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Notes From Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia. By Thomas Cushman. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995. 403 pp.

Thomas Cushman's detailed and wide-ranging Notes from Underground is a first in many respects: the first book-length ethnography of urban youth culture from what used to be thought of as 'the other Europe', the first sustained attempt to account for the cultural consequences of what is probably no longer called 'the great transformation' of formerly Communist countries, and one of a distressingly small number of interpretive studies of Russian society in a sea of political, economic and strategic treatises. While Cushman has a hard time resisting an impulse towards solipsism, when he sticks to the story his interviewees give him he produces a narrative that is engaging and important. This book makes a major contribution to the study of East European rock and roll, and will probably prove indispensable to scholars in that area. The book begins inauspiciously with the phrase, 'While there are many differences among sociological theorists . . .' (p. 1) and goes on to establish a complex and not altogether inspiring theoretical model, defined essentially by a defence of the relative autonomy of cultural creation, a thoroughgoing discussion of the social and historical importance of the rock music counterculture in St Petersburg, and a detailed description of the difficulties that the implosion of the Soviet system caused for Petersburg rockers. The theoretical discussion is at times trivial, as when Cushman observes that 'when economic times are tough, people engage less in cultural pursuits' (p. 236), or offers as a conclusion that with the arrival of capitalist markets, 'art became a business' (pp. 309-10). At times it is murky, as he never makes clear why he regards the influential music of T. Rex as 'prosaic' (pp. 42, 44). At times it simply gets in the way of the story, as he interrupts an anecdote with the clunker, 'Freud's voluntaristic positivism and his individualistic theory of the unconscious grated at the very core of Marxist epistemology and ontology . . .' (pp. 34—5). Fortunately, Cushman's paraphilosophical meanderings do not prevent him from telling the story of the Petersburg rock music scene in considerable detail. His narrative devotes much space to his wide-ranging interviews with musicians and producers, and his descriptions of the various musical outlooks of the groups are underlined with complete texts of representative songs, sometimes more than one of them. The depth of description helps Cushman to establish several important insights into Petersburg rock culture, especially with regard to the sacredness of both aesthetic objects and artists in the Soviet-era counterculture, and the complex organisation of countercultural identity, activity and ritual. Particularly useful are the insights he provides regarding the relation between the marginality of countercultural producers and products and the historical significance of the counterculture. Describing the difficulty of producing and distributing music in the Soviet era, he concludes, 'it was this very disorder that made music even more oppositional and resistant in the Soviet context . . . the fact that it was done under adversity made its practice all the more special to those who made it and those who consumed it' (p. 196). In this context, the strength of the musical counterculture, as well as its claims to authenticity, derived from the position of 'musical counterculturalists (who) acted as if the outside world did not exist' (p. 219).