The Politics of the Soviet Man In and Outside Russia

The scholarly concerns about the linkages between specific types of political systems and individual psychology and personality originate in the traumatic experiences of the German and Soviet totalitarian regimes. This scholarship—most famously exemplified by the work of Theodore Adorno on authoritarian personality—postulates the existence of a “basic personality structure” for the members of a specific cultural community.Footnote ¹⁰ It also claims a high consistency and high coherence of personality characteristics within a community.Footnote ¹¹ In effect, Adorno constructed a causal linkage from the parenting style to the prevailing personality to the type of political regime.Footnote ¹² The homo sovieticus scholarship is also closely related to the once-powerful “totalitarian model” that emphasized the systemic features of the political regimes built by Hitler and Stalin.Footnote ¹³ In contrast to Adorno, many intellectuals who worked with this concept saw causality along different lines, exploring the effects of the repressive political system on personality. Only after the collapse of communism and the growing rejection of the totalitarian model did alternative approaches to the Soviet man develop.Footnote ¹⁴

Observers in different communist states wondered about the potential psychological and cultural imprint communism had on their societies. Perhaps the first statements were made by the Polish writer, Czesław Miłosz, in Captive Mind (1953), where he elaborated on the idea of “enslavement through consciousness,” describing the paths of different intellectuals falling under the appeal of the ideological dictate in new communist states, and by the German journalist and political scientist Klaus Mehnert who wrote Der Sowjetmensch (The Anatomy of the Soviet man, 1958) inquiring “is Soviet man more ‘Soviet’ or more ‘man?’” Later, in the 1970s–1980s, two dissident Bulgarian writers, Georgi Markov and Assen Ignatow, after their escape from communist Bulgaria, developed critical writings about the impact of communism on the national psyche.Footnote ¹⁵ Markov's “In Absentia Reports from Bulgaria,” published in 1984 as The Truth that Killed, and Ignatow's Psychologie des Kommunismus, published in 1985 in Germany, speak about the social conditions of passivity and obedience resulting from the coercive system of power and the Soviet leadership style that punished any initiative and fostered conformity and adaptability.Footnote ¹⁶ The development of the totalitarian mind (and how to resist it) was also discussed by Czech scholars and writers, including the important work by Václav Havel advocating “living in truth.”Footnote ¹⁷

One of the first popular formulations of homo sovieticus belongs to Alexander Zinoviev, the Soviet sociologist who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1978 and developed an insightful critique of the Soviet regime and society in several of his writings including The Reality of Communism (1980) and Communism as a Reality (1981).Footnote ¹⁸ Despite the author's claim for a dispassionate, “scientific” analysis, Zinoviev relies mostly on literary principles of writing and uses assertions, monologue, and resonant effects to convey his message.Footnote ¹⁹ The more methodologically-sound and empirically-based formulation of the concept was advanced by the Soviet sociologist Yurii Levada who, along with his team, tried to capture the key characteristics of the late Soviet personality using large-N sociological surveys. Around the same time, relying on a more interpretive, aggregate-level analysis, the Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka developed the conceptualization of homo sovieticus as a cultural syndrome resulting from the decades of real socialism that he labeled as “civilizational incompetence.”Footnote ²⁰ Sztompka defined “civilizational competence,” conceived as an achievement of modernity, to involve the elements of an enterprise-oriented, civic, and discursive (Habermasian) culture along with the everyday culture of an advanced, urbanized, and consumer-oriented society.Footnote ²¹ State socialism and its central institutions of a planned economy, political autocracy, and Soviet imperial dominance, he argued, created a “vicious process” of promoting a contrary cultural syndrome of “civilization incompetence” through paralyzing entrepreneurship, citizenship, sovereignty, and the everyday virtues of civility and life comforts.Footnote ²² Sztompka's formulation responded to the discussion that was started by another Polish thinker and a priest, Józef Tischner, who juxtaposed the ethics of solidarity to the homo sovieticus syndrome.Footnote ²³ In Tischner's view, the totalitarian system also left an indelible imprint on Polish society in the form of “spiritual enslavement” and individual incapacity to take responsibility for life's decisions.Footnote ²⁴

