„Търсачи на чуждестранни парцали и твърда валута“: стилягите в Съветския съюз през Студената война (1945-1964)
“Hunters of Overseas Rags and Foreign Currency”: Stiliagi in the Cold War Soviet Union, 1945-1964

Summary/Abstract: This essay will examine stiliagi, a youth counterculture centered on consuming “western,” especially American, cultural and material products. This paper argues that Soviet “westernized” youth arose as a means of searching for an identity alternative to the heroic veteran, side-stepping official authority, and fashioning a taste based hierarchy as a means of acquiring social status and power. The stiliagi represented part of a broader wave of postwar spectacular countercultures in both capitalist and socialist contexts, suggesting clear parallels between how developed, industrialized societies reacted to the stresses brought by war and the peacetime transition. Similarly, the societal response to such countercultural youth in both the Soviet Bloc and in western Europe and America combined coercion with co-optation, in general shifting toward the latter by the early 1960s, though the ideological and structural differences explain some divergences in their respective approaches.

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