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1917
Idealistic Russian Describes Grim Reality of Revolution - Voices of the Past > .
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Thirty years after the
collapse of the USSR, the martial rhetoric and other trappings of the "strong men" of the totalitarian era are making a comeback. Why? The film's director Ivo Briedis and the journalist Rita Ruduša were both born in the Soviet Union. Together, they embark on a journey to explore the phenomenon of
Homo sovieticus. They want to know if a totalitarian mindset can still be found in countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. The thinker
Alexander Zinoviev defined as Homo sovieticus as a person who is, at their core, an opportunist. They
[RWAs] do not rebel against their [SDO] leadership, and want to take as little individual responsibility as possible. Did these characteristics develop specifically as a result of growing up in the Soviet Union, or can they develop in any society? To find out, they speak with people who lived under the Soviet regime, as well as with members of the first post-Soviet generation.
Homo Sovieticus (
Dog Latin for "Soviet Man") is a pejorative for an average
conformist [RWA] person in the
Soviet Union and other countries of the
Eastern Bloc. The term was popularized by Soviet writer and sociologist
Aleksandr Zinovyev, who wrote the book titled
Homo Sovieticus.
Michel Heller asserted that the term was coined in the introduction of a 1974 monograph "Sovetskye lyudi" ("Soviet People") to describe the next level of evolution of humanity thanks to the success of
Marxist social experiment.
In a book published in 1981, but available in
samizdat in the 1970s, Zinovyev also coined an abbreviation homosos (
гомосос, literally a homosucker).
New Soviet man: The idea that the
Soviet system would create a new, better kind of
Soviet people was first postulated by the advocates of the system; they called the prospective outcome the "
New Soviet man".
Homo Sovieticus, however, was a term with
largely negative connotations, invented by opponents to describe what they saw as the
real result of Soviet policies. In many ways it meant the opposite of the New Soviet man, someone characterized by the following:
- Indifference to the results of his labour (as expressed in the saying "They pretend they are paying us, and we pretend we are working").
- Lack of initiative and avoidance of taking any individual responsibility for anything. Jerzy Turowicz wrote: "it's a person enslaved, incapacitated, deprived of initiative, unable to think critically; he expects – and demands – everything to be provided by the state, he cannot and doesn't want to take his fate in his own hands".
- Indifference to common property and to petty theft from the workplace, either for personal use or for profit. A line from a popular song, "Everything belongs to the kolkhoz, everything belongs to me" ("всё теперь колхозное, всё теперь моё" / vsyo teperь kolkhoznoe, vsyo teperь moyo), meaning that people on collective farms treasured all common property as their own, was sometimes used ironically to refer to instances of petty theft.
- Chauvinism. The Soviet Union's restrictions on travel abroad and strict censorship of information in the media (as well as the abundance of propaganda) aimed to insulate the Soviet people from Western influence. There existed non-public "ban lists" of Western entertainers and bands, which, in addition to the usual criteria of not conforming to fundamental Soviet values, were added to the list for rather peculiar reasons; one such example being the Irish band U2, the name of which resembled that of Lockheed U-2, a high-altitude U.S. reconnaissance airplane. As a result, "exotic" Western popular culture became more interesting precisely because it was forbidden. Due to limited exposure, entertainers considered minor, B-list, or of low artistic value in the West were regarded as A-list in the Soviet sphere. Soviet officials called this fascination "Western idolatry" / "Idolatry before the West" (идолопоклонничество перед Западом / idolopoklonnichestvo pered Zapadom).
- Obedience to or passive acceptance of everything that government imposes (see authoritarianism).
- In the opinion of a former US ambassador to Kazakhstan, a tendency to drink heavily: "[a Kazakh defence minister] appears to enjoy loosening up in the tried and true Homo Sovieticus style – i.e., drinking oneself into a stupor".
According to
Leszek Kolakowski, the
Short course history of the CPSU(b) played a crucial role in forming the key social and mental features of the Homo Sovieticus as a
"textbook of false memory and double thinking". Over the years, Soviet people were forced to continuously repeat and accept constantly changing editions of the Short course, each containing a slightly different version of the past events. This inevitably led to forming "a new Soviet man: ideological schizophrenic, honest liar, person always ready for constant and voluntary mental self-mutilations".
The "Soviet man" is characterised by his tendency to follow the authority of the state in its assessment of reality, to adopt an attitude of mistrust and anxiety towards anything foreign and unknown, and is convinced of his own powerlessness and inability to affect the surrounding reality; from here, it is only a step towards lacking any sense of responsibility for that reality. His suppressed aggression, birthed by his chronic dissatisfaction with life, his intense sense of injustice and his inability to achieve self-realisation, and his great envy, all erupt into a fascination with force and violence, as well as a tendency towards "negative identification" – in opposition to "the enemy" or "the foreigner". Such a personality suits a quasi-tribal approach to standards of morality and law (the things "our people" have a right to do are condemned in the "foreigner").
— "Conflict-dependent Russia. The domestic determinants of the Kremlin's anti-western policy", Maria Domańska
According to philosopher Artem Magun, the disappointment of a group of Russian intellectuals including Zinovyev and
Levada in the Soviet project had extremely negative consequences in the 1970s: elitism in the Soviet
intelligentsia, the emergence of an anti-national and anti-populist pathos ("we are heavenly men, we think, but there is gloom and some anthropological degenerates around"). Despite the intellectuals' hypothetical affiliation with the homo soviets, this approach was just a pretense, Magun concluded. Magun concludes that the hostility of the intelligentsia towards the people was the cause of its subsequent (in the 1990s) betrayal, which in turn led to the counter-attack of "Putinist populism".
Since 1991 interest has extended to the phenomenon of
homo post-sovieticus.
Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev (
Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Зино́вьев, October 29, 1922, Pakhtino Village, Chukhloma Uyezd,
Kostroma Governorate – May 10, 2006,
Moscow) was a Soviet philosopher, writer, sociologist, and journalist.
Coming from a poor peasant family, a participant in
WW2, Alexander Zinoviev in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the symbols of the rebirth of philosophical thought in the Soviet Union. After the publication in the West of the screening book "
Yawning Heights", which brought Zinoviev world fame, in 1978 he was expelled from the country and deprived of Soviet citizenship. He returned to Russia in 1999.
The creative heritage of Zinoviev includes about 40 books, covers a number of areas of knowledge:
sociology,
social philosophy,
mathematical logic,
ethics, political thought. Most of his work is difficult to attribute to any direction, put in any framework, including academic. Having gained fame in the 1960s as a researcher of
non-classical logic, in exile, Zinoviev was forced to become a professional writer, considering himself primarily a sociologist. Works in the original genre of "sociological novel" brought international recognition to Zinoviev. Often he is characterized as an independent Russian thinker, one of the largest, most original and controversial figures of Russian social thought of the second half of the 20th century.
Anti-Stalinist in his youth, Zinoviev throughout his life held an active civil position, subjecting his works to sharp criticism at first the
Soviet system, then
the Russian and
the Western, and at the end of life the processes of
globalization.
Zinoviev's worldview was distinguished by tragedy and pessimism. In the West, as in Russia, his
non-conformist views were harshly criticized.
