History 305

Devine

Fall 2006

 

Study Questions for November 20th

 

In reading these chapters from Starr’s book, do not worry about the numerous names of musicians and festivals. The questions below address the important themes that emerge from Starr’s detailed account of Soviet jazz in the 1950s and 1960s. You can easily skim over the sections not addressed in the questions.

 

Starr, Red & Hot, Chapter 11

 

  1. What role did young people play in revitalizing Soviet popular culture after the death of Stalin?

 

  1. Who were the stiliagi?  What made them stand out from the Soviet status quo?

 

  1. Why were young people such as the stiliagi so alienated from Soviet society? How did they express their alienation?

 

  1. How did the Soviet regime respond to the stiliagi?  How did Communist leaders explain the emergence of the stiliagi and who did they blame for it?

 

  1. What factors pushed the stiliagi toward embracing jazz?  What needs did listening to jazz fulfill for them?

 

  1. Why did the characteristics of jazz – its emphasis on individuality, improvisation, and personal expression – prove especially attractive to those alienated from Stalinist values?

 

  1. Starr entitles this chapter “The Search for Authenticity.” Why is this an appropriate title?

 

  1. Why was the Sixth World Youth Festival of 1957 a “watershed” for Soviet jazz?  What impact did this festival have on Soviet jazz musicians and, more broadly, Soviet popular culture?

 

  1. To what extent should the opening of Soviet cultural life to the West be credited with the developments in jazz during the 1950s?  What role did the new generation of alienated Soviet youth play?

 

  1. Starr says the Soviet government’s willingness to “crack open a small window” to the West (p. 260) had unintended consequences. What were they?

 

 

 

Starr, Red & Hot, Chapter 12

 

  1. Why did jazz flourish in the Soviet Union between 1962 and 1967?  How did other developments in the USSR – the rise of Khrushchev, the launching of Sputnik – affect the government’s attitude toward jazz?

 

  1. Despite the government’s new willingness to accept jazz music, why was it still hard for jazz musicians to “play and eat”?

 

  1. What impact did the Soviet “music bureaucracy” have on jazz and on jazz musicians?  Why does the author say that the bureaucracy ended up forcing modern jazz in the USSR to become an “elite art”? (p. 267)

 

  1. How did the Komsomol deal with the problem of juvenile delinquency?  In what ways did its strategy resemble earlier strategies for dealing with “wayward youth” both in the US and the USSR?

 

  1. Why were the “jazz clubs” popular with both patrons and the government? Why were they also a “mixed blessing”? (p. 270)

 

  1. What did Mao Zedong have to do with Khrushchev’s decision to clamp down on “Western” music and culture in the Soviet Union?  Why else might Khrushchev have returned to the old policies of censorship?

 

  1. What impact did the rise of black nationalism and “soul” music in the late 1960s have on Soviet musicians?

 

  1. Why would the regime’s support of “jazz festivals” be considered a “policy of cooptation”?  Did this policy serve the government’s interests?