London 1955, p. 180. 76 Don Dallas Dateline Moscow. Melbourne, London, Toronto 1952, p. 94. 77 Sassoon Penelope in Moscow p. 31-32. 78 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 97. 79 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 90-94; Troitsky Back in the USSR p. 14. 80 Kabo The Road to Australia p. 99. 81 Harrison E. Salisbury Russia Re-Visited: Crime Wave Goes Unchecked. Violence, Drunkenness

and Graft Plague Communist Ruled Country, in: The New York Times, Oct. 1, 1954, p. 25. 82 Starr Red and Hot p. 206. 83 Salisbury Russia re-visited.

84 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 92.



48 Mark Edele

In the Kok khall foreigners mingled with upper class youth, and secret police informers.85 The club was a two-floor establishment, which featured a huge American style bar with "high

revolving stools," some small tables on the first floor, and more tables and small enclosed spaces, which were separated out from the rest of the room by curtains, on the second floor balcony.86 In most descriptions, both Russian and Western, the Cocktail Hall appears as a high-level drinking establishment with well-dressed waiters, fancy cocktails, and a bouncer who knew the regulars by name.87 One memoirist remembers "real cocktails, mixed according to American recipes."88 In a Komsomol' skaia pravda feuilleton, one Golden Youth sipped "an ice-cold 'Cherry-Brandy cocktail'" (kokteiV "cherri-brendi") through a straw.89 A foreign observer claims to have had "champagne cocktails" there,90 and Kozlov remembers both the abundance and diversity of liquor, as well as a special cocktail with the name "Carni- val" (Karnaval).9] Salisbury, by contrast, implicitly comparing the place to American models, describes it as "a hopelessly boring spot [...], where some vile concoctions, largely com- pounded of cherry liquor and Georgian brandy, were dispensed under the name of 'koktails'."92 Since most Muscovites did not have Salisbury's frame of reference, however, the Kok khall was an important spot of Moscow night-life, and Soviet moralizers saw it as one of the centers of evil "bourgeois" influence on Soviet youth.93 Lines started to form well before the opening time of 8 p.m., and those who did not know the bouncer (and could thus skip the line) were in for a long wait.94 Restaurants and night clubs were by no means the only places to display one's style. The postwar Soviet Union was in the grip of a veritable dance craze. End of term meetings at vuzy involved dances and Krokodil reported in 1947 that many students of Moscow State Univer- sity (MGU) spent their time in the dance school of the dormitory instead of studying.95 The MGU club organized dances, as did many other clubs, Komsomol cells, and, during the summer months, parks of culture and rest around the city.96 Stiliagi skated "in style" at the

85 On informers see Kabo The Road to Australia p. 99; Sassoon Penelope in Moscow p. 53. For foreigners see Sassoon, for Golden Youth see Protopopov, Shatunovskii Plesen' and IURII Trifonov Dom na naberezhnoi p. 107. 86 The best description is Kozlov Kozel na sakse pp. 90-94; see also Protopopov, Shatunovskii Plesen'; Trifonov Dom na naberezhnoi p. 107; Krotkii Montifom; Kabo The Road to Australia p. 99.

87 For the bouncer see Protopopov, Shatunovskii Plesen'; and Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 91. 88 Kabo The Road to Australia p. 99. 89 Protopopov, Shatunovskii Plesen'. 90 Sassoon Penelope in Moscow p. 53. 91 Kozlov Kozel na sakse pp. 92-93. 92 Salisbury Russia re-visited. 93 Krotkii Montifom; Protopopov, Shatunovskii Plesen'. 94 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 91. 95 Bondarev Silence p. 165; K. Eliseev Zachety i nedochety, in: Krokodil, March 10, 1947, 6; A.

Orlov Na studencheskie temy: Kto i kak gotovitsia k ekzamenam, in: Moskovkii komsomolets, April 13, 1946,3.

96 Fainsod How Russia is Ruled p. 251; Bondarev Silence p. 165; Gorbachev Zhizn' i reformy p. 68. Krokodil did not get tired of criticizing that parks of culture were transformed into huge open air dance halls, and that clubs ceased organizing anything else except for daily dances. M. Cheremnykh Ochen' liubim my, kazantsy, uvlekatel'nye tantsy, in: Krokodil, May 20, 1946, pp. 6-7; B. EFIMOV V enskom parke kul'tury. Zarisovki s natury, in: Krokodil, July 20, 1946, pp. 6-7; I. SEMENOV Nakonets- to ..., in: Krokodil, August 20, 1946, p. 10; V. GORIACHEV Uvazhitel'naia prichina, in: Krokodil, October 20, 1947, p. 9; Val's-obratnik, in: Krokodil, August 10, 1947, p. 5; V. SUKHAREVICH Kak my otdykhali v Saratove, in: Krokodil, August 20, 1947, p. 8; L. Sofertist S tantsami ..., in: Krokodil, September 10, 1948, p. 10; Foto-vitrina krokodila, in: Krokodil, February 28, 1949, p. 15; E. SHCHE-




Dinamo skating rink, which played jazz over the PA; frequented the dancehall in the Central Park of Culture and Rest to wait for the rare foxtrot number ("we jumped onto the dance floor and began shaking"); and stole jazz records at highly regimented high-school dances to play them "where nobody controlled you" - at dance-parties in the yard (dvor) or in private apartments left by unsuspecting parents away at the dacha.97

Thus, despite all its hardships, its queues, its empty stomachs, its crime and violence, despite all the phenomena Sheila Fitzpatrick has termed "Everyday Stalinism,"98 Moscow in the postwar period was also a place where the elite - both "golden" and,"middle" - and their children could enjoy themselves. In Stalin's last decade Moscow had a night-life it had not seen since the 1920s and would not see again until the 1990s. And this night-life was an important pre-condition for the emergence of the stiliagi and the reproduction of their style. Stiliazhnichestvo depended on public as well as private spaces to meet and to display the style, and on a public sphere in which its components - such as certain ways to dress, talk, or walk - could circulate, be imitated, appropriated, and re-created.99

Stalin vs. Tarzan: Alternative Sources of Information

The emergence of sub-cultures is often connected to an appropriation and re-working ("bricolage") of given models.100 Sometimes this bricolage resembles imitation: Soviet hippies and punks, or the German Halbstarken could draw on already existing and well developed systems of style.101 The stiliagi could not. Allen Kassof describes the stiliagi as the Soviet parallel to the British Teddy Boys.102 This description, however, cannot refer to origin and imitation. The style developed by the would-be stiliagi was new and genuinely Soviet. Indeed, they could not imitate the Teddy Boys because this subculture developed only in the 1950s and 1960s in Britain, at a time when the stiliagi already had their own system

