Here's a little musical omake called "Sovietwave: Synthpop in the land of soviets", I hope you like it.
If in the West, the rise of a new musical genre, after a phase of technical experimentation based on the will and talent of pasionate individuals, is based in part on its commercial potential as a vector of substantial profits in a buoyant market, in the Soviet Union, we can add the role of the State and its objectives in the promotion and development of new musical genres.
This is particularly true of sovietwave, whose international name is simply электронная музыка (electronic music) for the Soviets, a native variation of synthpop (short for synthesizer pop) which appeared at the same time in Western Europe.
Indeed, in the West, the rise of this genre of music, with the synthesizer as its main instrument, was due to a desire for artistic renewal among subculture-minded musical groups, in the case of the Soviet Union, the popularization of what was to become sovietwave was due to the desire of the Soviet state, and more specifically of the Ministry of Culture of the Ministry of National Economy, to find a modern, innovative soundtrack to accompany the images of space exploration by the Soviet space program from the 70s onwards - whether during the lift-off of the numerous rockets in the Soviet program, or when the images brought back by the probes were presented to the public on television - on the public channels of Soviet television, and thus extol the achievements of the Soviet Union in the field of space compared to its American competitor, not only to its own population but also to world public opinion. Indeed, the Soviet Union was one of the first states to have developed a global telecommunications network based on satellites launched from their space facilities, in order to influence world public opinion through the virtually free broadcasting of its television channels, and therefore intended to use this channel of communication as mean to positively influence the rest of the world's perception of the Soviet Union.
Moreover, the political aspect of promoting this music was not only due to the spatial competition of the Cold War, but also to the political balances in the decision-making spheres of the Soviet state apparatus. Indeed, paradoxical as it may seem, this musical genre found allies in the supreme soviet that normally oppose each other in the person of the neo-Stalinist and progressive factions, even though the reasons for this promotion differed.
In the case of the neo-Stalinists, this desire to promote this type of music is based on a conception of music that is authentically Soviet, and not simply an offshoot of a Western or even bourgeois musical genre. According to the rhetoric of this political group, sovietwave constitutes a new avatar of authentically Soviet musical creation, such as the theremin, and also demonstrates Soviet industrial progress in the technological sphere, since the main instrument of this music is a synthesizer: an instrument which, in order to be produced locally, requires an industry capable of mass-producing continuously behaving electronic circuits and the peripherals enabling the composition of this electronic music. Such a sector was still a novelty in the Soviet industrial palette of the 70s and 80s, and could therefore be used by neo-Stalinists to extol the industrial progress of the Soviet Union - and incidentally justify the type of economic development they supported at the time - in this field, in addition to extolling an entirely Soviet musical genre.
As far as progressive parliamentarians were concerned, this promotion was more simply part of a desire to put forward new musical genres to justify cultural modernity alongside political and economic modernity - promoting political freedoms and economic freedoms by increasing the role of the market in economic mechanisms.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to make the emergence of "sovietwave" solely a story of political support and technological development, since the rise of this musical genre is also the fruit of decades of investment by the Soviet Union since Malenkov in the artistic and cultural spheres, with the foundation of numerous art schools, and film schools throughout the Soviet Union (such as the Sverdlovsk Art Institute, the Leninogorsk Conservatory and the ReklamFil'm institutional studio in Tallinn): In the decades that followed, they provided the Soviet music scene with a pool of talent eager to explore, aided by the cultural liberalization that followed Stalin's death.
Among the leading figures of this type of music are the Kiev-based band Soyuz-61, formed in 1975 by two engineering students (their best-known song being "Ballet"), the Magnitogorsk band, formed in 1971 (their best-known song being "Electric Star"), and the Minsk-based music band Proton, formed in 1976 (their best-known song being "Zero"). True to its tradition of taking the best ideas from the private sector and injecting and developing them under the pavilion of the public sector, these bands were originally amateur groups who had been spotted through observation of the Soviet amateur or specialized music scene before making an offer to collaborate on projects supported by the Ministry of the National Economy or nationalization for the luckier ones: an offer synonymous with artistic, national or even international recognition, with worldwide broadcasting via the Soviet Union's satellite television network, and therefore difficult for the latter to refuse.
Initially restricted to the cultural sphere of the Soviet Union, with participation in music festivals such as the Leningrad and Moscow Music Festivals, this musical genre was then popularized throughout the Eastern Bloc with its introduction at the Sopot International Music Festival - a veritable showcase for the musical achievements of the Eastern Bloc and a place for cultural circulation displaying an overcoming of Cold War logic - before being invited, thanks to this festival, to the West with the participation of the aforementioned groups at the Toulouse International Music Festival in 1981. It was during this festival that fans of new musical genres had their first opportunity to compare these two varieties of synthpop and judge them artistically, even if ideological presuppositions might have biased this work.
Thus, after a Stalinist period marked by socialist realism and official art, in the following decades the Soviet Union managed to free itself from this burdensome past, offering its competitors on the cultural scene serious rivals to their own champions in the struggle for global cultural hegemony.
Excerpts from "Music for the Masses: Soviet Music from the Russian Revolution to the 1980s" by the canadian art historian Andrey Colton" (1990).
