Olga Krasa-Ryabets: The Imaginary Soviet – individual memories and collective fictional spaces

Imaginary West “...denotes not the border and not the real territory, but an imaginary space that is both real and abstract, familiar and unattainable, ordinary and exotic, located here and there.”

- Alexei Yurchak

This lecture examines the case of the Russian-speaking performance movement called The Toronto Rock Club which was active in Canada at the turn of the millennium. The Club consisted of young musicians and performers who immigrated to Toronto as children or teens from the former Soviet Union. The movement mirrored a late-socialist subculture called the Leningrad Rock Club which appeared in Soviet St.Petersburg in the 1980's as a reactionary, unofficial youth association. The Toronto participants were too young to have had direct experience with the Leningrad original or its socio-cultural context. Rather, they experienced the music via records or videos and incorporated it into a set of positive childhood recollections of late-Soviet and Perestroika periods. In this way, the Toronto Rock Club functioned as a collectively imagined space, constructed from early memories of the Club members. From this perspective, the Toronto Rock Club mirrored Russian historian Alexei Yurchak's concept of the Soviet-era Imaginary West to produce an Imaginary Soviet Union. This lecture takes up the case of the Toronto Rock Club in relation to its Leningrad prototype in order to understand how individual memories create collective imaginary spaces.