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Swinging between East and West: Yugoslav Communism and the Dilemmas of Popular Music

In 1990, months before crowds in Moscow and other major cities dismantled their monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire inadvertently shaped this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union. Lviv's borderlands identity was defined by complicated relationships with its Polish neighbor, its imperial Soviet occupier, and the real and imagined West. The city's intellectuals--working through compromise rather than overt opposition--strained the limits of censorship in order to achieve greater public use of Ukrainian language and literary expression, and challenged state-sanctioned histories with their collective memory of the recent past. Lviv's post-Stalin-generation youth, to which Risch pays particular attention, forged alternative social spaces where their enthusiasm for high culture, politics, soccer, music, and film could be shared. The Ukrainian West enriches our understanding not only of the Soviet Union's postwar evolution but also of the role urban spaces, cosmopolitan identities, and border regions play in the development of nations and empires. And it calls into question many of our assumptions about the regional divisions that have characterized politics in Ukraine. Risch shines a bright light on the political, social, and cultural history that turned this once-peripheral city into a Soviet window on the West.

Abstract
This article is based on interviews with and questionnaires completed by Donetsk area residents when the author visited the city January 7–17, 2014. They demonstrate that, at least among Donbas area residents with higher education, there were possibilities for building a "European dream" that Euromaidan protesters in Kyiv championed. Fighting for the rule of law, human rights, and an end to corruption—values identified with the Euromaidan—could have transcended Ukraine's regional divisions. Even those skeptical of "European values" still agreed that they belonged to one nation with differing political objectives. Yet the manipulation of the Kyiv protests by politicians, outbursts of violence in Kyiv, continued stereotypes of Ukraine's regions, and complex economic ties with Russia and Europe made this European dream elusive. Escalating violence in January 2014 and the sudden implosion of the regime of Viktor Yanukovych the next month polarized public opinion in Donetsk. Due to manipulations by local politicians, pro-Russian activists, and pro-Russian propaganda in local media, Donetsk residents and others in the Donbas protested the Kyiv "Junta" and demanded greater rights for their region. The ensuing geopolitical battle brought about greater Russian intervention, both politically and militarily, making it impossible for civil society to resist the sudden emergence of separatist republics. As pro-Russian activists and armed militants, some from across the Russian border, terrorized pro-Ukrainian citizens and Euromaidan activists, the European dream in Donetsk came to an end for the foreseeable future.

This article examines the emergence of the 'hippie' movement and responses to it in the western Ukrainian city of L'viv. Hippies in L'viv, like their counterparts in the capitalist West, created alternative social spaces in response to a sense of alienation in the modern industrialized world. Yet this sense of alienation and responses to it significantly differed, due to the postwar transformation of L'viv, efforts by the Communist Party to control all aspects of the public sphere, and national and regional tensions in western Ukraine. As a result, Soviet 'hippies', in rebelling against Soviet society, mirrored many of its features, and to an extent they became associated with elements of national and regional resistance in postwar L'viv. Persecution of hippies and negative perceptions of them furthermore reveal official attitudes toward the 'hippie' movement and certain assumptions about gender roles and the social order in 1970s Soviet society.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgements -- 1 The Threatening Other or Very Own? EU Drawbacks and the Politics of Self-Undoing -- Between Past and Present -- 2 The Polish Early Modern Republic as the Other Europe: The Sarmatian Moment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Polish Political Discourse -- 3 The Pursuit of France's Milieu Goals (1871–1925): The French Mental Mapping of East-Central Europe -- 4 Mirroring Europeanization: Balkanization and Auto-Colonial Narrative in Bosnia and Herzegovina -- 5 Turkey and Europe: The Eternal Suspense -- 6 Heart of Europe, Heart of Darkness: Ukraine's Euromaidan and Its Enemies -- Between Present and Future -- 7 Managing Ambivalence: An Interplay Between the Wanted and Unwanted Aspects of European Integration in Georgia -- 8 Guiding Macedonia to the EU: Walking Over European Values -- 9 Kosovo's EU Perspective: Pushing it Forward or Pulling it Away? -- 10 Can Albania Europeanize? Actors and Factors -- 11 Studying Trajectory of Turkey's EU Membership: Criticisms and Contributions of Critical Political Economy -- 12 In Lieu of a Conclusion: Regaining Dignity in Europe -- Notes on Contributors -- Index