Lecture format: on site
Room: 2R-EG-07 (lecture hall of the Institute for Eastern European History).
Street address: Spitalgasse 2, Campus of the University of Vienna, Hof 3.
This seminar traces the history of entrepreneurship in late Soviet music industry. Show business offers a prism for understanding how Soviet professionals engaged with economic reform in the late twentieth century. Estrada (or what we could cautiously call pop music) brought substantial profits for state-owned concert agencies, helping fund more ambitious forms of cultural production. Because music was a major commercial enterprise, culture industry employees were attuned to the need to market their product and to turn a profit. Music industry employees and contracted artists also had a keen sense of professional pride. Put simply, many wanted to make good music. The commercial orientation of late Soviet showbusiness, and a sense of ownership over their own work, made many music professionals embrace the ideal of entrepreneurship in the 1980s. For them, entrepreneurship meant the ability to decide what music to make and sell, the opportunity to increase their salaries and to invest in new programmes and technical equipment, and responsibility for the quality of their music and their own material wellbeing. Entrepreneurship meant taking charge – though this evoked many fears and dilemmas, it also stirred the passions of profit-oriented and proud professionals.
Zbig Wojnowski is a historian of Ukraine, Russia, and Central Asia. His research has focused on interethnic relations and imperial dynamics in the USSR. Zbig's book entitled 'The Near Abroad: Socialist Eastern Europe and Soviet Patriotism in Ukraine' examines how the flow of people and ideas across borders shaped Ukrainian and Soviet identities after the death of Stalin. Zbig is currently working on a monograph about the history of perestroika and the collapse of the USSR. The book examines the interplay between economic, social, and cultural transformations through the prism of show business.
The event will be recorded and uploaded to RECET's YouTube channel.
