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Late-Stalinist ideological campaigns and the rupture of jazz: ‘jazz-talk’ in the Soviet Estonian cultural newspaper Sirp ja Vasar1

  • Heli Reimann (a1)
Abstract

This paper on Soviet Estonian jazz explores the dynamics of the processes which temporarily extinguished jazz from the public arena during late-Stalinism. This microhistory inflected study draws on the conception of ‘rupture’ through a close reading of the way jazz was constructed in the official narratives of the Estonian cultural newspaper Sirp ja Vasar. Jazz in Estonia experienced no rupture during the first postwar years, but then the three successive Stalinist campaigns, each with gradually decreasing tolerance towards jazz, led finally to the temporary public disappearance of the music in 1950. The strategies enforced in the late 1940s, such as anti-jazz orchestra reform, dance reforms that banned the foxtrot and the other modern dances, and the eradication of the word jazz from public discourse, all served to silence the ‘formalistic’ musical form by framing it with negative connotations and by shaping the taste of the masses according to Soviet ideological paradigms.

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1.

This paper is a part of my doctoral project on Soviet Estonia jazz at the University of Helsinki supported by the Finnish Doctoral Program for Music Research.

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