Public and Private Matters in Comrades’ Courts under Khrushchev

Abstract

The theory of Soviet democracy based on Marxist-Leninist ideology did not recognize a clear distinction between public and private spheres. Because Soviet authorities expected their citizens to share the fundamentally common values of working people, those authorities also expected their citizens not to hold private world views that differed from officially sanctioned values.1 However, this did not preclude the reality of a private sphere in the Soviet Union. When the authorities and other citizens overlooked and did not intervene in one’s life, there would be a de facto private sphere. Many authors have pointed to the existence of private elements of life in Soviet history, even though socialist ideology never welcomed privacy.2 Some authors tried to divide Soviet life in a more sophisticated way because they thought that applying the liberal categories of public and private to Soviet Russia was inappropriate.3 Kharkhordin distinguished between personal life (lichnaia zhizn’) and private life (chastnaia zhizn’). The former did ‘not involve official organizations’ but was ‘subject to constant public gaze’, while the latter was ‘associated with corrupt behaviour per se.’ Although private life (chastnaia zhizn’) ‘was discursively assassinated’, later it ‘was reestablished … as the invisible sphere of the most intimate comportment’.4 If the private life emerged despite having been diminished, how was this possible and on what grounds?