This article explores how culture in the USSR became “Soviet.” Malte Rolf describes how different fields of communication and cultural production generated criteria that could be used to attach the label “Soviet” to all features of culture. Sovietizing culture was a work in progress, and various institutions, agencies, and experts actively participated in defining an adequate “Soviet style.” Focusing on this interplay of agencies and taking mass festivals as an example, Rolf portrays the dynamics of a growing selfreferentiality within Soviet culture in the 1930s in such cultural spheres as architecture, city planning, and mass celebrations. Under Stalinism, canonized “Soviet” standards also set the agenda for everyday communications. By reproducing an officially privileged agenda, participants in these daily communications encouraged a cultural inner Sovietization during the prewar decade. This article explores how and why the cultural canon of a closed system of “Soviet” references made its way so smoothly into die microstructures of society.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.