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<i>Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk</i>

Woodrow Wilson Center Press has published a new book, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960&#8211;1985, by Sergei I. Zhuk. It is copublished with Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rock and Roll in the Rocket City assesses the impact of Westernization on the city's youth, examining the degree to which the intake of Western music, movies, and literature ultimately challenged the ideological control maintained by state officials. One among many of Zhuk's stories is how the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar led Dniepropetrovsk's young people to embrace not one, but two Soviet taboos: rock music and Christianity.

A longtime resident of Dniepropetrovsk, Zhuk began the research for this project in the 1990s. Weaving together diaries, interviews, oral histories, and KGB and party archival documents, he provides a vivid account of how Soviet cultural repression and unrest during the Brezhnev period laid the groundwork for a resurgent Ukrainian nationalism in the 1980s. In so doing, he demonstrates the influence of Western cultural consumption on the formation of a post-Soviet national identity.

"Sergei Zhuk's illumination of youth culture in a provincial and closed Ukrainian city draws on a fascinating breadth of sources—archival documents, diaries, oral histories, and KGB intelligence. Zhuk shows how, despite the efforts of ideological officials and the paranoia of the KGB, the Soviet state fought a losing battle of accommodation and compromise against Western cultural influences. These influences, however, served to bolster as much as undermine Soviet ideology. Zhuk reconfigures Brezhnev-era society to reveal a more contradictory and multifaceted history than one usually encounters."—Kate Brown, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Sergei I. Zhuk is an associate professor of history at Ball State University. He is the author of Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917, also published by the Woodrow Wilson Center Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press. He was a Kennan Institute Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2002–3.

To reach Sergei I. Zhuk for an interview, call (765) 285-8735 or send e-mail to: sizhuk@bsu.edu . Media may also contact Sharon McCarter, Vice President of Outreach and Communications at sharon.mccarter@wilsoncenter.org or (202) 691-4016.

Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 is distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press, accessible online at www.press.jhu.edu or by telephone at 1-800-537-5487. The list price is $65 for hardcover.

Woodrow Wilson Center Press publishes books by fellows, resident scholars, and staff written in substantial part at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Titles range from popular accounts of historical topics to fundamental reviews of scholarly fields to authoritative background on important policy issues. For more information about the Press, or to search its backlist of titles, please visit www.wilsoncenter.org/press.