Russia in the Microphone Age

Russia in the Microphone Age
Author: Stephen Lovell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198725264

The first history in English of Soviet radio from its earliest days to the advent of television, showing the role played by broadcasting in establishing control of the Soviet State up to the 1970s: including the Cultural Revolution, Stalinist 1930s, World War II, the Cold War, and de-Stalinization.

Russia in the Microphone Age

Russia in the Microphone Age
Author: Stephen Lovell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-06-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191038385

The story of radio begins alongside that of the Soviet state: Russia's first long-range transmission of the human voice occurred in 1919, during the civil war. Sound broadcasting was a medium of exceptional promise for this revolutionary regime. It could bring the Bolsheviks' message to the furthest corners of their enormous country. It had unprecedented impact: the voice of Moscow could now be wired into the very workplaces and living spaces of a population that was still only weakly literate. The liveness and immediacy of broadcasting also created vivid new ways of communicating 'Sovietness' - whether through May Day parades and elections, the exploits of aviators and explorers, or show trials and public criticism. Yet, in the USSR as elsewhere, broadcasting was a medium in flux: technology, the broadcasting profession, and the listening audience were never static. Soviet radio was quickly earmarked as the mouthpiece of Soviet power, yet its history is also full of unintended consequences. The supreme irony of Soviet 'radiofication' was that its greatest triumph - the expansion of the wireless-listening public in the Cold War era - made possible its greatest failure, by turning a part of the Soviet audience into devotees of Western broadcasting. Based on substantial original research in Moscow, St Petersburg, and Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia in the Microphone Age is the first full history of Soviet radio in English. In addition to the institutional and technological dimensions of the subject, it explores the development of programme content and broadcasting genres. It also goes in search of the mysterious figure of the Soviet listener. The result is a pioneering treatment of broadcasting as an integral part of Soviet culture from its early days in the 1920s until the dawn of the television age.

Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia

Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia
Author: Brigid O'Keeffe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350160660

Hoping to unite all of humankind and revolutionize the world, Ludwik Zamenhof launched a new international language called Esperanto from late imperial Russia in 1887. Ordinary men and women in Russia and all over the world soon transformed Esperanto into a global movement. Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia traces the history and legacy of this effort: from Esperanto's roots in the social turmoil of the pre-revolutionary Pale of Settlement; to its links to socialist internationalism and Comintern bids for world revolution; and, finally, to the demise of the Soviet Esperanto movement in the increasingly xenophobic Stalinist 1930s. In doing so, this book reveals how Esperanto – and global language politics more broadly – shaped revolutionary and early Soviet Russia. Based on extensive archival materials, Brigid O'Keeffe's book provides the first in-depth exploration of Esperanto at grassroots level and sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked area of Russian history. As such, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia will be of immense value to both historians of modern Russia and scholars of internationalism, transnational networks, and sociolinguistics.

Metropolitan Belgrade

Metropolitan Belgrade
Author: Jovana Babović
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2018-06-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822983397

Metropolitan Belgrade presents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society. As the capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade became increasingly linked to transnational networks after World War I, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad during the early 1920s. Belgrade’s middle class residents readily consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state. Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisured indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. But as they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they marginalized Yugoslav performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life. Metropolitan Belgrade tells the story of the Europeanization of the capital’s middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years.

The Soviet Sixties

The Soviet Sixties
Author: Robert Hornsby
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2023-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300250525

The story of a remarkable era of reform, controversy, optimism, and Cold War confrontation in the Soviet Union Beginning with the death of Stalin in 1953, the "sixties" era in the Soviet Union was just as vibrant and transformative as in the West. The ideological romanticism of the revolutionary years was revived, with renewed emphasis on egalitarianism, equality, and the building of a communist utopia. Mass terror was reined in, great victories were won in the space race, Stalinist cultural dogmas were challenged, and young people danced to jazz and rock and roll. Robert Hornsby examines this remarkable and surprising period, showing that, even as living standards rose, aspects of earlier days endured. Censorship and policing remained tight, and massacres during protests in Tbilisi and Novocherkassk, alongside invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, showed the limits of reform. The rivalry with the United States reached perhaps its most volatile point, friendship with China turned to bitter enmity, and global decolonization opened up new horizons for the USSR in the developing world. These tumultuous years transformed the lives of Soviet citizens and helped reshape the wider world.

