Worker Youth and Everyday Violence in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union

Abstract

The essay explores the implications of a new campaign launched by the Soviet authorities against violent youth behaviour, especially amongst working-class youngsters, after Stalin's death in 1953. Relying largely on official sources from the archives, newspapers and other publications, and also on personal sources such as interviews and memoirs, the study explores what the new campaign reveals about everyday working-class youth violence in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. The new initiative represented part of a broader Thaw-era endeavour to reinvigorate the attempt to construct a socialist version of modernity, specifically by reforming the population's everyday way of life, in a fashion perceived as helping to create model citizens, ‘New Soviet People’. The findings contribute to a recent re-evaluation of the Thaw as a time not only of liberalizing reforms, but also of new coercive elements. Further, working-class violence reveals the extent of class differences in the supposedly classless Soviet Union, with working-class youth behaviour departing from the official model of normative conduct, predicated upon middle-class standards. The article focuses on male violence in particular, providing a glimpse of a working-class masculinity that is at variance with the officially prescribed model of socialist masculinity. By showing the frequency of collective violence amongst young workers, the author also questions the official discourse's frequent depictions of collectivism as a panacea for delinquency. Nonetheless, this account does not equate worker violence with conscious opposition to the government. Instead, it positions such behaviour within a wider context of the traditional working-class male youth milieu.