5,669
edits
Difference between revisions of "Magnitizdat (USSR)"
no edit summary
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
[[File:Magnitizdat.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Homemade tape- | [[File:Magnitizdat.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Homemade tape-recording unit "Voice" (MAG-59M), which belonged to M. B. Krizhanovsky, a Soviet engineer known for his underground recordings.]]Magnitizdat was the unofficial practice of (re-)recording uncensored music or speech onto cassette tapes, which were then redistributed throughout the Soviet Union. The term ''Magnitizdat'' is etymologically composed of two words – ''magnit'' (derived from Russian ''magnitifon'' [tape-recorder]) and ''izdat'' (meaning ‘to publish’) and was exploited in the early 1960s onwards to record ''avtorskaia pesnia'' (poetic songs by Bards) and later, rock music. Alongside the growing consumerist culture and technological developments within the Soviet Union, ''Magnitizdat'' became the natural replacement of ''Roentgenizdat'' – the adequately cheap x-ray disks and temporary solution to unofficial post-war music recording. As Kolya Vasin suggests - ‘Enterprising young guys ran around the streets of our town with show boxes filled with recordings ‘on the bones,’ but their time would not last long […] the era of tape recorders began.’ <ref>Igor Buser, Mark Linnik and Dmitry Zaitsev, Soviet Rock: 25 years in the underground + 5 years of freedom (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990) [Account by Kolya Vasin], p. 31</ref> | ||
The first tape recorders (the EL’fa-6, the Dnepr-3 and the Spais) slowly emerged into the market by the late 1950s, but ‘their production was limited.’<ref>Timothy Ryback, Rock Around the Block: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and The Soviet Union, p.44</ref> Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was steadily increasing the production of tape recorders throughout the 1960s; 128,000 cassette recorders were in circulation by 1960, which had risen to 4.7 million by 1985.<ref>Alexei Yurchak, ‘Gagarin and the Rave Kids’ in Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, pp. 82-83</ref> While an estimated fifty million Soviet citizens bought these Soviet-made tape recorders, many thousands of Japanese recorders were equally smuggled into the Soviet Union by Soviet sailors and were either sold in second hand shops or passed on through informal networks.<ref>Alexei Yurchak, ‘Gagarin and the Rave Kids’ in Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, pp. 82-83</ref> However, with the sudden increase of tape recorder sales and the influx of foreign tourists, these products were soon being exploited to re-record and multiply unofficial Western music records or songs by Soviet bards (singer-songwriters such as Aleksandr Galich, Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vyisotskii, and others who used poetry and music to express political commentary), which allowed artists and other amateur enthusiasts to become more accessible to a larger audience. Their music, which was initially restricted to small numbers gathering in private apartments, was now being circulated via underground networks to an increasing number of listeners. As Timothy Ryback states: | The first tape recorders (the EL’fa-6, the Dnepr-3 and the Spais) slowly emerged into the market by the late 1950s, but ‘their production was limited.’<ref>Timothy Ryback, Rock Around the Block: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and The Soviet Union, p.44</ref> Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was steadily increasing the production of tape recorders throughout the 1960s; 128,000 cassette recorders were in circulation by 1960, which had risen to 4.7 million by 1985.<ref>Alexei Yurchak, ‘Gagarin and the Rave Kids’ in Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, pp. 82-83</ref> While an estimated fifty million Soviet citizens bought these Soviet-made tape recorders, many thousands of Japanese recorders were equally smuggled into the Soviet Union by Soviet sailors and were either sold in second hand shops or passed on through informal networks.<ref>Alexei Yurchak, ‘Gagarin and the Rave Kids’ in Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, pp. 82-83</ref> However, with the sudden increase of tape recorder sales and the influx of foreign tourists, these products were soon being exploited to re-record and multiply unofficial Western music records or songs by Soviet bards (singer-songwriters such as Aleksandr Galich, Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vyisotskii, and others who used poetry and music to express political commentary), which allowed artists and other amateur enthusiasts to become more accessible to a larger audience. Their music, which was initially restricted to small numbers gathering in private apartments, was now being circulated via underground networks to an increasing number of listeners. As Timothy Ryback states: | ||