Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (61 page)

wartime diaries about their failings at both folk and modern dance
styles.
^{162
In the post-1948 period, club directors, such as those of}
Astrakhan
oblast’
, were strongly condemned for playing jazzy tunes and allowing Western dances. They had approached their responsibil- ities from a purely ‘commercial’ point of view.
^{163
Komsomol dances}
and public dance halls were hotly contested spaces, where official policy and popular taste jostled for space via the ‘tactics of the habitat’. Komsomol dance organizers were forced to engage in
bricolage
, juggling the competing demands of official decrees and audience desires.
^{164
Ultimately it was very difficult to impose a particular style}
of dancing on a young crowd. Svetlana Ivanovna explained to me how much she had enjoyed Komsomol dances in the post-war years. ‘They were fun. . . . alcohol was banned but we smuggled it in anyway and got drunk. [What kinds of dances did you dance?] Twist, ballroom, foxtrot, they were banned but we all did them. Boogie woogie was banned as well but we did it all the same.’
^{165
Svetlana Ivanovna and her friends}
had reappropriated these Komsomol events into arenas for the expres- sion of their personal, though officially disavowed, tastes.

Soviet young people also demonstrated a worrying passion for foreign
goods and clothing in the post-war era. A number of the discussants of the K.R. Affair noted that young people were prone to ‘worshipping’ ‘foreign knick knacks’.
^{166
The popularity of clothing from overseas was,}
to some extent, a result of Soviet shortages. As Svetlana Ivanovna explained, ‘we were making nothing of our own so they were very popular’.
^{167
However, the popularity of foreign clothes in the post-}
war period went beyond mundane necessity. Lieutenant Gritsai ob- served during the K.R. discussion in the Odessa garrison that, ‘We have some who love to boast about foreign pens, knives, or any other kind of similar thing considering these trifles to be markers of high- bourgeois culture.’
^{168
Suits, watches, and shoes from overseas were}

^{162
Mem. P. Iskovskii,}
Stalingrad v serdtse moem
(Volgograd, 2002)
,
205–6; Ermo- lenko,
Voennyi dnevnik,
97.

^{163
Inf. RGASPI M-f. 1, op. 6, d. 467, l. 113.}

^{164
Fu¨rst, ‘The Importance of Being Stylish’, 211–13.}

^{165
Int. Svetlana Ivanovna, Moscow, July 2004.}

^{166
Inf. GAOPDiFAO f. 1740, op. 1, d. 1112, l. 60.}

^{167
Int. Svetlana Ivanovna, Moscow, July 2004. On the shortage of clothing in the}
post-war USSR see: Filtzer,
Soviet Workers and Late-Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration
of the Stalinist System After World War II (Cambridge, 2002), 42–3.

^{168
Inf. RGASPI M-f. 1, op. 6, d. 467, l. 127.}

200
Being Soviet

particularly popular.
^{169
Prior to his arrest in 1949, A.A.A. ran a thriving}
business in Odessa selling American-made clothes and jewellery pur- chased from foreign sailors.
¹⁷⁰

The enthusiasm of many Soviet citizens, particularly young people,
for foreign cultural products such as music, movies, and clothing generated disquiet amongst Bolshevik administrators during the post- war turn against capitalist civilization. However, to describe it as evi- dence of resistance against the Soviet state would be over-simplistic. When they had the personal opportunity to interact with foreign-made culture they judged it on its merits. Overseas-produced films, clothing, and music provided light relief in the otherwise bleak circumstances of the post-war USSR. They were also enjoyed a certain ‘foreign chic’ which added glamorous, but not necessarily subversive, overtones.

The most widely discussed example of the tactical negotiation of the
post-war ideological campaigns, were the young people who structured their entire identities in relation to these glamorous overtones. The
stiliagi
(stylish people) were a largely urban youth subculture who

appeared in the late 1940s.
^{171
Their existence and behaviour provide}

a clear example of the subtlety with which the post-war shift in Official
Soviet Identity could be negotiated.

V.N.S., D.V.N., Ch.K.Sh., A.N.K., E.I.M., A.V.D., and I.V.K.,

were a group of musicians and students in Moscow who hung around
the Aurora, Metropol, and National hotels drinking, partying, and dancing to jazz music. They were self-identifying
stiliagi
who strove ‘above all in clothing and music to resemble Americans’. The group were devotees of jazz and had developed their own ‘eccentric’ dancing style. When they weren’t hanging around glamorous restaurants they would walk along Gorky Street, which they dubbed ‘Broadway’, shout- ing ‘America! Truman! Hoorah! Style!’
^{172
This Moscow circle, arrested}
in April 1950, bore all the hallmarks of many other
stiliagi
groups in the late-Stalin years.
Stiliagi
commonly sported padded shoulders in their jackets, broad ties with American motifs, narrow trousers, turned-back cuffs, and thick-soled shoes. Their haircuts were often swept back from

^{169
Inf. RGASPI f.17, op. 122, d. 273, ll. 7–8. Fu¨rst, ‘The Importance of Being}
Stylish’, 209.

