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Paper short abstract:

This talk takes up the basic question of social theory: how do the denizens of modern industrial states relate to their collectivities? What mediates this relation? I unearth an imaginary in which the relations of modern strangers are not mediated by circulation but by ethical striving.

Paper long abstract:

This talk takes up the basic question of social theory: how do the denizens of modern industrial states relate to their collectivities? What mediates this relation? I unearth an imaginary in which the relations of modern strangers are not mediated by circulation but by ethical striving. Throughout the 2010s, many former Leningrad residents told me about how they had made DIY things – knives, flasks, knitting needles – from industrial scrap at work in “soviet times.” On closer inspection, I often found that these stories of “soviet times” described properly post-soviet actions, events that happened years after the USSR had collapsed. This popular historiography of “soviet” things thus appeared to be factually incorrect: to be nostalgic or sloppy. Turning to Stalin-era juridical documents, I saw that it was neither. In this talk, I show that this apparent chronological error conveys a deeper truth: the stories’ narrative focus on factually illegal but essentially victimless actions express a collectivist ethic that did indeed anchor socialist property relations, in theory and practice, with a formal demand to place ethical obligations to social collectives above a blind obedience to regulations and rules. This collectivist ethic is routinely overlooked by scholars of the Soviet Union, because it makes little sense in such liberal categories as public and private. I suggest that we see it in the terms by which it was legislated: those of a “sacred and inviolable” commons of socialist property, and citizens’ “personal” rights to that common field.