The Informal Public in Soviet Society: Double Morality at Work

Abstract

THE concept of informal public is used here to designate the diversity of state-independent activities and interactions in late Soviet society. Segments of this informal sphere—which is different from the official public sphere—had begun to develop at the end of the 1950s. Unlike previous periods of Soviet history, when communication had been officially controlled or had taken place in the private “kitchen” setting, the Brezhnev era of stagnation provided public places for communication that escaped total control. The recent debates on the transformations in East Europe and Russia have made wide use of the concepts of public/private, civic culture, and civil society. These ideas have been major conceptual tools for sociological thinking on modernity in general. Since F. Toennis distinguished between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft and Durkheim claimed organic and mechanical solidarities, these concepts have shown how modernizing society differentiates into public and private realms, the boundaries of which are constantly shifting through the efforts of social actors. This means that each modern society, independent of its political regime and particular cultural patterns, develops its own public and private spheres with correspondingly different rules of the game. Researchers have identified two versions of the public realm in late Soviet society: the official public and the informal public. SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring 2002) The Informal Public in Soviet Society: Double Morality at Work BY ELENA ZDRAVOMYSLOVA AND VIKTOR VORONKOV Official public life and its relevant practices were controlled by party-state ideological norms and regulated by the relevant rules of communication and social integration as established by the state. Informal public life was regulated by the diversity of rules that will be referred to by the term unwritten or common law (which will be discussed later in the paper). The Official Public Realm and Kollektivist Practices The official public realm was the sphere of Soviet life regulated by official rules and controlled by the party-state bureaucracy. At the level of everyday life these were the rules of conduct and interaction in the Soviet kollektives (collectives). As the concentration camp was the model for totalitarianism for H. Arendt, so for us is the Soviet kollektive a model—an ideal type—of the Soviet official public. Oleg Kharkhordin provides an incisive analysis of the Soviet kollektive in its discursive representation. In his book, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices, Kharkhordin specifies the following rules of the game in the Soviet kollektives: mutual surveillance, collective correction, and selfrevelation . These techniques were invented to produce the true kollektive as a unit of Soviet society and the relevant type of “Soviet individual.” Through the use of mutual surveillance and admonition, social control in the communist kollektive aimed at the development of the Soviet individual. Reports on comrades’ everyday life and discussions of personal lives at the assembly of comrades were core kollektivist activities and were considered important procedures in the construction of the Soviet individual . The individual in Soviet society was integrated into kollektives . It should be noted that the kollektive was the name given only to the specific type of social integration that intentionally followed ideologically approved goals. The practically oriented theories of the Soviet kollektive were developed by Soviet pedagogical science beginning in the 1920s 50 SOCIAL RESEARCH (one of the main proponents was A. Makarenko), as well as in Soviet psychology and social psychology throughout all of Soviet history (see, for example, Etkind, 1997). The official organizational principle of the Soviet kollektive was democratic centralism , which presumed the following rules of subordination: subordination of the minority to the majority, subordination of lower organizational bodies to higher bodies, election from bottom to top, accountability from top to bottom. Along with the working unit, the family was another version of the kollektive, since it could be penetrated by party-state regulations . Illustrative of the kollektivist character of the Soviet family was the dependence of one’s career on family status (Tchouikina, forthcoming 2002) and the appeals of spouses (mainly women) to the enterprise party committees to restore and repair family relationships. Both working life and family life were subjected to state-inspired observation and control. Thus we see work and family kollektives as...