Sometime after the 2011–12 protests against Vladimir Putin’s third term, but before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I saw the Russian writer and public intellectual Dmitrii Bykov expound on his belief in the cyclicality of Russian history through the following metaphor: that Russia is a playhouse, where those in charge are the performers on stage and everyone else in the country is relegated to the audience. Most of them clap or jeer from the peanut gallery, while a minority in the front row occasionally trades places with the performers. An attempt to trade places is supposedly what took place in Russia in 1991, 1917, and also in 1956, the 1860s, and 1825, and maybe also in 2011–12. While the scholarly merit of Bykov’s grand vision is dubious, it expresses a mainstay claim regarding Russian society: that nothing in Russia ever changes because its polity never wants change. Supposedly for hundreds of years a limited crowd of elites, either already in power or close enough, have been trying to make change by taking charge of the passive nation, in Russian, the narod. However, the narod has never been interested in doing anything aside from enjoying the show.

What makes this vision of Russia’s eternal stasis seem plausible? Repetition goes a long way. This rhetoric hearkens back to foundational figures, such as Aleksandr Pushkin, with his oft-quoted aphorisms, like the one from Captain’s Daughter: “God save us from a pitiless and pointless Russian revolt.” Similar statements abound in a wide range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural artifacts. As I have argued elsewhere, essentialist views of the Russian social field also sat at the heart of both liberal and conservative strands of 1960s–70s Soviet neo-intelligentsia discourse, which gave birth to post-Soviet figures like Bykov.Footnote ¹ In today’s public rhetoric, the full two hundred years of saying the same thing about Russia tend to not matter as much as the Soviet past, about which people also say the same thing. Aging western Cold Warriors, many Russian liberals, and some east European decolonizers claim that Soviet communism has reduced Russians to an anti-liberal, horde-like state, in which even the nation’s intellectual elites are hopelessly entangled.

For outsiders, especially Ukrainians engaged in a war of national survival, essentialist rhetoric about a tried and true enemy of the “free world” has obvious use. For disgruntled Russian liberals too, there is clear appeal in blaming the unready nation for one’s most recent failure to bring about change. The problem with such talk is two-fold. For one, it aids the Putinist message, which has for decades insisted that the president rules with overwhelming approval from a passive narod; famously this approval has exact digits attached to it, hovering around 86% since at least 2012.Footnote ² And for another, essentialist views of the Russian polity can end up influencing Russia’s self-described pro-democracy elites when they do take power. The Afterlife of the “Soviet Man”: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus, a brisk monograph by the sociologist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova shows how talk about the incorrigible “Soviet man” made its way into the 1980s–90s sociology surveys of Yuri Levada, which in turn influenced how leading political actors of this era decided to enact the post-socialist “transition.” Meanwhile, Soviet Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism in Contemporary Russia, a longer work by the cultural historian Eliot Borenstein reveals the multi-decade consequences of the Russian elites’ failure of political imagination, which has bolstered narratives of social resentment that continue to make change in Russia seem unthinkable.

Sharafutdinova’s monograph starts with a broadside against today’s western pundits bandying Cold War monikers like “Homo Sovieticus” to explain post-Soviet Russia. However, the bulk of the text is not so much aimed at the western chattering class as at Russian public figures, who have subscribed to the same social imaginary when they should have known better. Chief among the latter is Levada, a founding figure of post-Soviet sociology, who in 1988 became the head of theoretical research at VTsIOM (All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion), Russia’s most important post-Soviet public opinion polling agency, which was created in the late 1980s to serve as a handmaiden to Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the USSR into a non-authoritarian country, and which has since become one of the pillars of Putin’s “spin dictatorship.” As a prominent public scholar of his generation, Levada helped set a tone for how the architects of Russia’s transition to liberal capitalism thought about the larger society that they were trying to reshape. For Sharafutdinova, the problematic nature of Levada’s social vision appears in his series of studies of the “typical Soviet man” whom Soviet socialism had supposedly produced over the course of the Soviet century and who was supposed to have been swept away by the introduction of market capitalism and democratic institutions. Sharafutdinova wonders how Levada ended up approaching the problem of describing Soviet society in such a scientifically and morally problematic way. Her answer is two-fold, involving both dissident history and the history of late Soviet sociology.

