The last two definitions of culture, culture as a meaning system that over time fossilses, routinises, and is fetishises into, as social constructionists note, the institutions, organisations, goals, and practises of a society, are at the heart of Richard Stites's book Riussian Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992). In his selective introduction to Russian popular culture Stites explores the popular culture--I would prefer to call it the mass popular culture--of Russia from 1900 to the 1990s just as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Stites looks in brief at Russian light reading material, Russian variety entertainments, Russian popular movies, Russian sports, Russian popular entertainments, Russian popular dances, Russian popular music, Russian popular television, and Russian popular radio.
Given that both culture and popular culture is dynamic--a fact that adds another dimension to the difficulty of defining culture--Stites delineates several stages in modern mass Russian popular culture. Russian mass popular culture, as was the case all across the modern Western world, arose with the coming of modernity with its industrialisation, its bureaucratisation, its mass politics, its mass economic systems, and its mass culture, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Russia's first mass popular culture, according to Stites, a popular culture that gave rise to new cultural forms and new inflections of "traditional" cultural forms in Russia, arose in a mass industrialising and mass bureaucratising Russia, in the 1900s under the last of Russia's Tsars. The second stage of Russian mass popular culture, a mass popular culture that gave more new inflections to Russian popular culture, ran from the Bolshevik Revolution to the rise of Stalin to power in 1928. The third stage of Russian popular culture, a mass popular culture which saw the attempt to create the New Soviet man, the new Soviet proletarian culture, and the cult of Father Stalin, though it didn't eliminate mass cultural aspects of the past, ran from 1928 to the Great Patriotic War. The fourth stage of mass Russian popular culture, a mass popular culture that saw the return of repressed aspects of "traditional" popular culture from before the Stalin era during the war and a return, after the war, of the Stalin era popular culture of the previous stage, ran from 1941, the year the Nazis and Germans invaded the USSR, to 1953, the year Stalin died. The fifth stage of Russian popular culture, the stage of Khrushchev and the cultural thaw, ran from 1953 to 1964, the year Khrushchev was removed from power. The sixth stage of Russian popular culture was the era of Brezhnev and his successors and ran from 1953 to 1984. In these years the thaw was slowed down but a return to Stalin era popular culture did not occur. The seventh stage in Russian popular culture was the era of Gorbachev with its openness and reform from 1985 to 1990, when the Soviet Union was dissolved and Russian and other nation-states arose out of its ashes. A concluding chapter makes educated speculations about where diverse Russian culture is going.
Stites does something in Russian Popular Culture that is critical for those wrongly obsessed with the concept of totalitarianism, autocratic rule from above, and for students of Russia and the USSR to understand. When I lived in Moscow, for instance, what I heard and what most Russian talked to me about was not the historical inevitability of communism, the joys of Mikhail Bulgakov, or the joys of Dmitri Shostakovich, though a few intelligentsia did talk to me about them. What I heard a lot about instead was the film Volga Volga, the heroes Chapaev and Zoya, the bard Vladimir Vysotsky, and the singer Alla Pugacheva, among others. What I heard a lot about, in other words, was Russian and Soviet popular culture and popular culture figures, mass popular culture and popular culture figures that most in the West, including many Western Sovietologists, had never heard of. The twentysomething daughter of the family I lived with when I was in Moscow, relatives of Mikhail Kalinin, head of the Russian SSR from 1919 to 1946, was a Beatles fan and had an Abba album released on the official Soviet record label, Melodiya. Another lesson I learned from Stites is that Russian and Soviet popular culture has always had subcultures and countercultures. Still another lesson Stites teaches, one I learned very early on in my studies of the USSR, was the puritanical nature of Russia's cultural mediators. Such paternalism, of course, is hardly the monopoly of Russia or the USSR. Still another important lesson Iearned from Stites is that Russian mass popular culture had a number of formal similarities to the popular culture of the masses throughout the modern world. Russian popular culture, like modern popular culture throughout the modern West, was romantic, escapist, sentimental, manichean, and nationalist. Finally, the important moral lesson I learned from my experiences in Russia and from Stites is that the Soviet Union was far more complicated and complex than many Western Sovietologists and mandarins allowed.
I highly recommend Stites's book for the reader with some knowledge of Russian and Soviet history and culture. The reader without an understanding of Russian and Soviet history and culture is likely to get lost in the rather large tangle of Russian and Soviet cultural figures and popular culture movements Stites tells us about. I also highly recommend the book to those interested in modern Western culture and its forms and contents
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