Progressiv weil national?

Abstract

The article analyses debates on jazz after 1953 through the lens of Soviet national cultures. Within the context of Cultural Cold War and the limited opening of the country, the question of a unique Soviet Jazz quickly gained political relevance. Soviet Estonia, at the multinational empire’s periphery, was often imagined as the “Soviet West” by contemporaries. The republic was home to a small but well-educated jazz scene that already developed during the time of the anti-western campaigns of the late 1940s. In the post-Stalin period, Party and cultural elites in Moscow and Leningrad increasingly struggled with a growing number of young jazz enthusiasts that aimed at establishing jazz as art music based on improvisation and influenced by the American model. In these debates on the establishment of a specifically Soviet Jazz, conservative and reform-minded members of the cultural elites envisioned Estonian jazz as an early role model for a number of reasons: Its members were not only highly qualified, but also willing to make traditional Estonian folklore a key element of jazz. What is more, the musicians kept close ties with the Estonian cultural institutions. The growing number of jazz festivals hosted in the Estonian Soviet Republic provided an important public space for the emerging young Soviet jazz culture. At the same time, many Estonian jazz musicians advocated a more critical approach towards improvisation than musicians from Moscow and Leningrad. Their discussions resembled arguments against American superficiality brought forward by party ideologists in the late 1940s. The article questions narratives of jazz as cultural resistance to political oppression, and argues that a focus on cultural transfer from behind the Iron Curtain is too narrow for explaining the genesis, heterogeneity and durability of late Soviet culture. Greater emphasis on the non-Russian peripheries as cradles of culture can provide us with more nuanced interpretations on the renewal of Soviet culture after Stalin’ death.