• 2 Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours : Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (New York : C (...)
• 3 Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours, 42.

4The literature on illicit economies is decidedly skeptical of such claims of obtaining for “friends.” Ledeneva’s influential Economy of Favours (1998), for example, suggests that “blat,” the circumvention of formal distribution rules through informal social relationships, worked by what she calls a “‘misrecognition game’ – in which blat remains obscured by the rhetoric of friendship, etc. in one’s own case, but could easily be recognised in the case of someone else.”2 But the “amazing happiness” of the mathematician’s narrative is a strongly positive emotion : a heroic feeling of social greatness. It is hardly the sheepish attempt to disguise mercantile interest with “altruistic motives of friendly help.”3 Perhaps more importantly, the mathematician’s narrative framing of having obtained the nylon air filters for friendship is hard to write off as “misrecognition” because the value of this heist itself depends on subsequent personal, friendly, communal relations. A bag full of industrial air‑filters is useless to someone without polyurethane – a material intended for sound isolation in tractors and tanks, slabs of which were cut in half lengthwise with an electrified wire and used in backpack construction (fig 2) ; it is useless without the technical skills and knowledge of how to make such a backpack ; and it is most obviously useless without a team of fellow mountaineers with whom to go into the mountains.

• 4 Douglas Rogers, “Moonshine, Money, and the Politics of Liquidity in Rural Russia,” American Ethnolo (...)

5When people told me stories of having made gear from materials obtained through illicit purchase, their narratives typically stressed the particular social details of the exchanges, rather than the calculation of benefits and costs. Most often, these exchanges involved bottles of alcohol, “small cash,” or “the price of a bottle” : material measures of value that, as Douglas Rogers eloquently illustrates, are hard to disentangle from other social relations into the mere quantifiable settlement of debts.4 Thus Lesha, the man who is depicted in figure 1 approaching the kayak in order to free it, explained that he could easily get medical alcohol from the hospital where he worked as a medical examiner, and that he once traded a liter of it for two ax‑heads, made for him at the Baltiiskii plant :

• 5 For the history of the development of lightweight alloys, including duralumin, for the Soviet airpl (...)

8Duralumin is an industrial metal, an aluminum‑based alloy, whose lightweight and non‑brittle qualities make it most useful for constructions that need to be light and strong, like airplanes.5 Or like kayaks. To form the carcass of the above‑pictured boat, lengths of duralumin pipes were fixed together with snaps made by boiling down polyethylene. This carcass was then covered with a lining of polystyrene foam (see figure 5), sourced at the Kirovsk plant, where it was intended to be used as soundproofing material for tractors and tanks. “We just took it from the warehouses,” explained the mathematician, whose story of “amazing happiness” is quoted above : “Didn’t strip any live tanks or anything like that.” Covering the polystyrene‑lined carcass is a skin made from a tarp of a TransAvto long‑haul truck, which gear constructors recall buying from truckers for a bottle or small cash, or just cutting off the trucks. The hydrodynamics of this particular boat were calculated at the Ioffe Physics Institute, which was also the source of tetrahydrofuran, a chemical used to glue together sections of truck tarp to form the kayak’s outer membrane.

• 6 Notably, DIY gear construction guides published after the 1960s often suggest the use of industrial (...)
• 7 P.I. Lukoianov, Samodel´noe turisticheskoe snariazhenie [Self‑made tourist gear] (M. : Fizkul´tura (...)

9This boat is quite representative of late‑Soviet Leningrad self‑made kayaks because, as I mentioned above, quality base models for such boats were outlined in officially published DIY guides. Indeed, such guides often recommended the use of explicitly industrial materials like duralumin, titanium and tetrahydrofuran.6 Figure 6 reproduces a diagram from the book Self‑Made Touring Gear detailing kayak construction. The caption to this diagram reads : “For carcass construction (pict. 85), it is best to use duralumin tubes D16T or D1T, with 1‑mm‑thick walls and the diameters : keelson – 25, stem – 22.”7

• 8 L.B. Direktor, Snariazhenie dlia gornogo turizma [Gear for alpine tourism] (M. : Profizdat, 1987).

