Russia and Russians – as well as other peoples that once lived in state socialist societies of Eastern Europe – are too diverse to be reduced to one personality type, argues political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova of King’s College London, the author of The Afterlife of the ‘Soviet Man’: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus.
Homo Sovieticus was the proposition that the communist regimes shaped a distinct personality type. It was based on research of the sociologist Yuri Levada and gained currency in sociology and popular imagination alike.
“When we say that a communist or totalitarian system changes a person, alters their essence and creates a new type of being, we are dehumanising people,” Sharafutdinova says in an interview with LRT.lt.
The interview was originally conducted in Russian, available here.
Traditionally, the term ‘Homo Sovieticus’ implies that there is a distinct personality type shaped by the Soviet political system. But how do you use the term?
I’m against using the term. A human being is a human being everywhere. And a human being is someone who adapts to the situation.
And just as there is no such thing as a democratic man, there is no such thing as a Soviet man.
But there are democrats, people who subscribe to democratic values.
There were also people in the Soviet Union who upheld values other than the ones forced on them. What’s more, the values propagated in the Soviet Union were not necessarily inherently bad, they looked very good: justice, welfare of the people. […]
Take Yuri Levada, who did his opinion polls in the late 1980s to develop a portrait of the common Soviet man. He had an idealistic understanding that people in the West were of a different type – freer, more liberal, more open, not hierarchical. And in contrast to this ideal, he drew his image of a hierarchical person, who loves and obeys the state, who is quite hypocritical. This notion of hypocrisy has passed from the early George Orwell to the late Levada, a conceptual development.
There are a lot of other sociologists who have studied the behaviour of people in situations of power hierarchy. […]
And it is not only in the Soviet Union that had a hierarchical order, it exists in any state where there is a great deal of injustice and a great deal of poverty and inequality.
And there are anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers who have tried to study this in other countries outside the Soviet space, in Latin America, in Africa or in Asia. For example, James Scott. And they have developed this notion, the tool of the weak. All these traits that we abhor – hypocrisy, opportunism – apparently exist in similar, though culturally distinct, circumstances of inequality and poverty.
Just as there is no such thing as a democratic man, there is no such thing as a Soviet man
And when we say that a communist or totalitarian system changes a person, alters their essence and creates a new type of being, we are dehumanising people.
Look at sociological, anthropological research that studied, for example, landless peasants and their relations to power. It turns out that this Orwellian and Levadian is something that allows people to confront power and express themselves, find some ways of acting and protecting their interests. [...]
You say we shouldn’t dehumanise people. But they are victims of totalitarian regimes, such as in China, North Korea, in Nicaragua or Belarus? Are there any distinctive features shaped by the experience of, say, the Soviet regime?
Speaking more broadly, you will agree with me that there is no such thing as a distinctive Chinese or Asian personality. In the West, no one would even discuss such propositions, seeing them as racist.
I would therefore not want to discuss the ‘Soviet man’. But why am I talking about the need to deconstruct the notion of Homo Sovieticus? […]
If we use this terminology, we are leaving something behind, in our blind spot. A focus on the Soviet common man distracts us from other things. And that is the colonial aspect of the hierarchy of ethnic groups in the Soviet system, something that was overlooked by sociologists like Levada.
Although they’d stress that the Soviet Union was a multicultural regime, they’d still place ethnic Russians as the dominant, central, state-forming element, even in the Soviet Union, let alone in Russia.
Levada has been conducting huge polls for years, but he has not measured this internal racism, internal colonialism. And why not? Because his emphasis was on totalitarianism, on the absence of freedom.
Levada has been conducting huge polls for years, but he has not measured this internal racism, internal colonialism.
Say, anti-Semitism was widespread and on the surface, it was hard to miss.
Yes, thank you. Have you ever heard of Homo Sovieticus as anti-Semitic? There’s no such thing in Levada’s book The Common Soviet Man that came out in 1993.
Because anti-Semitism, tensions and hierarchies inside the Soviet society did not matter in the context of the Cold War – the ideal to measure things against was the free man of the West. So I think it is important to consider how these notions were created, under what political pressures they emerged. And what was neglected as a result. What were the blind spots.
