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Oriented for a general reading audience, this book gives a unique and rare perspective on the KGB "special operations" in Soviet Ukraine, which targeted especially the USA and Canada, using issues related to Soviet Ukrainian identity and cultural diplomacy of Soviet Ukraine after Stalin's death in 1953 until the perestroika of the 1980s. Concentrating on the period of the Cold War after Stalin and cominbing the counterintelligence documents from the KGB archive in Kyiv, Ukraine, with the official KGB correspondence and reports to the political leadship of Soviet Ukraine, this book offers an experimental view of the political and cultural history of relations between Soviet Ukraine and "capitalist America" through the prism of KGB operations against the US and Canada. Written from a "hidden" perspective of KGB operations from 1953 to the end of the 1980s, this book covers intelligence and counter-intelligence operations and the active measures of the KGB, but also various problems of anti-American cultural campaigns in Soviet Ukraine, sponsored by the KGB, involving the issues of cultural consumption, knowledge production, youth culture and national identity. Using carefully researched archive materials, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students of KGB operations, the Cold War, counterintelligence and political and cultural history of the relations between Soviet Ukraine and the United States and Canada, and a role of cultural consumption in this history.

Introduction: Back in the USSR : the "glory days" of late socialism, fascination with the West, identities, and scholars -- The closed rocket city of Dniepropetrovsk -- Anti-Soviet crimes, poetry, and problematic nationalism, 1960-1968 -- The campaign against the novel Sobor and the end of the national literary revival -- The first wave of music from the West : the consumption of jazz -- Beatlemania, shocking blue, and the Ukrainian cossacks -- Sources of rock music consumption -- Western adventure stories and Ukrainian historical novels : problems of the homogenization of Soviet culture -- Crimes from the West : Westerns, the Mafia, and crime films -- Idiocy and historical romance from the West : comedy and historical films -- The democratization of rock music consumption -- Popular religiosity in the Dniepropetrovsk region : cultural consumption and religion -- Taming pop music consumption : from "Tantsploshchadka" to discotheque -- The Komsomol magazine Rovesnik and the ideology of pop music consumption -- Antipunk campaigns, antifascist hysteria, and human rights problems, 1982-1984 -- Tourism, cultural consumption, and Komsomol business -- Conclusion: "Between Moscow and L'viv" : the closed city as an ideological failure of late socialism