10In the summer of 2012, I met with Boris Lazarevich Kashevnik, author of several belay devices described in the book Gear for Alpine Touring,8 and specifically of the “bukashka” belay device, versions of which, Kashevnik told me, were used in the 1982 Soviet Everest expedition (fig. 7). I asked Kashevnik whether the book was ever condemned for advocating the illegal appropriation of resources. But the question surprised him :

• 9 Thus the distinction between factory‑made, self‑modified and self‑made was a gradual one ; and inde (...)

11There were several factory‑made models of kayak sold through state sporting goods stores by the late 1980s, and former Leningrad kayakers recall that, at least in Moscow and Leningrad, most everyone who wanted such a boat could find a way to get one. They also recall that these factory‑made boats were heavy and unwieldy, good for paddling around lakes but not good for white water, and that they had to be modified for serious trips. But neither these self‑modified factory‑made boats, nor their technically superior self‑made counterparts, were excluded from officially supported tourist institutions : both kinds of boats could be taken on officially organized boat trips, financed through enterprise trade‑union organizations, and both could be used to earn merit distinctions in highly regimented Soviet sport.9 Likewise, the climbing gear that was handcrafted at work and smuggled out past enterprise pass‑gates could be used in state‑financed base camps, to which subsidized tickets were distributed through climbing clubs at institutes, enterprises and universities. Boris Lazarevich himself was an instructor at such a base camp for a number of years. Thinking of people organizing their own mountaineering trips, he turned to his wife and started laughing :

• 11 Gregory Grossman, “The ‘Second Economy’ of the USSR,” Problems of Communism, 26, 5 (Sept. 1977) : 2 (...)
• 12 Georgy Malenkov, 1941. Cited in Joseph Berliner, Factory and Manager in the U.S.S.R. (Cambridge, MA (...)

12How can we understand the production of such things ? It does not easily fit into the dominant theoretical frameworks through which illicit transactions in Soviet‑style economies have been understood. It is not, for example, easily framed through the concept of a “second economy,” which Gregory Grossman famously defines as “all production and exchange activity that fulfills at least one of the two following tests : a) being directly for private gain ; b) being in some significant respect in knowing contravention of existing laws.”11 The self‑made gear I describe above seems to fail the first of the “second economy” tests : speakers insist that it was not made for private gain. The overwhelming majority of my interlocutors said that they made gear for themselves and for their friends, and that maybe they swapped gear, but that they did not construct gear to turn a profit. And while I often heard people joke about pilfering materials to make personally useful things, these stories typically framed such apparent theft as collective actions, victimless crimes, and transactions necessitated by the material needs of some particular social collective. Soviet enterprises are, after all, well‑known for spoiling the resources they had managed to hoard, and Soviet leaders themselves had long publicly lamented that “in many enterprises, equipment, raw materials, processed materials, tools, things for which our industry has a desperate need, are piled up wherever they happen to fall, spoil, rust, become useless.”12 Sometimes, such ostensibly misused material could be put to rational use through personally brokered transactions, which were sometimes perfectly legal. And so self‑made gear also fails the second “second economy” test : it was not necessarily made in knowing contravention to rules, regulations and laws.

• 13 See Janos Kornai, Economics of Shortage (Amsterdam : North Holland Publishing Company, 1980) ; Kath (...)

13Notorious for generating material shortages, the centrally planned Soviet economy drove actors to hoard materials.13 Hoarding itself exacerbated shortage, but it also generated stockpiles of surplus material. And while most of the stories I heard about self‑made gear certainly involved “some knowing contravention of existing laws,” it is critical to point out that speakers did not categorically differentiate between legal and illegal transactions : in both cases, narrative stress fell on effectively tapping unused stockpiles through personal relations, and on putting these stockpiles to a practical, often communal use. Indeed, on closer examination, some of these irregular transactions turned out to also be perfectly legal. Thus Ivan, a former‑Leningrad climber and present‑day entrepreneur, explained how he had once made a down jacket for high‑altitude climbing : he said that he happened to be working near a feather‑and‑down factory,

• 14 Foundational to this critique is Ludwig von Mises’ Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonweal (...)
• 15 F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review, 35, 4 (1945) : 524.
• 16 Gregory Grossman, “Historic Role of the Soviet Underground,” in Stephen F. Cohen, Andrew Schwartz, (...)

