Monitored Selves: Soviet Women’s Autobiographical Texts in the Khrushchev Era

Abstract

The late 1950s and 1960s saw an extraordinary boom in Soviet memoir and autobiographical writing. In 1967 (the 50th anniversary of Soviet power) more than 5000 titles of memoir books, brochures and articles were published.¹ The Soviet women’s autobiographical sketches I am interested in were an important part of this boom. These vospominaniya or ocherki are collected in anthologies (sborniki) consisting of short narratives — each usually five to ten pages long — and referring to specific events. They are stories about heroic women, Russian and of other nationalities, fighting for a ‘bright future’, compiled as pieces of information (svedeniya) about the emancipation of Soviet women by the party/state. Such collections of sketches were published in 1959, 1963, 1968, 1975 and also in 1983. The rapid growth of this literature was considered an effect of social-historical and political circumstances:² it was perceived as a vital, indeed revolutionary, new literary-documentary form associated with moral and spiritual renewal. According to N. I. Glushkov, the development of the genre was dictated by the cultural-historical experience of the new society. ‘The acknowledgement of the strength of the word’, he writes, ‘naturally accompanied people’s strivings to use it as an ideological weapon to influence their contemporaries’ way of thinking.