^{170
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 31773p, ll. 37–8.}

^{171
See: Fu¨rst, ‘The Importance of Being Stylish’, and M. Edele, ‘Strange Young Men}
in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and life of the
Stiliagi
, 1945–1953’,
Jarhbucher fur
Geschichte Osteuropas, 50.1 (2002), 37–61.

^{172
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 19091, ll. 56–134.}

Subversive Styles? 1945–53
201

the front and curled at the back, in the style of Johnny Weissmuller
from the 1951–2
Tarzan
movies.
^173
Female
stiliagi
were less widespread and usually wore short skirts and heavy lipstick.
^{174
The groups made a}
point of loving jazz, dancing the foxtrot and boogie woogie, and litter- ing their speech with English words such as ‘Cool’ and ‘Baby’.
¹⁷⁵

The term
stiliagi
was coined by the Soviet press and the ‘stylish youths’ were publicly criticized in the late-Stalin years. In March 1949
Krokodil
compared them to heads of wheat that stand taller than the rest in the field but have no corn in them. Its description of a pair of young
stiliagi
stressed their ridiculous clothing and effete manner- isms.
^{176
The journal’s depiction of two}
stiliagi
dancing closely mirrored the almost deformed postures shown in an October 1951
Ogon¨ek
article about American soldiers in Britain.
^{177
Komsomolskaia Pravda}
also joined the attack opining that

narrow pants do not make a
stiliaga
but those who along with narrow pants narrow their honour and their conscience. These people parade their scorn for work, for life, for all that is holy . . . Like a case of the flu the frightening thing is the risk of complications. The complications of the
stiliagi
I consider parasit- ism, hooliganism, and banditism.
¹⁷⁸

Such heavy-handed criticism could create the false impression that
the
stiliagi
were a coherent trans-local social movement. The styles and subcultures associated with a
stiliaga
lifestyle were, however, very loca- lized. Vladimir Feiertag describes how in late-Stalinist Leningrad ‘each block, each region had its own hero and
stiliaga
whom it admired’.
^179
The
stiliagi
of Riga dressed in a very different style from those of Moscow, sporting caps and jackets with zips rather than suits and ties.
^{180
Vasili Aksenov’s friends in Kazan had done ‘everything they}
could to ape American fashion’. However, his first contact with Moscow
stiliagi
wearing ‘genuine article, made in the USA’ clothing, came as

^{173
Mem., A. Kozlov,}
Kozel Na Sakse
(Moscow, 1998), 78–81.

^174
Ball,
Imagining America,
185, Edele, ‘Strange Young Men’, 43.

^{175
Mem. Chernov, ‘Istoriia istinnogo dzhaza’; M. Ruthers, ‘The Moscow Gorky}
Street in Late Stalinism: Space, History and Lebenswelten’, in Fu¨rst, ed.,
Late Stalinist
Russia, 260–2.

^176
Krokodil
, 10.3.1949, p. 10.

^177
Ogon¨ek
, 10.1951: 44, p. 13.

^178
Zubkova,
Russia After the War,
192–3.

^{179
Mem. Chernov, ‘Istoriia istinnogo dzhaza’.}

^{180
A. Troitsky,}
Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia
(London, 1987), 4.

202
Being Soviet

quite a shock.
^181
The
stiliagi
were also not the first young people to face criticism for their style of hair, clothing, and make-up in the USSR. ‘Flappers’ had attracted censure in the 1920s, and Nina Kosterina wrote scathingly about the ‘Young Ladies’ in her class with ‘Hair fluffed up (a permanent), stocking torn, narrow skirt (latest style!), circle of interests as narrow as her skirt’ in 1938.
^{182
A group of senior-year students at the}
1st Secondary School in Riga in 1947 also exhibited many of the characteristics later associated with the
stiliagi
. They were ‘fascinated with foreign rubbish’ and constantly whistled German tunes ‘with a foxtrot motif’. Their language was littered with Spanish, English, and German words and they wore their hair long, with stylized moustaches and rings on their fingers. At school dances these students performed ‘the perverted German dance—swing’.
¹⁸³

What distinguished the
stiliagi
from these other groups was their almost exclusive reliance on America as a palette from which to con- struct their identities.
^184
The
stiliagi
were generational rebels, self- consciously rejecting the masculinity of the wartime
frontoviki
or the conformity of their parents: many of them were ‘Golden Youths’ whose parents were members of the Soviet elite.
^{185
What tied them all togeth-}
er, however, was the aspiration to dance and dress to the same American ideal. In reality, they had very little idea what American young people were like. Their
Tarzan
haircuts and shoulder pads mimicked an imaginary America, rather than their contemporaries across the Atlan- tic. Nonetheless, within the symbolic world of post-war Stalinism, they were associating themselves with the glamorous West in a manner which was instantly recognizable to everyone around them.