SEXOLOGY | Igor S. Kon |  |
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| Curriculum vitae | Selected books | Russian | |||
"Symbolic Interaction", vol. 16, N 4 (Winter 1993), pp.395-405
Igor S. Kon
What could be worse than the socialism? - Whatever comes after it.
Contemporary Russian joke.
To understand contemporary processes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, one has to put them in a perspective of global sociohistorical transition from the Industrial to Postindustrial society, from Modern to Postmodern culture and from Materialist to Postmaterialist values.
In the pre- and early-industrial societies most important social identities and statuses have been conceived as given or achieved once and forever. Any substantial change of identity or self-concept after adolescence was considered abnormal, painful and detrimental both for an individual and for the society. Stability was healthy and normal, change - dangerous and problematic. Gradually, especially since the 1960s, the emphasis was reversed. In contemporary society, as Daniel Bell had stated, "no longer any child be able to live in the same kind of world - sociologically and intellectually as his parents and grand-parents had inhabited. For millennia - and this is true in some sections of the globe, but they are shrinking - children retraced the steps of their parents, were initiated into stable ways and ritualized routines, had a common body of knowledge and morality, and maintained a basic familiarity with place and family. Today, not only does a child face a radical rupture with the past, but he must be trained for an unknown future. And this task confronts the entire society as well" 1.
The acceleration of technological, social and cultural changes makes generational differences more visible and puts higher pressures on the individual ability to meet new and unforeseen challenges, role-sets and identities. More dynamic philosophy of life is being gradually implemented in the sociology of life-course, social and developmental psychology, socialization theory (educational practice is more conservative), psychiatry and other disciplines.
To paraphrase William Simon 2, contemporary mentality, taken as a whole, means: normalization of change, individualization, deconstruction of the most "solid" and even sacred entities like Nature, God, Socium, Person, and Gender, pluralization and problematization of the world, culture and individual.
Identity crises and uncertainties about one's self are now common phenomena far beyond adolescence, and these, however painful, experiences are seen not as a malaise but as a challenge and prerequisite both for the individual development and for the social innovation. Postmodern self-identity is supposed to be: individual/personal rather than social or natural; flexible and changeable rather than stable and immutable; self-directed rather than externally regulated; pluralistic and relational rather than monolithic and devoid of internal contradictions.
"The development of society towards a higher level of individualization in its members opens the way to specific forms of fulfillment and specific forms of dissatisfaction, specific chances of happiness and contentment for the individuals and specific forms of unhappiness and discomfort that are no less society-specific".3
Being primarily reflection and concomitant of the social-economic development of Western societies, individualization and personalization have been nevertheless equally important for the "socialist camp". Although objective life conditions in the USSR have been different from the West, dominant value orientations and social aspirations were evolving in the same direction. 4
Already in the early '70s. Soviet sociology could not support the official propaganda's claims about "complete opposition and polarity" of the Western/capitalist and Soviet/socialist ways of life. The research on job motivation and value orientations showed internally contradictory picture. Because of the general disillusionment in the Communist Utopia, instead of the required "moral considerations", for the majority of industrial workers "good salary" became the most important single factor of job satisfaction. Yet a "good salary" was never received, and work came to be considered less and less a valuable and gratifying activity. General "cultural shift" in terminal values was pointing in the same direction as that described by Ronald Inglehart 5: towards greater individual autonomy, self-direction, emphasis on belonging, self-expression, and the quality of life.
In the surveys carried out among Soviet workers and engineers in the '70s, it was found that the values of creativity and initiative topped the list in the hierarchy of values, while an orientation toward self-discipline, meticulousness and punctuality all but bore a negative connotation. A distinct shift of personal interests away from the sphere of work and public affaires to the family life and consumer activity was noted. 6
For the ruling Communist party this shift was ideologically subversive and economically dysfunctional. Soviet economy was a highly institutionalized inefficiency, and the only means for its improvement prescribed at the time was a higher job motivation and a stronger work discipline -a sort of the "Communist-Protestant" work ethic. Postmaterialist values and life styles were denounced as hedonist and bourgeois-decadent. But people didn't want to work for nothing and they effectively managed to escape from the hopelessly bureaucratized public life into private worlds of intellectual interests, music or drinking. And it was possible to legitimize this shift theoretically, by an appeal to Marx's theory of alienation and the notion of the "all-round personality development".
Western sociologists interpret this attitudinal shift as a recent development, the immediate result or precursor of Gorbachev reforms. For example, Murray Yanowitch sees in my publications of "the immediate pre-Gorbachev years" a "virtual celebration of personal independence or autonomy", "stress on the supreme value of independence of thought and action". 7 Yet the ideas, quoted by Yanowich, were only paraphrases of what was originally published in the '60s and not in an underground dissident leaflet but by the official Party publishing house. However, it was impossible to implement these ideas in the real social and educational policies. We have been contemporaries but not participants of the global socio-cultural changes...