And what was overlooked was this narrative of Russians as liberators and their civilizational role in Central Asia, in the Caucasus.
On the whole, we can say that the Soviet man was very diverse, a simple person, able to adapt to political institutions, structures of violence, cultural aspects – in that sense, there’s nothing distinctive. Any person adapts to their environment to some extent.
What’s interesting and important to grasp is that the Soviet did not think that the system could change. It was like the weather – you can’t control the weather, you can’t control the rain or the sun, right? You adapt, you take an umbrella or put on a raincoat. […]
There is a reason why the term Homo Sovieticus caught on. On the other hand, as you rightly say, it puts a label on a person. Are you saying we shouldn’t reduce all the different people into one type?
No, we shouldn’t. That is, if you are someone working for the good of the country and care about the future of Russia and its people – even if you don’t want this state to exist, as is the position in the Baltic states and beyond – your approach will not be “I wish they didn’t exist at all”. There’s a small step from “I wish they didn’t exist” to “let’s do something about it”.
If you are a considerate politician, you won’t lump everyone together, but rather look for sources of hope, optimism and transformation. Czesław Miłosz, Georgi Markov, Yury Levada, Vladimir Bukovsky – they were all Soviet men...
They were rather anti-Soviet.
They were anti-communist, but they were still Soviet men. That is, they came of age, were educated there.
But even in psychology, there is the term groupthink, but there is always also someone who is cast away from the group, someone who does not agree with the group and tries to ask critical questions. That is to say, these very people, like Czesław Miłosz and George Markov, and Bukowski, Solzhenitsyn, as well as many others – they were expelled. And although they were all Soviet men, they were dissenting.
And the same is true of modern Russia – if we put everyone in the same box, what shall we say about Liliya Chanysheva, who was jailed for 7.5 years in Ufa? They’re Russians, Bashkirs, Tatars and so on. They grew up there. Will they also bear this stamp on their foreheads, Homo Sovieticus?
You’re still at the point I was at in 2014 when I wrote the book The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity, where I try to understand why people suddenly put faith in Putin and why he became so popular.
And why?
This book creates a picture in which today’s Russia, Russia of the 1990s and the Soviet past, are all seen in the same frame, where I try to draw common parallels.
What I am writing about is that what we have today in Russia, or at least before 2022, is the result of a very deliberate and well-conceived national identity politics that the Kremlin was pursuing in response to the unrest of 2011. At that time, it felt that economic modernisation led to an emergence of social groups that wanted democracy and participation, a different state, and opposed corruption.
In response to these demands, which were expressed in the protests of 2011-2012, the Kremlin completely changed its approach in 2013 and said: “We are a special civilization. We are a great country.”
But why has this narrative become so central? Importantly, this narrative of Russian greatness and exceptionality was a seed put in a very fertile soil. And the fertile ground was prepared by framing the 1990s as a decade of trauma. Throughout the 2000s, there were efforts to construct the image of the 1990s as a collective cultural social trauma. And that was successful because a lot of people had really suffered through those years.
You come from Lithuania and I visit Latvia quite often, because my husband is from there. He remembers the 1990s in Latvia as very difficult.
The 1990s were hard for everybody in our region. But Russia’s dealing with the trauma was very differently from the others.
And why? First, because Lithuania, Latvia and Poland had an idea that they were becoming Europeans. In order to sustain this idea, you need the elites and the people who believe in it.
In Russia, unfortunately, the elites that came to power said nothing had to be done, in fact, things were better before. And in Russia, more than 80 percent of the people felt they lost more than gained from the transition.
You could have told people that these reforms brought openness, freedom, opportunities to travel, pluralism, the internet, entrepreneurship and so on. But all of this was neglected.
Instead, the people were given this idea of exceptionalism, first Soviet and now Russian. And many people today have nothing to lose, many people go to war to get some money, because they have nothing to lose. So, the social component of this war is just a horrifying reflection of the society.
