ABSTRACT
The claim that dissent had disappeared in the former Soviet Union through the efforts of the regime, particularly during the Stalin era and in the late Brezhnev years, has been discredited. Civil society continued throughout the Soviet era to exercise the methods of coded criticism: modestly deviating from the system. It has been made explicit that the industrial Nomenklatura responded in part to the structural changes that took place in the West, but it is not accurate to suggest that purely technological factors and material developments in the international arena led directly to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In retrospect, the nature of unofficial Soviet rock and its relation to poetry, literature and philosophy, coupled with its intuitive function, attracted specific acts that contravened the safeguards imposed by the omnipotent and omnipresent Soviet system. Western rock music contributed to the popular conception within the Soviet Union of a mythical Western utopia.
