Authors

Discussion

In this paper, I look into discursive tools and cultural concepts used to navigate the transition from childhood to adulthood in a diary kept by Ivan Khripunov, a teenager from the south of Russia, in 1937–1941. I analyse how he constructed various images of desirable future, combining the conceptual framework of kul’turnost’, visual codes of Soviet cinema and ideologized interpretations of literary characters offered by Stalinist school to master different and often contradictory roles of a son in a peasant family, a high school student, a komsomolets, and a blue-collar worker.

On Ivan’s example, I demonstrate that social and cultural characteristics often regarded as pertaining to different youth groups, children from well-educated urban families (continuous schooling, reading as a primary leisure activity, and career aspirations in creative professions) and rural young people (upward mobility, vocational training, and indoctrination through “cultured” practices) could entwine within an individual biography. As Ivan assembled his multi-faceted identity, he consistently interpreted the lack of practical skills such as the ability to interact with Soviet bureaucracy or lead an urban lifestyle in an industrialized society as a sign of an intrinsic personality flaw which might prevent him from joining the socialist collective. Therefore, his “self-forging” efforts were paradoxically directed at becoming a version of the Soviet citizen Sheila Fitzpatrick described as a “survivor.” The analysis of Ivan’s self-exploration allows me to question the incompatibility of the revisionist social historical view of the Soviet “pragmatic self” and the post-revisionist concept of ideologized self-fashioning focused on the relations between identity and ideology. Ivan’s experience of adulting challenges the existing understanding of different modes of exercising “Sovietness.”