Homo Sovieticus

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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. Image: Mistrus Media Conflict-dependent Russia. The domestic determinants of the Kremlin's anti-western policy", Maria Domańska Opinions [ edit ] The thinker Alexander Zinoviev defined as Homo Sovieticus as a person who is, at their core, an opportunist. They do not rebel against their 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? a b Barbara Evans Clements, Daughters of the Revolution: A History of Women in the U.S.S.R. (Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1994), 73.

Bridges, David (1997). Education, Autonomy, and Democratic Citizenship: Philosophy in a Changing World. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-15334-8. Homo sovieticus was a „czlowiek zrodzony przez warunki istnienia komunistycznego (socjalistycznego) spoleczenstwa, bedacy nosicielem zasad istnienia tego spoleczenstwa, samym swoim osposobem zycia zachowujacy stosunki wewnatrz-kolektywne tego spoleczenstwa.” (Tischner 1992) Gessen’s Homo Sovieticus seems, in the end, more a projection of liberal disappointments in the post-Soviet years than a player in the country’s recent past. A fascinating but flawed account, The Future is History presents a Russia whose future in fact stands outside history, as its people are condemned decade after decade to rehearse the same drama of tyranny and obedience. The "withering away" of the family was no longer a goal of economic and political progress. The new party line was that the family, like the state, was to grow stronger with the full realization of socialism. Massive propaganda campaigns linked the joys of motherhood with the benefits of Soviet power. [22] Soviet ideology began to argue that woman's public role was compatible with her roles as wife and mother. In fact, that the two reinforced one another and were both necessary for real womanhood. [23] Almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, today more often than ever, global media and intellectuals rely on the concept of homo sovieticus to explain Russia's authoritarian ills. Homo sovieticus - or the Soviet man - is understood to be a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality, an innate obedience to authority and no public demands; they have been forged in the fires of the totalitarian conditions in which they find themselves.Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. If you are familiar with the phrase "what a disgusting thing your jellied fish is" (from Eldar Resanov's iconic movie "The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath"), you probably know who Andrey Myagkov or Barbara Brylska are. If you lost count of how many times you watched "Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession'' with Yuri Yakovlev or "Operation Y" starring Yuri Nikulin and Alexander Demyanenko on New Year's Eve, there is a good chance that you grew up in the Soviet Union or were born to a Russian-speaking family in any of the former Soviet republics.

Sharafutdinova grew up in the republic of Tatarstan, an oil-rich region with a majority Tatar population, and received her PhD from George Washington University. Her first book, Political Consequences of Crony Capitalism inside Russia (2010), examined the rise of corruption in the provinces. As privatization and free elections were introduced simultaneously in the early 90s, access to power meant access to property, and vice versa. Sharafutdinova identifies two political models that emerged: ‘centralized and noncompetitive’, the system favoured by the tight-knit Tatar elite, and ‘fragmented and competitive’, which characterized the Nizhnii Novgorod region under Yeltsin ally Boris Nemtsov. In the latter, politicians aired corruption scandals over the course of nasty campaigns, leading many voters to see elections as elite infighting and to respond with apathy and protest voting. As competitive democracy delegitimized itself, the Tatar model looked increasingly appealing. Popular disillusionment with democratic institutions united the self-interest of Putin’s circle with the desires of an alienated public. This, Sharafutdinova argues, is why most Russians didn’t mind when Putin abolished regional gubernatorial elections in 2004 (according to polls) and why his popularity remained high even as oil prices dropped. The contemporary American and Russian sociologist and social anthropologist Alexei Yurchak believe that the constant reference to the expression Homo sovieticus in Western academic and publicist discourse manifested assumptions that socialism was "bad", "amoral" or "imposed", expressing ideas about the existence of socialism as such in the Soviet Union and, accordingly, about the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union. [18] For a final note, here is a citation from Mark Zakharov's film "To kill a Dragon" (1988) based on the play of Yevgeny Schwartz: "What are you? … You are free people! Get up! You are slaves! /…/ I will now make everyone understand this and kill the Dragon in themselves! IN YOURSELF, do you understand that?"Of course, things were not the same after the Russian occupation of Crimea in2014 andthe lengthy military conflict in the Donbas region, steered and fed by the Russian authorities enabling local separatist forces. Yet, a year ago on New Year's Eve and Christmas, no one among us commoners could have imagined the hell Ukraine and the rest of Europe were about to enter in 2022. Yuri Levada and his research team initially were leaning towards a theory that the Soviet person or Homo Sovieticus is a dying social archetype. However, they changed their position in the early 2000s and argued that the Soviet person continues to live on in modern Russian society. In other words, the Soviet man did not disappear but evolved into an "adaptable" Putin's man with equally twisted beliefs about social reality and their place in it. Many Westerners and ex-Soviets (the ones younger or simply fortunate to be better oriented in matters of history and truth) scoff at the Homo Sovieticus for possessing the naivete of a blind kitten. Not Alexievich. There isn’t an ounce of ridicule in her approach. Instead, there is a profoundly humanist understanding of immeasurable loss and confusion, of deracinated personhood, and of a perpetually shifting system of ideological coordinates that only amplifies this disorientation. At work you say one thing, at home another, you pretend to do your job, your employer pretends to pay you, in public you pretend to be atheist while at home you teach your kids to say the namaz, and on and on it goes, this neverending umbilical cord of duplicity, chaining a person to the regime of lies.