Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955-1991
ISBN: 9780773568792
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / McGill-Queen''s University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Popular music -- Soviet Union -- History and criticism; Popular music -- Social aspects -- Soviet Union;

Red Stars tells the story of seven singers; Èdita P'ekha, Iosif Kobzon, Lev Leshchenko, Sofiia Rotaru, Valerii Leont'ev, Alla Pugacheva, and Irina Ponarovskaia. Their songs, broadcast on Soviet radio every day for decades and sometimes selling hundreds of millions of copies, tell the story of Soviet popular culture since the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Collectively the seven embody the efforts of a generation to fashion a new worldview.

David MacFadyen is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at UCLA. He has written extensively on Soviet popular culture and is the author of The Sad Comedy of Èl'dar Riazanov and several books on Joseph Brodsky.