Youth, popular culture and communist media. Case study: the 1953 International Youth Festival

• Autores: Andrada Fatu-Tutoveanu
• Localización: Visiones multidisciplinares sobre la cultura popular: actas del 5.º Congreso Internacional de SELICUP / coord. por Eduardo de Gregorio Godeo, María del Mar Ramón Torrijos, 2014, ISBN 978-84-617-0400-2, págs. 338-346
• Idioma: español
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • While 1953 represented a key year for the communist countries, due to Stalin�fs death and its political, social and cultural consequences for the satellite countries (Romania among them), a less analysed event on which Romanian media focused on the same year was the International Youth Festival organised in Bucharest in August 1953.

    Taking place in an extremely difficult period of the Cold War and in the same time unique in terms of the foreign politics and propaganda associated to it, the event involved multiple and extremely interesting connections at different levels between politics (with an accent on foreign relations and national identity promotion) and culture, more particularly popular culture (propaganda, festivals and youth manifestations). The paper uses a series of concepts and theories related to Soviet propaganda and in particular celebrations (Baiburin & Piir, 2009) and festivals (von Geldern, 1993; Petrone, 2000; Simpson, 2004).

    The presentation will focus on these events as associated with a specific visual stereotypes and a religious mimicked power iconography (we can speak of new rituals and civil religion), exhibiting the communist happiness �glife has become more joyous, comrades�h (Petrone, 2000). The presentation will discuss the case study by connecting this section of propaganda with the particular youth population segment and the methods applied by the system for controlling and shaping them. The paper approaches the event both as a popular culture youth manifestation (and its specific features in such an unusual context for a satellite country, dominated by a communist regime during the first decade of the Cold War) and through the functions it played within propaganda and which were reflected in the discourse (including visual) promoted by the main periodicals of the time (particularly those with a cultural profile such as Flac.ra or those addressing young audiences, such as Scanteia tineretului).