Hi - This is a scene from a mid-70's film called Afonya where the protagonist goes to a club, takes another person's girl, and then tries to dance with her. He's not as "hip" as her, and when the music changes, she's like, "[Change your style because] it's an energetic dance."

This clip is from the same film. So, as you can see, there was a variety of Soviet nightlife just as there is a variety in modern Russia and beyond.

This is from a 1982(?) Soviet film Station for Two where a guy gets stuck at a train station in the middle of nowhere and antagonizes-->befriends-->falls in love with a waitress at said train station. It has English subtitles. The Soviet club scene intensifies.

One more! From the 1977 film Mimino, where a Georgian pilot and an Armenian truck driver make friends in a way that I've completely forgotten. This scene shows the Georgian going on a date, but his date doesn't show up, so the two of them dance. The goatee'd singer of this clip is the same actor as the "other person" whose girl was taken away [off scene] in the first listed clip.

By the end of the '80s, people started letting loose a little more. In this music video by famous rock musician Viktor Tsoy, they essentially talk about how crazy they are, staying up past the last tram, unwilling to pay for a taxi, and walking around the whole night. These are the hooligans that Andropov and his type railed about.

These clips are from contemporary Soviet films, so I hope they can be considered primary data. I encourage like-minded people to contribute clips. Soviet cinema is more than soldiers marching around and Andrey Tarkovsky melodramas, and there's plenty of information to be derived about non-sugar-coated day-to-day life.

Occupied Estonia was a pretty swanky place in the late 70s - 80s if you had the cash and the connections that allowed you into those swanky places. My parents used to go out on weekends to fancy places like hotel Viru that had foreign tourists and good drinks as well as disco music. That hotel was also used as a place to spy on (and recruit) the westerners and now has a pretty good KGB museum in the spaces they used for surveillance. But then everything was always more "western" in the Baltic republics.

http://www.amazon.com/Moscow-Farewell-George-Feifer/dp/0595167284 This is a book I read way back in the day, and although it does not center on the nightclub life, it certainly provides a picture of the "swinging" scene as the author experienced it. A very good read, I think.

Edit: I felt compelled to post it although I am no expert in Soviet history, because I believe very strongly in examining individual lives as people actually live them. At the time I knew nothing about life in the USSR, and I sort of went along with the author as an American living in what was then a very inaccessible city.

As charming Soviet films of the period are they are merely commenting on trends and subject to whims of a director for artistic or other reasons. This is my own experience of disco era in the USSR: every collective(schools, universities, factories etc.) had a Komsomol organization and they supervised the setting up and running discos. In reality the cool kids with the up to date collection of pop albums on of reel to reel tapes or cassettes, rarely actual vinyl (too precious items to Use so recklessly) would be playing dance tracks. The best disco in our city was our University's. Tickets were distributed by the Komsomol functionaries as well as amongst groupies. The disco night would also feature slide shows consisting of photographs of original lp album covers and other disco related glamourising pictures and posters. TROITSKY, Artemy is the reputable source on the subject, I suggest looking up here: http://russiaprofile.org/bg_peopleinculture/38017.html