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theses

Among the first histories of Perestroika, this dissertation traces late Soviet reform from the election of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 through the Soviet collapse in 1991. It reconstructs the imaginary horizons of reformers who saw Perestroika as a response to a pervasive moral crisis, signaled by alienation in the workplace and ennui in society at large. Gorbachev set out to address the crisis by transforming the Soviet population, turning each lethargic person into an actively engaged citizen. In this way, reformers followed in the footsteps of their predecessors, attempting once and for all to create the new Soviet person. This dissertation brings the discussion of Soviet subjectivities to the late Soviet period by showing how central the vision of socialist man was to the design of Perestroika and by delving into the consequences, intended as well as unintended, of the push for reform. The Party state foresaw letter writing as one of the central means of activating the population. From the early Soviet period, the practice of public letter writing distinguished a person as an actively engaged citizen. During Perestroika, citizens used the letter not only to make demands on the state, but to wrestle with their own moral worth in Soviet society. This study delves into previously untapped archives of public letters—a document that became a symbol of reform. In contrast to scholarship that reads public letters as the unfettered expression of the vox populi, this study interprets them in the context of the institutional, social, and political forces that produced them and shaped their meaning. Read in this way, public letters provide an opportunity to explore the mechanisms of popular engagement and subjectivization. The sources show that Soviet citizens under Gorbachev were not defined primarily by apathy or opposition to the state, but were acutely attuned to Soviet politics and actively engaged in a shared effort to improve the workings of the socialist project. The strictly historical methodology employed here resists teleological readings of the period, situates actors in their time, recreates the open-ended historical horizons of the reform project, and takes into view the mostly Soviet and Russian precedents that informed the architects of reform. In so doing, this dissertation challenges studies of Perestroika that view reform as the start of a transition towards liberal capitalism. Beyond Russia and the Soviet Union, this reading of the late Soviet period raises new questions for the study of revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 concerning the extent to which socialist notions of ‘man’ shaped emerging political agendas. This study also speaks to research on democratic development at the end of the Cold War, offering a reminder of the multiple models that guided global political change.

ETD_8095

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Courtney Doucette

doi:10.7282/T3M90CJH

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.