Authors

Discussion

The collective diary was used in Soviet pedagogy as a tool for youth upbringing and collective development; in today’s terms, it was seen as one of the instruments for creating proper Soviet subjects. The genre quickly expanded beyond the pedagogical experiments and became popular among the Soviet youth, who perceived it more as a kind of pastime activity and an opportunity to leave memories of happy school and university times for the future. In my presentation, I will dwell on one of the late Soviet collective diaries preserved in the Museum of the History of Education in Novosibirsk City and the Novosibirsk Region – the collective life-writing kept by a group of ten graders from the School N 49 of the Novosibirsk city in 1968-1969. Appealing to the diary and several accompanying documents donated to the museum by one of the authors, I will show how the collective diary simultaneously captured the late Soviet coming-of-age experience – and reinforced the official ideological discourses, which shaped how this experience was supposed to look like. Using the case of the diary, I demonstrate how the teenagers in the USSR could replicate and reinterpret the state ideology to navigate adolescence and express themselves.