FROM PERESTROIKA TO CATASTROIKA.
Perestryoka as peaceful revolution from above was a nice but unrealistic Utopia. To combine radical economic reforms with the democratization of the country, which had neither democratic institutions nor, for some three generations, any experience of market economy, was impossible. Joint irresponsibilities of the Communist hardliners, "democratic" revolutionaries, nationalist movements and Gorbachev's inefficiency, instead of reforms, produced the collapse and disintegration not only of the Soviet state and empire, but of the economy and society as a whole. One aspect of this historical tragedy - whatever its benefits for other countries and future generations - was a global crisis or, rather, loss of identity.
Socio-economic changes in the USSR are extremely fast, dramatic, unexpected; people have been unprepared for them. Embracing all spheres of social and private life, all social institutions, roles and values, individuals could not internalize them gradually, one after another. And because these changes are accompanied by tremendous human sufferings and conflicts, they are seen by many people as intrinsically negative and threatening.
No nation in the world could accept and live through such drastic experiences cheerfully, and the Soviet people have been extraordinarily poorly equipped for them.
The Soviet culture and personality have been systematically oriented not towards the innovation and change but towards stability and continuity. Official Communist ideology was for many decades extremely, unbelievably conservative. It was not even an ideology, which is always geared towards real social problems but a routine propaganda, bent on covering and denying any problems. Attempts to reconsider old Marxist-Leninist dogmas were punishable as revisionism. In the art criticism, a deadly classicism reigned; everything should have been done exactly like the classics. The word "modernism" itself was sort of ideological invective and accusation. Every innovation looked suspicious and potentially dangerous. Social and cultural life was dull and tedious. "The guaranteed future" -- the main advantage of the socialism over the capitalism -- had to be merely the continuation and repetition of the past and present. This atmosphere was deadly and desperate for any initiative and innovation, the creative personalities being stifled by the system, yet the people got used to this life-style, and after such upbringing it is extremely difficult to accept radical changes.
Equally strong was a predilection for stable, institutionalized, fixed, openly bureaucratic social identities instead of individual self-development and self-direction. Contrary to Marx's own legacy, personality and self in the official Soviet ideology were conceived not as the ultimate values but as the means and the functions of a social structure or the social group. Individuality was systematically abused and suppressed as a manifestation of the bourgeois individualism. Economically, this was promoted by primitive egalitarianism in wages and by the elimination of competition. Politically, this stemmed from the bureaucratization of public life and the notion that the individual was a "cog" that moved automatically in the impersonal clockwork of the social mechanism. The category of human rights, historically and logically aimed to defend the individual from society, was eclipsed by the list of the individual's obligations to society. One-sided emphasis on the collectivism, group belongingness and collective responsibilities tended to produce global conformity that was detrimental for individual initiative, self-direction, personal integrity and moral responsibility.
The monistic versus pluralistic world outlook of the Soviet Marxism served as a justification for the primitive, simplicistic, authoritarian mentality, incompatible with cognitive complexity and intellectual tolerance: one party, one truth, one leader, and so on. In the commonsense psychology and ethics the normative image of a "monolithic" personality -- strong man, made from one block, uncompromising, without doubts or internal contradictions --was reigning. This militant, even militarist, masculine canon may be very attractive, but in the situation of social change and transition, it is socially and psychologically dysfunctional. As a famous Russian historian, Vassili Kluchevskii once ironically remarked, "the firmness of convictions is more often the inertia of thought than consistency of thinking". 8 When confronted with the dramatic and unexpected social changes, the monolithic personality, especially if trained in the spirit of discipline and obedience rather than that of an individual autonomy and responsibility, shall have either a neurotic breakdown or will try to oppose any innovation at all cost.
Such social-psychological equipment was, to put it mildly, not especially helpful for radical reforms and was conducive for the catastroyka rather than for perestroyka.
Are the dominant trends of contemporary Russian mentality new or old? I believe, they are both, and, at the example of the famous Prague "Staro-novaya synagogue", I will call them "old-new" syndroms.
LOSS OF IDENTITY.
The concept of "Soviet man" had always been ambiguous. In the official propaganda, "Soviet man" was a personification of the socialist type of personality, whose most important and 100 per cent positive traits were a) the acceptance of the goals and principles of the Communist ideology, the priority of the public, social interests over the private, individual; b) the perception of a work for a society's good as the highest meaning of life, the mode of assertion of the personal dignity and a means of development of individual abilities; c) the acceptance of the principles of collectivism, solidarity and internationalism as basic norms of interaction with the other people. 9.
Few, if any, individuals have taken this ideological fiction seriously. At best, it was a diffuse normative statement telling people what they were supposed to be or, rather, to appear. In the most cases, however, it was merely a lip-service.
