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film about Milanese fascists, this film became a real blockbuster during the 1970s and early 1980s in the USSR, romanticized in the imaginations of many “fascist” heavy metal fans and local “punks” who tried to emulate the dress code and behavior of Shtirlitz and other Nazi characters from this Soviet film.70
As early as December of 1983, the secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional Komsomol committee O. Fedoseev reported to the Komsomol Central Committee in Kyiv that in February–March of 1983, local ideologists encountered the rise of the punk movement in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, but they successfully mobilized all activists and “Soviet patriots,” organizing special counter-propaganda events all over the city and the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. As a result, they managed to curtail this “fascist movement.” The Dnipropetrovsk oblast Komsomol organization developed political measures on “how to fight fascist punks,” which became a model for the entire republic. The KGB administration approved those measures.71
However, between 1982 and 1985, the KGB and the police identified twenty new groups of neo-fascists/punks in Ukraine who had hundreds of followers. Arrested by the police and interrogated by the KGB, the members of these groups employed various fascist symbols and paraphernalia, painted their faces “in punk fashion,” and shaved their temples.72 Only a few of them, however, had anything to do with the Nazi ideology or fascism.
Conclusion
The KGB’s anti-hippie, anti-fascist, and anti-punk campaigns in Soviet Ukraine were intended to weaken young Ukrainians’ fascination with the products of Western (especially American) popular culture, such as films and pop music, and their idealization of Western neo-fascist images and culture. However, the results of these campaigns were contrary to what had been expected. The campaigns contributed to the immense popularity of forbidden Western cultural products among young consumers. Ironically, these campaigns amplified the interest in Western culture among the transgressors’ ideological supervisors who were supposed to erase it from the imagination of the Soviet youth.
Yet, there was another surprising and dangerous outcome of the anti-punk campaign in Soviet Ukraine, accentuated by KGB officers and local propagandists. During 1982–1984, the KGB active measures targeting “fascist punks” and the authorities’ hostile and coercive actions against disobedient youth encouraged young people to think about the state in political terms, and to openly criticize the Soviet political system, identifying it as a mafia state.73 Since 1967 and the anti-hippie campaigns in Soviet Ukraine, the KGB feared the potential “politicization” of cultural consumption by local youth. The drastic difference between the peaceful and relatively a-political Soviet hippies’ behavior and that of the Ukrainian “fascist punks” inspired by Italian films and Anglo-American rock music exacerbated the KGB’s fear. The political behavior of young Komsomol members became a dangerous cultural phenomenon. Their political programs, adopting neo-fascist cultural practices, challenged the Soviet political system that had to be replaced by a “more efficient, honest and stable” authoritarian system. Worse, many Ukrainian punks demanded the “liberation of Ukraine from Russian exploitation.”74 The cultural trends among young Soviet Ukrainians analyzed in this study—the mixture of popular culture and political nationalism—survived the KGB persecution, foreshadowing the distinct signs of revival in post-Soviet contemporary Ukraine.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Irina M. Kozintseva, the inspiration and the love of my entire life. Without a sabbatical leave from Ball State University, its material and moral support, I would never have finished my archival explorations in Kyiv and Dnipro during my research trip to Ukraine in 2019. My words of gratitude also go to Olga Bertelsen who invited me to share my research findings with her colleagues in Florence, Italy, and improved my text tremendously by her thoughtful suggestions and comments. Finally, I would like to thank the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., for two research grants in 2018–2019 that allowed me to complete this manuscript, a part of my more ambitious book project.
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