16Conceptual frameworks like the “second economy” cannot help us understand such transactions, because these frameworks are fundamentally concerned with private interest. Indeed, this question – of private interest, private property and private spheres – forms one of the dominant scholarly puzzles concerning Soviet‑style societies. Liberal economists have long held that a “socialist” economy, based on central planning rather than privately interested market exchange, is not possible in principle. Lacking privately motivated exchange, such an economy would lack free market prices ; and, without market prices, it would have no mechanism by which to determine the most effective solutions.14 If such an economy were possible at all, it would certainly be inefficient, because the central planner would never be able to account for its endless contextually specific complexity, for questions that can only be resolved by the “man on the spot.”15 Indeed, there is no scholarly disagreement about the fact that the Soviet economy did not function as planned. The fact that it managed to function at all, despite its endemic distribution problems, is often noted to have had much to do with the irregular transactions people performed to keep things circulating, and specifically with the “USSR’s shadow economy and the rest of its underground – misappropriation, corruption, organized crime” that existed in the fertile shadows of command.16

• 17 David Crowley, “Warsaw Interiors : The Public Life of Private Spaces, 1949‑65,” in Susan E. Reid an (...)
• 18 Deborah Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York : Peter Lang, 2 (...)
• 19 Susan Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” Differences, 13, 1 (January 1, 2002) : (...)
• 20 Ibid.

17Corollary to the illicit persistence of privately‑motivated market exchange, scholars have noted citizens’ private spheres persisting “despite ideological prohibition”17 ; have analyzed the “determination of Soviet citizens to define and defend private life”18 ; have aligned the socialist notions of public and private with “a discursive opposition between the victimized ‘us’ and a newly powerful ‘them’ who ruled the state.”19 Such analyses of socialist private spheres, like analyses of illicit socialist markets, tend to draw a distinction between private interests and public policy ; to focus, in other words, on how “the imperative to be honest and ethically responsible among those who counted as ‘us’ contrasted with the distrust and duplicity in dealings with ‘them’ and with the official world generally.”20 This assumed opposition is inherent to the definitively opposed concepts of public and private. But it occludes an important economic and ethical logic. This logic is that of the personal : a regime of ethics and property based on mutual aid and usufruct, rather than on acquisition and exchange.

• 21 Lewis Siegelbaum, “Introduction,” in Borders of Socialism : Private Spheres of Soviet Russia (New Y (...)

18In this article, I approach the well‑trodden field of centrally planned economies’ irregular transactions from this other, non‑private, angle. I propose that, if we take the institution of personal ownership seriously in its own right – instead of dismissing it as “a legitimizing cover for the acquisition of property that was private in all but name”21 – a particular a‑legal logic emerges : a logic whose ethical demands are not against the law, but beside it. Below, I examine the legal logic of personal ownership ; I show how the 1961 Third Party Program extended this legal logic to the ownership of immaterial personal ethical states ; and I suggest that this late‑Soviet valorization of ethics is key to understanding the above narratives of self‑made gear.

• 22 Michael Lambek, “Introduction,” in Ordinary Ethics : Anthropology, Language, and Action (New York : (...)
• 23 Charles Taylor, “The Person,” in Michael Carrithers and Steven Collins, eds., The Category of the P (...)
• 24 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Othe (...)

19My understanding of “ethics” draws broadly on what Michael Lambek calls “ordinary ethics” : I am concerned with the tacit evaluations of goodness that inform everyday practice. Taking “ethics to be fundamentally a property or function of action rather than (only) of abstract reason,”22 studies of “ordinary ethics” are fundamentally concerned with contextual, first‑person evaluation, and, in the end, with Aristotelian striving. In this article, I take this concern with ethical striving to solve an inverse problem. Performing a sort of archeology of ethics, I deduce the values for which speakers find it virtuous to strive by attending to how they valorously describe their past actions. Valorous narratives frame actions in positive terms : as something to be proud of. Reading such narratives with attention to how they depict irregular transactions, my aim is to locate the values that are held to be ethically determining : held to be “ends such that our not choosing them reflects on us rather than undermining their status as ends.”23 I am concerned, in short, with how people describe what they did. I am interested in deducing the concepts that speakers mobilize to narrate their irregular transactions proudly ; and, more broadly, interested in how people position themselves as ethically righteous, how they represent “their relation to [their real] conditions of existence.”24

• 25 See Olga Smolyak’s “Sovetskie nesuny [Soviet nesuny],” Otechestvennye zapiski, 1, 46 (2010) : 311‑3 (...)