Perhaps the most publicly-influential formulation of the concept of homo sovieticus belongs to the Russian sociologist Yurii Levada, who worked for the All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VCIOM) and was known for his unorthodox views in relation to Soviet ideological doctrines.Footnote ²⁵ In the late 1980s, he developed a research project entitled “the Soviet simple person” to study the ideal-typical features of the personality type developed during the Soviet Union that he thought might become a hindrance in the post-Soviet democratization process. Levada's aim was to develop a list of mutually interdependent characteristics that linked the social system and the symbolic sphere: the commonly-shared thinking patterns, dispositions, attitudes, and values of Soviet people. The project was based on a massive representative survey of Soviet citizens across the USSR, with the sample of 2700 respondents, and its findings were summarized in Sovetskii prostoi chelovek (A Simple Soviet Man, Moscow 1993), which elaborated the key personality traits that could be viewed as specific to the Soviet system. The survey questions were very wide-ranging and explored, among other things, people's salient identities (who do you feel yourself to proudly be?), attitudes towards the state, a sense of obligation to and expectations from the state, moral predispositions (should a person be responsible for…?), images of the nation, views of important historical events and prominent historical personalities, the balance of preferences on risk and stability, levels of tolerance, views of social stratification, professional and educational aspirations, a sense of social and political efficacy, and views about the Soviet collapse. The findings were both provocative and in line with the criticisms originating among educated groups in the society. Based on these surveys, sociologists from the Levada group suggested that the Soviet man was (a) simple and simplified (in a sense of being obedient to authorities, modest and satisfied with what he/she has, living as “everyone does,” not trying to stick out, not trying to be different from others), (b) isolated, (c) lacking choice, (d) mobilized, (e) hostage to the group, and (f) hierarchical.Footnote ²⁶ Furthermore, the fundamental features of homo sovieticus included a sense of exceptionalism, state paternalist orientations, and imperial character.Footnote ²⁷ These main traits, according to Levada, resulted from a forced socialization process featuring tight control over information, vertical social mobility mechanisms, and constant propaganda pressures.Footnote ²⁸ Levada also believed that this personality type was not compatible with democratic norms and might become a break in the transformation of post-Soviet society but he hoped that these features would go away as the social institutions giving rise and supporting such personality type would be reformed.

One of the defining traits of the Soviet man emphasized by Yurii Levada was duplicity (dvoemyslie) or an ability to have double conscience (dvoinoe soznanie), making him into a homo praevaricatus or a “cunning man” (chelovek lukavy), who according to Levada “not only tolerates deception, but is willing to be deceived, and, what is more, constantly requires self-deception for the sake of his own self-preservation (including psychological), and for the sake of overcoming his split personality and justifying his own cunning.”Footnote ²⁹ Levada suggested that such duplicity developed as a structural result of state pressure and the violence that “produced a total readiness to adapt in cunning ways to the system.”Footnote ³⁰ The need to adapt to unattainable and impossible goals and around inflexible and rigid structures (ideological/political/economic) by maneuvering, shifting, and adjusting resulted in the culture of doublethink. Levada related this trait to George Orwell's doublethink that referred to human ability to maintain simultaneously two contradictory beliefs: “The party intelligent knows which direction to shift his past memories to; subsequently, he knows that he is creating a deceptive version of reality; however, he is relying on doublethink to convince himself that reality is untouched/authentic.”Footnote ³¹

Such a pessimistic sociological stance on the late Soviet period that was expressly negative in its portrayal of the Soviet person is not very surprising given the historical context of the late Soviet Union and the anti-communist ideological leanings of Russian intellectuals, who found themselves at an unprecedented time of open political discussion, communication, and research made possible by the perestroika. The foundational assumptions of the project were deeply political. According to Levada's own views, the simple Soviet man project was set up to in order to find and describe the type of personality associated with a repulsive political system. This system was viewed through the prism of Soviet totalitarianism. The analytical lens used to explore the massive empirical data collected through surveys—sometimes involving 200–300 questions—was itself colored by a critical and even moralizing stance that resulted in accentuating the attitudes and predispositions of the survey designer. This lens was maintained throughout the continuation of the Soviet man project in the 1990s and the 2000s, thereby constantly shaping data interpretation and highlighting Soviet legacy issues at the expense of situational factors. The early expectations about the imminent transformation of the Soviet person were very unrealistic. A more historically-conscious analysis would not expect people who had lived their lives (at times facing basic survival) under a paternalist system secured by the state from the cradle to grave to turn overnight into ambitious entrepreneurs desiring to become rich and escape from the conditions they found themselves in initially. At a 2004 public lecture about the simple Soviet man project, Yurii Levada admitted as much, noting the naiveté of many people's shared ideas in the last years of the Soviet Union, when they imagined entering a new age of freedom and expecting the Soviet people to “shrug off the coercive, pressing, and crippling shells that seemed outdated and repulsive.”Footnote ³²

Furthermore, the theoretical foundations of the project were based on Talcott Parsons’ social systems theory.Footnote ³³ Levada was among the Soviet sociologists who introduced (and was criticized for it) the functionalist approach into Soviet sociology in the late 1960s.Footnote ³⁴ According to systems theory, the different parts of the social system (i.e. social structures such as educational, legal, and religious) work together to reproduce the overall system (i.e. maintain equilibrium). Applying this approach to analyze late Soviet Union as a case of a disintegrating totalitarian system, Levada highlighted the interdependence between the repressive political structures and the type of personality (or a socio-cultural type, as Levada referred to it) that helped to maintain it. In short, the functionalist analysis of totalitarianism as a system predetermined a very negative outlook on what the simple Soviet man was about, thereby establishing important limitations for this concept.