GLOV Nezamenimyi, in: Krokodil, March 10, 1949, p. 7; A. Bazhenov Sred' shumnogo bala sluchaino ..., in: Krokodil, August 30, 1949, p. 6; Vy govorili, chto perestroili ..., in: Krokodil, June 10, 1951, p. 15; I. Semenov Kuda poiti v vykhodnoi?, in: Krokodil, July 30, 1952, p. 5. 97 Troitzky Back in the USSR pp. 13-14; KozLOV Kozel na sakse pp. 70-71, 87-89; Feiertag

Dzhaz ot Leningrada do Peterburga pp. 68-69. 98 Sheila Fitzpatrick Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in

the 1930s. New York, Oxford 1999. On postwar living conditions see e.g. Zubkova Russia after the War p. 9-55; Greta L. Bücher The Impact of World War II on Moscow Women: Gender Conscious- ness and Relationships in the Immediate Postwar Period, 1945-1953. PhD diss., Ohio State University 1995; Sheila Fitzpatrick War and Society in Soviet Context: Soviet Labor before, during, and after World War II, in: International Labor and Working Class History 35 (Spring 1989) pp. 37-52; Smith The Impact of World War II pp. 256, 259-260.

99 For a description of socialization into the stiliaga culture through hanging out on the "Broadway" (i.e. Gor'kii Street), watching stiliagi, imitation of their style, acquaintance with people from the in- group, and participation in public group rituals see Kozlov Kozel na sakse pp. 78-80. On the importance of restaurants and other public spaces for the stiliagi see Belokonev Spravka p. 63; and Shelepin Otchet TsK VLKSM XII s"ezdu p. 3. On the Leningrad scene see Feiertag Dzhaz ot Leningrada do Peterburga pp. 68-69.

100 Cf. Hebdidge Subculture.

101 On punks and hippies see Pilkington Russia's Youth and Its Culture, passim; and Mark Allen Svede All You Need is Lovebeads: Latvia's Hippies Undress for Success, in: Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post- War Eastern Europe. Ed. by Susan E. Reid and David Crowley. Oxford, New York 2000, pp. 189-208. On German youth cultures of the 1940s and 50s see Thomas Grotum Die Halbstarken. Zur Geschichte einer Jugendkultur der 50er Jahre. Frankfurt, New York 1994, pp. 191-208; Kaspar Maase Entblößte Brust und schwingende Hüfte. Momentaufnahmen von der Jugend der fünfziger Jahre, in: Männergeschichte - Geschlechtergeschichte. Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne. Ed. by Thomas Kühne. Frankfurt, New York 1996, pp. 193-217.

102 KASSOF The Soviet Youth Program p. 154.



50 Mark Edele

of style.103 The same is true for "American Rock'n Roll styles" which the stiliagi later inter- preted and appropriated. Rock n' Roll took off in the United States in the mid 1950s, when the stil' had already existed for at least half a decade in the Soviet Union. 104 Moreover, if they

had simply copied any Western models they would most likely have identified themselves with the names of these "imported" subcultures, as later punks or hippies would do. Instead, they called themselves chuvaki ("dudes"),105 stiliagi ("style hunters"), and shtatniki. 106 Though not simply copying a given model, they did draw on non-Soviet sources of information and stylistic raw material. To begin with, jazz was essential for the development of the new style, and it came from different sources. Records were still around from what Stan-

has termed the "Red Jazz Age" ( 1932-1 936). 107 Record collections of stiliagi in the early 1950s contained pre-war recordings of Utesov, Tsafman, Varlamov, Skomorovskii, or Rosner, which were suppressed after 1946. 108 The immediate postwar period also provided the opportunity to listen and dance to live-music in public. The period between the end of the

103 John R. Gillis Geschichte der Jugend. Transi, by Ulrich Herrmann, Lutz Roth. Müchen 1980, p. 277. This information is part of a new post-script in the German edition and not contained in the original Youth and History. Tradition and Change in European Age Relations 1770-Present. New York, London 1974.

104 Pilkington Russia's Youth and Its Culture p. 66; Rollin Twentieth Century Teen Culture p. 181. On the later incorporation of the Elvis Presley model into the style, see Kirsanova Stiliagi p. 19.

105 Chuvak, a slang expression, can mean "(young) man," "fellow," "guy," "dude," or "friend." See I. IUGANOV, F. IUGANOVA Russkii Zhargon 60-90-kh godov. Opyt slovaria. Moskva 1994, p. 204; A. Flegon Za precidami russkikh slovarei. DopolniteFnye slova i znacheniia s tsitatami Lenina, Khrushcheva, Stalina, Barkova, Pushkina, Lermontova, Esenina, Maiakovskogo, Solzhenitsyna, Voznesenskogo i dr. London 1973, p. 388; A. Fain V. Lur'e, Vse v Kaif! [No place] 1991, p. 164; T. G. Nikitina Tak govorit molodezh'. Slovar' molodezhnogo slenga. 2nd rev. ed. S.-Peterburg 1998, p. 517; I. P. Vorivoda Sbornik zhargonnykh slov i vyrazhenii, upotrebliaemykh v ustnoi i pis'mennoi rechi prestupnym elementom. Alma-Ata 1971, p. 23; IRINA H. CORTEN Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture. A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953-1991. Durham, London 1992, p. 35. The origins of the term are obscure. Most likely, chuvak entered the language of the stiliagi through street and tavern slang. According to one dictionary, it originated in Gypsy-jargon (I. Iuganov, F. Iuganova Slovar' russkogo slenga. Slengovye slova i vyrazheniia 60-90-kh godov. Moskva 1997, p. 246). Another source notes "restaurant musicians' slang" as the origin: Troitzky Back in the USSR p. 14. Dal' lists a word which is pretty similar to chuvak and might have later evolved into this term - chuvasha, denoting a disorderly person (neopriat- nyi chelovek) (VLADIMIR Dal' Tolkovyi slovar' zhivago velikoruskago iazyka. 2nd. ed. Vol. 4. S.- Peterburg, Moskva 1882, p. 611). It might also have been derived from the female form chuvikha, originally a slang expression for prostitute, which, judging from a collection of dictionaries of criminal jargon, is older than the term chuvak (IRINA H. CORTEN Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture. A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953-1991. Durham, London 1992, p. 35; Vladimir KOZLOVSKII [ed.] Sobranie russkikh vorvorskikh slovarei v chetyrekh tomakh. New York 1983, passim and vol. 3, 133). In later GULag jargon chuvak denoted a young man without connections to the world of criminals, maybe a reflection of an influx of stiliagi into the camps (Slovar' lagerno blatnogo zhargona. Rechevoi i graficheskii portret Sovetskoi tiurmy. Moskva 1992, pp. 282, 262).

