I've been researching the youth counterculture movements from the 40's - 60's USSR, including the stilyagi. I'd like to find more information about the countercultures of the time, including pictures of their outlandish (in the context) fashion choices and the practice of copying Western music onto old x-ray plates to make bootleg copies. I'm particularly interested in photos or political cartoons from confirmed sources. Are there really cartoons showing the stilyagi mocked by chimps in the zoos? Is it true that a newspaper ran the slogan, "Today he listens to jazz -- Tomorrow he sells out his homeland," referring to the music-loving youth?
For the curious, here are some sources I've found so far:
Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia. Artemy Troitsky. Boston and London: Faber and Faber. 1987. > Troitsky is the expert on countercultural music movements in the USSR. From his intro: “The bloody virus called rock music that recognises no borders has infected millions, made them shake and sweat and cry. At the recent plenum of the Soviet Writers Union some of our well-known literary figures compared rock music to AIDS, having in mind the allegedly demoralising and generally destructive effect on our youth. Yes… and the antidote has still not been found, although local experts have gone to great lengths experimenting with various drastic counter-measures. This is the chronicle of a curious epidemic that hit the USSR at least 30 years ago but continues to claim victims.”
http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/25/the-stylehunters-of-soviet-russia/ > A very interesting article on Messy Nessy Chic with lots of great photos. I'd like to find out who owns them, to ask permission to use them on a project, but unfortunately the trail to ownership seems to have gone cold.
http://www.openculture.com/2014/06/soviet-hipsters-bootlegged-western-pop-music-on-discarded-x-rays.html >An article featuring actual music from 'bones' records and a clip from the Stilyagi film. Again, if anyone can offer insight into how to find music from 'bones' that I can get permission to use, I'd appreciate it.
http://wanderer-records.com/wanderer.php?keyword=film&media=flexi >Wanderer Records will let you buy actual 'bones' records, for those interested in owning a piece of history.
Any help/pointers is much appreciated! Thanks.
Can't help with information, but just passing along another resource to check out: film documentary How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin dir Leslie Woodhead (USA, 2009), and the follow-up book How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution by Leslie Woodhead, Bloomsbury USA (2013).
I recall that the doc discussed and showed an x-ray plate; don't recall whether they played any of them on film. Also interviews with several rock & roll fans from the day.
I found this with a little searching, which appears to have been printed in the cultural magazine Krokodil in 1957.
http://back-in-ussr.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8F%D0%B3%D0%B85.jpg
I hadn't seen that particular cartoon before, but there were lots of such cartoons printed in magazines like Krokodil. Here is a Krokodil archive: http://journal-club.ru/?q=image/tid/72
I found one photo of a newspaper from 1956 with that headline, but I couldn't verify it. The photo from the link you had looks photoshopped to me. The one I found looked real, but
As for other sources:
Julianne Furst's Stalin's Last Generation is a good place to start in terms of secondary sources.
If you are interested in the 70s and 80s you can also check out Alexei Yurchak's perfectly titled Everything Was Forever Until It was No More