Transnational Russian Studies

Transnational Russian Studies
Author: Andy Byford
Publisher: Transnational Modern Languages
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2020-01-30
Genre: National characteristics, Russian
ISBN: 1789620872

Transnational Russian Studies offers an approach to understanding Russia based on the idea that language, society and culture do not neatly coincide, but should be seen as flows of meaning across ever-shifting boundaries. Our book moves beyond static conceptions of Russia as a discrete nation with a singular language, culture, and history. Instead, we understand it as a multinational society that has perpetually redefined Russianness in reaction to the wider world. We treat Russian culture as an expanding field, whose sphere of influence transcends the geopolitical boundaries of the Russian Federation, reaching as far as London, Cape Town, and Tehran. Our transnational approach to Russian Studies generates new perspectives on the history of Russian culture and its engagements with, and transformation by, other cultures. The volume thereby simultaneously illuminates broader conceptions of the transnational from the perspective of Russian Studies. Over twenty chapters, we provide case studies based on original research, treating topics that include Russia's imperial and postcolonial entanglements; the paradoxical role that language plays in both defining culture in national terms, and facilitating transnational communication; the life of things 'Russian' in the global arena; and Russia's positioning in the contemporary globalized world. Our volume is aimed primarily at students and researchers in Russian Studies, but it will also be relevant to all Modern Linguists, and to those who employ transnational paradigms within the broader humanities.

The Soviet Century

The Soviet Century
Author: Karl Schlögel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 928
Release: 2024-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691237298

An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet Union The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police. Drawing on Schlögel’s decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, and featuring more than eighty illustrations, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate, and grounded in firsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result is an unforgettable account of the Soviet Century.

"Singing a Different Tune"

Author: Helena Goscilo
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2023-04-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

A beneficiary of the pioneering incorporation of sound and synchronicity into cinema, the Hollywood musical became the most popular film genre in America’s thirties and forties. Its eastward migration resulted in a barrage of Polish screen musicals that relied on the country’s famous cabaret stars, while in the Soviet Union it inspired the audience-pleasing kolkhoz musicals of Ivan Pyr’ev and their urban counterpart, directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Like Stalin, Slavic moviegoers delectated tuneful melodies, mobile bodies in choreographed dance numbers, colorful costumes, and the notion that “all’s well that ends well.” Yet Slavic versions of the musical elaborated scenarios that differed from the Hollywood model. This volume examines the vagaries of this genre in both countries, from its early instantiations to its contemporary variations almost a century after its dramatic birth.

Russia

Russia
Author: Christopher J. Ward
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000415392

This lucid account of Russian and Soviet history presents major trends and events from Kievan Rus’ to Vladimir Putin’s presidency in the twenty-first century. Directly addressing controversial topics, this book looks at issues such as the impact of the Mongol conquest, the paradoxes of Peter the Great, the “inevitability” of the 1917 Revolution, the Stalinist terror, and the Gorbachev reform effort. This new ninth edition has been updated to include a discussion of Russian participation in the War in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, Russia’s role in the Syrian civil war, the rise of opposition figure Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s confirmation as “president for life,” recent Russian relations with the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the European Union as well as contemporary social and cultural trends. Distinguished by its brevity and supplemented with substantially updated suggested readings that feature new scholarship on Russia and a thoroughly updated index, this essential text provides balanced coverage of all periods of Russian history and incorporates economic, social, and cultural developments as well as politics and foreign policy. Suitable for undergraduates as well as the general reader with an interest in Russia, this text is a concise, single volume on one of the world’s most significant lands.

The DJ Who “Brought Down” the USSR

The DJ Who “Brought Down” the USSR
Author: Michelle Daniel
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1644696495

Of the many Cold War radio DJs who broadcast to the USSR, Seva Novgorodsev must be near the top of the list. A masterful BBC presenter, Seva was considered a sage of rock ‘n’ roll. His programs introduced forbidden western popular music and culture into the USSR, rendering him an “enemy voice” and ideological saboteur to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Despite KGB threats and constant media pillorying, Seva remained on the air for 38 years, acquiring millions of listeners all across the breadth of the USSR and beyond. He became a cult phenomenon, dismantling the Soviet way of life in the hearts and minds of youth. This is the story of Russia’s first and best-known DJ.