20Historical epochs cannot, of course, be analyzed through memoirs. Speakers’ present‑day assumptions are bound to color their narratives of the past. But a virtue‑based analysis of oral history gives me a thread by which to trace an ethical platform that I then find supported in historical texts – late‑Soviet media accounts, juridical texts, political speeches and Party documents. Specifically, I note a curious overlap between how contemporary speakers ethically position themselves in narratives of irregular late‑Soviet transactions, and how authoritative late‑Soviet texts propose to decentralize administrative state control in favor of “social self‑management.” Unlike studies analyzing the practices of late‑Soviet filching – practices, by which theft was persecuted and by which workers made personally useful things25 – this article is concerned with ethics and narrative. I do not suggest that the speakers who claim to have been motivated by friendship and mutual aid were really thus motivated in practice ; nor do I suggest that speakers are deluded in such claims and were actually motivated by acquisitive interest. Indeed, different people may narrate the motivations behind one and the same action differently : a sympathetic person may explain an irregular transaction as a necessary action of mutual aid, an unsympathetic one may say that it was nothing more than selfish theft. What interests me in such descriptions is not whether such actions were truly as selfless (or selfish) as the speakers claim, but the fact that narrating an irregular action as socially necessary mutual aid makes it commendable. This interests me because this assumption – that helping others out of difficult situations is righteous, even if it involves factually illegal actions – is characteristic not only of former‑Leningrad residents’ stories about illicitly transacting around the state’s rules. It is also characteristic of the official late‑Soviet program of “social self‑management,” which advocated “comradely mutual aid” as a way of constructing the communist future, in which the law would become unnecessary and the state would wither away.

• 26 N.S. Khrushchev, “Kontrol´nye tsyfry razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR na 1959‑1965 gody [Contro (...)

21In 1959, Khrushchev declared that the “withering away” of state institutions would not leave society ungoverned : the death of the state would not be like the emptiness left behind after tree branches are stripped of their leaves, but “the development of socialist statehood into communist social self‑management.” The building of communism is a continuous process, to be achieved materially, by creating “complete abundance for the satiation of everyone’s needs,” and to be achieved morally, by perfecting “socialist labor relations [… to become] based on the comradely cooperation, friendship and mutual aid of all of society’s laborers.”26

• 27 Susan Buck‑Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe : The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambrid (...)
• 28 Evgenii Pashukanis, General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), quoted in Harold Berman, “Soviet Fami (...)
• 29 James Spindler and Harold J. Berman, “Soviet Comrades’ Courts,” Washington Law Review, 38, 842 (196 (...)
• 30 Berman, “Challenge of Soviet Law,” 235‑236.
• 31 Behind this declared state monopoly of socialist property lies the violent dispossession of citizen (...)

22The “withering away” of the state had been the ultimate goal of the Soviet political imaginary, its raison d’être, since the 1917 Revolution.27 But this ultimate goal was formulated in different ways at different times. Early‑Soviet jurists expected the ultimate liquidation of private property to give rise to a non‑legal order, in which “the withering away of the categories of bourgeois law – the categories themselves, and not this or that particular rule – can under no circumstances mean their replacement by some new categories of proletarian law.”28 Three decades later, Khrushchev’s proposal to develop socialist statehood into communist social self‑management supposed a very different juridical model : one in which there was “no essential conflict between the person and the society (or state), such as is suggested in the terminology of ‘private’ and ‘public’.”29 This essential conflict – between private and public – was resolved by the 1936 Stalin Constitution. Proclaiming “socialist property” to be the “sacred and inviolable basis of the Soviet order,” the Constitution guaranteed citizens’ personal rights within this state-led monopoly ; and on this new socialist basis, it created a new stability of laws, allowing for “the wholesale restoration of these ‘bourgeois’ institutions [of money, property, the family, criminal sanctions, the state, law]”.30 Specifically, along with the right to labor and rest, the right to vote and the right to social security, the Constitution guaranteed citizens the right to own, use and inherit “personal property,” as their rightfully earned share of the socialist whole.31

• 32 S.I. Vil´nianskii, ed., Sovetskoe grazhdanskoe pravo : uchebnik dlia iuridicheskikh shkol [Soviet c (...)
• 33 For a detailed analysis of this transformation, see Xenia Cherkaev, “Dostoinstvo lichnosti kak lich (...)
• 34 O.S. Ioffe, “Novaia kodifikatsiia sovetskogo grazhdanskogo zakonadatel´stva i okhrana chesti i dost (...)

