Abstract
For the past decade, the late Soviet period from the Khrushchev to Brezhnev eras has been a popular topic among historians. Many scholars have focused on the Soviet authorities’ new policies, several forms of civic initiatives and the transformative relations between state and society during that period. Among the prominent features of those years were a dynamic political and social atmosphere due to Stalin’s death in 1953, multiplying amnesties, and criticism of Stalin in 1956 and 1961.1 This chapter contributes to research of the period by focusing on the revival of obshchestvennost’, which was energetically promoted by the authorities, and by examining the people’s vigilante brigades that emerged just after the 21st Communist Party Congress of 1959 as a case study of obshchestvennost’.
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For example, Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2007)
Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)
Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)
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N. P. Iablokov, Narodnye druzhiny na strazhe obshchestvennogo poriadka, Moscow, 1963, p. 4.
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 358.
Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 102–124.
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© 2015 Kiyohiro Matsudo
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Matsudo, K. (2015). Obshchestvennost’ in the Struggle against Crimes: The Case of People’s Vigilante Brigades in the Late 1950s and 1960s. In: Matsui, Y. (eds) Obshchestvennost’ and Civic Agency in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137547231_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137547231_8
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