106 The evolution of the term stiliaga is equally unclear. STARR credits the journalist Semion Nariniani with inventing it, without giving a reference. He locates this invention after the Tarzan movies had been shown (see below), which is clearly wrong; Red and Hot p. 237. In the interview with Troitsky, Kozlov credits "a satirical article in one of the central newspapers" with the invention (Troitzky Back in the USSR p. 13); in his memoirs he credits Beliaev's feuilleton in Krokodil (which he misplaces in time as appearing in 1948, not in 1949) (KOZLOV Kozel na sakse p. 76). Kirsanova Stiliagi p. 73 follows this version. Beliaev's feuilleton itself, however, implies that the term already circulated among students in 1949 (see the quotation above). In any case, the term stuck. "Style hunter" is Starr's translation of the term (Red and Hot p. 237).

107 Starr Red and Hot p. 107-129. 108 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 70; Feiertag Dzhaz ot Leningrada do Peterburga p. 68.




war and the "deep freeze" of late 1946 was an "euphoric interlude" in the history of Soviet jazz. Besides the big jazz orchestras of Rosner, Utesov and Tsafinan, a multitude of smaller ensembles appeared in the restaurants and theaters of Moscow. They played and recorded new American jazz numbers as well as "waltzes, polkas, and Soviet pop tunes."109

The state's attack on jazz was resolute. The popular jazz-man Eddie Rosner and most of his musicians were arrested in late 1946, and the arrest of other jazz musicians in Leningrad and Moscow soon followed. Alexander Tsafinan lost his post as director of the Radio Com- mittee Orchestra in 1947. Ordered to play no more jazz, the State Jazz Orchestra was re- named the State Variety Orchestra. To use the word dzhaz in public was strictly forbidden, piston- valve trumpets were considered "a perversion of art," and the use of a "Wa-wa" for a trumpet, or "too much rhythm" on the drums were considered highly dangerous deviations. Saxophones were confiscated in 1949, and at the beginning of the 1950s thousands of jazz- men were arrested. To ensure that all dance music was properly Soviet the Komsomol "organized brigades of party aspirants and music students to check all restaurants, theaters, and dance halls."110 The result was, as a stiliagi-song recorded by the secret police in 1952 put it, that all one could hear in public was "utter garbage" (sploshnaia lazha), not jazz.111

Although the regime did all it could to repress jazz and direct the dance craze into "cultured" channels after 1946, it never succeeded in blocking Western music completely. Cracks in the iron curtain included the BBC and the American propaganda station Voice of America (VOA). In 1950, on average about thirteen Soviet citizens shared a radio set.112 Not every set was able to receive Western radio, though, since the majority - 82 percent in 1947 and still two-thirds in the 1950s - were cable receivers which could only tune into Soviet stations.113 In other words, only 1.3 million sets capable of receiving foreign broadcasts (wave receivers) were in the hands of Soviet citizens in 1947, mainly in those of city dwellers.114 In 1950 this number climbed to perhaps one-third of the officially counted 13.343 million radio sets, or 4.45 million wave receivers.115 This would mean that 39 people on average shared a wave receiver. This proved enough to make the authorities nervous. In February 1947, three days after the VOA had started Russian language broadcasts, a Krokodil cartoon made fun of BBC habitués who talked only about the "staggering news" they heard on the radio - that Bette Davis married again, what the boxer Joe Louis was up to, and so on. "I see," says one person to such a radio fan, "you are completely BBC-eed" (vy ia vizhu sovsem vzbibisilis').ut In April of the same year, an article by Ilia Erenburg in Kul'tura i Zhizn ' marked the beginning

109 Starr Red and Hot pp. 205-207; Feiertag Dzhaz ot Leningrada do Peterburga p. 65. 110 Starr Red and Hot pp. 214-217; Pilkington Russia's Youth and Its Culture p. 66; Stites

Russian Popular Culture pp. 118-1 19. 111 Belokonev Spravka p. 63. 112 Narodnoe obrazovanie, nauka i kul'tura v SSSR. Statisticheskii sbornik. Moskva 1977, p. 7

(population of 178.5 million) and 397 (13.343 million radio receivers). 113 ALEX Inkeles Public Opinion in Soviet Russia. A Study in Mass Persuasion. Cambridge, MA

1967, p. 251; Stephen Kotkin Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjucture, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. New Series 2 (Winter 2001) no. 1, p. 122.

114 Inkeles Public Opinion in Soviet Russia p. 251. 115 This conforms broadly with Hixson's estimate of five million shortwave receivers. Walter L.

HIXSON Parting the Curtain. Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961. New York 1997, p. 33. For the number of radio sets in 1950 see Narodnoe obrazovanie p. 397. For the estimate of one third of wave receivers see Kotkin Modern Times p. 122.

116 V. Goriaev Slushaia zagranitsu, in: Krokodil, February 20, 1947, p. 3. The broadcasts started February 17, 1947; BROOKS Thank You Comrade Stalin p. 210.



52 Mark Edele

of a full-blown propaganda campaign against the "False Voice" of the "American Goebbels," the "Voice of Wall Street" and the "Voice of the Dollar." ' 17

In order to prevent further BBC-ing of the population the state stepped up its efforts to jam the broadcasts and keep the airwaves clean. Between 1945 and 1949 it "became harder and harder to find the BBC or the Voice of America. Jammers covered practically all wave-bands on short wave."118 By 1947 it was already difficult to pick up Western radio stations due to "heavy Russian jamming."119 A special effort to jam the wave-bands of the VOA started in 1948. 12° In 1949, Fedor Belov reports, the government added another counter measure and "cut down the charge in the batteries in order to stop radio fans from listening to the short wave broadcasts of the Voice of America."121 All this had only limited results because of counter measures taken by the Western stations.122 In 1948 an article in Sovetskaia muzyka complained that "[s]everal times each evening propagandists from the Voice of America send us examples of American music."123 With a powerful radio-set such as the "Leningrad" it was still possible to listen to the West in 1949.124 German "trophy" sets were another device which allowed listening to VOA.125 A French visitor to the Soviet Union in 1950 met a man who confidentially confessed that he listened to broadcasts from abroad.126 Aksenov remembers how he and his friends in the early 1950s spent hours playing around with their radios in order to hear some banned jazz.127 And Kozlov in 1953 not only listened to VOA and BBC on his receiver "Minsk," but also recorded American jazz tunes on his brand-new tape re- corder.128 The American propaganda station itself claimed eight million listeners.129 There were other sources for "not-recommended" music as well. Red Army officers stationed in East Berlin bought large numbers of jazz records and brought them to Moscow, where they supplied the black market.130 The high-society youth whom the nineteen-year old Aksenov met at the above-mentioned party in Moscow in 1952 owned an American radiola with records of Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Peggy Lee, and Woody Herman.131 Kozlov's collection held American recordings of Glenn Miller and Benny Good- man, which had entered the Soviet Union via Germany after the war. He also had some "German trophy fox-trots of the type 'Komm zu mir.'" (trofeinye nemetskie fokstroty tipa "Komzumir").132