23The right to such personal property was initially established in relation to obviously material things. The “basis of Soviet citizens’ personal property is socialist property,” juridical textbooks explain, and “the source of personal property is socialist labor. Each Soviet citizen, whether he works at a factory or at a plant, on a collective farm or at a social or government enterprise, participates in socialist production ; and this participation in the collective socialist production is the source of his personal property.”32 This logic was then extended to that immaterial property which, like authorship, is directly related to material relations. And then, in the early 1960s, it was extended to explicitly immaterial, moral spheres : to the protection of personal ethical states like honor and dignity.33 Guaranteeing the citizen’s right to “demand that society’s moral‑political evaluation of his person (lichnost´) be formed on the basis of the correct perception of what he had done and what he had not done,”34 the 1961 Foundations of Civil Jurisprudence decreed that personal ethical status was subject to legal protection by the logic of property law : just as personally owned property derived from and co‑constituted the entirety of socialist material relations, so did personal ethical states derive from and co‑constitute the evaluative framework of socialist morality.

• 35 Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia : A Study of Practices (Berkeley : Un (...)
• 36 Aleksandr Shishkin, Marksistskaia etika : khrestomatiia [Marxist ethics : a reader] (M : Izd. Insti (...)
• 37 Ibid.
• 38 Ibid, italics added.
• 39 Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 89.
• 40 Ibid, 294, 303.

24And all the while, the law did not evaluate subjects’ ethical states. It left such regulation to quasi‑juridical social collectives. As Oleg Kharkhordin details in his study of the Collective and the Individual in Russia, such kollektivs were a specifically Soviet institution of small‑group cohesion and social (self‑) surveillance, which became all‑prevalent in the 1960s, “spreading horizontal control throughout the whole body social.”35 It was only as a member of such a collective that a citizen could have his/her ethical status protected by the new civil code, because “personal honor is indivisible from the honor of the collective,” as the 1961 textbook of Marxist Ethics explains : “The feeling of honor, like the feeling of duty, can only grow and fortify within a collective, by accomplishing socially important tasks.”36 Such collectives were quasi‑juridical. Marxist Ethics gives examples of collectives united by employment, by their members’ shared obligation to manage socialist property at the “factory, enterprise, collective farm, military regiment.”37 But it also explains that “the Soviet person, regardless of the specific position he occupies, is always a member of some certain collective” and strives to help that collective “accomplish the tasks with which it is faced in a commendable way.”38 Indeed, the Soviet collective, the kollektiv, was defined not by the particular institution in which a group of people was collectively employed, but rather by the “internal system of relations of comradely cooperation and socialist mutual help” that arose between people working together to achieve a socially necessary socialist goal.39 And thus the “collectivization of life” that Kharkhordin notes to have created a “mega‑kollektiv called the Soviet people” in the 1960s was comprised not only of formal, enterprise‑based collectives, but also of informal collectives within those formal collectives, and of “informal collectives outside the official terrain altogether.”40 In all cases, these social entities were understood to unite people striving to better society : in their formal employment positions as well as in their personal lives.

• 42 Over 4,600 people were found guilty of anti‑Soviet agitation between 1956 and 1960, nearly half of (...)
• 43 Khrushchev, “Kontrol´nye tsyfry,” 103.
• 44 For a discussion of the role that late‑Soviet quasi‑juridical social institutions played in the adm (...)
• 45 Ioffe, “Novaia kodifikatsiia,” 71.

26But Khrushchev and the other architects of the Third Party Platform did not simply “revive” the early‑Soviet intention to get rid of the state. They specifically proposed making legal administration unnecessary by letting personal ethical striving take over : by making social organizations take up the task of administrating society. The law, in this reform logic, is not abolished but out‑grown. The law is not wrong, just inadequate. Framing Soviet people as ethical subjects, the Third Party Platform encouraged them to take an active personal stake in furthering collective interests where the law fell short. By claiming – falsely – that political crimes were no longer committed in the Soviet Union,42 Khrushchev declared that such “unprecedented unity of the entire population’s political convictions”43 showed that society was ready to take over the state’s administrative tasks – from the organization of medical care and physical education to the prevention of crime. Implemented in a series of quasi‑juridical institutions,44 this call to de‑centralize social administration rested on the valorization of “Communist Morality” over and above the law. “Our country’s various legal codices are now complemented by the Moral Codex of the Builder of Communism, which is part of the [Third] CPSU Program,” the renowned jurist Olympiad Ioffe explains. “This document must become the fundamental law for Soviet people in their relationships with each other, with the state and with society.”45 And the demands of this document largely boil down to comradely mutual aid. As the 1963 Agitator’s Handbook explains :

