“The individualized practise of listening and doing it in a foreign language”

Yurchak discusses that broadcasts in languages other than those spoken in the USSR were jammed (178) and as such the BBC World Service, amongst others, was readily available to Soviet music fans. How do we read this decision? To block broadcasts that were in Russian and the other languages of the Soviet Union suggests that the state saw broadcasts that were readily understood by the greater population as more dangerous than those that were harder to understand. This makes sense, sort of – a Russian language broadcast of Voice Of America, which could package an American agenda in a local language, was deemed more dangerous to Soviet society than an English language broadcast of the same station. Yet, Yurchak also makes clear that it was the “foreign sound,” “non-Soviet sound, and American English” (191) that listeners desired. Meanings did not matter; the broadcasts were valued by virtue of being foreign. By allowing these certain foreign language stations to be broadcast, those who did not speak or did not have the time and money to learn to speak foreign languages were excluded from the broadcasts. The “individualized practise of listening and doing it in a foreign language” (179) thus belonged to a privileged crowd. These circumstances seem to foster, rather than block, the production of so-called “bourgeois ‘art'” (185). It was, after all, groups like our dear friends the stiliagi who integrated American-English slang into their subcultural identity. How significant was the ability to speak in English (or other dominant Western language) as an exclusionary (bourgeois?) cultural signifier?