The structurally-determined view of the Soviet personality, which presumably dominated the social system of the late Soviet period, posited that the Soviet man was the result of human adjustment and adaptation to various pressures generated by the system. This approach did not allow for recognizing human (whether individual or collective) agency and reflexivity, and promoted a flat, mechanistic version of the individual. It was also very static in its view of state-society relations and could not explain the dynamics of the system and its potential for change.Footnote ³⁵ Meanwhile, a growing number of empirical studies of the Soviet and other communist societies illustrate the presence of individual agency and creative responses to the regime.Footnote ³⁶

Guided by the totalitarian model, Levada's conceptualization identified exclusively negative features that the system, based on repression and state-organized violence, imparted to Soviet individuals. As insightfully observed by Mischa Gabowitsch, this view was coupled with a tendency to idealize western society, as if a monolithic west, with norms and institutions that Soviet society should strive towards, existed.Footnote ³⁷ In his tribute to Levada, Anton Oleinik noted that the portrait of the Soviet man was an anti-thesis to Levada's understanding of a “simple American man”—a highly idealized vision that Levada developed in the 1960s and had to abandon once the Iron Curtain came down.Footnote ³⁸

How did Levada acquire this idealized notion? Anna Krylova argues in her seminal work on Stalinist subjectivity that the roots of this binary vision lie in the American intellectual discussions of the 1940s–50s, when “A discourse on classical liberal values and the ‘autonomous’ liberal self, defined against the threat of totalitarian collectivism, emerged at the center of public, intellectual, and academic life.”Footnote ³⁹ A critically-minded Soviet sociologist, Levada was recognized by the 1960s for his knowledge, and he suffered for his attempt to disseminate ideas that were then considered to be “bourgeois sociology.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Ironically, by the time Levada was able to initiate his ambitious research project on the simple Soviet man in the late 1980s, the systems theory was long discredited within American sociology.Footnote ⁴¹

It is also important to keep in mind the timing of Levada's Soviet man project. Among the ideological motivations guiding progressively-minded scholars to join in criticizing the Soviet state and society was the fact that the political system opened up to such criticism. Levada was not alone in his stance. Negative statements about homo sovieticus were made by other scholars and public intellectuals in the late 1980s. In a 1989 collection of essays entitled “The Soviet Union on the Brink” (World Affairs, 1989), the authors, including Maya Ganina, Stanislav Govorukhin, and Vladimir Dudintsev, problematized the moral void in Soviet society resulting from decades of totalitarianism. They considered the emergence of “a new type” of man “raised in the atmosphere of lies, treachery, and servile loyalty to the leader” as the biggest crime of Stalinism.Footnote ⁴² Svetlana Boym's portrayal of late Soviet everyday life in her Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994) also highlights the cynicism, materialism, and doublespeak of Soviet citizens. Other theorists have continuously referred to the importance of the Leninist heritage in Russia.Footnote ⁴³ Vladimir Tismaneanu, a renowned Romanian American political analyst, wrote about “the internalization of Leninist forms of thinking by millions of denizens of the Sovietized world, their readiness to accept paternalistic collectivism as a better form of life than risk-driven, freedom-oriented experiences,” noting that “residual Bolshevism continues to be a major component of the hybrid transitional culture of post-Soviet Russia.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The more affirmatively-predisposed research on the evolution of the post-totalitarian, late Soviet state and the Soviet leadership's policies of increased focus on Soviet citizens’ consumption, leisure, and personal development—and the social modernization these policies promoted—was produced later.Footnote ⁴⁵ This was hardly conceivable in the environment dominated by the overwhelming criticism of the Soviet system in the late 1980s and the early 1990s.

The critical sociological view of homo sovieticus was paralleled by the more derisive, negative, and colloquial (slang) word sovok that was widely used in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods in reference to Soviet mentality and attitudes of the average Soviet citizen. Both of these terms exhibit the sarcasm and a self-deprecation that were common traits among many Soviet citizens and are still widely shared among Russian intellectuals today. The concept has recently seen a wide-scale revival both in and outside Russia. The emotional charge associated with these terms’ usage in the late Soviet period and increasingly today, however, is arguably very different. In the late Soviet period, the critical intellectuals—full of hope for a renewal—called for change at all levels: institutional, social, and individual. In the current environment, this term is associated with the sense of disappointment and resignation with the current state of Russian politics. While the existence of the Soviet man in the late Soviet period was predicated on the creation and collapse of the Soviet regime, thereby ensuring his leaving the historical scene, current views accentuate his comeback, revival, and, potentially, immortality. The future of Russia is presented as being “stuck” in the past.Footnote ⁴⁶ This critical and often derisive position on the Soviet man associated mostly with Russian and western intellectual elites contrasts with an important discursive shift in Russia's public space. Growing Soviet nostalgia and the consolidation of Russia's national identity under Vladimir Putin has produced attitudinal changes reflected in the greater acceptance of the Soviet heritage by Russian citizens. Nowadays, many former Soviet citizens in Russia “wear” these terms proudly and patriotically, and the creation of various small communities on social media (such as “We are from the USSR” on Google+) is a good indicator of these trends, as is the broad popularity of hit songs such as “Made in the USSR” (2004) by the Russian pop-singer Oleg Gazmanov. The sense of pride about the Soviet past has long displaced the shame and repentance associated with perestroika and glasnost.Footnote ⁴⁷

