Enthusiasts, Bohemians, and delinquents: Soviet youth cultures, 1921-1928.

This dissertation examines the nature of Soviet youth cultures during the period of the New Economic Policy (1921-1928). It begins with a study of the party's optimistic vision of the younger generation as a crucial element in the construction of a new communist culture. The bulk of the study then focuses on a wide variety of youth sub-cultures including working class youth cultures, communist youth cultures, delinquent and criminal youth cultures, and the nightlife cultures of Soviet flappers and foxtrotters, and by doing so reveals entirely new aspects of everyday life in Soviet Russia after the revolution. The dissertation is particularly concerned with the shifting areas of alliance, resistance, and rebellion between youth cultures and the dominant Bolshevik culture, and the ways in which this struggle illuminates the challenges of social transformation and cultural construction after the revolution. Studies of the New Economic Policy have traditionally focused on the political and economic struggles of the 1920's. This examination of youth cultures demonstrates on the other hand, how the use of cultural history and the study of problems of everyday life, behavior, and belief contributes to a deeper understanding of the transitional nature of NEP as well as providing additional reasons for its eventual demise. This includes a discussion of the vital relationship between culture, politics, and state ideology in the 1920's as well as an examination of the ways in which the distance between state and society suggested by the persistence of resistant youth cultures shaped and limited the entire revolutionary endeavor. The final chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the Bolsheviks' concern about the younger generation's persistently "deviant" and "decadent" behavior contributed to the demise of NEP and the abandonment of NEP's gradualist policies of education and reform in favor of the more authoritarian policies of the Cultural Revolution.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103220/1/9308321.pdfDescription of 9308321.pdf : Restricted to UM users only