Crooked and Straight: Street Stories and Moral Stories in Early Soviet Odessa

Moral storytelling about urban public life in Odesa in the 1920s is at the center of attention. A key social space is in focus: streets and corners as spaces and as concepts. And a particular storyteller is central: the well-known and yet biographically mysterious feuilletonist for the city's evening newspaper, “Al. Svetlov.” Soviet journalists, like Soviet reality, were expected to offer ideological clarity: a morally unambiguous and teleologically straight story about the death of the past and the birth of a bright and healthy new world. But such temporal and moral (and thus political) consistency was elusive—in the urban spaces where “vestiges” of the old persisted, and in their telling, as observers found it difficult to sustain an unwavering and unambiguous moral orientation. The article asks also how minor and subordinated individuals understood their own lives, suggesting an orientation other than delinquency and pathology.