Copyright @2013 Australian and New Zealand Journal of European Studies http://www.eusanz.org/ANZJES/index.html Vol. 2013 5(2) ISSN 1837-2147 (Print) ISSN 1836-1803 (On-line) ‘Soviet Young Man:’ The Personal Diaries and Paradoxical Identities of ‘Youth’ in Provincial Soviet Ukraine during Late Socialism, 1970-1980s SERGEI I ZHUK Ball State University
[email protected] Abstract: Using personal interviews and six diaries of contemporary male authors representing various social groups of urban residents in Soviet Ukraine (two from the cities, and four from towns), written in Russian and Ukrainian, from 1970 to the beginning of the 1980s, this article analyses archival documents and contemporary periodicals and explores the influences of the massive exposure to audio and visual cultural products from the “capitalist West” on the self-construction of identity of Soviet youth from provincial Ukrainian towns. This article seeks to study a concrete development of cultural détente from “the bottom up” perspective, avoiding the Moscow/Leningrad “elitist/conformist” emphasis of recent scholarship. Key words: détente, diary, identity, Soviet Ukraine, youth, Westernization During the period in the 1970s known as détente, when international tensions relaxed, the political and cultural centres of Soviet civilization such as Moscow and Leningrad opened to foreign guests from the “capitalist West,” and at the same time the provincial Soviet towns became exposed to large volumes of audio and visual information from capitalist countries on Soviet radio, television and movie screens. On March 4, 1972, a communist leader from one industrial region of Soviet Ukraine complained to local Komsomol ideologists, “There is too much capitalist West on our Soviet television screens today… Television shows (teleperedachi) about American music and films, about western fashions, prevail on our central channel from Moscow.