117 INKELES Social Chanee dd. 346-379. The campaign went on at least well into 1951.

118 Kabo Road to Australia p. 108. 119 Dallas Dateline Moscow p. 1952. According to Brooks, jamming began later, "in the winter of 1948." Brooks Thank You Comrade Stalin p. 210. 120 According to Inkeles, this effort started in February, according to Hixson in Winter 1948; INKELES Social Change p. 378; HlXSON Parting the Curtain p. 33. 121 Fedor Belov The History of a Soviet Collective Farm. New York 1955, p. 80. 122 Hixson Parting the Curtain pp. 35-37. 123 G. Shneerson Vrednyi Surrogat iskusstva, in: Sovetskaia muzyka (1948) no. 7, p. 87; quoted in Starr Red and Hot p. 210. 124 Kabo Road to Australia p. 108. Other stiliagi invested their money in the set "Baltika" to listen to jazz on VOA; Feiertag Dzhaz ot Leningrada do Peterburga p. 69. 125 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 6. 126 GORDEY Visa to Moscow p. 286. 127 Aksenov V poiskakh grustnogo bebi p. 12. 128 Kozlov Kozel na sakse pp. 89-90. 129 BROOKS Thank you Comrade Stalin p. 210. 130 Starr Red and Hot p. 223. 131 Aksenov V poiskakh grustnogo bebi p. 12. 132 Kozlov Kozel na sakse p. 70.




Sometimes jazz also slipped into films imported from Austria or Germany as part of reparation payments. The Obrastsov Puppet Theater performed a satire on Hollywood to which "many people went simply to hear the excellent jazz that accompanied it."133 One Westerner witnesses two such shows, one in 1949 called "Under the Flutter of her Eye- lashes," a skit on Hollywood accompanied by jazz music which "appeared to delight rather than repel the audience." A "cosmopolitan music" act was shown in 1950 and the observer "seldom heard jazz played so well, and the applause was long and loud."134

"X-ray editions" (Roentgenizdat), illegal copies of popular Western recordings on dis- carded x-ray plates, circulated in the late forties and early fifties.135 Outlawed jazz tunes were disseminated, according to a Central Committee report of November 1949, "by war invalids who traveled from city to city, by unauthorized recordings that were distributed under the packaging of more acceptable music, and from person to person in handwritten song books."136 In the end, surveillance and repression of jazz proved incomplete.137 The regime was "completely unable to suppress the spread or popularity of this sort of music" and the authorities talked about the "complete anarchy" which made distribution of jazz music to dance places possible.138

After three years of anti-jazz campaigning, a report of the central committee apparatus complained in 1949:

"Orchestras of four to eight individuals often perform at evening dances in clubs, movie houses, and so forth. [These orchestras] imitate the manner of playing of American jazz performers and get carried away with dry rhythms, harsh harmony, and music that is deprived of any melody.

In the performances of dances, they often delve into 'special' Western 'styles' with the easy hand of some sort of 'connoisseur' of Western tastes."

According to Starr, musicians who played for stiliagi dances soon began "to explore the hotter tempos of postwar jazz and early rhythm and blues. Student bands at the House of Scholars at Kazan University became avid devotees of the new jazz in order to satisfy the dancer's demands [...]. [They] were offering completely banned music to local stiliagi by 1951-52."140

Clothing style and fashions cannot be transported by radio waves, but there were other channels for these visual elements. Soldiers as well as civilian personnel working with the occupation troops brought not only artifacts such as clothes or watches from the West, they had also the chance to interact with allied soldiers, and the German jazz subculture. The "unprecedented influx of American goods" on the German market after 1945 was "by no means restricted to West Germany," as historian of German jazz and rock rebellion Uta Poiger points out. "Until the construction of the Wall in August 1961, a constant stream of

133 Starr Red and Hot p. 224. His source is an interview he conducted with Harrison Salisbury. On jazz as part of "trophy films" see also Peter Kenez Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953. New York, Cambrigde 1992, p. 214; FEIERTAG Dzhaz ot Leningrada do Peterburga p. 65.

134 Sassoon Penelope in Moscow pp. 39, 148-149. 135 Starr Red and Hot p. 241; Zubkova Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo p. 151. For a des-

cription of the making of such "flexidisks" see Troitsky Back in the USSR p. 19. In the late 1950s Riga was the center of this underground industry; Svede All You Need is Lovebeads p. 195.

136 Kiril TOMOFF Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939-1953. Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago 2001, pp. 266-267.

137 Starr Red and Hot p. 232. 138 TOMOFF Creative Union d. 267.

139 Quoted in TOMOFF Creative Union pp. 265-266. 140 Starr Red and Hot p. 241. Based on oral history material.



54 Mark Edele

people flowed back and forth between East and West Berlin."141 Soldiers, thus, had the chance to see, buy, and bring back elements of Western style. The name of one of the stiliaga dances - the "triple Hamburg" suggests the German origin. Until April 1947, "when a kind of curtain began to come down on foreign observers," it was also possible to interact with the

not so small community of foreigners in Moscow,142 for example over a drink in the Cocktail Hall.