As an antidote to this irritating ideological cliche, an ironic version of the Homo sovieticus - "Sovok" (the literary meaning of this word -- a little shovel, which can be used for any purposes, especially for the dust collection) has emerged in the early '80s. "Sovok" was a personological correlate of the Soviet life-style, a modal personality type, whose characteristic traits were conformism, laziness, inefficiency, hypocrisy and irresponsibility.
According to Alexander Zinoviev, "Homo Sovieticus", or "Homosos", being the product of adaptation to certain social conditions, can't survive in any other milieu, like the fish cannot live without water. "But homosos, in contrast to the fish, is himself the bearer and conserver of his environment or social habitat." 10 Being not a degeneration but the highest product of civilization, homosos is omnipresent, and "the virus of homosossery is spreading apace over the entire globe".
These negative traits, however, were projected and attributed only to others. Nobody ever said "I am Sovok", and the charge "But yes, you are!" would be terribly insulting. It was a strategy of self-alienation from the Soviet society and its values. Negative traits were acknowledged and discussed without any detriment to the personal self-esteem. The guilty was social system, and the victims were other individuals, never oneself.
Because of these negative connotations, very few people would be really distressed at the disappearance of the "Soviet man". However, the adjective "Soviet" was also designation of a certain civil (citizenship) and geographical {country) status. Now this word is meaningless, and many other, more specific, social role/identities and statuses, directly or indirectly associated with the Soviet system, -- Party membership, academic degrees, social prestige and privileges - also have desintegrated or lost their legitimation. Individuals urgently need new self-definitions framed in a more personal, non-bureaucratic, individual terms. But this is an extremely difficult task.
Let me offer a personal example. Who am I? In the past, while traveling abroad, I would usually mention my formal Soviet identity first. Now I don't know even the name of my country. Am I Russian? First and foremost, the word means to me an ethnic identity. Claiming to be a Russian, I'm renouncing my half-Jewish origins. Am I a Jew? This has nothing to do with my citizenship, and even psychologically this claim is doubtful. My language, culture, education have been Russian. I've learned, long ago, to feel myself Jewish not because I did belong but because of the anti-semitism and discrimination. My political identity is also problematic. After leaving the Communist Party in 1990, I have no political affiliation and don't want to have any. My terminal values are democratic and pro-Western but I don't believe in a sudden transformation of Russian society. I've written many books and papers and I believed that some of these were reasonably good. Now the criteria are changing and I need critical self-examination. I was born and lived through most of my life in Leningrad. Now my town is called St. Petersburg. Yet for me, whatever my attitudes to Lenin, Peter the Great or Saint Peter, this name has only dim historical connotations. I'm symbolically deprived of my birth-place. So what is my social identity, where do I really belong?
Still, I'm in a better situation then most of my contemporaries. Everybody in Russia knows that Professor Kon is "the sexologist". But I know they are wrong -- such discipline doesn't exist, and I strongly dislike its medical connotations. So everything in my life is problematic, and whatever self-definition is put forward, I feel myself being an impostor.
And this is more than normal intellectual masturbatory play with the existentialist categories. The people who, unlike myself, cannot indulge themselves in translating their uneasiness into theoretical concepts, may want to take revenge upon someone who, they think, had ruined their country and stolen their glorious past and their solid social identities. I don't share these feelings but I can understand them.
ADOLESCENT SYNDROME
Adolescent syndrome is a combination of the lack of historicity ("before us there was nothing valuable..."), maximalism ("everything or nothing"), impatience ("everything immediately") and negativism ("everything is bad and should be changed"). A general trait of the revolutionary visionaries and rooted also in the messianic attitudes of the pre-1917 Russian intelligentsia, adolescent syndrome is especially typical for the radical democrats. But are they really democrats or neo-Bolsheviks? Bolshevism is not as much a theory as a definite mentality. Many Russian anti-communists are, in fact, more genuine Bolsheviks than the old Party apparatchiks.
The original Leninists of the 1917 believed that all previous world history had been merely a pre-history, "genuine history" beginning only with themselves. The old world of social injustice should have been completely destroyed and the brave new socialist world built on its ruins. The results of this adventure are well known. The anti-communists of today believe that 70 years of Soviet history were completely wrong and everything done at that time should be remade as soon as possible. Says a Russian proverb, "to crush down is not to build up"... By feverishly renaming cities and streets, even if there was not enough money to print new maps, they try to change not only the present and the future but even the past.
This mentality is the old Communist propaganda in reverse. Before 1987 everything Soviet was by definition good and everything Western was bad. Now it's just the opposite: everything undesirable, including global, worldwide problems, like pollution or drug-addiction, is attributed to bad Communist policies. The market economy, on the contrary, looks like a synonym of humanism and social justice. Many politicians of present generation have made their careers without any positive, constructive ideas, only by the negative statements about the past and irresponsible promises for the future.
