Laboratories of the Soviet self: Diaries from the Stalin era

The dissertation is an inquiry into the self of the Stalin era. It investigates self-narratives and processes of individual self-fashioning in a broad range of diaries from the 1930s. The dissertation shows the diary of the Stalin period to be a widespread literary genre. It links the popularity of the diary in the Soviet system to the promotion by the Bolshevik government of a fundamentally modern concept of the subject.;In its efforts to mold the population into active and "conscious" revolutionary subjects, the Soviet regime employed a wide range of subjectivizing practices. Specifically it promoted the writing of diaries as means of self-regulation and self-perfection. The Soviet program of creating the New Man and the practices employed by Soviet activists to mold individuals' selves are discussed in chapters 1 and 2 of the dissertation. Chapters 3 to 7 investigate actual diaries from the 1930s, showing how members of Soviet society applied onto themselves the revolutionary agenda of social purification. The central part of the dissertation is devoted to an analysis of four case studies which illustrate in great detail the operation of Soviet diaries as both records and instruments of self-transformation.;The dissertation highlights the degree and intensity of popular involvement in the Soviet project. Revolutionary narratives of transformation and purification decisively shaped the ways in which Soviets diarists wrote about themselves--or, more precisely, wrote their self. The dissertation also demonstrates how essential relationships of interiority were to the nature of the Stalinist self and the working of the Stalinist system as a whole. Soviet subjectivity was defined in terms of a quality of the soul--of the stage of development of an individual's subjective consciousness relative to the objective trajectory of history's unfolding. By exploring the collectivist ideal of individual self-realization in the Soviet 1930s, the dissertation challenges the utility of the liberal concept of an autonomous self, as well as of attendant distinctions between the public and private spheres, for our understanding of life in Stalinist Russia.