“Two Lonelinesses Just Met”: Late Soviet Loneliness and Management of Contacts

Abstract

The article examines late Soviet loneliness and organizational solutions to overcome it. It explores networks of social relations constituting loneliness, material artifacts that mediated the establishment of contacts between lonely people, and the composition of socio-technical infrastructures that set the routes of movement of people, things, and information. The discovery of loneliness as a spatial problem with specific places of geographical concentration, which transpired as a result of newspaper discussions during the 1970s–1980s, led to the development of complex topological solutions. Among the measures developed in the late USSR to combat loneliness that are examined in this article were social evening, personal ads, and dating services. The article describes the emergence of social evenings, including their spatial and temporal characteristics, and the underlying principles of how they functioned, illustrating how cultural events were adapted to facilitate dating for single people and how they transformed cultural community centers into hubs of resistance to loneliness. The personal ads that began to appear in the newspapers were a result of cultural transfer and were mediating social technologies that preceded face-to-face meetings between singles. The impact of the material aspects of communication—enabling contacts between individuals from different parts of the country—is analyzed in terms of how connectivity was organized. The newly emerging dating services were an institution that combined existing technical solutions with a dataset of questionnaires, which served as a repository of loneliness; computers and landline phones played an important role in facilitating contacts for lonely individuals. The article’s conclusion emphasizes that the emergence of loneliness as a social problem and the development of corresponding solutions mark significant qualitative shifts in Soviet social life. These institutions and social technologies aimed at combating loneliness coordinated human trajectories, promoted mobility, and helped bridge the spatial and temporal divides characteristic of late modernity. The study is based on materials from the central and local press, letters of lonely people to the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta, transcripts of experts’ meetings conducted by the newspaper’s editorial office, memoirs and fiction, and the 1976 documentary film Razreshite poznakomit’sia (Let me introduce myself) about the first attempts to overcome loneliness in an organized way.

Text in Russian