Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955-1991

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary in Alberta.

An impressive jump: having just finished two books on a denizen of the
most rarified realms of Soviet-era art, this Dalhousie University
professor turns his sights from the Nobel prize-winning poetry of Joseph
Brodsky to the crowd-pleasing lyrics of the USSR’s most famous pop
stars. What’s more, David MacFadyen plans another two volumes on the
topic of what the Russians call estrada (mainstream, singer-oriented pop
music), to cover the period before and after this one.

In Red Stars he examines the careers of seven of the most famous
estrada stars—P’ekha, Kobzon, Leshchenko, Rotaru, Leont’ev,
Ponarovskaia, and Pugacheva—whose names, though unknown in the West,
will be familiar to anyone who came of age in post-Stalinist Russia.
While academic interest in Soviet popular culture has been on the
increase in both Russia and elsewhere, most of the scholarly work
assumes a fairly intimate understanding of this topic on the part of the
reader. MacFadyen’s book, in contrast, is an enthusiastic,
well-researched overview of a key element of 20th-century Russian
culture that demands no such prior knowledge. It includes extensive
citations from newspaper reviews, fan mail, interviews, and so forth.
(Usually, however, the author mentions the source of these quotations
only in his endnotes, which can be frustrating.) It also includes a
number of illustrations, although more (and in color) would have been
desirable considering how much of his analysis touches on the visual
presentation of these performers’ songs. Ideally, such a book would
also be accompanied by a CD. Although most of the musical styles
discussed by MacFadyen are ultimately derived from Western pop music,
there is an element of exotic difference that is hard to put into words.
One final criticism concerns MacFadyen’s promiscuous use of abstract
categories (e.g., civic vs. lyric, realist vs. romantic) that, as in his
previous work on Brodsky, appear to point to something deep and
significant, but not convincingly enough to justify the emphasis given
them by the author.