In the first four chapters of the book, Sharafutdinova argues that Levada’s views were shaped by anti-Soviet rhetoric forged by eastern bloc dissidents, often written for western audiences, in which the idea of a “typical” individual created by state socialism played a central role. Czesław Miłosz and Georgii Markov directed their ire at the ways in which Polish and Bulgarian cultural elites agreed to fall in with the party line, thanks to the various carrots handed out to them by cynical apparatchiks. The Russian-born Vladimir Bukovskii made similar arguments about the USSR, but more explicitly extrapolated the experience of his painful dealings with individuals in the Soviet police, carceral and psychiatric systems onto the Soviet people writ large. Aleksandr Zinoviev, who in his youth attended IFLI—the prestigious Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, where he was taught by the leading figures of 1930s Soviet Marxism—aggregated most of the dissident perspectives and added a playfully dialectical gist to them in his 1982 book, Homo Sovieticus. All of this brings Sharafutdinova to the fifth, longest, and most important chapter, where she shows how eastern bloc dissident rhetoric made its way into the work of Levada and other founding figures of what was about to become post-Soviet sociology. Their sensibilities about the “Homo Sovieticus” turned into a plausible sociological framework thanks to the work of Talcott Parsons, an American sociologist of the 1950s who created a theory of “structural functionalism.” By the 1970s, Parsons’s theory was discredited among fellow western scholars because it was “conservative and equilibrium-oriented, with no satisfactory explanation of the sources of social change.”Footnote ³ However, it was still appealing to 1980s Soviet researchers, partly because thanks to Brezhnevite censorship they had not had full access to fresher scholarship, partly because like Soviet dialectics it was a “broad system theory,” and partly because it seemed to dovetail with a feeling of unchanging malaise that Levada and other disgruntled Soviet liberals felt about the USSR after two decades of Brezhnevism.Footnote ⁴ Finally, Parsons’s theory coincided with western treatments of “totalitarianism,” which circulated widely in samizdat.

“Homo Sovieticus” rhetoric, Parsons’s structural functionalism, and the discourse on totalitarianism altogether shaped Levada’s surveys about the typical Soviet man, which were formulated in 1989 at VTsIOM and published in a collective volume, A Soviet Ordinary Person, in 1993. In VTsIOM’s rendering, Homo Sovieticus was defined along commitments to four values: 1) self-isolation and exceptionalism, 2) state paternalism, 3) egalitarian hierarchism and 4) an imperial syndrome. Allegedly, each of these values normally functioned in a pro-regime fashion, but in turbulent times they could all switch to an anti-regime valence, without radically altering their bearings. Thus, with 1), the Soviet man would for the most part think of the USSR as a superior country, but then in a turbulent historical moment, such as perestroika, he would think of the USSR as exceptionally inferior. With 2), the Soviet person would celebrate the state for its cradle-to-grave system of social welfare, but in times of crisis he would resent the state for failing its social mission. With 3), Levada’s surveys found that a typical Soviet was egalitarian while accepting of some hierarchies, but in times of crisis would flip to a populist, anti-elitist mood. And finally, with 4), Levada’s respondents would ordinarily be proud of Soviet power’s stretch across the Soviet republics and the eastern bloc, but at the time of USSR’s dissolution they would switch to an isolationist stance and reject their pan-Soviet identity.

The four-part model of Homo Sovieticus created by Levada’s survey design was structurally unable to render social change into view. The liberal sociologists of the 1980s–90s could have tried to build out a more robust understanding of how different groups of Soviet people—rather than some amorphous unitarian “social type”—had themselves adapted to, transformed, and at times resisted Soviet socialism, and how they were now trying again to adapt, transform, and at times resist post-Soviet new norms, many of which were forced upon them in an authoritarian style by self-identifying “democrats” of the 1990s who then became Putinists of the 2000–2010s. Instead, the “Homo Sovieticus” surveys made it seem like normative Soviet Russian people were a certain way, assumed that normative western liberal people were a certain different way, and implied that if Soviet Russians did not turn into western liberals, it was because they just did not want to. These priors were confirmed in a survey conducted thirty years later, in 2017, by Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, which had split off from the state-run VTSiOM in 2003. The passive, pro-authoritarian Soviet man was still “alive and well,” Gudkov concluded, which by then, five years after the failed protests of 2012, was a good excuse for why Levada’s cohort had failed at bringing about democracy in Russia.

