Communist morality and meanings of private life in post-Stalinist Russia, 1953-1964.

Abstract

During the Khrushchev era, Soviet citizens faced formidable physical constraints on privacy and an official ideology, communist morality, which denied a distinction between public and private spheres. By examining controversies about sex, love, marriage and divorce, and child rearing, this dissertation reveals the ways in which, despite these obstacles, people defined and defended a distinctly Soviet conception of private life. Drawing upon the theoretical insights provided by scholarship on gender, I emphasize the ways in which seemingly natural distinctions are culturally and historically constructed. Thus my dissertation argues that the analytical categories of public and private, which originated in theories of Western society, must be applied to Soviet history in a critical way; the content of these categories should be examined rather than assumed. I demonstrate that the Soviet definition of the private consisted of two components. The first was a complex of complicated, highly emotional human relationships; the second was individual interests, based not on the possession of commodities, as in bourgeois society, but on the struggle to fulfill personal aspirations rather than social goals. This unofficial conception of the private proved to be resilient; state efforts to supplant it only increased its appeal. It provided Soviet citizens with a source of meaning and satisfaction, a focus for aspirations, and a way to evade some of the demands of an overbearing state. The dissertation is organized thematically. In chapter one I analyze the history, principles, and institutional implementation of communist morality and explain several key concepts. In chapter two, I discuss living conditions and the absence of physical privacy. Chapter three examines attempts to regulate sexuality; chapter four describes conflicting discourses about romantic love. Chapters five and six focus on divorce and child rearing respectively, detailing efforts to instill officially sanctioned attitudes and the paradoxical results that ensued. The dissertation draws on a wide variety of sources: government policy and laws; journals and newspapers; party and academic writings; archival materials, such as court records; literary sources; and twenty oral history interviews, which I conducted in Russia during the 1993-94 academic year.