Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985

How did rock music and other products of Western culture come to pervade youth culture in Brezhnev-era Dniepropetrovsk, a Ukrainian city essentially closed to outsiders and heavily policed by the KGB? In Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, Sergei I. Zhuk assesses the impact of Westernization on the city's youth, examining the degree to which the consumption of Western music, movies, and literature ultimately challenged the ideological control maintained by state officials. One among many of his stories is how the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar led Dniepropetrovsk's young people to embrace not just one, but two Soviet taboos: rock music and Christianity.

This book is the first historical study -- in any language -- of the everyday lives of Soviet urban youth during the Brezhnev era. A longtime student and resident of Dniepropetrovsk, Zhuk began research for this project in the 1990s. Weaving together diaries, interviews, oral histories, and KGB and party archival documents, he provides a vivid account of how Soviet cultural repression and unrest during the Brezhnev period laid the groundwork for a resurgent Ukrainian nationalism in the 1980s. In so doing, he demonstrates the influence of Western cultural consumption on the formation of a post-Soviet national identity.

"Sergei Zhuk's illumination of youth culture in a provincial and closed Ukrainian city draws on a fascinating breadth of sources -- archival documents, diaries, oral histories, and KGB intelligence. Zhuk shows how, despite the efforts of ideological officials and the paranoia of the KGB, the Soviet state fought a losing battle of accommodation and compromise against Western cultural influences. These influences, however, served to bolster as much as undermine Soviet ideology. Zhuk reconfigures Brezhnev—era society to reveal a more contradictory and multifaceted history than one usually encounters." -- Kate Brown, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

"Zhuk provides an invaluable addition to a less researched but culturally transformative period between Khrushchev's 'thaw' and Gorbachev's perestroika. Illustrations, an excellent bibliography, and richly informed footnotes abound." -- Choice