In contrast to Levada and his cohort, Sharafutdinova offers two examples for rendering a view of Russian society that does not ride roughshod over lived experiences of millions of Russians. In the mid-century Soviet era, she cites the work of Klaus Mehnert, a German of Russian extraction who visited the USSR in the 1950s and wrote about how a wide range of Soviet citizens he met there lived and thought in terms similar to those of the western bourgeois middle class, even as they navigated difficult circumstances such as a repressive state and rampant alcoholism. As for the post-Soviet 1990s, Sharafutdinova dedicates her penultimate chapter to the work of anthropologist Natalia Kozlova, who used a combination of “empathy and distance” to interpret written ego documents by ordinary Soviet individuals, so as to understand how they actively responded to Soviet social challenges, how they constructed social ties within state socialism, and how they experienced the loss of those ties during and after perestroika.Footnote ⁵ Kozlova’s approach allows us to understand “the void experienced by the Soviet people when what they considered to be a norm had disappeared.”Footnote ⁶ Finally, Sharafutdinova ends The Afterlife of the “Soviet Man” with a chapter on Yuri Dudˊ, a socially engaged independent interviewer with an influential YouTube platform, whom she presents as a model of an ideal post-Soviet man who actively tries to remake Russia for the better by highlighting the work of fellow Russians, from successful celebrities to impactful social activists.

With Dudˊ, Sharafutdinova reminds us of what social types are for–they aren’t sociological categories, but political narratives. For her, Dudˊ and his guests embody a salubrious post-Soviet cultural elite. I might continue Sharafutdinova’s train of thought by highlighting how Dudˊ’s cohort imagines their audience. For example, a singer like Monetochka (whom Dudˊ interviewed in 2020), with tens of millions of views on YouTube, need not think of herself and her fans strictly in terms of elites versus the narod. A politician like the late Aleksei Navalˊnyi, whom Dudˊ interviewed twice and whom Sharafutdinova does not mention in her book, also almost never spoke of the narod in his writings, nor did he spend much time imagining the model citizen that would bring the “Wonderful Russia of the Future” about. Rather, he insisted that this future polity would be forged by grassroots activists, alive in the here and now. They would do so by growing their coalition, making themselves visible on the street, and winning elections. To that end, Navalˊnyi traveled the country, listened to its many different constituencies and included their concerns in his own program, which often meant turning well to the left of where he had started in the mid-2000s. I contend that Navalˊnyi’s example shows most apparently the extent to which discourse about an incorrigible narod—whether as Cold-War-era “Homo Sovieticus,” or as Bykov’s peanut gallery—runs entirely counter to a discourse that is committed to democratically channeling popular will into a power platform. Conversely, through Borenstein’s book we can see the scale of what “The Wonderful Russia of the Future” is up against; that is, a panoply of post-Soviet, postsocialist self-loathing political imaginaries that constantly get in the way of all attempts at anti-authoritarian solidarity.

The self-consuming dynamic of post-Soviet collective identity narratives studied by Borenstein is captured well in the poet Roman Osminkin’s 2019 quip, quoted in the Introduction to Soviet Self-Hatred: “the proverbial ‘post-Soviet’ will be over when the last viewer of Irony of Fate chokes on the last spoonful of Olivier salad.”Footnote ⁷ The poet’s joke refers to a whole range of identities that desire to destroy one another: the capitalist would like the socialism-loving sovok (derived from “Soviet person”; also, literally a play shovel) to choke; the oppositionist would like the Soviet empire-loving bydlo (“sheeple”) to choke; the tasteful post-Soviet man of the world would like the Olivier-loving Russian country bumpkin to choke. Borenstein’s book unpacks these and other identities through his trademark smirky reading of a wide range of cultural texts, including commercial film, highbrow and shlock fiction, and artifacts of internet culture, such as memes and forum posts.

