In Search of the Soviet Reader: The Kosygin reforms, sociology, and changing concepts of Soviet society, 1964-1970 (original) (raw)

2013, Cahiers du Monde russe

After the fall of Khrushchev and the introduction of the Kosygin reforms, Soviet newspapers, which had previously had their print runs set centrally, were placed on a commercial footing. To maximise sales, journalists needed more accurate information about readers and enlisted the services of sociologists to help them. This article, which focuses on the youth newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda, looks at the consequences of journalists’ brief flirtation with the social sciences, both in terms of how journalists understood readers, and how it affected their representation of Soviet society. While some journalists saw a need to reorient the paper, others resisted the sociologists’ findings, either because of confusion over the identity of the ‘mass reader’, or because some considered it more important to educate and transform readers’ tastes and opinions. Nevertheless, sociology did have a more lasting effect. The article argues that a sociological ‘aesthetic’ took hold, owing much to the idea that an era of ‘developed socialism’ required a sober examination of a changing society, rather than a fixation on romantic heroes. Focusing on the paper’s ‘Social Portrait’ series, which used sociological data to find the most ‘ordinary’ Soviet worker in various professions, the article argues that this new aesthetic may have succeeded in describing the values of the new ‘Soviet way of life’, but it failed to resolve the question of how the country was to move forward in a post-heroic age.