Sergei I. ZhukRock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center. 2010. Pp. xvii, 440. $65.00

Sergei I. Zhuk's nuanced study offers a welcome addition to the growing literature on what used to be regarded as an unvariegated era of Soviet history bracketed by the liberalizing reforms of Nikita Khrushchev and the turbulence of perestroika. Zhuk's main purpose is to explore the connections between identity formation, ideology, and cultural consumption. His analysis offers valuable insight on the cultural and political milieu in which the post‐Soviet Ukrainian leadership came of age, and on the complex and contradictory ways that Soviet ideologists lost the cultural Cold War with the youth of a strategically vital Ukrainian city.

As an important center of the Soviet military‐industrial complex and the space program, Dniepropetrovsk (formerly Ekaterinoslav) was closed to foreigners in 1959 and became a magnet for a highly skilled and well‐paid workforce. Although these engineers and scientists could not travel abroad,...