Self-Made Boats and Social Self-Management

Abstract

This article begins with the heroic stories former-Leningrad residents tell about making their own outdoor tourist gear out of illicitly obtained industrial materials. Reading these stories not as evidence of illicit circulation, but as expressions of ethical values, the author shows that they are united by common assumptions of generosity and argues that these assumptions cannot be understood through analytic frameworks concerned with private, acquisitive interest. Instead, she argues that they must be understood as the expression of an idiosyncratic Soviet property regime based on personal welfare that was not opposed to, but co-constitutive of, socialist property. Analyzing political statements, juridical arguments and media texts from the 1960s, the author shows that the 1961 Third Party Program reforms extended the juridical logic of personal property to personal ethical realms. Specifically, the Program demanded that people place their ethical obligations – to strive for overall greater good – above their formal obligations to follow the letter of the law. By framing necessary but unplanned transactions in the “a-legal” terms of “mutual aid,” this ethical stance helped the economy appear functional despite its endemic circulation problems.