Singing Off the Road to Life: The Threat of Sonic Delinquency in the Early Soviet Union

Abstract During the New Economic Policy, Bolshevik activists and the public alike shared a fixation on singing criminals and young delinquents. It saturated stories of criminality and moral or social reform, from newspapers to sociological literature and even one of the first Soviet sound films. Some activists described public singing and noisemaking as a counterrevolutionary struggle waged by the soldiers of the urban street, hooligans, and besprizorniki . Others ventriloquized these delinquent youth in their own melodrama narratives. This article examines the role of singing and noisemaking in narratives of criminality and reformation in the 1920s, revealing how the condemnation of street song was a result of the growing importance of music and the audible environment to socialist construction. The crisis of besprizornost ′ and hooliganism was a phenomenon shaped by the increased reach of radio, loudspeakers in public spaces and workplaces, and organized mass demonstrations of singers performing newly‐composed Soviet songs. In the midst of the concurrent public fad for songs that romanticized criminal lifestyles, the sonic delinquent “counterrevolution” was revealed to be public ambivalence to the Soviet project as it was being staged through sound.