Soviet cassette culture
The “cassette revival”, whether real or imaginary, has re-ignited the interest in cassette culture. Hopefully, the reader will find some information about Soviet and post-Soviet cassette culture interesting.
Just like in other countries, Soviet citizens listened to pre-recorded tapes and used blank cassette tapes to copy music from other sources.
But pre-recorded tapes sold in the Soviet Union were mostly boring domestic fare, so Soviet citizens sneaked Western vinyl records into the country and then made tape copies off them to share with friends. Then friends of the friends would make a second copy. Then their friends would make a third copy. Of course, the quality quickly deteriorated from one tape to the next, but people wanted to listen to Western music so badly, they had to put up with poor quality.
It is important to note that the government did not care much for copyright infringement. The Soviet copyright law permitted Soviet citizens to copy music as long as they were not making profit.
The government was interested in what kind of music its citizens were listening, whether they get the right message, not how much they paid for the copy.
The state-owned recording firm Melodiya — yes, it was called a “firm” — selected content that was compatible with communist ideology, and signed contracts with Soviet artists as well as with Western labels. Music was sold mostly on vinyl records, in fact Melodiya was officially called “a gramophone record firm”.
The very lenient copyright law combined with chronic shortage of popular music released on either vinyl records or cassettes effectively sanctioned mass copying and sharing of music. All this copying required blank cassettes.
Production of Soviet cassettes started in the late 1960s and at first they were made of American parts. Several years later, the production was completely localized.
By the middle of the 1980s Soviet cassettes looked just the same as they did twenty years ago, and mostly came in Type I 60-minute flavor. Foreign-made cassettes, albeit more expensive, were valued much higher, for their mechanical quality, for better magnetic formulation, for longer play, and of course, for visual appeal.
A 10-pack of 90-minute Japanese tapes would cost more than a half of an average monthly salary. I begged my mother to buy them for me, and she did. Later, when I started working myself, I bought a 10-pack of TDK Type II tapes. These twenty cassettes, and then some, sustained my listening habits through the 1990s.
The culture of tape dubbing stemmed not only from inability of the Soviet state to keep up with the music tastes of its citizens, but also was fueled by censorship. Many music acts, Soviet and Western, were deemed offensive or detrimental to communist ideology and thus were prohibited.
Just like censorship of printed books brought to life samizdat — books, published abroad, smuggled into the Soviet Union and re-typed at home on a typewriter, censorship of musical acts inevitably resulted in shadow distribution of foreign music and of Soviet underground performances.
These unauthorized performances were called “kvartirnik” from the word “kvartira” meaning apartment.
By the end of 1980s the stranglehold of the communist ideology weakened, while stronger copyright laws have not yet been enacted. This caused an explosion of private businesses dubbing and selling tapes.
Still, whether one recorded a cassette off a friend’s vinyl record or bought it in a street booth, the packaging was lacking. At the very best, it would be a J-card printed on a laser- or even on a dot-matrix printer, black-and-white.
Then something truly unimaginable for any country with robust copyright laws, happened: a magazine for women called Rabotnitsa started printing J-cards for popular music acts, in full color, with a short description and bio on the other side. All you had to do is cut the card out of the magazine, fold it, and put into the cassette box. Now your tape looked every bit professional as a commercially produced one. Immediately, the magazine became popular with men, and its circulation skyrocketed almost overnight.
The orgy of copyright lawlessness ended in the 1990s, when private recording companies started making their own deals. It seemed that the era of underground sharing of books and music was over.
But as the Russian state keeps tightening the control over radio, television, print and internet, flooding state-controlled media with vacuous talk shows and third-rate music, kvartirniks, the private concerts, become popular again.
It is easy to share information over the internet, but China has shown that building a gated national network is possible, and Russia recently tested a capability to completely disconnect the Russian portion of the Internet.
If the digital Iron Curtain is erected, offline sharing will return, only this time it would employ memory cards and external hard drives, not re-typed memos and cassette tapes.
