In the selected passages we read in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Alexei Yurchak articulates the ways in which Soviet society and culture developed with, and because of, sound technologies, how these sound technologies in the Soviet context were developed and modified with and by Soviet social actors, and how these social and cultural formations had tangible political effects on individual, local, State, and international levels. When I read Yurchak, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic immediately came to mind, a reference it seems Yurchak invites us to consider by beginning this chapter with a quote from Tarkovsky’s film adaptation of the novel, Stalker. In this vein, I think it could be fruitful to consider the common themes in both our reading for class, and broadly within the novel, to consider how sound technology was used in a Soviet context to essentially reformulate Soviet life, and what music’s role is in this process.
In Roadside Picnic, written in 1971, an unexplained alien visitation to a non-major Soviet city has rendered a large area, the Zone, uninhabitable and littered with bizarre, non-terrestrial technologies. State officials secure the Zone, and forbid citizens from entering, but provide only ambiguous reasons as to why. Despite being forbidden entry, and despite the unexplainable, often grotesque, effects the Zone has on individuals, people (Stalkers) covertly enter the zone and collect the technologies the aliens left, using them themselves or selling them on a thriving black market. These technologies have polarizing effects on their users: they can completely disfigure those exposed to the technologies, or can be extremely and widely useful to its users. The technologies cultivate a culture around themselves, and social formations, economic structures, and even to a degree, the State are modified to an equal extent as the aforementioned modify the technologies themselves.
The parallels between Yurchak’s 1950s-1980s-era Soviet Union and the fictional setting of the Strugatsky’s novel share obvious and glaring similarities. Much like the Zone, the imagined West of the Soviet public becomes central to Soviet life. And just as in the novel, this West is repurposed through technology for Soviet ends. As Yurchak highlights through the examples of tape replication (Yurchak, 188) and x-ray plate records (Yurchak, 182), Soviet people engaged in the West’s music not just through their own cultural lens, but through technological modifications specific to their cultural practices. This invites the question: to what extent were Soviets, like Stalkers, using technologies less to place themselves in dialogue with the West, and more to place the West in dialogue with Soviet life? As Yurchak shows, exposure to Western media through these technologies partially created the conditions for Soviet rock, jazz and sonic technological practices to not only take hold culturally and socially, but actually impact how the State engaged with non-Soviet culture. If, as Yurchak shows throughout, the act of imagining, through sound technology, is an agentive way of articulating the Soviet self, I am interested in how we can situate the use and modifications of sound technology as both distinctly Soviet in this context, and in dialogue with technological modifications we have observed in past texts and more broadly in the history of music technology.