Borenstein’s first three chapters describe three iterations of self-hating post-Soviet conceptions of the common people. “Homo Sovieticus” came in the early 1980s, preceding perestroika. Borenstein, like Sharafutdinova, also takes this term out of Zinoviev’s text, but puts it as a waystation between the early Soviet discourse on the “New Man” and the forthcoming post-Soviet era. This positioning allows us to see how “Homo Sovieticus” articulated for its audience the task of leaving the Soviet Union behind. Apparently, this could only be done by doing violence to one’s common Soviet self, even as one might well have felt attracted to that Soviet self, as Zinoviev’s playful dialectic suggests. Sharafutdinova’s book, as well as recent work on Levada by Bradley Gorski, reveals this self-disciplinary ethic in Levada’s surveys. For my part, I have shown elsewhere how a program of anti-Soviet elitist self-discipline took over the pages of Russia’s first business daily Kommersant, and also appeared on the widely watched TV gameshow What? Where? When? Footnote ⁸

The self-disciplining anti-Soviet project generates a kind of antithesis, evident in the imaginary figure of the sovok of the 1990s, the subject of Borenstein’s second chapter. In artifacts such as 1990s commercials for MMM (the infamous 1990s Russian bank-turned-ponzi-scheme) and Yuri Mamin’s 1993 film, Window to Paris, Borenstein perceives a speaking subject who hates the fact that he is a country bumpkin in polite non-socialist society, but also suspects that he possesses a better moral compass, a better education and more culture than western capitalists. But in that case, it would seem that Homo Sovieticus’s self-sacrifice program was the wrong way to think about the post-Soviet transition. Instead of burning one’s previous identity on a post-Soviet funeral pyre, the sovok now wishes he could preserve at least some aspects of it. With that, Borenstein suggests that the sovok is a former Soviet “intelligentsia” type.Footnote ⁹ I would add here, based on my own line of research, that we should make sure to interpret the term “intelligentsia” correctly. What it describes is a universal subject of post-war Soviet socialist modernity, who has now been flung out of that modernity and who is still attracted to it, but who is also attracted by the possibility of no longer feeling uncouth vis-à-vis the more modernized west. To put it in another, more sociopolitically grounded way: the sovok speaks for the collective of millions of educated, urbanized former Soviet citizens, who, thanks to official, late Soviet rhetoric came to think of themselves as “everyone,” that is, everyone who mattered in the coming future of accomplished socialism.Footnote ¹⁰ This socialist future became a “future past” in 1991, and the sovok is shaped by this lost teleology, even as he has now ended up in a capitalist timeline, with its own teleology, in which becoming a well-to-do western middle class is the ultimate goal.

One could imagine a political resolution to the identity deadlock expressed in the term sovok, but mainstream Russian liberal narratives of the 1990s precluded that resolution by constantly articulating politics as a confrontation between liberal democrats and “red-browns.” Then, as the failure of 1990s liberal Russian imaginaries transitioned into Putinism, the problem of the sovok was subverted into an even more bad faith imaginary. The Putinist regime coopted both erstwhile liberal capitalists and communists, and started trying to get everyone in the opposition to believe that post-Soviet politics was no longer a contestable confrontation between capitalist and socialist platforms, but a hopeless encounter between a malcontent minority and a pro-Putin majority. This claim felt true enough to a lot of frustrated liberals, the failure of the 2011–12 protests further bolstered that feeling, and figures like Gudkov in 2017 were ready to confirm it through sociology. This dynamic fed the rise of rhetoric on bydlo and vatniki, whom Borenstein covers in his third chapter. Bydlo was an old, repurposed word; vatnik (literally, “puffy coat,” referring to the simple winter clothes of common people, possibly in prison) was new, created as an internet meme by a certain Chadsky—a mix of Chaadaev and Chatsky—who came up with it during the 2011–12 protests.Footnote ¹¹ Both bydlo and vatnik refer to the familiar essentialist ways of thinking about Russia, in which “we” (the liberals) are in a minority against “the people.” Putinist mouthpieces were, of course, happy to confirm this insight. However, by putting bydlo and vatniki into the same genealogy as Homo Sovieticus and sovok, Borenstein reminds us of the origin of the problem of all of these post-Soviet “we” identities: that they begin with the original sin of feeling like the post-Soviet can only be brought about if “we” attack some part of our own social body. Insofar as that social body had the names “Homo Sovieticus” and sovok (in the 1980s–90s) those monikers still retained the memory of that collective identity. However, with bydlo and vatniki of 2000s–2010s, the disavowal of a vision of a common Russian polity has become complete, and with that, the post-Soviet transition has reached its political-imaginary culmination as a state of permanent, entrenched “civil war.”Footnote ¹²

