Soviet Rock on Screen

The Life, Death, and Resurrection of a Film Genre

Rita Safariants

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9780299354800
• eBook ISBN:
  9780299354831
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

As the Iron Curtain fell and Cold War suspicions thickened in the second half of the twentieth century, the quintessentially American genre of rock and roll, seen as a potent symbol and product of an enemy ideology, quickly became a clandestine import in the USSR. The Soviet underground embraced the forbidden sounds, despite official propaganda that called rock stars social parasites and corrupting sluggards. Contrary to the regime's desires, the genre grew in popularity until it could no longer be ignored. In the Soviet Union's last decade, a flailing film industry, controlled by and dependent on an increasingly unstable central government, seized on the rock star as a central figure—and the Soviet rock film was born.

In Soviet Rock on Screen, Rita Safariants chronicles the birth, life, death, and resurrection of a genre that rapidly became one of the most readily recognized cultural signifiers of the perestroika era and which continues to reflect and codify Russian culture. During their initial heyday in the 1980s, rock films were influenced by and encouraged the cultural shifts of perestroika and the incipient political storm. Today, Safariants argues, the reemergence and reconfiguration of the genre indicates the extent to which Soviet-era cultural emblems inform Russian national identity and obliquely support the current political repression under Putin.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Introduction
• 1. Singing Along with the Establishment: Aleksandr Stefanovich’s The Soul and Start from Scratch
• 2. Rockin’ Past the Suspicion Machine: The Rock-and-Roll Blockbuster and the Soviet Film Industry
• 3. The Tsoi Effect: Soviet Rock Stars on Screen
• 4. The Leningrad Rock Film: Valerii Ogorodnikov’s The Burglar and the Soundtrack of Late Soviet Adolescence
• 5. The Brothers of Rock: Aleksei Balabanov and the Moral Downfall of the Soviet Rock Star
• 6. Raising the Dead: Sequels, Remakes, Legacies, and the Post-Soviet Rock Film
• 7. “Tsoi Lived, Tsoi Lives, Tsoi Will Live On”: Preserving the Rock Star Body in the Post-Soviet Biopic
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index