The Invention of Loneliness in the Late Soviet Union: on the History of a Discussion

The article is devoted to the discursive discovery and subsequent framing of loneliness in the late Soviet society. The author is interested in how, in the late 1960s Soviet Union, the phenomenon of loneliness, previous-ly described by international journalists as a consequence of the capitalist system, along with mass homeless-ness, unemployment, alienation, and atomization, was discovered, ideologically neutralized, and became part of the social policies of the late Soviet state. The article describes a meeting held in the editorial office of Liter-aturnaya Gazeta on June 20, 1967, where a closed discussion about loneliness took place. The purpose of the discussion was to discuss an article by a Czechoslovak journalist about the experience of discovering loneliness in the Czechoslovak SSR, developing strategies for describing it and inventing ways of overcoming it, such as marriage advertisements in rural and urban newspapers, as well as specialized dating services that provided pro-fessional help in finding a soul mate. The author defines the conditions for the emergence of such a discussion and approaches to the recruitment of experts who were part of the editorial policies of the renewed Litgazeta and the representation of Soviet human sciences in the space of public media. The paper examines the post-war his-tory of the transformation of discussion as a special kind of discursive genre and practice of social interaction sensitive to changes in the system of social relations. It also focuses on the struggle between different discourses to define the meaning of loneliness during the discussion. The author turns to the discourse analysis model de-veloped by Laclau and Mouffe to investigate the course of this struggle and to identify political implicatures in the speeches of the discussion participants. A list of discourses used by experts to fix the meaning of loneliness has been identified, and antagonistic continua of meanings have been revealed. These meanings shaped the strat-egies of institutionalization of loneliness that followed the discussion.