Alternative Views on the Soviet Personality

History is written by the winners.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is hard to expect that views of the Soviet man right after the collapse of the Soviet Union would be favorable given the wholesale rejection of the system along its political, economic, and social lines. Yet different approaches and methodologies used to explore Soviet society were being developed already in the 1990s, and they have arrived at very different results. The work of Natalya Kozlova, a Russian sociocultural anthropologist, is not well known in the west. A pioneer in the field of the everyday life studies in Russia, Kozlova advanced an inside-out analysis of the Soviet personality, developing an original methodology and relying on theoretical foundations that differed radically from those of Yurii Levada.Footnote ⁴⁹ She referred to her methodology as “reading human documents.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, her core research technique was based on a narrative analysis of various writings by Soviet citizens collected and stored in the “peoples’ archive” (narodny arkhiv). These “peoples’” documents represented individual reflections of social relationships revealed through the everyday practices referred to in these sources. They “carried rich information about the social games played during the Soviet and the post-Soviet periods.”Footnote ⁵¹

The “peoples’ archive”—a product of perestroika itself—was created in 1988, driven by the desire to preserve and make publicly available societal voices from the Soviet period.Footnote ⁵² The documents Kozlova studied included letters, postcards, memoirs, and personal journals of ordinary Soviet people. These documents—the texts of Soviet everyday life—allowed for exploring the intimate worlds and relationships within families, networks of friends, and relatives, as they lived, worked, traveled, got married, raised kids, interacted with the government, and procured food, clothes, and other necessities. These documents allowed for scrutinizing the deepest aspirations of Soviet citizens, including their worries, successes and failures, and everyday social practices.

Kozlova underscored that her research required a multidisciplinary approach drawing on methods and analytical frames developed by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists.Footnote ⁵³ She treated her sources as objects that reflect routinization and sedimentation of social norms and meanings. “Sedimented, discursive, and therefore, social history are behind every ‘word,’ rhetorical phrase, and trope. The texts carry the imprint of relational experiences. People endure and act, remember and forget, speak out and hold back, replay their lives over and over again. The memory is heterogeneous and collective in nature.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In contrast to the outside-in, deductively-driven sociological approach used by Levada, Kozlova's interpretative approach sought to understand the social world from the point of view of the participants. Kozlova was not politically neutral. She openly admitted that, as someone who lived the Soviet life, her position was one of “ontological co-participation.” She dubbed herself “podopytnyi nabliudatel΄” underscoring her concurrent positions of an observer and a test subject.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such proximity for a scholar to the subject studied carried both the promise of a greater understanding through empathy and the danger of substituting one's own attitudes and perceptions for the objective knowledge of social norms and practices.Footnote ⁵⁶ But the caring awareness and reflexivity about these issues revealed in her writing makes her approach appear more solid than the approaches based on a positivist epistemology that allege objectivity but do not show any reflexivity about the ideological orientations that might have gone into specific research projects. Kozlova's prescient observation that “the faith in the superiority of modern western civilization seen as a pinnacle of temporary and spatial hierarchies of social forms is behind the self-assured claims for intellectual and moral judgments,” captures very well the problems of sociological approaches on homo sovieticus discussed earlier.Footnote ⁵⁷

Natalya Kozlova did have a bigger research agenda. Along with such scholars as Steven Kotkin and other revisionist and post-revisionist historians, she wanted to explore Soviet civilization as an alternative project of modernity.Footnote ⁵⁸ Her work represented and was part of the paradigm shift led by social historians of the Soviet Union away from the totalitarian model that equated the Stalinist/Soviet experience with that of Nazi Germany, and viewed it as a system of top-down state domination over the society.Footnote ⁵⁹ Kozlova's understanding of modernity was based on a specific conceptualization of modern people's social identity construction through reflexive individual effort. The exploration of this process, mediated through writing letters, diaries, and other memoirs in which individuals try to position themselves within the web of social relationships and discursive practices offered by the system, was Kozlova's central research aim. She looked at this process through Soviet rural individuals’ “modernization,” selecting social strategies and constructing their life narratives within the officially- sanctioned canons of what constitutes a proper life path in the Soviet system.Footnote ⁶⁰

Kozlova's empirical research into Soviet everyday life allows for an important alternative to the totalitarian model of Soviet state and society and produces a sense of appreciation for the “socialist modernization project.”Footnote ⁶¹ Her focus on continuous and unintended social invention as a precondition for the reproduction of Soviet society allowed for a more nuanced conceptualization of the interplay between social structure and agency and for the appreciation of the constant duality of these two components of social reality. The totalitarian model focused solely on the structure (Stalinist state institutions), viewing Soviet citizens as a brainwashed and corrupted emanation of the system (cogs), or its victims. Kozlova viewed individuals as actors involved in complex social games and interactive, communicative, and discursive processes underpinning the social construction of reality; as actors drawing on cognitive devices from publicly-available cultural frames and models to forge their distinct identities with social meaning and purpose. Her approach allowed for avoiding the duality of structure and agency and for appreciating both the rules of the game as the structure's limiting the range of actions as well as the creative agency of the players to circumvent the rules as well as stretch, disobey, or apply them creatively.

