The River in Thaw-era Soviet Popular Song (1954–1970): The Formation of an Amicable Space

he article examines the images of the river in the Thaw-era popular Soviet songs. Songs have traditionally been a way of both forming a general system of spatial imagination of society and fixing the changes taking place in it. In the Soviet unified culture, the censored song occupied an important place as an «intermediary between the private and official spheres of people’s lives» (Cherednichenko), an active instrument for the dissemination of state ideology; at the same time, the song embodied «variants of the Russian model of the world of the Soviet period», forming the mass «mythopoetic image of the era» (Shchukin). The popular song, with its repetition and constant reproduction, persistently set the images of the Fatherland as a whole and its individual parts, the dominant ideas about the significant in human life, and finally, the preferred patterns of behavior. From the 1930s to the first half of the 1950s rivers were depicted in «official» Soviet songs as an important part of the new ideological project: the Soviet people entered into confrontation with the power of the «great» rivers and curbed them, symbolically proving the superiority of the new organization of society. In the Thaw-era Soviet society, centralized aestheticization of ideological attitudes was preserved, but the image of the river is changing dramatically: instead of the «great» rivers, small rivers or even streams are increasingly appearing, the «great» rivers are symbolically likened to «small», representing part of a harmonious landscape where an ordinary person rests or reflects on the «course of life». The theme of the heroic conquest and transformation of nature is transferred to the «space», to the «virgin lands», to the «taiga», and the river turns out to be a space for demonstrating, on the one hand, the solid status of Soviet people as «the master of their vast Motherland», on the other, the achieved harmony of traditional and new values. Changes in the image of rivers in the Thaw-era songs suggest that they function as part of the representation of a new image of the friendly Soviet world.