Sure, negation, destruction and uncertainty are necessary elements of every revolution, and anti-communism is as legitimate as anti-fascism. Yet adolescent syndrome is hardly compatible with economic efficiency and liberal democracy.
THE ENVY.
Like the adolescent syndrome, envy is a global phenomenon. It is much easier to love an alien, whom you do not know, than your own neighbor. According to an old Moslem joke, Allah once decided to reward one holy man and told him: "For your holiness, I will fulfil your every wish, on only one condition -- your neighbor will receive twice as much of the same". After a long deliberation, the holy man said: "0, Allah! Take one of my eyes out!"
There are two strategies to cope with this feeling. First is a competition: "I'm better than my neighbor, and I will prove it by working harder and having more than he has!" The second strategy is envy: "I'm better than my neighbor, and I will not permit him to have more than I have!"
In the pre-industrial, peasant, Gemeinschaft societies individuals are very tolerant to the out-group inequalities based on the estate/status differences, which are believed to be natural, unchangeable and unquestionable. The level of individual aspirations is strongly related to one's own social origin's status. The peasants don't compare themselves with the nobility, they live in a different social and cultural worlds. Yet the same people are extremely sensitive, intolerant and envious to the successes of their own kind (the communal envy).
There are three explanations of this phenomenon.
I/ In preindustrial societies people tend to believe that one's gain is inevitably somebody else's loss: the amount of all good and desired things being limited, something can be gained only in the process of redistribution, at the expense of the other, and this is considered to be socially and morally reprehensible and unjust. ë
2/ People are afraid of social differentiation, need for achievement is perceived as a threat to social stability and equilibrium, undermining the existing power relationships, prestige and authority.
3/ Being a "greedy institution" 12, Gemeinschaft "requires complete involvement of the individual, stability of social relations, and lack of differentiation of the personality as well as of the labor performed." 13
As the result of the relative undifferentiation between the social and personal, face-to-face, emotional relationships, the change in somebody's wealth or status undermines not only the power structure but the whole network of the interpersonal relations as well. People don't want these changes, hence - strong envious reactions^
The market economy and urban way of life, with its high mobility and anonymity, gradually change these conditions. Social stratification being no longer taken for granted, as something natural and permanent, one's level of aspiration is no longer limited, at least in principle, by one's social origins, one can compare himself and compete with anybody, and the competition breeds intergroup, class and status envy and conflicts. Yet these social conflicts are not necessarily personalized. The people also know that social or financial success may result not only from a robbery, but from the honest individual initiative and industriousness, which are positive qualities. Intra-group rivalry and envy don't disappear but become less obvious and less efficient as the means of social control on a societal level.
Russian social situation is different. The traditional peasant community existed here much longer and was much stronger than in the West, and its egalitarian attitudes have been additionally legitimized and strengthened by the Russian intelligentsia's anti-capitalist mentality. The independent farmer, "kulak" was the most hateful personage of the early 20s century Russian classical literature. And these negative attitudes have been further aggravated by the Communist egalitarianism.
There is a joke about it. During the 1917 revolution, an old countess asks her maid about the noisy crowd in the street: "What do these people want?" -- "They want that there should be no more rich people". - "Isn't that strange? -- says the old lady. -- We dreamed that there should be no poor people".
Marx himself was well aware of this danger, he even defined primitive egalitarian "barracks communism" as "the envy, institutionalized as a power". Yet the abolition of the private property and collectivization of peasantry strongly undermined individual autonomy and industriousness and generated instead of it an extremely vicious, militant and envious lumpen mentality, which effectively blocked every individual effort to do better and to rise above the average. Not to permit anybody to have more was psychologically more important than the improvement of a general well-being.
This mentality, combining hatred towards socially superiors with the envy towards socially equals, had a disastrous influence on the fate of perestroyka itself. The only real chance for perestroyka to succeed, was to begin privatization not with the state-owned industry but with the agriculture. However, Gorbachev's timid passes in the direction of individual farmership, even without private land property, were undermined, from the one side, by the Party and kolkhoz bureaucracies, and from the other side -- by the envious neighbors, who didn't want any changes and perceived the new farmers as their worst class enemies. Envy, disguised as a social justice, is the most powerful enemy of -- social and economic progress.
PRIVILEGES VERSUS RIGHTS.
Like in the feudal society, Soviet social identities were rooted not in the universalistic principle of human rights but in the particularistic principle of group privileges. Each particular social group, strata or substrata had its own set of privileges. Some of these privileges were legal and open, some -- illegal and secret. For example, high level Party and State officials received so called "Kremlevka" - first rate food for a symbolic price, which were in existence some 30 or 40 years ago. Privileges, connected with one's hierarchical status, have been often bigger and more important than the salary. Losing his status, one had to lose all his privileges. It was one of the most important guaranties of political loyalty. To use your privilege was both your right and your duty.