Frontoviki were among the first men to stress clothes and outer appearance, and they provided an example which the younger would-be stiliagi could radicalize. Konstantin, one of the two recently returned soldiers enjoying themselves in 1945 Moscow in Iurii Bondarev's Silence, owns a "cream-coloured jacket with the fashionable slit at the back," a "snow-white [...] singlet," "a splendid quilted cap," a "leather, fur-lined jacket," a red woolen scarf, and a huge collection of ties, some of them foreign, in 1945. 143 By 1949 "fashionable cowboy shirts" had been added to his collection.144 Among the artifacts they brought back were also Western journals and picture magazines. In Konstantin's room stood a divan "strewn over with copies of English military journals and American magazines with Hollywood cinema stars smiling from their pages."145 A student at a Leningrad Engineering Institute referred in 1946 to "books and periodicals that we get from overseas" as his source of information of life in the West. 146

What the frontoviki brought into the country circulated relatively freely, at least immediately after the war, as the black market was not under control.147 Another important institution for the circulation of artifacts were second hand stores (komissionnye magaziny or komissionki), which sold, among other things, clothes brought there by Western embassy personnel, and "trophy" goods.148 Movies were another window to a non-Soviet semantic system which "fed directly into the

newly emerging culture of the stilyagi"149 "It was a big mistake of comrade Stalin," stated a friend of Aksenov, "to allow our generation to watch trophy films."150 The destruction of the war, budget cuts, an increasingly complex censorship, and the "anti-cosmopolitanist"

141 Uta G. Poiger Jazz, Rock, and Rebels. Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 2000, p. 2. 142 Alexander Werth Russia. The Post-War Years. New York 1971, p. xii. For the part of the foreigners who left accounts of what they saw see Harry W. Nerwood To Russia and Return. An Annotated Bibliography of Travelers' English-Language Accounts of Russia from the Ninth Century to the Present. Ohio 1968, pp. 265-285. For tourists as sources of information about the outside world in 1946 see Fay King Footloose in the Soviet Union. London 1947, p. 37. In the second half of 1947 a decree made it illegal to give "any kind of information to foreigners." Werth Russia: The Post-War Years p. 349.

143 Bondarev Silence pp. 15, 29, 83, 107. 144 Bondarev Silence p. 240. Another fashion-conscious./roHtov/A: is Vasilii ("Vas'ka") in Zhanna

Gausner Vot my i doma ..., in: Zvezda (1947) no. 1 1, p. 4-106. 145 Bondarev Silence p. 29. 146 King Footloose in the Soviet Union p. 37. 147 On the circulation of "trophy" goods Cf. Kirsanova Stiliagi p. 72. On influx and sale of trophy

good see also Otchet o rabote Partkollegii Kommissii partiinogo kontrolia pri TsK VKP (b) za iiun' 1939 - 1946 gody, in: RGANI f. 6, op. 6, d. 3, 11. 57-59; For a vivid description of a black market in the center of Moscow see Bondarev Silence pp. 22, 29-30, 107.

148 KROTKll Montifom; KOZLOV Kozel na sakse pp. 81-82; A. Sergeev Omnibus. APbom dlia marok. Moskva 1997, quoted in Kirsanova Stiliagi p. 72.

IW Richard Stites Russian Popular Culture. Entertainment and Society since 1900. Cambridge, New York 1992, p. 125.

l™ Aksenov v poiskakh grustnogo bebí p. 17.




terror led to decreasing productivity in the film industry.151 The release of Soviet-produced films fluctuated between 19 and 24 feature films a year between 1945 and 1952, and only in 1953 was a more normal number of 45 films reestablished:

Release of Soviet-produced Films 1945-1 953 152

1945 1946 1947 1948 1949

feature films 19 23 23 17 18

total 23 30 30 28 32

1950 1951 1952 1953

feature films 13 9 24 45

total153 28 18 32 57

This "picture famine" (period malokartin'ia)154 - led to a boring and repetitive movie- repertoire.155 Consequently, fewer and fewer people went to the movies.156 To counteract this situation, the Politburo of the Party's Central Committee decided in June 1948 to release a couple of "trophy films" which had been taken from Germany in 1945. The release was such a success, that already in August of the same year another decision released an additional 50 "trophy films." These, again, were met with popular approval and similar actions were taken in March, May and June of the following year.157 These decisions, however, only centralized what was previously local practice. In October

1946 Vecherniaia Moskva criticized the club of the workers of the film industry for having shown sixty foreign films in six months. In March 1947, Kul'tura izhizn ' reviewed a couple

151 Thomas J. Slater The Soviet Union, in: Handbook of Soviet and East European Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Thomas J. Slater. New York, Westport CO, London 1992, p. 16; MlCHAL J. STOIL Cinema Beyond the Danube. Metuchen 1974, p. 94; Stites Russian Popular Culture p. 121; Kenez Cinema and Soviet Society pp. 211-212, 227. Stoil states that in 1952 "only five feature films were released." He does not give a source for this assertion and Slater repeats it, quoting Stoil. For 1952, according to my data, the release (as opposed to the production) of feature films was 24 (see table 3). For the number of produced films see Kenez Cinema and Soviet Society p. 210 and Maya Tu- ROVSKAIA The 1930s and 1940s: cinema in context, in: Stalinism and Soviet Cinema. Ed. by Richard Taylor and Derek Spring. London, New York 1993, p. 44. 152 Sovetskie khudozhestvennye fiPmy. Izd. Vsesoiuznyi gosudarstvennyi fond kinofil'mov. Annoti-

rovannyi katalog. Moskva 1961, vol. 3, pp. 22-26. 153 Including animated films.

1 Istoriia sovetskogo kino. Moskva 1975, vol. 3, p. 97. See also Stites Russian Popular Culture p. 121; Kenez Cinema & Soviet Society pp. 209-226.

Krokodil repeatedly made this a topic of ridicule. See L. Brodato Zamedlennaia s"emka, in: Krokodil, August 20, 1945, p. 8; Davaite pomechtaem, in: Krokodil, November 30, 1945, pp. 6-7; B. EFIMOV Kuda poiti segodnia, in: Krokodil, July 10, 1946, p. 10; E. Evgan U vkhoda v klub, in: Kroko- dil, September 10, 1947, p. 5; V. Prorokov Zimnye kartiny, in: Krokodil, December 10, 1947, p. 10; L. Soiferist S tochki zreniia zritelia, in: Krokodil, March 10, 1950, p. 12. See akso KENEZ Cinema & Soviet Society p. 213. 136 Irina Kondakova (éd.) "Tarzan - chelovek ne isporchennyi burzhuaznoi tsivilizatsiei", in:

Istochnik(1999)no. 4, p. 99.

