A Heart-to-Heart Conversation: Debating the Limits of Adolescent Friendship, Love, and Courtship in 1960s Russia

Abstract: The article explores the experiences of teenagers as they sought romantic and sexual autonomy against the background of shifting attitudes toward sexuality, marriage, and reproduction in Russia in the 1960s. In the early 1960s, a new wave of publications celebrated high-school romance as a way to constrain adolescent sexuality and as a path to a stable Soviet family. Emphasizing the need to teach teenagers about the dangers of premarital sex, the experts argued that first love was wholesome because it was based on idealization of the object of affection. This idea, however, met with resistance from many parents of teenage girls. Fixation on teen girls’ chastity cut across class lines, with middle-class parents relying on the morality discourse to make sense of their children’s lives, while working-class families reproduced peasant norms of girls’ “honor,” synonymous with virginity and determined by the community. Based on the analysis of teenage letters, diaries, and sociological studies along with publications on adolescent love and friendship in the Soviet press, the article shows that the state-sanctioned discourse empowered teenagers to challenge the rules established by their parents and the broader community and claim romantic and sexual autonomy. Teenagers pursued romantic relationships they called “friendships,” although no consensus seems to have existed on its legitimate conduct. Moreover, the state-initiated conversation about high-school love encouraged adolescents to talk to adults about sexuality in more or less direct terms—an important step in liberalization. At the same time, despite its emancipatory potential, the official discourse reinforced highly gendered views of the relationship between the sexes and thus set strict parameters for what was appropriate, parameters internalized by many teenagers. Official discourse legitimized conservative concepts such as “maiden honor,” condemning premarital sex and placing the burden of chastity on women. Even more so than the morality lectures, the price paid by teen girls if premarital sex led to pregnancy reinforced the prejudice that it was their responsibility to keep first love “pure.” Thus, while the public conversation about adolescent love had an emancipatory thrust and encouraged young people to seek romantic autonomy, it also reinforced a gendered understanding of romance and sexuality, according to which men were active sexual beings while women were above all wives and mothers.