In the end, Kozlova arrived at interpretations that appreciated the humanity, agency and what she termed “civilizational” values, such as altruism, compassion, and sense of justice expressed in the “little” Soviet person's everyday life. Consider a few observations from her 1999 publication based on the communication in one ordinary family over a period of two decades and the individual agency demonstrated in various spheres of life, including consumption issues, the ironic use of the official ideological language, escape towards counter-culture, and appreciating the value of social life within the working collectives. With regard to widespread shortages of meat products and various other necessities, Soviet citizens employed creative strategies to compensate for shortages, including exchange, using the post to send things from one location to another, personal skills (for sowing and knitting clothing items), and, importantly, relying on subsistence household agriculture in the private plots of land allocated to people by the state. Kozlova also suggests that: “the household economy is not based on an equivalent exchange; it is based on the moral economy of selfless giving and obligation, on heartfelt closeness and ethical grounds. Every family member is a part of the whole; but the older members are mostly giving and the younger family members are mostly receiving.”Footnote ⁶²

Kozlova was well aware of the strict limits on the diversity of life repertoires attainable in Stalinist society through the publicly available cultural models that provide individuals with symbolic resources necessary for forging personal identities. Soviet citizens were embedded in the dominant “order of things” characterized by a historically unique discursive field and the social organization forged by the Soviet state. They could only rely on the symbolic resources and background understanding made available within the social system Soviet citizens lived in. Kozlova admitted that, “language is practical and coercive.” Yet she also argued that “the bearers of language and culture are not victims of inevitability but carriers of intention.”Footnote ⁶³ Such intentionality is fully present, for example, in the “naively written” life story of Evgenia Kiseleva, a simple woman with five years of schooling who starts narrating her life experiences at age sixty, pleading to make a film based on her life story.Footnote ⁶⁴ Kiseleva's story, Kozlova and Sandomirskaya note, clearly demonstrates that simple survival is the biggest value she lives by: “living in truth” is not of concern for Kiseleva; staying alive is.Footnote ⁶⁵ The authors suggest that this is a story of not only individual but also communal survival, with the ethics and tactics very similar to those described by James Scott in a different cultural context.Footnote ⁶⁶

The analytical frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certau, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Paul Ricoeur, Norbert Elias, and Michel Foucault—some of the pillars of post-classical sociological analysis—also form the edifice upon which Kozlova's approach to Soviet society is built.Footnote ⁶⁷ The concepts developed by these scholars can also be used to reveal the political nature of Levada's project, which in the end, stigmatized the Soviet man rather than explained him. For example, the simple Soviet man's long-criticized and ridiculed duplicity and flexibility suggested by Levada (after all he is a “cunning man,” or chelovek lukavy) could also be looked through James Scott's lens of “weapons of the weak” and Michel de Certau's countless ways of “making do” and the art of the weak in everyday life.Footnote ⁶⁸ These two scholars relying on different methodologies and drawing on different regions of the world—de Certau in Latin America and Scott in Malaysia—analyzed the subtle ways in which ordinary people can resist the dominant order from within the system. Both recognized the authentic consciousness and human wisdom of the powerless. The cunningness and evasiveness in the practices of poor peasants in Malaysia were viewed by Scott as a part of their everyday struggle against the rich, a struggle over meanings and values as well as over material goods and resources. Levada's conceptualization, however, stigmatized and sneered at the cunningness of the simple Soviet man.

Kozlova's approach is not the only alternative view on the Soviet society. Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (2004) is another original exploration of the late Soviet generation that avoids the stigmatization of Soviet people and highlights the human creative potential, even under the conditions of a post-totalitarian society. This study showed the appreciation of ordinary Soviet citizens, some living in “de-territorialized spaces,” creating new meanings, and living alternative lifestyles. Yurchak went so far as to suggest that such cultural creativity within the inflexible official ideological and political structures prepared the late Soviet generation for the new, post-Soviet era.Footnote ⁶⁹ As opposed to Kozlova's book, Yurchak's book (written in English) has received much acclaim and recognition and inspired other studies of the social experience of living in the late Soviet Union. These studies have noted the vibrancy of individual life supported by new trends in consumption, leisure, and spiritual practices pursued by Soviet citizens that were in some cases supported, and in others not opposed, by the Soviet state.Footnote ⁷⁰

Similarly, going against the totalitarian model and the overly-politicized histories of communism in the context of eastern Europe, British historian Mary Fulbrook tried to understand “the ways in which East Germans felt it was possible to live quite ‘normal’ lives in the GDR.”Footnote ⁷¹ Her focus on the “complex set of processes that can roughly by subsumed under the concept of emergent individualism or an enhanced focus on the fulfillment of individual goals” does reveal “a wide diversity of people, a range of social groups and subcultures, who actively participated in all sorts of way in making their own history.”Footnote ⁷² Understood as product of totalitarian system, Levada's conceptualization of homo sovieticus just does not capture the richness of personal life stories, identities, actions, and aspirations of individuals who happened to be born in communist regimes. It is therefore worth investing more time to think why the more nuanced and neutral (or even positive) take on the late Soviet man has not influenced the more recent public discussions about homo sovieticus with reference to the post-Soviet Russian public, to the extent that Levada's conceptualization of the simple Soviet man has.