One my acquaintance was appointed the "responsible consultant" of the Central Committee, and this position gave him also also the right for "Kremlevka". Being a bachelor and the person of unusual moral sensitivity, he decided not to use this privilege. When he didn't take his due the first month of his new job, he was politely reminded about it by a small administrative officer. But when he failed to do it second time, he was summoned by his boss.
- Do you like your new job, is everything okay?
- Yes, I do, thank you very much.
- Then why don't you take your "Kremlevka?"
- I don't need it, I eat in the cafeteria.
- What you do with your property, is your own business. Maybe your salary is also too big for you? Nobody would mind if you will give part or whole of it to the poor. But if you don't receive your salary, it is a nuisance for the accountant office. "Kremlevka" is just the same. A lot of people in Moscow would be grateful, if you give them this food, it's up to you. But when you don't take it, it looks that you want to be different and better than your colleagues here, and this is unacceptable. Let's never return to this issue..."
Economically, highly stratified system of privileges was a result of permanent shortages, a specific form of rationing and distribution of goods. Yet the symbolic meanings of the privileges were even more important than material benefits. In order to receive something, one had not to work hard but to belong, to be a member of some prestigious organization. Already in the early '30s, the famous Soviet satirists Ilya IIf and Evgenij Petrov parodied this system in the form of an announcement: "The beer is sold only to the trade-union members".
The higher the organization - the bigger and more sophisticated have been its privileges. The Party Central Committee was especially inventive and ingenuous in marking status differences, without the smallest shade of egalitarianism.
The restaurant in the Party's Academy of Social Sciences had three different rooms -- for the students, for the professors, and a special room for the Rector of Academy and for the first secretaries of the regional party committees. The food, as far as I could see, was everywhere the same, good and cheap. But the student cafeteria had self-service, the professorial restaurant had waiters, and in the special room the luxury crystal glasses and the cotton, instead of paper, napkins have been served..
Even the smallest change of the ritual was a serious social event. The following story was told me many years ago by Fyodor Burlatsky. In the Central Committee the head of a department was entitled to have lunch in his office, the deputy-head could order for himself and for his visitors a free cup of tea with biscuits, and "zavsektorom" (head of a smaller subdivision} -- a cup of tea without biscuits. One day a liberal reform came -- "zavsektorom" was also given the biscuits. But now the difference between him and his superior would have disappeared, that was impossible. So, a deputy-head of the department was served his tea-cup with a genuine cotton napkin, and zavsektorom -- with a simple paper...
Similar strict hierarchy reigned in the academic institutions, universities, industrial plants. The Academy of sciences, for example, had two medical centers: one for the simple mortals and another, "special" (everything privileged, exclusive, and better than the average was named "special") --for the members of the Academy and for the most distinguished full professors-doctors. Yet within the special dispensary there was - and still is -- its own hierarchy. If a professor is waiting for his turn before the doctor's office (the lines have not been long) and a corresponding member of the Academy comes, the last person goes first. And the full member, an academician has the same precedence over a corresponding member. Status is more important than the appointment. So sometimes these honorable men have to explain to each other who is who: "Excuse me, please, I'm an academician, so I will go first. -- But I'm also academician and director of the Institute"....
After the death of my mother in 1989, I badly needed a place where I could have a decent lunch. I was a full member of the Academy of pedagogical sciences and Chief researcher at the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences. Yet in order to obtain the privilege to lunch at the "special" restaurant of the Academy of Sciences, just two blocks from my house, the director of my Institute had to write a formal letter to the Vice-president of the Academy, explaining how important I was and how badly I needed this privilege. The Vice-president, who knew me for decades, has put on this letter a very favorable resolution. The Academy's chief administrative officer, more influential than the President himself, then gave his order, and after three more weeks of bureaucratic correspondence at the lower administrative levels, I was put upon the enviable list. I was grateful, appreciative and proud.
At the Novosibirsk branch of the Academy I heard a joke, a parody announcement in the campus store: "The imported furniture is received for sale. Academicians are entitled to a dining-room, corresponding members -- to a bedroom, professors-doctors -- to a study, candidates (PhD) -- to an office desk, and junior research associates without scientific degree -- to a kitchen stool".
The hierarchy of privileges was an integral part not only of Soviet distributive system and social life but also of the mentality. Privileges have been the signs and elements of one's identity/status. And the same people who protested against the privileges of the other, higher, strata, were deeply convinced that their own privileges were right and just: "Sure, these lazy and arrogant Party officials have too much. But I'm a full professor, my time is more valuable than that of a young assistant, so how can we stand in the same line? I have legal and moral right to go ahead."