157 Kondakova (éd.) Tarzan p. 99.



56 Mark Edele

of letters to the editor about the German comedy The Woman of my Dreams {Die Frau meiner Träume, 1944) featuring Marika Rökk.158 Judging from a September 1947 Krokodil cartoon and its accompanying explanation, this movie was shown by a number of local clubs, not as part of a central decision.159 Between 1947 and 1949 at least 35 entertainment films of Nazi origin were shown in the Soviet Union.160 Among the trophy films were also classics of American cinema of the 1930s - The Stage-Coach, Mr. Deed Goes to Washington, The Roaring Twenties - which were shown under changed titles. Although the names of the role models John Wayne and James Cagney were unknown to them, stiliagi watched them and talked in quotations from these films.161

The experiment with the German movies paved the way to the release of the Tarzan movies in 1951, starring swim champion Johnny Weismuller.162 This caused quite a stir. Letter-writers were outraged by the "animal primitivism of the film's hero," the "animalistic- sexual basis" of this "empty and worthless film," and its "definite bad influence on many of our young people, who evidently think that if a film is shown it must be good."163 Fellow students of Gorbachev remember "how they enjoyed the Tarzan movies shown at their dorm at Moscow University and filled its corridors at night with ape-man howling."164 And Weismuller' s haircut was taken up by stiliagi and incorporated into their style.165

Foxtrot to Normalcy, the New Class, and the New Man

The existence of a group of young people with the necessary resources in an environment only partly controlled by state power, in which elements of alternative semantic systems circulated, still does not adequately explain the emergence of stiliazhnichestvo. After all, the circulating elements of style had to be appropriated and creatively combined into a system by actors who had to invest a lot of time, money, and emotions into a lifestyle which was not only under constant attack from their social environment but also considered dangerous by a state not known for its leniency. Zubkova has suggested that generation played a role. The young men who became stiliagi were too young to remember the fear and threat of the Great Terror. Thus they were more likely to underestimate the state's potential for brutality and act more freely than the older generations.166 However, this explanation, like those advanced in this paper so far, is only concerned with the possibility of the emergence of stiliazhnichestvo. It only moves from an environmental to a mental level. Moreover, the fact that the style persisted into the late 1950s and beyond despite severe social pressure also suggests that one

158 Kenez Cinema & Soviet Society p. 213-214. The movie was translated as "The Girl of my Dre- ams" in Russian; Turovskaia The 1930s and 1940s: cinema in context p. 51. 159 E. Evgan U vkhoda v klub, in: Krokodil, September 10, 1947, p. 5. 160 Kenez Cinema & Soviet Society p. 225 n.14. 161 Aksenov V poiskakh grustnogo bebi p. 16. See also Turovskaia The 1930s and 1940s: cinema

in context o. 51: STITES Russian Popular Culture p. 125.

162 Kondakova (éd.) Tarzan pp. 99-101. Kenez misplaces them in time. He mentions them in context with films shown in the 1940s and states that by "the early 1950s [...] foreign films disappeared from Soviet screens." Kenez Cinema & Soviet Society p. 214, for Tarzan p. 213.

163 Blatant Advertising - Empty Film, in: Cina [Latvia] June 1 1, 1952 quoted from: Current Digest of the Soviet Press vol. 4 (1952) no. 23, p. 37.

164 Stites Russian Popular Culture p. 125; obviously based on oral history testimony.

165 In a puzzling twist of the time arrow Starr makes Johnny Weismuller to the "prototype" of the style of the stiliagi. However, the style already existed by the time Tarzan was shown; Starr Red and Hot p. 237. On the "tarzan hairstyle" of the stiliagi, see SHELEPIN Otchet TsK VLKSM, p. 3; KOZLOV Kozel na sakse p. 8 1 .

166 Zubkova Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo p. 137.




has to look for some deeper cause for the evolution and reproduction of the style. What made

it so appealing? One possibility to make sense of the emergence of the stiliagi is to see them as part of a

"return to normalcy" after the deprivations of war.167 A comparative perspective reinforces this point: the stiliagi were not unique in the postwar world, nor were they unique in Soviet history. After the first big and brutal war of the Soviet epoch, the civil war, an equally thriv-

ing night-life emerged, as well as a comparable phenomenon: the "foxtrotters."168 Nor was stiliazhnichestvo an isolated phenomenon in the postwar world. Every major industrialized nation experienced something similar - including the upset reactions. In the US, the popularity of Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, Bing Crosby, Frankie Lane, and increasingly rhythm and blues and, by the mid 1950s, Rock'n Roll, made concerned adults ask for state regulation and censorship of juke boxes in order to save youth from "sinful situations" and "immorality" triggered by dancing the jitterbug and the boogie woogie.169 In Germany, an already existing swing culture hugely expanded under the influence of American occupation. From small south-Bavarian towns to divided Berlin, jazz and, by the mid 1950s, Rock'n Roll music, dances, and fashions fired young people's enthusiasm and disturbed moralizers and authorities. East-Germany, too, escaped neither the jazz craze nor Halbstarken riots.170 In Prague, the pásek "wore.wide-cuffed trousers, striped socks, and safari-styled jackets," while their Bulgarian equivalents "sported thick-soled shoes, [...] sweaters, and neckties from abroad."171 Britain saw the development of the Teddy Boys and Denmark that of the "laeder-jakken." In Austria the equivalent was known as "Plattenbrüder," in France as "blouson noirs," and in Spain as "Gaberros."172 East of the Soviet Union, in Japan, "Kasutori Culture" - an escapist demimonde of liquor, nihilism, pulp fiction, cabarets, revues, and strip shows - flourished in the late 1940s and into the 1950s.173 The Soviet Union was part of a larger international trend - the emergence of hedonistic lifestyles after the war.

Here, however, such hedonism was only in the reach of the affluent minority of the top elite and the middle class. Thus, the phenomenon of stiliazhnichestvo is closely linked to the process of social stratification of Soviet society and the embourgeoisement of the elite. The eccentricity of the style can be seen as an attempt of children of the elite to mark themselves

as superior to children of lower strata. This linkage of style and social stratification also

167 Cf. Sheila Fitzpatrick Postwar Soviet Society: The "Return to Normalcy", 1945-1953; in: The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union. Ed. by Susan J. Linz. Totowa, New Jersey 1985, pp. 129-156; Julie Hessler Cultured Trade. The Stalinist turn towards consumerism, in: Stalinism. New Directions. Ed. by Sheila Fitzpatrick. London, New York 2000, pp. 182-203.

168 GORSUCH Youth in Revolutionary Russia pp. 1 16-138. 169 ROLLIN Twentieth Century Teen Culture pp. 103-196. no Detlef Peukert Edelweißpiraten, Meuten, Swing. Jugendsubkulturen im Dritten Reich, in:

Sozialgeschichte der Freizeit. Untersuchungen zum Wandel der Alltagskultur in Deutschland. Ed. by Gerhard Huck. Wuppertal 1980, pp. 307-327; Arno Klönne Jugend im Dritten Reich. Die Hitler- Jugend und ihre Gegner. München, Zürich 1995, pp. 228-260; Maase Entblößte Brust und schwingende Hüfte; PoiGER Jazz, Rock, and Rebeis; Grotum Die Halbstarken. On Bavaria see HUBERT Hingerl Gusgasga. Die wahrhaftigen, aber nicht immer erbaulichen Kindheitserinnerungen an eine bewegte Zeit. Kempten 1996, pp. 229-265.