The Renaissance of the Soviet Man?

The different approaches toward homo sovieticus reviewed above rely on multiple methods and theories that are embedded within opposing paradigms in the philosophy of science (positivist and constructivist). Driven by different, built-in analytical assumptions, they result in very different understandings of what the Soviet man was about. Natalya Kozlova's approach, self-admittedly empathic, produces a less judgmental (and at times more positive) version of the Soviet man in his everyday life. The Soviet man engages in dynamic social games governed by “social grammar” (or the dominant rules) and in the construction of modern Soviet identities based on self-reflective construction of the meaning of one's own place within the society, thereby simultaneously contributing to continuous societal reproduction. Levada's simple Soviet man resembles Orwellian characters tainted (to say mildly) or corroded (in stronger language) by their life in a state controlled by Big Brother and, therefore, systematically deceived, deceitful, and unable to resist the moral poverty of society controlled by the totalitarian state.Footnote ⁷³

During the last decade, Levada-style explanations have re-emerged in the media and in academic discussions in Russia with the new vigor and passion, presented as both the result and the cause of Russia's authoritarian political system.Footnote ⁷⁴ This trend is supported by the Levada center directed by Lev Gudkov (since 2006, when Yurii Levada passed away), that has continued the national surveys associated with the simple Soviet man project. Sociological surveys of the “post-Soviet man” have highlighted the continuing relevance and durability of various aspects of the presumed Soviet personality dispositions more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of post-communist transformation in the early 1990s, Russia observers (and Levada himself) hoped and predicted that Soviet mental habits and attitudes would quickly fade away into history. But homo sovieticus, as some Russian sociologists argue today, “had mutated and reproduced, acquiring along they way new characteristics such as cynicism and aggression.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Lev Gudkov, who has continued Levada's project, argued in Abortive Modernization (2011) that “the main obstacle for Russia's modernization … is the type of soviet or post-soviet man (homo sovieticus)—his basic social distrust, his experience of adaptation to violence—that makes him incapable of understanding more complex moral/ethical views and relationships, which, in turn, makes the institutionalization of new social forms of interaction impossible.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Gudkov even refers to the “specific insanity of Russian society” (nevmenyaemost΄) that periodically blocks modernization and complains about the moral impotence of Russian society that creates conditions for the reproduction of repressive institutions, as well as the man himself: “vengeful and aggressive, insulted, envious, cunning and flexible.”Footnote ⁷⁷

The problematic project originating in the late Soviet period notwithstanding, the Levada center has maintained its high reputation as an independent and trusted public opinion pollster in Russia. Moreover, many Russian intellectuals, who tend to be pessimistic about Russia's prospects for change, share views similar to Gudkov's. A 2011 interview with well-known writer Olga Sedakova, for example, reveals the extent of Russian intellectuals’ disappointment and judgment passed upon homo sovieticus in contemporary Russia, practically repeating Levada's earlier observations about doublethink, flexibility, simplicity, cynicism, and lack of self-respect.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yurii Pivovarov, a well-known Russian historian, also believes that the Soviet system resulted in a “diminished quality of human beings” (snizhenie kachestva cheloveka), repeating and agreeing with the formulation of Josef Brodsky as well as Levada's model of the simple Soviet man.Footnote ⁷⁹

The political relevance of these views has grown in the last few years, arguably motivated by the revival of some of the Soviet formats of governance and even a political rhetoric that borrows heavily from the Soviet past.Footnote ⁸⁰ The societal reaction to Crimea's annexation and the further entrenchment of the “besieged fortress”-driven politics promoted by the Russian government has provided another stimulus for these discussions, such as the one that opened the lecture series organized by the Sakharov Center and the Yegor Gaidar Foundation in Moscow in 2016.Footnote ⁸¹ The discussion was dedicated to the theme of the anthropological consequences of the Soviet regime, with participants mostly discussing the relevance of the soviet personality type in contemporary Russia.Footnote ⁸² Masha Gessen's latest book, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017), which builds on Levada's Soviet personality model and follows Lev Gudkov's analysis of “recurrent totalitarianism” in contemporary Russia, has provided a fresh impetus for these debates in the west.Footnote ⁸³ Russia's “totalitarianism-lite” is “like a recurrent infection; … the recurrence might not be as deadly as the original disease, but the symptoms would be recognizable from when it had struck the first time.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In short, yet again the model of the simple Soviet person seems to have acquired dominance as a frame of reference for Russian intellectuals.