People were fighting not for the rights but for the privileges, and an important part of the present feeling of identity-loss is really only a nostalgia for the lost privileges. This specific idea of distributive justice was a part of a global bureaucratic ethos, which is still alive and well and hardly compatible with the free market mentality or the idea of human rights.
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS.
For many decades Soviet economy and social life was a highly institutionalized inefficiency, every individual initiative being directly or indirectly punishable. The more one tried, the more frustrated and helpless one was feeling himself. Everything progressive was doomed in advance. In the late '70s, struggling for the recognition and institutionalization of Soviet sociology, we always repeated the same cheer: "Let's drink for the success of our hopeless endeavor!" One of my friends often quoted the advice of an old whore to her young novices: "First of all, girls, don't fuss under the customer!" Whatever the amount of your energy, sooner or later you got tired. Productive social activity was being gradually eliminated and replaced by bureaucratic simulation and the meaningless rituals. The predominant and ever growing feeling in the '70s and '80s was social indifference and apathy.
Learned helplessness was a natural outcome of this situation, and it was also a rational strategy for survival, self-defence and even promotion: people with ideas and ambitions were not needed. For an independent, self-directed person this was humiliating and intolerable. But the low level of aspirations, expectations and performances was compensated and hypercompensated by the complete social and moral irresponsibility. Salary was practically unrelated neither to the quantity nor to the quality of one's work, and the satisfaction of one's basic, elementary needs was more or less guaranteed by the state.
Fundamentally USSR was the country of petty bureaucrats. Everybody, from the industrial worker to the university professor, was a state official. Both Soviet social system and the system of socialization have been essentially maternalistic. The Communist Party, like an authoritarian Mother, knew your "rational needs" better than you did yourself. She may have punished you for the mistakes and misdeeds but it was done in the name of your own "best interests". The Party and the State always cared about you, and for many people this authoritarian care and control was quite acceptable.
Now nobody cares, people feel themselves more uncomfortable, vulnerable and helpless than ever before, and there is little hope for the future. Hence the widespread pessimism, fear, and apocalyptic expectations, which sometime function as a self-fulfilling prophesies.
DOUBLETHINK.
The capacity, described by George Orwell, to combine, sincerely and without guilt, absolutely incompatible beliefs and statesments about one and the same subject, is one of the most problematic, universal and permanent traits of Soviet mentality. Certain amount of a double-think is an absolute precondition for survival in totalitarian society. People were supposed to share the official ideological values but anybody who would be naive or stupid enough to take these values literally (that Soviet society was democratic, that everybody had right and duty openly express his opinions, etc) was doomed, -- real functioning of the Soviet system had nothing to do with its official front image. Yet complete and conscious rejection of the official values also was socially and psychologically dysfunctional: everyone had volens nolens to use the official language, and it was easier to do it automatically, without arguments and reflection. Complete self-conscious cynicism, like an absolute division between public and private life, is unbearable for the majority.
Doublethink is by definition amoral, incompatible with individual integrity, self-realization and moral responsibility. Yet, paradoxically, in some cases, it was a stimulus for reflection: what kind of language and reasoning one had to use in this particular case or circumstances? And reflection and doubt are, by definition, subversive and anti-totalitarian.
Doublethink is a doubly manipulative strategy. On the one hand, it helps the social system to subjugate and manipulate individual consciousness. On the other hand, it helps individual to escape some pressures of the dominant ideology by transforming his intellectual dependence and subservience into a mere double-talk, lip-service for the official purposes. With the degradation of the Communist system, double-think was becoming more and more conscious ^^ cynicism and hypocrisy. Already in the early '50s there was a joke that God had given a man three valuable qualities - intelligence, honesty and Party membership - on the condition that they should never be implemented in the same person.
According to poet Mikhail Svetlov's ironic definition, the good, moral person is a person who is disgusted while doing bad, amoral deeds. This formula sounds cynical, yet it is psychologically correct: when your disgust becomes real strong, you will try not to do bad things, even under pressure.
It was the double-think, that helped many Soviet intellectuals to accept easily new anti-communist ideas and to change their political beliefs. The promptness of this conversion is best proof of the bankruptcy of the former ideology, which was supported mainly by the force. Yet it is also another manifestation of the same double-think: people, who can change their beliefs overnight, shall do it again and again, they are not to be trusted..
TRADITIONALISM.
Soviet revolution is at the same time democratic, because it is directed against authoritarian dictatorship, and conservative, because it is aimed at the restoration of the pre-socialist, capitalist social order. But how far back we want to go?
If the postmodernism is a drive to the unknown future, post-communist traditionalism, like Moslem fundamentalism, is a drive to the unknown past. Recent past is rejected in favor of something forgotten and unknown. It is a return not to the "real" historical past, but to the idealized, imaginary past, when everything was bright, moral and beautiful.