171 Timothy W. Ryback Rock Around the Block. A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. New York, Oxford 1990, p. 10.

172 Gillis Geschichte der Jugend p. 277; Heinz Bude Generationen im 20. Jahrhundert. Historische Einschnitte, ideologische Kehrtwendungen, innere Widersprüche, in: Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift fur europäisches Denken 54 (July 2000) Nr. 7, pp. 567-579, here p. 573.

173 John W. Dower Embracing Defeat. Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York, London 1999, pp. 148-154.



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explains some of the inner developments of the subculture described in the first part of this paper. Sociologist Georg Simmel has described the dynamics of fashion as a process where the elite of a society constantly struggles to express symbolically their difference, while their social inferiors imitate these stylistic innovations.174 This model describes the dynamic between the Golden Youth shtatniki and their middle class imitators quite well: As the middle class became materially more secure and their sons started to imitate their social betters, the sons of the top elite refashioned themselves into shtatniki. 175 It also accounts for the later spread of the style to working class youth and the reaction of middle class stiliagi. As overall living conditions increased in the 1950s, working class youth started to imitate middle class stiliagi, who in turn remade themselves into shtatniki}16 While class position and aspirations to upward social mobility explain the inner dynamics of the style and its spread, they do not explain its deviancy. After all, both the Golden Youth and their middle class imitators could have found styles more in conformity with Stalinism. Instead they developed a style which was considered deviant not only by state and party, but also by the majority of the population. And they reproduced the style despite significant social and political pressure to conform to Stalinist standards. The reason for this was not political in a narrow sense of the word: Politically disaffected youth found themselves not in the Kok khall, but in illegal Marxist circles in the tradition of pre-revolutionary radicalism.177 The stiliagi, on the other hand, were decidedly apolitical. 178 What, then, accounts for the deviance? Zubkova's argument about generations can be developed in another direction. What precisely did self-fashioning as a stiliaga provide for men too young to fight in the war? The high prestige of front-line experience put everybody who lacked it at an emotional disadvantage. Students from what can be called the "school- bench generation" were confronted every day with the self-assured behavior of fellow students, who were but slightly older than they were, and who displayed their status as veterans

by wearing their orders and medals on a daily basis. With victory the role of the front-line soldier had been transformed into an ascribed status which was not open to achievement. Consequently, younger men were brought into a defensive position against self-assertive veterans.179 This gap between men of the fighting cohorts and those too young to be part of the glorious "generation of victors" was additionally enhanced by the younger men's lack of any military experience.180 The frontovik as the dominant model of masculinity was unobtainable for members of the school-bench generation. They could either live with an inferior status, or invent an alternative, non-military form of manliness. Stiliazhnichestvo was one

174 Georg Simmel Zur Psychologie der Mode. Soziologische Studie, in: Idem Schriften zur Soziolo- gie. Eine Auswahl. Ed. by Heinz- Jürgen Dahme and Ottheim Remmstedt. Frankfurt 1983, pp. 131-139.

175 On the improved situation of the industrial elite in late Stalinism see Eric Duskin Stalinist Reconstruction and the Confirmation of a New Elite, 1945-1953. New York 2001. 176 Kharkhordin The Collective and the Individual in Russia p. 341; Belokonev Spravka p. 63; Slavkin Pamiatnik neizvestnomu stiliage p. 75; and Zubkova Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo p. 153.

177 Zubkova Russia after the War pp. 109-1 16. 178 "Political" in the narrow sense used here means an articulated interest in how state and society

should be ordered.

179 The frontoviki in postwar society are the topic of my ongoing dissertation project "A 'Generation of Victors?' Second World War Veterans in the Soviet Union, 1941-1956," The University of Chicago.

180 Although the law on universal military draft from 1939 did not exempt prospective students, a gap between the drafting age and the possible age of graduation from the ten-year school allowed students to circumvent the draft if they entered vuzy right after graduation; Nicholas De Witt Education and Professional Employment in the USSR. Washington 1961, pp. 53-57.




strategy for coming to terms with this situation. The marginal status of women in the subcul-

ture can be explained much better from this perspective than by arguments stressing greater social pressure on young women and puritanist "Soviet morality:"181 Young women were simply not pressed to adhere to a standard of gendered selfhood which was unobtainable to them.

The inferior position of men of the school-bench generation to veterans was, of course, not an exclusive problem of the sons of the Stalinist elite. They were, however, the first to have the means to find a solution for a problem which transgressed social boundaries. Thus, the spread of the style to lower social groups later in the 1950s might have been driven by gender issues as much as by class issues.

Conclusion

Stiliagi have captured the attention of scholars since the middle of the 1950s. But only a minority have treated them as a phenomenon of the Stalin era.182 More often stiliagi are seen as creatures of the Thaw. They emerged, the story goes, because of the lessening of state pressure on society.183 This paradigm even structures the work of some scholars who know about the existence of stiliazhnichestvo in the postwar years. Richard Stites, for example, puts

the story of the emergence of the subculture in his chapter on the Thaw, not in the chapter on Stalinism.184 In a similar move, Frederick Starr devotes his chapter on Stalinism to the repres-

sion of jazz, while the stiliagi are separated out in a chapter on the "search for authenticity," connecting the years 1950-55. 185 For Stites and Starr, stiliagi have more to do with Khrushchevism, than with the environment which actually bred them - Stalinism. This tendency to connect stiliazhnichestvo and the Thaw sometimes even leads to a complete reversal of the time arrow: Hilary Pilkington knows about their existence during the 1940s but nevertheless claims that they "emerged in the 1950s," and firmly connects them to the Thaw.186

Clearly, for Stites, Starr, and Pilkington the emergence of stiliazhnichestvo during the years of Stalinist totalitarianism is fundamentally counter-intuitive and hard to explain. It seems to violate deeply held beliefs about the nature of Stalinism and the near-total role of state action within this civilization. Interestingly, we encounter similar problems if we try to

apply recent work on "Stalinist subjectivity" to explain the emergence of stiliazhnichestvo. I will concentrate here only on one of the most outspoken representatives of this trend,

181 See Kozlov Kozel na sakse pp. 86-87; Troitzky Back in the USSR pp. 13-15. 182 Zubkova Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo pp. 151-154; Kharkhordin The Collective and

the Individual in Russia pp. 290-291; TROITSKY Back in the USSR pp. 13-17; Kirsanova Stiliagi pp. 72-75.

