The Many Faces of the Collective: Poruka, Responsibility, and Requirement in the Soviet Society

Abstract

From 1970 to 1984 Ann Kleimola and Horace William Dewey wrote a series of articles exploring the concept of poruka (suretyship) in pre-Petrine Russia. Kleimola and Dewey called the variety of communities where poruka applied the collectives. The present article argues that the Soviet state used the collectives, borrowed as a concept from French utopian socialists, as vehicles for bonding its subjects with poruka and thus extending state control down to the smallest social groups and organizations. The article examines in detail the original Soviet theory and practice of using poruka bonds in the educational collectives of Anton Makarenko’s youth delinquent colonies. Makarenko’s experience, proliferated in fictionalized accounts, articles and lectures, became the foundation of the Soviet suretyship-based collectives.