Friends in Private, Friends in Public: The Phenomenon of the Kompaniia Among Soviet Youth in the 1950s and 1960s

Sometime in 1956 Liudmila Alekseeva, then a history graduate student, ran into a friend outside Moscow State University. Within minutes they had established that they had the same problems and frustrations concerning life and work. Within days they had set up a get-together of like-minded friends and acquaintances—a kompaniia—in a small room in a Moscow communal apartment. They began to be the regular hosts of “a group of regular guests, who, like us, were looking for opportunities to dance to jazz, drink vodka, and talk until dawn.”1 Soon Liudmila was part of an interlocking network of such friendship circles, which assembled in various apartments, discussed Soviet life and politics, circulated underground literature, and listened to the songs of bards such as Bulat Okudzhava. They were not alone. The young intelligentsia all over the Soviet Union imbued their friendship circles with a spirit of political and social reawakening turning them into something more meaningful than just a random collection of acquaintances. These circles varied in nature, size, origin, composition, and almost everything else—yet they were recognized as a phenomenon of their time and characterized as much by their own self-perception as by the reaction they evoked within the official sphere. While neither exclusively a reserve for the young, nor in essence a Khruchchevite invention, kompanii were nonetheless strongly rooted within the social, political, and ideological changes of the early Thaw and thus in many ways a phenomenon of a period of transition.