Revolutions per Minute

Revolutions per Minute offers the first comprehensive, cultural account of sound recording's impact on Soviet creative production. By examining how a variety of sound recording devices, formats, and experiences sparked major changes to concepts of authorship, attention, archive, and representation in the USSR, Matthew Kendall uncovers how Soviet writers and filmmakers gleaned inspiration from these tools when they forged new art for a new world. Through an analysis of popular Soviet literature and films that draws connections to voice memos, ethnographic field recordings, listener surveys, and the burgeoning recording industry, Revolutions per Minute foregrounds sound recording as a legible and important technique of Soviet modernity.

Across fifty years of examples, Kendall demonstrates that sound recording offered novel pathways through the contradictions of Soviet life, thanks to its paradoxical ability to objectively capture the world and remake it at the same time. Revolutions per Minute thus expands the boundaries of analysis for Soviet literature and cinema, and by making space for failure, imprecision, and incoherence, Kendall highlights an overlooked dimension of art and technology's intersection in the Soviet Union.