Conference Agenda

This paper explores the musical exchange between the USSR and Cuba during the Cold War, examining how this transnational dialogue found and continues to find expression in and through musical performance. First enacted in the early 1960s, the cultural initiative between the two socialist states involved contracting Soviet musicians to imbue the pedagogical tenets of the fabled “Russian School” of performance into Cuba’s newly-reorganized, Soviet-style musical institutions. As Soviet musicians began taking up residence on the island, the Soviet state began to fund the studies of Cuban musicians at the USSR’s most esteemed institutions. Through interviews, documents, and recordings I trace the stories of the Cuban musicians who became absorbed into the Soviet sphere by way of this exchange, arguing that the Russian School was instrumentalized as a discursive, affective, and institutional tool in replicating ideas of “Soviet greatness” in revolutionary Cuba. To ask how the Sovietization of Cuba found expression through sound is to take seriously the ephemerality of musical performance and pedagogy as processes through which Cuba’s “new (wo)men” were interpellated into the “Soviet consciousness” (Loss, 2013).

The values and aesthetic markers that have congealed around the tradition of performance typifying the “Russian School” invite us to consider how performance and pedagogy become embroiled in the iterative process that is the national constitution of identity. Pervasive in the musical press across the twentieth century is a robust discourse linking the “Russian School” to ideas of a distinct “Russian sound” and “style.” The ubiquity of this discourse suggests that such sounds and styles became sonic and embodied indices of Russo-centric Soviet nationalism. I argue that to train one’s body according to the pedagogical mandates of the “Russian School” was to perform and sound Soviet identity. But far from presuming a unidirectional imperial power flow, I ask how musical performance and the stories that congeal around it can come to stage, both literally and figuratively, the agonistic and sometimes irreconcilable tensions between cultural imperialism and individual agency—a dualism that characterized much of the Cold War ideological battle.

This paper explores Soviet Central Asia’s embrace of Russian dissident ‘guitar poetry’ (Smith, 1984) during the 1970s and 80s, and the genre’s expressive possibilities and political significance for practitioners in the region then and now. Pioneered during and after Khrushchev’s Thaw by legendary Moscow-based bards (in Russian, bardy) such as Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotskii, guitar poetry entailed the highly individualistic, and often deliberately unpolished, solo recitation of original texts to simple melodies and the sparse accompaniment of an acoustic guitar. Non-Russian Central Asian bards adopted these hallmarks of guitar poetry—both its form and characteristic performance style—and, like their Russian counterparts, circulated their recordings through informal networks (e.g., magnitizdat), gave performances in unofficial spaces, and articulated perspectives on Soviet life beyond state-sanctioned activities and discourses. Yet importantly, Central Asian bards usually wrote their songs not in Russian, but in their own languages, thus nativizing the genre while still capitalizing on its broader valence as cosmopolitan and, to a degree, transnationally anti-establishmentarian (Djagalov 2013).

The case of Lidush Habib (1963-2002) exemplifies this dynamic and its complex legacy today. Active as a bard from the early 1980s until his death, Habib came from a small ethnic minority community in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains and produced guitar poetry in his native Shughani, one of several Pamiri indigenous languages that were banned—and are still banned—from all state institutions. As the self-described “first Vysotskii” of the Pamirs, Habib sang of personal moral weaknesses, societal dysfunctions, and, crucially, the virtues of his politically marginalized lands and peoples. This paper examines Habib’s recorded performances and public statements alongside those of his key contemporary disciples to show how their voices, in words and embodied practice, mobilized the musical tradition of one hegemonic source (in this case, Russia) to counter the rule of another (the Tajik state). Despite contemporary efforts across Central Asia to de-Russify and recuperate ethnonational musical heritage, Russian guitar poetry remains one Soviet cultural inheritance that continues to animate, at least in some corners, minoritarian struggles.