Soviet Rock on Screen by Rita Safariants
In the Soviet Union, rock music was deemed an unwelcome Western import, a potentially subversive force—none of which prevented a brisk black market in LPs and cassettes and the growth of a genuine underground rock scene. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign of political and social reform in the late’80s, underground rock surfaced and intersected with the state-controlled movie industry.
That unanticipated overlap is the subject of Rita Safariants’ Soviet Rock on Screen. The Russian studies professor (University of Rochester) is the first author to pair the spread of Russian rock with the liberalization of Soviet film (several previous books have surveyed those subjects separately). Movies featuring Russia’s nascent rock stars became touchstones of Glasnost with a significance that continues (in surprising contexts) today.
As Safariants explains, Soviet movie producers sought to capture the USSR’s youth audience, and Soviet rock bands wanted access to state-run record labels and studios. Prominent among the new stars of concert stage and screen was Viktor Tsoi, who died in 1990, age 28, at the height of his career. He’d emerged from Leningrad’s underground scene and appeared in no less than seven films before his death in a car crash.
Safariants compares Tsoi’s postmortem idolization to Lenin’s embalmed corpse on perpetual display in Red Square. Tsoi’s “post-Soviet monumentalization” has only “grown since Putin’s ascent to power.” Although the anti-authoritarian band Pussy Riot gained brief notoriety, anti-Putin rock acts are now entirely playing in exile, while many performers inside Russia have become pre-war, pro-Putin.
The legacy of Soviet rock and Soviet rock films is ambiguous. Those ‘80s stars have been exploited by a regime in search of modern-day homegrown culture heroes but can also be seen as a eulogy to Russia’s squandered potential. Tsoi has been resuscitated in pro-Ukraine-war propaganda yet also symbolizes nostalgia for a bygone era and the possibility of change, a dialectic that remains unresolved.
Soviet Rock on Screen: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of a Film Genre is published by University of Wisconsin Press.
