Lenin in the Groove

This essay takes a media historical approach to interrogate celebrations of Vladimir Lenin's centenary in the Soviet Union, during which both the state recording company Melodiya and the monthly journal Krugozor, an educational magazine with companion recordings, reevaluated the relative merits and shortcomings of sound recordings in spreading socialist ideology. The need to create recorded materials for domestic audiences as well as socialist and capitalist countries around the world prompted a series of debates over how best to memorialize Lenin's voice and re-historicize the sonic environment of his time. Lenin's voice carried with it substantial historical, political, and cultural power. But his earliest recordings-those made during his lifetime-were of poor quality and even poorer intelligibility. As such, attempts to restore and remaster Lenin's voice necessarily involved the Soviet imagination, especially as the generation of those who knew him personally aged (and died). This tension-between creation and preservation, between artifice and authenticity-would preoccupy sound engineers and producers in the years leading to the centennial. Using archival sources alongside LPs and flexidiscs, this essay traces the connections between voice, format, and mythology across the Soviet epoch and proposes a new understanding of socialist realism in audio media

Genealogy · Groove (engineering · Engineering · Geology · History · Mechanical Engineering · Political Economy and Marxism

• Digital Tradition

  Eliot Bates•Digital Tradition•2016

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