Emotional Judgment: Love and Law in Soviet Journalism after Stalin

• In Event: Narratives of Trial and Imprisonment in Russian and Soviet Culture from the 1920s to the 2020s

Abstract

This paper presents the post-Stalinist debate on family law as the incubator of a new vision of Soviet legal journalism. In 1954 the newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta published a landmark article calling for reform to the 1944 Family Edict, which had increased barriers to divorce, prohibited unmarried mothers from filing paternity suits and banned fathers from appearing on the birth certificates of children born out of wedlock. Over the 1950s and 1960s, the campaign shaped a legal journalism that marshalled emotion on three levels. The first level was thematic: the debate shone a spotlight on the complexities of private life, revealing citizens’ emotions to be far from those mandated by law. The second level played out through form, with the journalist expressing emotion in such a way as to provoke an emotional response in the reader. And the third level was social, since the emotional connection between journalist and reader invoked a public consensus in favor of reform. Together, these levels of emotion presented journalism as the voice of an obshchestvennost’ that – united by its attention to experience and capacity for empathy – could advocate for change.

Author

• Rebecca Reich, U of Cambridge (UK)