The latest renaissance of Levada's vision of the Soviet man appears puzzling given the strong analytical reasons to doubt the broader theoretical foundations of the analysis, and provided the existence of alternative approaches on the subject. Not only has the model of totalitarianism been heavily criticized (especially when applied to the late Soviet Union), but scholars of personality and politics have long shifted away from the Adorno-style, essentialist arguments about personality traits.Footnote ⁸⁵ Furthermore, the ethical issues involved in the revival of this vision of the Soviet personality and, particularly, the sense of resignation and disappointment with the Russian people today accompanying this view are arguably even more significant and in need of careful reflection. Arguably, the widening usage of the overtly negative caricature of the Soviet man today reflects the primitivization and ideological polarization of public debate about Russia, as well as the deep disappointment of intellectuals—both in Russia and the west—disaffected by the success of Putin's political leadership and legitimation strategy.

The essentialist understanding of personality traits means relying on constructed labels as explanations (after all the conceptualization and operationalization of central traits is constructed and imposed on society by the analyst). The political implications of such views are highly questionable. Besides their conservatism and the under-appreciation of the potential for change in the system, these models carry with them a seed of arguments denoting the masses as slaves/sheep/bydlo.Footnote ⁸⁶ Furthermore, the arguments about Soviet personality resonate quite strongly with the arguments made by some government officials and even some Russian scholars that the Russian people are not ready for democracy. Thus, in 2010 two Russian sociologists, Vladimir Magun and Maksim Rudnev, reported that close to 80% of Russians do not share European values and that their values and orientations could be a break to Russia's modernization. These arguments in essence imply or directly place the responsibility for Russia's failed democratization on value orientations and personality traits characterizing an average Russian citizen.

Besides Russian intellectuals, the issue of communist legacies has recently attracted growing scholarly and more popular attention in the west as well.Footnote ⁸⁷ Various studies demonstrated the relevance and, arguably, the centrality of the communist experience for shaping political values, attitudes, and in some cases even morality among post-communist publics today, especially as it relates to Russia.Footnote ⁸⁸ David Satter argued, for example, that the conditions of moral choice under totalitarianism left the country (post-Soviet Russia) in a state of moral vacuum, with the public unwilling to understand the moral significance of what took place in the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Russians are too passive and unable to pass moral judgments, he suggested in the conclusion to his book; they do not value individual life and prefer nationalist delusions.Footnote ⁹⁰ Presumably, many of the challenges Russia faces today could be seen through the prism of “communism's shadow.”Footnote ⁹¹

It is noteworthy that the evolution of scholarship and public debates on homo sovieticus in east European countries followed a somewhat different trajectory. After the fall of communism, east European scholars pointed to the condition of “collective learned helplessness,” the defensive withdrawal into privacy (“inner exile”), forced conformity, powerlessness and apathy, lack of civic virtues and moral duplicity along with the discussion of “civilizational incompetence” referred to earlier.Footnote ⁹² The more systematic studies of the effects of post-communist syndrome in the countries of central Europe, however, especially those that focused on economic reforms, largely failed to demonstrate the usefulness of concepts drawing on the communist psychological heritage. A large-scale, international comparison-based study undertaken in 1990 in six countries (Russia, Ukraine, East Germany, West Germany, United States and Japan) to search for the potential impact of homo sovieticus attitudes in formerly communist countries have concluded that, at least when it comes to economic transition, psychological traits and attitudes held by people in post-communist countries are less important than situational factors in influencing the success of the transition.Footnote ⁹³ Their evidence did not support the idea of homo sovieticus as a distinct breed of person who might react differently to processes associated with economic transition. Furthermore, Klicperová-Baker, Feierabend, and Hofstetter, who have conducted a series of survey-based, experimental studies in the countries of central Europe and the United States looking for the presence of the post-communist syndrome, were able to capture its different manifestations in post-communist countries but also argued that “it would be a mistake to generalize and ascribe the syndrome to entire formerly-oppressed populations.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Currently, the issue of the psychological impact of communism seems to have been laid to rest in most east European countries. Nonetheless, the march of populist politics around the world, and in eastern Europe particularly, has led to an occasional re-use of this term, now as homo post-sovieticus. It relies on the same negative frame and refers to those who are “obsessively nostalgic about the communist past.”Footnote ⁹⁵ But Russia does stand out as a country where the term has experienced a significant revival and acquired a particularly momentous following in intellectual circles.