If Borenstein’s first three chapters reveal the discourses on the post-Soviet common; Chs. 4 and 5 consider discourse on post-Soviet elites. Opening with the “New Russian”—the key trope for nouveau riches of the 1990s—Borenstein points out that this figure was a “mirror image of the sovok,” whose values are “literally reversed: he loves flashy garbage and cannot be bothered with the heritage of high culture. It is bad enough that men with money now rule the world, but even worse that they are so irredeemably vulgar.”Footnote ¹³ Once again, I think the concept of “Soviet intelligentsia” is crucial here. The great irony of the “transition to capitalism” was that its mass culture was forged by and in many ways was about economically conflicting social actors who originated out of the same late Soviet engineering and technical “mass intelligentsia” class. The sovok/New Russian dyad is an expression of that conflict and that memory. The sovok, driving his paradigmatic Zaporozhets, collides with a Mercedes, and in that moment (captured in so many “New Russian” jokes) he prefers to think of the driver of the fancy car as a petty demon, who knows nothing of real life or of real value, who has acquired wealth by inexplicable trickster magic. But not so deep down he must know that the Mercedes owner is probably not a whole lot more uncouth than him, nor is he less “cultured,” at least when it comes to Soviet mass middle-class culture. Building on Borenstein, it seems to me like this shared social origin story is why by the 2000s references to New Russians disappeared. By then, Russian high rollers were able to make it fully clear that their “new money” was actually a former Soviet intelligentsia affair. The exuberantly wealthy interviewees of Elizabeth Schimpfössl repeatedly make this lineage claim, as does Pavel Lungin’s 2002 film, Tycoon, which Borenstein unpacks.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, the tricksters of the 1990s started looking much more respectable in the 2000s by joining up with Putinism. Borenstein brings up a number of artifacts from the 2000s–2010s to illustrate this transformation. Perhaps the most evocative of these are the Ethnogenesis series of young adult novels funded by Konstantin Rykov, an internet media oligarch near Putin, centered on the protagonist Andrei Lvovich Gumilev, “a titan of industry, a paragon of virtue, and a man with an impeccable pedigree,” which apparently involves “a strain of alien DNA,” in addition to noble fin-de-siècle forebears.Footnote ¹⁵ Through these texts and others, we can see how Russian wealth fused with the state in the 2000s–2010s, and was then able to account for itself through a neo-feudalist narrative about an alignment of economic power with conservative values, such as patriotism, libertarianism, and “noblesse oblige.”

