Soviet Rock on Screen
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A01=Rita Safariants
Author_Rita Safariants
Boris Yeltsin
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Mikhail Gorbachev
musical cinema
musical film
perestroika
rock film genre
rock music
rock-n'-roll
Russia
Russian celebrity culture
Russian cinema
Russian culture
Russian Federation
Russian film
Russian film industry
Russian ideology
Russian politics and culture
Russian pop music
Russian popular music
Russian rock
Russian rock film
Russian rock stars
Russian rock-n-roll
Sergei Solov'ev
Soviet celebrity culture
Soviet censorship
Soviet cinema
Soviet culture
Soviet film
Soviet film industry
Soviet ideology
Soviet politics and culture
Soviet pop music
Soviet popular music
Soviet rock
Soviet rock film
Soviet rock stars
Soviet rock-n'-roll
Soviet Union
USSR
Viktor Tsoi
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vysotsky
Product details
- ISBN 9780299354800
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2026
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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As the Iron Curtain fell and Cold War suspicions thickened in the second half of the twentieth century, the quintessentially American genre of rock and roll, seen as a potent symbol and product of an enemy ideology, quickly became a clandestine import in the USSR. The Soviet underground embraced the forbidden sounds, despite official propaganda that called rock stars social parasites and corrupting sluggards. The genre grew in popularity until it could no longer be ignored. In the Soviet Union’s last decade, a flailing film industry, controlled by and dependent on an increasingly unstable central government, seized on the rock star as a central figure—and the Soviet rock film was born.
In Soviet Rock on Screen, Rita Safariants chronicles the birth, life, death, and resurrection of a genre that rapidly became one of the most readily recognized cultural signifiers of the perestroika era and which continues to reflect and codify Russian culture. During their initial heyday in the 1980s, rock films were influenced by and encouraged the cultural shifts of perestroika and the incipient political storm. Today, Safariants argues, the reemergence and reconfiguration of the genre indicates the extent to which Soviet-era cultural emblems inform Russian national identity and obliquely support the current political repression under Putin.
In Soviet Rock on Screen, Rita Safariants chronicles the birth, life, death, and resurrection of a genre that rapidly became one of the most readily recognized cultural signifiers of the perestroika era and which continues to reflect and codify Russian culture. During their initial heyday in the 1980s, rock films were influenced by and encouraged the cultural shifts of perestroika and the incipient political storm. Today, Safariants argues, the reemergence and reconfiguration of the genre indicates the extent to which Soviet-era cultural emblems inform Russian national identity and obliquely support the current political repression under Putin.
Rita Safariants is an assistant professor of Russian at the University of Rochester. Her work has been published in the Slavic and East European Journal, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and elsewhere.
