1960-е и развитие массовой культуры: заметки о советском варианте модерности
Authors: Васильева Зинаида 
Published: May 2013

In her essay, Zinaida Vasilyeva engages in polemics with Mark Lipovetsky. Her major argument consists of three points: first, she disagrees that the abbreviation "ITR" correctly describes the discourse and culture analyzed in Lipovetsky's article. In the Soviet context, this abbreviation could have signified a highly qualified engineer, as well as a middle-level technician or a qualified and experienced worker. She thinks that the discourse described by Lipovetsky is a general enlightenment (progressors') discourse of the scholarly and technical intelligentsia ( nauchno-tekhnicheskaia intel -ligentsia ). ITRs and NTIs are not synonymous. Moreover, engineers and scientists (representing hard sciences) did not compose a community with a shared culture and discourse. This was true from neither the emic nor the etic point of view. Their worlds were divided by strict administrative and symbolic boundaries. Vasilyeva suggests that the very attempt to contrast the "engineer discourse" with some "humanities" discourse preserves traces of the old competition between Soviet elite groups. In her view, the examples discussed by Lipovetsky do not prove the existence of the ITR discourse. Instead, they document a controversial and problematic discourse about the modernity of the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia. This discourse focused on issues such as industrialization, the emergence of mass culture, the technocratic elite, and so on.
Vasilyeva's second point of criticism is directed at the ITR culture/discourse which, she claims, characterizes a highly diverse mass of Soviet consumers of culture, including an average representative of the humani­ties. She interprets the emergence of such mass cultural consumption in the postwar USSR as a sign of the development of modern society, when the change of the urban social-demographic landscape was accompanied by the appearance of new identities and cultural models. While Vasilyeva agrees that representatives of technical professions composed the major­ity of the population with higher education - that is, of the Soviet middle class - she insists that this Soviet intelligentsia of the epoch of the 1960s represented a generational cohort rather than a professional group. Institutes of higher education and new industrial enterprises served as their spaces of socialization where they could set up clubs, youth theaters and other groups of interests, and develop and test new behavioral and cultural models and discourses. For the intelligentsia of the 1960s, generational networking played such a crucial role because of their "social orphanhood": their fathers perished during World War II or lagged behind their children in terms of education. As a social phenomenon, the postwar generation left behind their parents and thus could not rely on traditional family examples and models. Vasilyeva finds examples of their new Soviet subjectivities in movies by the director Marlen Khutsiev, whose protagonists are very Soviet yet also very modern. New gender roles were also tested in the movies of the 1960s. Vasilyeva refutes Lipovetsky's view on the role of women in the ITR culture ("obedient lover or 'war bride'") with examples of female protagonists in Mikhail Romm's "Nine Days of One Year", and in Khutsiev's "The Il'ich Gate," and "July Rain." Finally, Vasilyeva turns to progressors' ideology and essentialism as features of the ITR discourse. She sees the former as an enlightenment project that displays nothing specifically Soviet. Moreover, didacticism characterized not only the technical but also the humanitarian elites who associated themselves with the prerevolutionary Russian intelligentsia and regarded themselves as the bulwark of "true Russian culture." Already in the nineteenth century, "romantic anti-capitalism" and rejection of the European-type social-economic transformations was bringing together left and right, radical and conservative intellectual traditions that shared the ideal of Russia's "special path." Vasilyeva contends that essentialism is endemic to almost all Russian intellectual trends. Lipovetsky's concept of the ITR community, in her view, is construed in the same essentialist mode.