From Vladislav Zubok’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin To Gorbachev:
American radio broadcasts and music exercised huge “soft” power upon many young Soviets. American jazz and swing were repeatedly banned in the Soviet Union before World War II and again when the Cold War started. Many young people developed the habit of listening to Voice of America’s radio programs, almost exclusively because of the VOA’s music programs. The number of shortwave radios in Soviet homes grew from half a million in 1949 to twenty million in 1958. At the end of his life, Stalin ordered the production of shortwave radios to be stopped by 1954. Instead, Soviet industry began to produce four million such radios annually, primarily for commercial reasons. Particularly popular was the VOA’s Time for Jazz. Its disc jockey, Willis Conover, owner of a fabulous deep baritone, became a secret hero of many Moscow and Leningrad youngsters. They sang, without understanding many of the words, the songs of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and listened to Ella fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and the improvisations of Charlie Parker. Later came Elvis Presley. According to all accounds, the VOA’s audience numbered millions. Records of American music stars were not available in stores, and gettinga foreign-made vinyl disk was considered a miracle. By the late 1950s, tape recorders began to change this and broaden the exposure of Soviet youth to Western music.
Fans of Adorno’s work may or may not be surprised to see that one of the oppositions set up here is between totalitarian/authoritarian power and jazz/popular music (not that, I suspect, anyone even really believes Adorno’s lines about the relationship between popular music and totalitarianism, but maybe!) (or maybe they wouldn’t! I’m not even sure anymore). Even members of Adorno’s cast of characters reappear here, as heroes (of course, that would be the case in a book that celebrates the demise of, to date, one of the only serious contenders to capitalism), working to overthrow the oppressor. Which is, maybe, one of the elements of Adorno’s work that bothers me – the way it aligns with the systems it claims to oppose. Ignoring for a minute whether or not jazz fans were really (effectively) working against a system of absolute oppression, it is odd, isn’t it (I mean, isn’t it?), the ways that Stalin(ism) seemed to work toward an Adornoian utopia, a society free of the evils Adorno got so worked up about.