This conservative Utopia is multifaceted. On the one side, it is an expression of global, worldwide disillusionment and reaction to the contradictions and excesses of modernization. On the other side, it is a continuation of the Brezhnev's era social inertia, with its emphasis on stability and continuity. Finally, it is a specific form of the anti-communist ideology.
Traditionalism is usually presented as a revival and renaissance of the spirituality, universal /read: religious/ moral values and national traditions, distorted or suppressed by the Communist regime. But very often it appeals not only to the presocialist, but to the precapitalist, preindustrial relations, more imaginary than real.
The traditionalist Utopia is both unrealistic and authoritarian; you can't turn history back and to make people live according to the rules which became problematic or invalid centuries ago. But the greatest danger of traditionalism is that it is strongly linked with the primitive and militant nationalism.
When most of their social identities are lost or inflated, people naturally turn to their ethnic identity as the last resort. The growth of nationalism as a reaction against cosmopolitan modernity is a global process and a serious challenge even to the Western democracies. 15 For the multinational Soviet Union, where all social problems and conflicts have been for many decades ignored, denied or brutally suppressed, this issue was fatal.
Ethnic/national identity is often interpreted not as common cultural heritage, but as a biological, blood unity, which is defined negatively, by the common enemies. The human race is divided on "nashi" (our) and "ne-nashi" (non-our). Negative identities based on hatred seem stronger and more virulent than the positive ones, based on love and cooperation. Persons of mixed origins or culturally and linguistically marginal feel themselves homeless, rootless and vulnerable. The most chauvinistic and xenophobic Russian writers introduced even a division between the genuinely "Russian" ( by blood) and merely "Russian-language" writers. According to sarcastic formula of a well-known theater director Mark Zakharov, Alexander Poushkin was not the greatest Russian poet but a "Russian-speaking poet of Ethiopian origin"...
IS THERE A LIGHT AT THE TUNNEL'S END?
The attitudes described above are dysfunctional both for market economy and for political democracy. Yet the painful loss of identity is in the long run only a precondition of further development. Without being stripped out of their old bureaucratic role/identities, people cannot develop their new individualities. But is it possible to overcome this social heritage?
I'm methodologically skeptical about the "essentialist", ontological and fatalistic interpretations of "Homo Sovieticus" or "Russian Character". Modal personality type had always been a loose metaphor rather than an analytical concept.
Sure, some historical continuity is undeniable. American historian Edward L. Keenan summarizes fundamental traits of 17th century Russian village political culture as:
a strong tendency to maintain stability and a kind of closed equilibrium; risk-avoidance; suppression of individual initiatives; informality of political power; the considerable freedom of action and expression "within the group"; the striving for unanimous final resolution of potentially divisive issues. 16
And, according to Keenan, Russian peasants who in the '30s replaced the former Westernized elites in politics and culture, "did not cast aside the attitudes - the view of the world and of man -- that they brought with them to their new positions. Indeed, they prospered in politics precisely because they practiced the traditional habits of risk-avoidance and the subjection of the individual will and impulse - including one's own - to the interests of the group. They took control of an increasingly stable state and society whose traditional patterns of centralization, bureaucratization, and pragmatism, whose objectives of security and control, all based upon fear of uncontrollable situations, were newly reinforced by the experiences of the preceding decades of insecurity and chaos".17
The historical continuity is undeniable. The syndromes, mentioned above, are clearly related to the "oblomovism" /social passivity, incapacity for any action/, "manilovism" /fancy dreaming instead of action/ and "khiestakovism" /irresponsible boastfulness and cheating/.
However, early '20s century Russian capitalism was created not by Oblomovs, Manilovs, and Khlestakovs. Envious and passive in the USSR "Sovok" is socially and personally successful in emigration in the USA or in Israel, where he must conform to other social standards and where his efforts are duly rewarded. And if people can be competitive, industrious and successful in emigration, why can't they do the same in their own land, when its social system is changed?
It is true, the data on Soviet immigrants are scarce and related mainly to the Jewish immigration, and Jews are generally believed to have higher that average level of achievement motivation. It is also possible that the individuals, of whatever ethnic origins, who have had the courage and strength to begin a new life abroad, may be psychologically different from the majority of Russian/Soviet population and their success is not a promise for others, who stayed at home and now are involved in the social change against their will. But if human personality is generally plastic and flexible, why not in Russia?
The loss of identity is a terrible experience for old people, for the people with the vested interests in the Communist system, for the Party and state officials, whose bureaucratic mentality and experiences became useless and even dysfunctional, for the persons who are incapable to adapt to new conditions because of their intellectual rigidity.
But there are others -- such as a new class of private entrepreneurs and managers.