• 47 Berliner, Factory and Manager in the U.S.S.R., 222.
• 48 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, Schedule A, vol. 33, Case 338/(NY) 1390. Male, 52, Gre (...)
• 49 HPSSS, Schedule A, vol. 19, Case 358. Male, 25, Great Russian, Mechanic.
• 50 HPSSS, Schedule A, vol. 27, Case 523. Male, 40, Byelorussian, Dispatcher (employee).
• 51 For a study of Stalin‑era hobby organizations, see William Odom, The Soviet Volunteers : Modernizat (...)
• 52 CPSU, Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union : Adopted by the 22nd Congress of the C. (...)
• 53 Eva Maurer, “Cold War, ‘Thaw’ and ‘Everlasting Friendship’ : Soviet Mountaineers and Mount Everest, (...)
• 54 Ibid : 495.

27Mutual aid – as an ethical demand – obviously predates the 1960s. Mutual aid is a human universal, a religious ideal, an Anarchist and Communist virtue, and an indispensable ethical stance for people living in a poorly planned, shortage‑ridden bureaucratic structure : where “the hard‑headed Soviet businessman,” as Joseph Berliner puts it, “cannot take the position that the laws are sacrosanct.”47 In the hundreds of personal oral histories collected by the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System shortly after World War II, speakers recall of their lives in the Stalin‑era Soviet Union that, “people have to help each other. […] We all worked together to falsify the reports ;”48 that, “those who drink vodka together are good friends and in their working relationship they are much more lenient towards one another ;”49 that, “often workers would come and beg for bread and I would give it to them and write is off under the name of waste, in Russian brak.”50 Valorizing comradely mutual aid as the way to build communism – as everyone’s ultimate goal – the Third Party Program aligned Soviet collectives’ formal social obligations with the everyday ethical stance upon which speakers relied to frame their irregular actions in socially righteous terms. Thus formulating the Soviet system’s ultimate aims in a believable way, the Program also diversified the methods by which citizens were encouraged to strive for those ultimate aims. While Stalin‑era voluntary social organizations motivated people to invest their leisure time and personal efforts in the state’s militaristic goals,51 their late-Soviet counterparts encouraged citizens’ own self‑realization by helping to “improve cultural services and recreation facilities for the working people ; encouraging physical training and sports,” with the goal of achieving the “all‑around harmonious development of the individual.”52 Publicist texts and specialized discourses quickly picked up the demands of the new Party Program : true summits were no longer taken by everyone’s unfaltering obedience to a hierarchical structure of command, but by the voluntary unification of many different individuals in one common cause. “In a complete reversal of the earlier Stalinist discourse on al´pinizm,” notes Eva Maurer in her study of Thaw‑era high‑altitude mountaineering texts, “mountaineering’s private aspect was now publicly staged, emphasizing a sense of community and friendship among individuals and downplaying political connotations.”53 But it is important to recognize that what Maurer notes as the “private aspect” was actually personal : based on the assumption that through their personal striving, individuals would create the greater collective good, “that success was only possible if leaders took into account and allowed for the individuality of all participants.”54

• 55 Thomas Wolfe thus argues that post‑Stalin journalism increasingly stimulated personal critical thou (...)
• 56 Iraklii Andronikov, “Mysli o sobirateliakh [Thoughts about collectors],” Nauka i zhizn´, 7 (1961) : (...)

