RevDem Podcast · Review of Democracy

Stiliagi and Soviet Masculinities- A Conversation with Alla Myzelev

·32 min·2 clips

The Blue Horse group in Kharkiv staged a fake Khrushchev visit and some members were arrested.

1. RevDem Podcast’s Democracy and Culture series centers this conversation on Stilyagi and Soviet masculinities. 2. Alla Myzelev, Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at SUNY Geneseo, joins host Adrian to discuss her book Stilyagi and Soviet Masculinities, 1945-2010 from Manchester University Press. 3. The episode asks what Stilyagi can show about youth culture, fashion, and masculinity in the Soviet Union. 4. Myzelev says Stilyagi first appear in 1948 and are described as men and women who dressed differently, listened to jazz, and used English-like words. 5. She says newspapers and magazines quickly portrayed them in negative terms. 6. She compares their look with Soviet ideals associated with Joseph Stalin and, today, Vladimir Putin. 7. She links Soviet masculinity to military achievement, ideology, and formal behavior. 8. Myzelev says men worrying about clothing and appearance was especially jarring in the Soviet context. 9. She describes Stilyagi as moving more freely, using their hands and feet, and greeting women with hugs or kisses. 10. She frames that style as an alternative to hegemonic masculinity and as a form of homosocial male friendship. 11. Myzelev says she began the project from an interest in making do under Soviet shortage and limitation. 12. She says she started interviewing people in the early 2000s because those who remembered the movement were getting old. 13. She says some women told her to interview men because the men were considered more interesting. 14. Myzelev places Stilyagi in the late Stalin period, after World War II and during a time of political danger. 15. She says she became interested in “slight rebellion” rather than open dissidence like later figures such as Sakharov. 16. She uses the phrase “tactics of the habitat” for the ways people adjusted their behavior to survive. 17. She says Stilyagi were often limited to private apartments, parks, and some hotel spaces such as Intourist sites. 18. She says universities, institutes, and high schools could punish visible difference through humiliation, expulsion, and sometimes violence. 19. Myzelev says the Blue Horse group in Kharkiv built its own laws, imitated a Khrushchev motorcade, and was punished differently depending on family background. 20. She says educated families often adopted the style early, while Soviet class labels were hard to map onto intelligentsia, cultural capital, and wealth.

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