The Celebrification of Soviet Culture: State Heroes after Stalin
Journal: D-Scholarship@Pitt (University of Pittsburgh)
Year: 2017

Celebrity as an object of study is absent in narratives of Soviet cultural history. Contrary to the dominant interpretation of celebrity as a manifestation of market economic practices, this dissertation contends that the concept is not unique to first-world systems. Celebrities not only thrived in the second world but were supported and embraced as state resources because of their usefulness to the Soviet cultural administration. Their images attended to state needs while also fulfilling the pu