This thread started me thinking about pop culture in the Soviet Bloc. In the west we stereotyped Communist pop culture as “boy loves Socialist tractor” repeated nonstop. Was it mostly propoganda, or was it mostly love stories and comedies? How much choice in movies, TV, and music did you have? Was there anything like a “celebrity culture”? And how easy was it to find Western entertainment?
It was mostly crap. Take PBS, but strip the few worthwhile shows and substitute really boring propaganda that nobody believed but nobody would ever question out loud. And it’s not like people had nearly as much access. TV’s and even radios were a lot less common.
I’ve seen Soviet cartoons, too. It’s sort of like if you took a small hit of LSD and then your friends locked you in a small, cold, dark room with lots of insects crawlin all over you.
You didn’t. The state decided what was available. This didn’t mean there were no garage bands (towards the end in East Germany even a few decent rock bands) but they were prevented from doing anything in public at the least.
Yes, but it wasn’t entertainment. There were legitimate Soviet popular heroes, but they tended to be people like Molotov or Kalashnikov. They were popular for a reason, and supported by the state.
It was illegal. You can guess the rest. No, it wasn’t impossible, but very risky. East Germans had it easiest, because most of East Germany was in range of western television and radio signals. For many families, sneaking a listen to American jazz was quite popular.
Estonians were in the same boat, except they got our Finnish TV and radio which is why a lot of 35+ year old Estonians know Finnish quite well. They did think that our food commercials are western propaganda though. 
Ok - “pop culture” was “mostly crap” as all pop culture everywhere was mostly crap. That said, 70s and 80s brought some very good pop culture music, comedy movies were always very well done, and Soviet cartoons, though MUCH less in quantity were pretty good in quality: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Nu+Pogodi&oq=Nu+Pogodi&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_l=youtube.3..0l10.1757l5909l0l6297l15l15l3l2l2l0l125l1071l2j8l10l0.
The State didn’t fully decide what was available. The folk music (“bard” culture) was extremely widespread, and the State had very little control over it. Vysotsky, Galitch and Okudzhava were extremely popular and their recordings were everywhere even though the State very seldom sanctioned their concerts.
The Western pop/rock was not “illegal” per se. It was just not imported into the country officially, so any recordings you got were multi-generation copies or were brought into the country by tourists - Soviet or foreign. In fact, I remember home-made “vinyl” records made from X-ray prints, they were called “kosti” (“bones”) in slang. So, in spite of no or very little official imports, Abba, Mamas and Papas, Bob Dylan, Queen, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were wildly popular. As well as some more obscure (to Americans) Western pop phenomena as Demis Roussos, Space and Boney M. Some of the more popular Russian rock groups, such as Mashina Vremeni and Voskresenye got their beginnings at the same time.
This is mostly about the tail end of 60s, 70s and 80s. I have no idea about before that - was way before my time.
Well, there was always the Trololo guy…
An ex-roommate who was raised in the USSR spoke lovingly of Cheburashka, and indeed, when I used to walk around the Russian neighborhoods in New York I’d see his image everywhere.
She also told me that movies were taken pretty seriously back in Soviet days - she was shown “Battleship Potemkin” many times in school, for example.
When I asked if Western movies and culture were censored, she scoffed and said that her first memories were of going to Disney cartoons, and that she knew all the Beatles’ music as a teenager.
Granted, she also scoffed at the idea that there were any food or product shortages in stores in the USSR, and that if there ever were, it was no different than Westerners lining up for hours to get hot new sneakers that are in short supply. Maybe Western propaganda has lied to me about that, too, but I suspect she’s wrong, or in denial - so maybe she’s wrong about the censorship, too.
They had sport. Football wasn’t the government’s favourite, but was very popular. Of course most of the Eastern European teams aren’t doing so well now, especially the East Germans, and teams like Spartak Moscow struggle to get the fans in at their huge and rundown stadia, but they were certainly quite popular back in the day.
My thesis advisor grew up in West Germany and said he and his friends preferred the programming that was broadcast from East Germany, so apparently it wasn’t all terrible.
Thats not true, the bands that performed in a venue bigger than a house just had to use sly language if they were going to criticize the government. I know a couple off the top of my head like Karat(synth prog rock) and Kino(post punk/goth) and you can find more just by googling “russian/east german prog rock” or whatever genre you want to find. I’d link myself but the results are full of links of questionable copyright(who knows what the status of stuff from the SU is now). But there is plenty there to start exploring.
Just the other night I watched a strange animated movie produced in the Soviet Union, its English translated title is Tale of Tales and it alternates between a very minimal story of a small cute wolf trying to survive and then caring for a baby with no dialogue, and some haunting anti war segments. I’m certain a ton of cultural allusions and commentary were flying over my head completely and the animation style was stunningly strange.
Things were not as restrictive as people commonly believe, at least in the 70s.
I don’t have much data except on picture. It was from the book ‘A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union’. Here’s a photo:
Punk and Metal Heads in the USSR
That would have been early 80s sometime. So clearly there was a scene. I also recall, but can find a pic, a shot of a young couple and the boy was wearing a Rush: Signals tour shirt.
**Hooligans! **
(how did an Irish surname come to be a criminal classification in the USSR?)
They had a great appreciation for home grown movie musicals.
Here, BTW, is Stalin’s favorite musical,Volga Volga
There was an amazing metal scene behind the Iron Curtain.
From the Soviet Union itself you’ve got Korrozia Metalla; from the (present-day) Czech Republic, Master’s Hammer; from Poland, Kat; and from Hungary my personal favourites, the mighty Tormentor!
And that’s just scratching the surface!
Hendrick Smith’s The Russians is the classic book on the subject of Soviet Russia.
Most rock music was outlawed. Rock albums were smuggled in with classical music covers pasted over the original.
A couple of theatre producers put Soviet accepted lyrics to the music of Jesus Christ Superstar and gave the result the title “Rock and Roll at Dawn.” I would kill for anything from this musical.
The bards mentioned by Terr were pretty damn amazing.
You had guys like Vladimir Vysotsky who was *and still is * a big, big, big, big deal, and then down in the nitty-gritty of the underground you had guys like Egor Letov and this wonderful lunatic right here.
Between the bards, the metal, Cheburashka for the kids and Tarkovsky for the grown-ups, I think it’s safe to say that Soviet pop culture was everything but “terrible” or “boring.”
Then there was Sektor Gaza. I use to love how recording lists would highlight the songs by them that didn’t have profanity.
I can’t remember the title of this documentary, but it was something we watched in a class I took on 20th century Europe in college and it had a segment about Western pop culture in the USSR. There were a few Western movies that were officially allowed to be shown, and one of them was the 1968 musical Oliver! A woman was interviewed who talked about seeing this movie in the theater, and how sorry she felt for Oliver…and all the other poor starving orphans in the West. People had been led to believe that things were still basically the same as in Dickens’s times.
One of my classmates was an exchange student from IIRC Bulgaria, and when the class was discussing the video she mentioned that when she was a kid in the '80s her father had made a trip to the West as part of his job and had managed to bring back a videotape of a Spiderman cartoon. She said she and her siblings watched it over and over again, and all the kids on the block would come over to watch it too. None of them spoke English, but they still thought it was one of the greatest things they’d ever seen.