Rock and Roll in the Rocket City

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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. 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."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"Refreshingly new and rich in insights."--Russian Review"Zhuk's innovative book opens up a new field of inquiry, one that raises fundamental questions about what we really know about how the Soviet Union worked."--Transitions Online"[Zhuk] makes his case convincingly in his thoroughly researched and well-organized study of western cultural influences during his youth in his home city."--Russian History"Rock and Roll in the Rocket City is crammed with food for thought and should provoke many productive conversations in the field of Soviet history and beyond."--Slavic Review"Rock and Roll in the Rocket City should be included in every course taught on twentieth-century Ukraine."--Slavonic and East European Review"Zhuk's excellent monograph makes a signal contribution in teasing out the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of official policy toward 'western' cultural influence from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. [The book] should be lauded for taking a major step forward in the study of popular culture in the late Soviet Union."--Journal of Social History"Zhuk's history of rock music is a very important contribution to late-Soviet social and institutional history."--Laboratorium"This book is a rich read that pairs depth of analysis to an accurate measure of anecdote, and which succeeds in keeping a critical distance to a subject that clearly lies close to the personal affection of the author."--European Review of HistorySergei I. Zhuk is a professor of history at Ball State University. He is the author of Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917. He was a Kennan Institute Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2002-2003.