183 See KASSOF The Soviet Youth Program pp. 154-164; THOMAS F. MAGNER The Stiliaga and his Language, in: The Slavic and East European Review 15 (Spring 1957) no. 1, pp. 192-195; Mark G. Field Drink and Delinquency in the USSR, in: Problems of Communism (May- June 1955) vol. 4/3, pp. 29-38; Idem Alcoholism, Crime, and Delinquency in Soviet Society, in: Social Problems vol. 3, (July 1955) no.l, pp. 100-109; Irina H. Corten Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture. A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953-1991. Durham, London 1992, pp. 138-139.

184 STITES Russian Popular Culture 124-126. 185 Starr Red and Hot 236-243.

186 Pilkington Russia's Youth and Its Culture pp. 66, 226, 247.



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Jochen Hellbeck, rather than review the whole body of literature.187 His original and highly inspiring work was the source for the term "self-fashioning" used throughout this paper.188 Hellbeck argues that individuals "could not conceivably formulate a notion of [...] [themselves] independently of the program promulgated by the Bolshevik state."189 He gives two reasons for this. In the article in which he originally developed this idea he proposes to conceptualize Stalinism as a closed semantic system which did not supply "alternative sources of identity."190 Obviously reacting to empirical challenges to this thesis, Hellbeck later shifts the explanation from the cultural to the social. He now argues that it was social pressure - the threat of atomization - which enforced conformity: "The real problem was that a lasting revolt against the objective revolutionary current appeared utterly undesirable to the dissenting subject because of its combined threat of self-marginalization and atomization." However, he still maintains that the discourse embraced and disseminated by the Soviet state was the sole possible source of identity:

"Soviet subjects owed their authority to speak out to their self-alignment with the revolutionary master-narrative. Just as the Revolution was a source of subjectivity and enormous power, a subjective stance against the Revolution threatened to engender loss of self and total powerless- ness."191

The example of the stiliagi shows that, at least for the postwar years, Hellbeck's model needs slight adjustments. At least for certain privileged groups it was possible to formulate identities outside of revolutionary discourse. Neither was the cultural universe available to Soviet citizens so one-dimensional that official models could not be challenged by alternatives, nor

was social pressure strong enough to ensure conformity in every case. Social pressure did not necessarily atomize actors. It could instead lead to processes of group formation among people who were subjected to similar pressures, especially if conforming to approved standards of behavior, dress, or thought came at the price of a problematic self-image, or a low status. Thus, while Hellbeck is without doubt correct in his insistence on the appeal of revolu-

tionary discourse and the strong pressures to conform to officially promoted identities, he overstresses his point when he claims that this prevented dissent. He ignores counter-pressures and appeals from other directions.

One problem in Hellbeck's work, as well as Amir Weiner's application of it for the postwar years, is that they both treat political identity as the model form of self-fashioning.192 It may be true that it was extremely difficult to formulate political identities totally unaffected by the Soviet project. However, self-fashioning as a political being was by no means the only

187 For a critique of older treatments of the "Stalinist subject" see Anna Krylova The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History New Series 1 (Winter 2000) no. 1, pp. 1 19-146.

188 Jochen Hellbeck Fashioning the Stalinist soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931-1939), in: JBfGOE 44 (1996) pp. 344-375; Idem Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History New Series 1 (Winter 2000) no. 1, pp. 71-96; Idem [reply to Sarah Davies], in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History n.s. 1 (Spring 2000) no. 2, pp. 439-440; IDEM Self-Real ization in the Stalinist System: Two Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, in: Russian Modernity. Politics, Knowledge, Practices. Ed. by David L. Hoffmann, Yanni Kotsonis. New York 2000, pp. 221-242; Idem Writing the Self in the Time of Terror: Alexander Afinogenov's Diary of 1937, in: Self and Story in Russian History. Ed. by Laura Engelstein, Stephanie Sandier. Ithaca, London 2000, pp. 69-93; and Idem Einleitung, in: Tagebuch aus Moskau 1931-1939. Transi, and ed. by Jochen Hellbeck. München 1996, pp. 9-73.

189 Hellbeck Fashioning the Stalinist Soul p. 372. 190 Hellbeck Fashioning the Stalinist Soul. 191 Hellbeck Speaking Out p. 95. 192 Weiner Making Sense of War esp. pp. 364-385.




choice available. In principle, and sometimes in practice, people could formulate self-under- standings which had little to do with politics. And they could do so because not every space and not every activity was consistently politicized or tightly controlled. Such self-fashioning,

moreover, also had greater chances of survival and reproduction than any attempt to be politically oppositional to the Soviet state. While state organs clearly opposed stiliazhnichestvo, the worst thing which seemed to have happened to stiliagi during the late Stalin years was exclusion from the Komsomol or from their educational institutions, public shaming, and sometimes law suits for "parasitism." For "weekend stiliagi," who dressed up only for dances, the pressure was even more limited. The state did not use the more brutal means of social control at its disposal - to round them up, deport, or even kill them. Obvi- ously, the struggle against stiliazhnichestvo was not a hardline concern.193 This is in marked contrast to state reaction to clearly political student groups, which emerged during the same period.194 The reproduction of the style during late Stalinism indicates that non-terrorist ("soft-line") forms of social control were much less successful than terrorist ("hard-line") ones.

As the phenomenon of the stiliagi thus illustrates, to look for explanations for social and cultural phenomena exclusively from a state/society (or state/individual) perspective restricts our vision. It is significant that what former stiliagi remember in memoirs and interviews is fear of society, of confrontations with "average Soviet people," not fear of what the state might do. If my interpretation is correct, they also did not react to the actions of the state, but to a socio-cultural phenomenon: self-assertive veterans. State action (and the lack thereof), to be sure, influenced the emerging subculture. It did not, however, cause it or prevent it from

happening. Stiliazhnichestvo thus reminds us that not everything which happened under Stalin was an effect of state action or revolutionary aspirations. Some phenomena emerged because of cultural and social forces which were neither created nor controlled by the state.

This does of course not mean that state discourse and state action were not important and sometimes decisive parts of Stalinist Civilization. My claim is much more modest: I dispute that state action and state discourse were the only things which mattered in every case. I argue for a return to a more complex concept of Stalinist Civilization which accounts for social stratification and cultural diversity and which does not start with the assumption of an inte-

grated totality of state, society, and the individual under the umbrella of an all-embracing discourse. Such a concept of Stalinism would allow us to write the history of subjectivities in Stalinism, rather than the history of a singular "Stalinist subjectivity."

193 On the distinction between "hardline" and "softline" policies, and the different prospects of their execution see Terry D. Martin An Affirmative Action Empire: Ethnicity and the Soviet State, 1923-1938. 4 vols. Ph.D. diss. The University of Chicago 1996, vol.1, chap. 2; vol. 2, chaps. 4 and 6.

■* Zubkova Russia after the War pp. 109-1 16.



The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953

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