The Soviet Dance Floor from the 1950s to the 1970s, or the Youth Votes with Their Feet

Abstract. Since the 1950s, Soviet youth were massively attracted to new dances of African American origin (boogie-woogie, rock and roll, twist, shake, etc.). Although the Soviet Union politicized the new dances in the Cold War environment as imperialist provocation, Soviet youth voted with their feet against the Soviet public dance project. Why did this happen despite opposition from politicians and professional choreographers? Using the example of social dances in the USSR in the mid-1950s and 1970s, we will show how the Communist Party and the Soviet state attempted to nationalize the dance leisure of young citizens and how, in turn, young people privatized the state’s project of patronizing their free pastime. Drawing on M. de Certeau’s concepts of briolage and A. Yurchak’s “relationship between inside and outside,” materials from public choreographic discussions, fiction, memoirs, Soviet cinema, sociological surveys, and interviews are systematically drawn upon for the first time to clarify principles of functioning in late Soviet society. The author concludes that the project of the Soviet dance floor under state control failed for reasons that were not so much choreographic. It proved to be outdated and lifeless, and Soviet youth did not accept it because it was unsuitable for adult education.

Keywords: relationship between inside and outside (vnyenakhodimost’), inconspicuous state, cultural policy, leisure time, dance, Soviet dance repertoire, rock ‘n’ roll, twist.

For citation: Narskiy I.V. The Soviet Dance Floor from the 1950s to the 1970s, or the Youth Votes with Their Feet, in Novoe Proshloe / The New Past. 2021. No. 4. Pp. 54–69. DOI 10.18522/2500‑3224‑2021‑4-54-69.

The article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).