The identities of sovok, bydlo, New Russians and Rich Russians all act to make politics of anti-authoritarian solidarity in Russia less thinkable. The last chapter of Borenstein’s book—a study of Russian “pro-Orc” fan riffs on The Lord of the Rings canon—describes a somewhat similar dynamic mapping onto the post-Soviet geopolitical imaginary. Since 1991, Russian mass audiences have overwhelmingly embraced the mainstays of western mass culture, even as they might have disliked the whole package of 1990s reforms that western culture arrived in. With the invasion of Crimea in 2014, Putinism has started to play up tried and true past narratives of cultural isolationism, foremost among them Soviet anti-fascist rhetoric, used to tar the “Russophobic West” and “Anglo-Saxons.” However, the anti-fascist legacy brew has had to exist in a cultural field still very much dominated by western pop. Luckily for the Putin regime, other anti-western discourses can deal with this problem. One example is the “pro-Orc” variety, according to which the Orcs and Sauron are the real martyrs and heroes of the Tolkien universe. Borenstein goes through a range of pro-Orc Russian fan revisions that have unfolded in online essays, right-wing poetry, and above all, shlock fiction, such as the unforgettably titled Tankist Mordora (Mordor’s Tank Driver). These texts all carry out a paranoid reinterpretation of the Tolkien canon, which obviously does not in any way directly refer to Russia, but does, I think, celebrate a fictional version of a liberal rules-based order with universal values. This canon’s moral orientation has attracted mass audiences throughout the world, not just in the west, and the Russian Orc knows all of this when he claims that in fact Tolkien’s obvious good guys are Russophobic “Rohanites, Jews and Elves” engaged in “faggot porn.”Footnote ¹⁶ Such enemies naturally demand a patriotic response of identification with Mordor. The pro-Orc twist is fueled by the western mass narrative trend of re-evaluating formerly impeccable good guys (the Jedi in recent Star Wars canon, for example). Except, whereas in western mass culture that re-evaluation is typically based on some larger moral framework, the Russian Orc just borrows the questioning gesture itself, without its concern for some greater truth. This is precisely the kind of sophistry that is necessary in the face of a west that will never feel all that “Other” vis-à-vis twenty-first century Russia The pro-Orc apologist arrives within these global cultural coordinates, but scrambles their possible universalist meaning. This gesture becomes especially useful during Russia’s war in Ukraine. The “anti-Nazi” rhetoric of Putin’s “special military operation” appeals to a universalist morality (after all, who likes Nazis?!); the pro-Orc comes on top of it, scrambles it of all meaning, and gives permission to “anti-fascist” troops in Ukraine and fans at home to cheer for military atrocities against a civilian population. Mordor’s Tank Driver, having served Stalin, then Sauron, then Putin, and now possibly wearing a Nazi-inspired Wagner Group patch, is the ideal man for the job.

The obvious political response in the face of narratives that divide collective political subjectivity is to forge counter-narratives that unite. Sharafutdinova plays her part by calling upon sociologists to construct better frameworks for understanding how ordinary Russians actively shape their social lives, and how those energies might be turned away from fueling authoritarianism. Borenstein’s style is more aligned with Slavoj-Žižek-style psychoanalytic critique, aimed at a subject who speaks of hatred towards the Other, even as he also believes himself to be that Other. At the end of this therapy séance, the subject should generate more productive political narratives, in which the collective self and its adversary do not collapse into one thing. Vis-à-vis Ukraine, that would mean admitting that Ukraine and Russia are different countries, which exist within a larger world framework in which there is no “West” and “the rest,” but a far more complicated web of historical, cultural, and political affinities and distinctions. Within internal Russian politics, I think Borenstein’s style of cultural therapy should convince the subject to think about politics in terms of active constituencies that contest power, instead of catch-all categories, like sovki, bydlo, vatniki, or their poorly defined flipsides, like “the opposition” and “the intelligentsia.” Surely, quality sociology would be essential for this better way of thinking, so Sharafutdinova’s and Borenstein’s implied aims complement one another. For my part, I think as scholars of the region, we can aid in both tasks by historicizing frameworks, such as “post-Soviet” and “postsocialist” to help us understand better how these terms are not neutral descriptors, but active projects, created by a variety of participants. Since at least the 1960s, a whole range of actors articulated both “post-Soviet” and “postsocialist” as programs for Russia’s future. In the 1990s–2000s, Russia’s elites and their allies interpreted these programs in a way that led them to support the rise of a post-Soviet authoritarianism, which differs from the one that preceded it. By telling this history, we can give the lie to longtime orientalist bromides about Russia’s eternal proclivity for despotism. Such claims absolve historical actors of responsibility for the choices they made. In my view, we should remind them of those choices, in the hope that next time around, they might choose better.