Towards A Social Cognitive Approach to Personality

The approach to Soviet people developed in Natalya Kozlova's scholarship resonates strongly with the most recent approaches advocated in the sub-field of personality psychology. In recent decades, the field of psychology has undergone intensifying calls to move away from arguments involving personality traits (understood as latent and enduring individual features) and towards integrating personality-based research with social constructionist accounts that emphasize the extent to which individual beings, their identities, and behaviors are a product of their social setting.Footnote ⁹⁶ An alternative, social-cognitive view of personality departs from a “personality trait”-centered view and advances an agentive view of personality envisioning people as “self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulating, not just reactive organisms shaped and shepherded by external events.”Footnote ⁹⁷

These social-cognitive approaches to personality, including those that focus on schemas and motives, might prove far more useful in exploring the role of psychological factors and Soviet legacies in contemporary Russian politics.Footnote ⁹⁸ These approaches address reciprocal interactions between personality structures and the socio-cultural environment and include the study of not only habitual dispositions but also of individual potentials, thus extending the traditional focus of personality studies.Footnote ⁹⁹ Political scientists have yet to integrate the more recent advances in personality psychology and move away from the conventionally agreed upon application of the “Big Five” as enduring traits that apply across various situations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Together with an appreciation for the agentive view of personality, the inclusion of the socio-cultural environment into the equation is therefore an important challenge for political scientists who want to bring psychological factors into the analysis of political outcomes.

The social-cognitive approach to personality allows for recognizing the importance of Soviet cognitive and affective legacies in contemporary Russia, but it necessitates an inquiry into the political and social context interacting with the expression and salience of specific features and shared attitudinal predispositions associated with the Soviet past. The recognition of the historically contingent and constructed nature of such salience and expression opens the possibility for a vision of Russia's future that is less pessimistic and more open-ended than those driven by approaches that rely on more essentialist conceptualizations of personality or culture. Recent studies of collective action undertaken in Russia in spheres as different as housing and public utilities or public commemoration of historic events such as the World War II or Stalinist repressions, illustrate the potential sources of public action needed for securing Russia's better future.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Over the growing concerns in the west as well as within Russia during the last decade and a half, the Russian political leadership has taken Russian society on a “ride” away from more open, pluralist, and competitive politics and ideals in the direction of a more authoritarian, closed, and repressive political system, traditional values, and intolerant attitudes. The clearly identifiable synergy on the part of the Russian leader and the masses—dubbed by some observers as the “Crimean syndrome”—unfortunately leads many Russian and western intellectuals, disappointed by the Russian majority's demonstrated lack of immunity to authoritarianism, towards adopting explanations that focus on the “faulty” post-Soviet personality structure inherited by the Russian people as a Soviet legacy.Footnote ¹⁰² Motivated by the revival of the homo sovieticus-driven discourse in the Russian and foreign media, this study explores the history of the term “Soviet man” and discusses its analytical foundations and limitations, as associated with the sociological project undertaken by Yurii Levada. I criticize the term on analytical grounds, demonstrating that the sociological theory, as well as the scholarship on personality in the field of psychology, have long since moved away from the essentialist and deterministic views of individual personality and monolithic culture. I also argue that the origins of the term are closely linked to the historical moment of the end of the Soviet Union and the ideological choice made by Russian intellectuals in favor of liberalism and in opposition to the Soviet system, which was perceived at that moment through the western rather than the Soviet framework as a totalitarian state and society.

The subsequent evolution of scholarship about the late Soviet Union gave rise to alternative approaches and views concerning the Soviet man. I discuss the framework of analysis developed by Natalya Kozlova and several other studies that promote a more neutral, non-stigmatized view of Soviet society and the public. I argue that the analytical frameworks appreciating the agency, creativity, and choice as something intrinsic to individuals is more enabling and enlightening when thinking about Russia's future than those that perceive individuals and society as a product of the dominant structure (such as the totalitarian state).

The empirical work associated with the Levada center that went into the simple Soviet man construction does not need to be discarded entirely. Elsewhere I attempt to reclaim some of the empirical findings of this project using a different analytical approach and utilizing such concepts as social norms, shared mental models, and identities. These terms allow for capturing the Soviet cognitive and affective legacies without making them inevitable and without precluding the possibilities for their transformation. Levada's massive and systematic empirical work—quite unique and non-replicable at this point—could and should be used to support the research on contemporary politics and society in Russia as long as the analytical foundations of the Soviet man project defined at the time of the imploding Soviet Union are cast-off.

Considering how important it is today to imagine the scenarios for Russia's different futures (the post-Putin era), the homo sovieticus-based arguments appear as deeply conservative. They emphasize the likelihood for Russia's political stagnation and social degradation; they lock Russia (even if psychologically) in its present (and even past) condition. Of course, the future is uncertain and the scenario of Russia's stagnation might turn true, but what is certain is that the path towards a different future is being constructed today and this path requires the ability to envision a different future for Russia. If serious political changes are to happen in Russia, they need to transpire at the individual level as well. Ridding society of its agency (even if analytically) and its capacity for self-reflection and change takes away the alternative visions for Russia's future and therefore poses ethical problems. At a minimum, intellectuals owe the public a degree of self-reflection to avoid turning their disappointment with the absence of democratic change in Russia into a suggestion that change is not possible due to homo sovieticus. The understanding of historical contingency and political construction involved in the processes viewed as Soviet revival should invite new ideas for imagining the conditions for Russia's transformation.