CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Bratcher, Abigail |
|---|---|
| Title | Community Building on the Shop Floor: Emotions, Families, and a Comrades' Court in Khrushchev's Moscow |
| Summary | This thesis investigates the role of emotions in community building in a Khrushchev-era comrades' court in the First Moscow Kirov Watch Factory. One of the hallmarks of the Khrushchev era in Soviet history is the re-invigoration of volunteer local bodies of social control; tens of millions of citizens actively participated in druzhiny, women's councils, housing committees, and comrades' courts in republics across the Soviet Union. Historians over the decades and across the continents have debated the authenticity and efficacy of the Khrushchev-era spirit of civic-mindedness, or obshchestvennost', in Soviet society. In this paper, I take as my source base the transcripts of the comrades' court at the First Moscow Kirov Watch Factory to explore the nebulous realm suspended between state and society, public and private. I argue that, in practice, the workplace comrades' court shifted conversations of labor discipline to violations of the gender order in family life. The specific mechanisms of the comrades' court encouraged peer intervention into personal interactions beyond the factory walls; the factory, then, became a place to discuss abusive husbands, neglectful mothers, and alcoholism in the home. I use feminist affect theorists to understand how shame and love circulated in the court in an attempt to transform the biological family into a factory family. |
| Supervisor | Francisca de Haan |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/bratcher_abigail.pdf |
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