抄録
The purpose of this paper is to examine how the public/private distinction was constituted in the Soviet Union of Khrushchev era and how it affected gender relations in society. The public/private distinction cannot be ahistorically fixed but it changes from time to time by conscious or unconscious political decisions so that it could show political characteristics of each era.
Although many researchers insisted that there was no autonomous private sphere in the Soviet Union, it does not mean that there was absolutely no room for people to act on their own will. Moreover, no one has denied that intimate relationships as those between family members could still be autonomous to a certain extent. From this point of view, the author tries to reveal the Soviet way of making public/private distinction by watching closely what kind of policies influencing the family had been adopted.
The Soviet government in the Khrushchev period encouraged people to participate in the policy process, since Khrushchev called for building the communist society where ordinary people would govern themselves without the state. For example, many people sent letters to the state or the party so that their opinions could be incorporated in the new family law. Professionals including leading family law scholars who prepared drafts of the law never ignored opinions from people.
The new family law acknowledged some room for self-determination on the ground of the intimate nature of relationships between spouses. However, people could not always enjoy their autonomy in family matters, because the party-state could have ideologically legitimate interferences in their lives. The government encouraged people to organize the comrade courts in factories as well as residential quarters to solve daily problems as minor violations of work regulations, quarrels, hooliganism and so on. Judges elected by the members of each unit often intervened in family matters to deal with cases. Women's Soviets, established in many communities, also meddled in family life helping women to keep house in the scientific and socialistic manner. In this way, the private sphere of the Soviet people was very limited, while they might have reduced the privacy through their own social activities under the ultimate control by the party-state.
From the gender perspective, it was clear that women publically had responsibility for running household as the name of the women's soviets suggested. Soviet women had to work both inside and outside home as working mothers, while men had lost their status as the head of family after the October Revolution and were not seriously expected to be working “fathers.”
