Deborah Field’s book explores the patterns of love and family life in the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev (1954–1964). While it is an archive-based historical study, it is in many ways inspired by a sociological discussion and contributes to a scholarly debate, very lively since the end of the 1980s and reaching an apogee in the late 1990s, concerning the public privacy of socialist societies. Borrowing the concept of public sphere elaborated by Jürgen Habermas and revised in a frequently quoted book edited by Jeff Weintraub, the author pursues the discussion inaugurated by other scholars, including Vladimir Shlapentokh, Oleg Kharkhordin, Katerina Gerasimova, Susan Reid, and Svetlana Boym, who explored private life in Russia from the perspective of the public sphere. The originality of the present monograph is that it is devoted specifically to the Khrushchev era, a brief moment in Soviet history which marked a turning point in political and everyday life. While the thaw experienced during that period has recently attracted the attention of historians and sociologists alike, there are as yet few publications on the social history of that period.
Field’s study is based on several types of source, all of them in Moscow. The author consulted the archives of ministries, educational institutions, plants, councils, and courts, analysed publications on love in newspapers, journals, and propaganda literature, and also in 1993–1994 conducted oral interviews with Muscovites from different social milieus.
The first two chapters are devoted to an analysis of the essential elements of the social context of the 1950s and 1960s: communist morality as an official ideology regulating private life, and crowded housing conditions. The author proposes an original interpretation of the purposes and functioning of that communist morality, a Bolshevik invention somewhat forgotten during the time of Stalin and reinvented during the thaw. The Stalinist system was built on the foundation of mass enthusiasm, backed by fear of repression, while the political turn of the mid-1950s presupposed new patterns of mass mobilization. During the process of de-Stalinization, Soviet society had to develop modes of functioning other than terror and totalitarian control. The author insists that under Khrushchev Soviet society had no major mobilization potential. Since terror and fear were no longer used, and capitalist incentives did not exist either, it was not easy to mobilize the population, which suffered from poverty and poor living conditions. Deborah Field shows that the communist morality, this code of behaviour of the builder of communism, was nothing more than an unfortunate attempt to create an alternative system of values for postwar Russia. It was an instrument of social regulation and it served to offer a new explanation for the communist project.
The purpose of that ethical code was to mobilize the entire society to work hard. The private life of the Soviet people as such did not really interest the engineers of that society, neither in the 1920s and 1930s nor in the 1960s, but they considered it necessary to channel the emotions, feelings, interests, sexual behaviour, and romantic codes of the working masses in the right direction. The rules of the communist morality of the 1960s were rather simple and conservative: a good Soviet man and woman had to be wise, and be able to control their emotions. Family life with children was considered the only suitable form of expression of love and desire. Soviet men and women were to be modest in their aesthetic demands, in their appearance, and in their behaviour.
In reality, Soviet people, tired of living in difficult conditions and overcrowded apartments, were more and more sceptical about the postulates of communist morality, and tended to be more and more interested in privacy, despite the fact that they were supposed first and foremost to be oriented to the common good. Soviet literature and the cinema were witnesses to that longing for intimacy and subjectivity. The party ideologists and local officials had to respond effectively to the demands of the population. To satisfy the expectations of the population, they invented and promoted new rituals related to life-cycle events, and some of those inventions gained in popularity. For example, the wedding rituals dating back to that time are today valorized by post-Soviet citizens. In general, the “privatization” of the social life of society started in the 1950s, and continued into the first decade of the present century. The repudiation of all that was “communal” and part of the “common good” which is typical of the post-Soviet population also took root at that time.
The author’s careful examination of official ideology, of artistic representations, and of the institutional records of everyday life results in a critique of the idea supported by some authors of a sharp distinction and separation in the USSR between all that was unofficial or private and all that was official or public. Field argues that “this period was characterized by a fluid relationship between the public and private spheres, between state and society” (p. 102). She shows that the interactions between Soviet ideology and everyday life were multiple and multidimensional. The population used the cornerstones of the hypocritical state discourse to defend their private interests; for example, in the court they manipulated the postulates of communist morality. On the other hand, they despised that ideology and disregarded it. That official morality was too abstract, while the relative liberty of the period of thawing stimulated reflection, discussion, and alternative lifestyles. As a result, the political and pedagogical authoritarianism was contested by the Soviet population, just as it had been in other countries too since the 1960s.
Field’s book is also interesting as a contribution to a historical study of emotions. Inspired by the constructionist approach to the study of emotions, it stresses the role of discourse in shaping the collective representations and practices of everyday life. So, the discourse on love – both the official (moralistic) and the artistic (romantic) – play an important role in the author’s analysis, especially in the third chapter. According to the moralistic discourse, love can only be positive and engenders responsibility and devotion. Romantic vision, represented in Soviet films and literature, describes the spontaneity and dangers of love, as well as the suffering, emotional struggles, and conflicts that it can bring. During the thaw under Khrushchev, subjectivity and individualism assumed an important place in Soviet culture. Field remarks that in the absence of real privacy in overcrowded apartments, people delineated the private through acts of the imagination. Small objects, poems, songs, and other reminiscences or traces of individual taste, choice, happiness, and grief constituted the imagined privacy.
Chapters 4 to 6 are devoted to the everyday realities of private and family life, including such issues as marriage, divorce, child-rearing, contraception, abortion, and medical assistance. Field examines the continuity with pre-war society and the changes under Khrushchev. Although the hypocrisy of the official discourse and its remoteness from the realities of private life were typical of the whole Soviet period, the Khrushchev era was marked by great efforts on the part of officials, experts, and professionals to solve the country’s growing social problems.
Field’s book is an original archive-based study, but it is surprisingly short for a historical monograph. The main chapters based on the author’s own archival research constitute around fifty pages, covering themes such as romantic love, family life, child-rearing, sexual practices, and divorce. As a consequence, many subjects are only briefly studied, and some important issues are scarcely touched upon at all. For example, while in her introduction and the first few chapters the author mentions that the construction of mass housing was an important particularity of the era, having a great impact on private life, the new patterns of living in individual flats are not investigated. This book can be seen rather as a useful synthesis of Soviet private life than as an exhaustive contribution to the study of its subject. Since it is well-written, retraces the main outline of the academic debate and also of the Soviet ideological debate on private life, and provides a solid bibliography and index, it will be useful for anyone looking for a synthesis on the subject.
A comparative dimension could have enriched the analysis. It would have been useful had Field put the results of her research into a broader context, comparing her findings with what historians and sociologists have written about private life and discourses on love in other countries, especially socialist countries, in the same period. While the universe of communist morality seems rather grotesque to us today, we may still wonder to what extent the Soviet case was original, and in what respect it was typical of the postwar world.
