Nõukoguliku avaliku diskursuse eripäradest 1940. lõpu ja 1950. aastate džässialaste kirjutiste näitel / Characteristics of Soviet Public Discourse: The Case of Jazz-Related Writings in the Late 1940s and 1950s

Abstract

Teesid: Artikkel analüüsib nõukoguliku diskursuse eripärasid 1940. aastate lõpul ja 1950. aastatel Eesti ajakirjanduses ilmunud džässi käsitlevates tekstides. Fookuses on kuni 1953. aastani kestnud ideoloogilise jäikuse ja kultuurielu range kontrolliga iseloomustatav hilisstalinismi periood, mil džässi kujutati vaenulikku ideoloogiat esindava dekadentliku nähtusena. Muutused keelekasutuses leiavad aset seoses 1950. aastatel alguse saanud sulaga, kui džässi püütakse uutele tekkinud oludele vastavalt kohandada.

The article examines writings on jazz published in the Estonian press during the late Stalinist period, more particularly in the second half of the 1940s and the early 1950s. This was a period characterised by ideological rigidity and tightening of control over cultural life. At that time, a forceful anti-jazz rhetoric prevailed, reflecting the postwar Soviet authorities’ efforts, in the context of the Cold War, to distance themselves from the West and to assert their identity through their opposition to it.

Following Stalin’s death, a significant discursive shift occurred in jazz-related rhetoric. Anti-jazz polemics were gradually replaced by texts that sought to adapt jazz music to the Soviet cultural model under the ideologically relaxed conditions of the Khrushchev Thaw. Jazz was no longer approached primarily through political antagonism; instead, attempts were made to integrate it into the existing cultural institutions and discursive frameworks governing cultural life.

The article addresses the following questions: What linguistic strategies characterised the public jazz discourse in Estonia during the late Stalinist period, how were these strategies used to construct jazz, and how did this relate to the Cold-War-era anti-Western discourse? What discursive shifts occurred in the treatment of jazz at the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw in the 1950s? How did jazz-related texts published in the Estonian press reflect all-Union ideological models?

The detailed analysis focuses on the article ‛On Contemporary American Jazz Music’, published by Valter Ojakäär in the weekly Sirp ja Vasar in 1949. In addition, the study examines sharply satirical and openly mocking anti-jazz texts published in the early 1950s. A key marker of changing attitudes toward jazz was Leonid Utyosov’s 1954 article, that was also published in Estonia, while jazz-related discussions published in the newspaper Edasi in the mid-1950s serve as examples of the transformed discourse.

This study is based on the premise that Soviet language functioned not merely as a means of communication but as an ideological technology of power through which Soviet reality was constructed, value judgments normalised, and collective consciousness shaped. Such language use was characterised by ritualisation, abstraction, an abundance of ideological clichés, and a strict binary opposition between good and evil, one’s own and the foreign.

One of the central linguistic strategies employed in these writings was animalisation of jazz. The music was attributed animalistic and inhuman characteristics and associated with uncontrolled noises and instinctive behaviour. Through such vocabulary, jazz was removed from the sphere of conscious and cultured artistic creation and positioned as a hostile and primitive phenomenon.

Attacks on jazz were closely intertwined with anti-capitalist rhetoric. This is particularly evident in Valter Ojakäär’s 1949 article, where jazz is portrayed as ‛barbaric entertainment’ and an expression of a ‛degenerate mentality’ within American society. Music was evaluated not according to aesthetic criteria but through moral and ideological ones, with profit and monetary value serving as the primary measures by which music was judged. The article also highlights the Soviet discourse’s tendency toward semantic flattening of ambiguity. Irony, humour, and parody were either ignored or deliberately misinterpreted in order to neutralise their polysemic potential. In Ojakäär’s writing, titles of jazz compositions and band names are ridiculed, with humorous wordplay interpreted literally and subjected to ideologically motivated readings. This ‛wooden-language’ interpretive practice demonstrates the system’s inability – or unwillingness – to perceive the ambivalence inherent in artistic expression.

Finally, the article emphasises the role of emotions in Soviet discourse. Anti-jazz texts employed strategies of evoking fear and revulsion in order to shape negative attitudes toward the West and the United States. Through emotionally regimented discourse, ideologically sanctioned feelings were reinforced, guiding readers to perceive jazz as the sonic embodiment of a hostile world.