28Indeed, the widely noted fact that 1960s publicist texts valorize independence and personal initiative specifically concerns the valorization of independent personal striving for the overall greater good.55 Discussing independent hobby collectors in a 1961 article, the public intellectual Iraklii Andronikov notes that while collectors may be accused of hoarding rare things that ought to be in museums, they actually provide a great public service by finding and organizing material that would otherwise be lost. Listing a plethora of subjects – pictures of bridges, sayings and aphorisms, paintings and postcards – he asks whether the state can, and whether it ought to, keep a salaried museum worker “who would dedicate his life to collecting fans and binoculars ? Or to subsidize the decades‑long acquisition of gingerbreads ? And all the while the two and a half thousand ginger breads collected by Vinogradov are an entire section of folk art.”56 The fields of knowledge to be beheld are so complex and variegated that they can only be attained through the individual, personal striving of citizens who have taken upon themselves the personal responsibility of furthering the collective good. The only smirch on this system of social self‑management is the selfish consumerist greed of private interest. Andronikov continues :

• 58 Rezo Chkheidze, Otets soldata [Father of a soldier] (Gruziia‑fil´m, 1964).

29More to the point of this article’s opening question of irregular transactions and illicitly obtained materials, many late‑Soviet films and cartoons tacitly condone maverick actions that disregard the rules, showing protagonists’ primary obligations in terms of collectivist ethics rather than formal adherence to laws. Exemplary are films like the 1964 patriotic war‑drama Father of a Soldier, which shows Soviet people defending their country during the Great Patriotic War by repeatedly breaking the Soviet State’s regulations and rules.58 The film shows an elderly Georgian peasant who travels from his village to a front‑line hospital to visit his wounded son, only to find that he is already discharged back to the front. Against regulations, hospital staff are persuaded to let him see his son’s room, where his son’s former roommates convince him to go find his son on the front lines. He hesitates, because he has no traveling papers, until he meets a soldier who convinces him to illegally sneak aboard a freight train, and subsequently vouches for him when a sentry arrests him at gun point. In the chaos created by advancing German forces, the peasant cannot find his son. But he follows an army regiment which he convinces to take him on, against the rules, despite being too old ; and whose discipline he routinely breaks, refusing to be delegated secondary, less dangerous missions. His regiment takes Berlin, and in the last days of battle, he hears his son singing, and then finds him mortally wounded, just in time to have him die in his arms. A film about good people retaining humanity in the face of horrendous conditions and helping each other overcome difficulties by all available means, Father of a Soldier shows that laws and regulations must sometimes be circumvented for the good of the common cause. These rules themselves are well‑intentioned and necessary, just sometimes inadequate. It is, of course, generally proper that military hospitals strictly regulate who is allowed to enter, that civilians not be allowed up to the front lines, that regiments not enlist those who are not legally allowed to serve ; but, if these regulations hinder the greater good, then people should help each other get around them.

• 59 Deborah Field, “Irreconcilable Differences : Divorce and Conceptions of Private Life in the Khrushc (...)
• 60 Ledeneva, Economy of Favours, 9.
• 61 Powell, “Plan Execution and the Workability of Soviet Planning,” 74.

31It is often noted that people did not take late‑Soviet ideological demands seriously, and that they “used Communist morality for their own ends.”59 I certainly have no grounds to argue against such assertions. But I also want to suggest something else : that by paying close attention to how those “ends” are narrated, we can see a curious alignment between the formal demands of collectivism, and the informal explanations speakers give of their own irregular practices. This approach does not pretend to determine “true” motivation. It does not suggest that late‑Soviet irregular actions were actually as selfless as they are depicted in films like Father of a Soldier, nor does it assume that behind such ostensibly selfless acts lurks a “misrecognition”60 of acquisitive interest. It insists only that ethical claims are a worthwhile object of analysis in their own right. Paying attention to what people say about why they do things shows the centrality of “comradely mutual aid” to a shortage‑ridden economy that, it has often been noted, would have stalled in its endemic shortages and stockpiles had people not kept materials circulating through irregular, unplannable, personal transactions. And while the ethical evaluation of any particular action is always in the eye of the beholder, notice what such possibility of ethical evaluation allows. By opening a space in which to analyze actions according to their presumed motivations, the valorization of mutual aid over and above the law allows speakers to explain properly motivated irregular actions in terms of ethics, rather than economics : as personally responsible, socially upstanding actions that help a collective attain its goals. And this makes those necessary but unplanned transactions by which people kept this economy running appear to be an entirely non‑economic question : it allows an economy reliant on “planning cum improvisation”61 to appear predictably managed. In other words, the valorization of Communist Morality over and above the law also helps bolster the ideological image of the law itself.