The Soviet Union of the 1950s and 1960s existed in a transitional state, emerging recently from postwar reconstruction and on a path toward increasing urbanity, consumer provisioning, and technological might. Modernizing rhetoric emphasized not only these spatial and material transformations, but also the promise of full-fledged communism's looming arrival. This transformational ethos necessitated a renewal of direct attempts to remold humanity. Gender equality--or, at the very least, removing bourgeois strictures on women--remained a partially unfulfilled promise. Technological advances and the development of Soviet industrial capacity offered a new means of profoundly altering the lives of Soviet men and women. As other scholars have noted, Soviet women were the most obvious targets of these campaigns, but they were not alone in these projects. This dissertation argues that the Soviet state also directed intensive campaigns to remodel male consumptive and bodily practices in order to rid them of politically and socially destructive tendencies, making them fit for the modern socialist civilization under construction. Rooted in, but divergent from, Bolshevik novyi byt campaigns and Stalinist kul'turnost efforts, Soviet authorities actively sought to craft productive male citizens of a modern mold freed of the rough and coarse habits associated with working-class and village masculinities. Many of men targeted in these campaigns fell short of these stated aims. Instead, they pursued and produced their own images of masculinity outside of these official reconstructive efforts. Thus, this dissertation places malleable images of masculinity at the intersection of post-Stalinist politics, economics, material culture, and sexuality by analyzing a wide range of recently declassified Komsomol archival documents, letters to the Supreme Soviet, Soviet state records, published memoirs, newspapers, and literature.
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