Especially important are age and generation differences. What for people of my generation is a catastrophe, for the young people is a challenge. Without established social identities and privileges, they have nothing to lose. They are much more pragmatic and individualistic than the "eternal adolescents" of the '60s. Generation, whose parents, grandparents and even grand-grand-parents are socially and morally bankrupt, cannot be idealistic and philosophically-minded. Skepticism and political indifference has precluded them from active involvement in the Utopian, reformist stage of perestroyka but they may be quite efficient economically.
In the recent public opinion polls there is a sharp demarcation between the older, less educated and rural and the younger, better educated and urban populations. Positive attitude to private property and market economy was expressed by 63 per cent of the respondents below 25 and only 19 per cent of those over 60 years; with educational level the relation is inverse. 18 In Moscow poll (January 1992), three fifths of the respondents answered "no" to the question whether perestroyka was worth beginning. Several months later, in a Russian survey, 80 per cent said that before perestroyka life was better. Yet the people younger than 25, with the university education and affiliated to cooperative, private and joint enterprises strongly disagree with that opinion. 19 Younger, better-educated and more urban people are more ready to take the risk of economic competition, and they are categorically against egalitarian principles of distribution. 20 Young people are also much more optimistic and sure about their own future. At the question "Whether young people are capable to work hard?" 71 per cent answered "yes". At the question "Whether young people are capable to develop the initiative?" the positive answer was given by 79 per cent. 21 And hopes and expectations of young people are socially more important than the fears and anxieties of the old ones.
Age and education are also correlated with the general shift to Postmaterialist values. Two recent surveys, in the European part of the USSR, Spring 1990, and in the Russian Federation, January 1991, while showing a lower proportion of Postmaterialists than was found in Poland and Czechoslovakia, show clear and rather steep upward slopes. "Like other advanced industrial societies, Russia seems to be undergoing an intergenerational shift from overwhelmingly Materialist values toward increasingly Postmaterialist values - and this shift brings with it growing mass pressures for democrati-zation" 22. Postmaterialists are much more likely to support core democratic values -- liberty, democratic norms, right consciousness, dissent and opposition, independent mass media, competitive elections and political tolerance.
This sounds promising, but contemporary Russian youth is formed not by the nascent new social order but by the decomposition of the old one. The psychological preconditions of the capitalist ethos, loosely described as a protestant ethic, include not only an agressive individualism, initiative and self-direction but also a basic feeling of trust (in God, in himself, in other people and at least in some social institutions) and some general ideas of human rights, law and order.
The high levels of interpersonal trust and of subjective well-being, which, according to Inglehart, are conducive to economic and political cooperation, rest upon economic prosperity and security. Yet the data from the 1990 World Values survey in Eastern Europe "reveal the lowest levels of subjective well-being ever recorded... In the surveys carried out in Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Latvia and Litvania, about as many people describe themselves as "unhappy" as "happy", and about as many say they are "dissatisfied with their lives as a whole" as say they are "satisfied". This is an extraordinary and alarming finding. In 1990, these societies ranked far below much poorer countries such as India, Nigeria or China... We view this as an indication of profound malaise among the general public... Unless a positive sense of well-being is established, it bodes ill for the stability of the new regimes". 2ã3
Young people are not exempt from this malaise. There is tremendous gap between their ultimate and immediate values and between their goals and means. Post-communist youths are extremely Materialist and pro-capitalist in their values but they are not ready for hard work and self-sacrifices. They want to be rich but not to work hard. The most popular answer (53 per cent) to the question "What is most important for the young people?" in the Russian public opinion survey (September 1991) was "material well-being", and the least popular (3 per cent) -- "the social activity". This is not a simple reaction to the old hypocritical Communist propaganda cliches.
Comparative analysis of job motivation and life plans of Russian and Ukrainian teenagers (high school students) in 1985 and 1991 24 shows very consistent trends: I/growing orientation on money and other material values; 2/sharp increase in the levels of social expectations, be it salary, prestige, or power position; 3/sharp decrease in the readiness to take on a hard or unpleasant work. In 1985 social expectations of the high school graduates have been reasonably realistic, they hoped to have what could be really achieved. Now their expectations are sharply increased and became absolutely unrealistic. Teenagers want to have everything immediately and for free, without taking extra trouble. They expect much more help from their parents and social institutions than these can really afford, especially now.
This hedonistic and dependency-bound orientation is dysfunctional both for socio-economical and for the moral development. Young people, wanting to become rich and not to work hard, are much more prone to be involved in the criminal, than in the socially productive activities. And the crime rate in Russia is really growing dangerously.
Another dream of young people is emigration. 85 per cent of Magun and Litvitseva's respondents would like to go abroad for a temporary work, 49 per cent - for a permanent job, if a decent position is available, and 19 per cent want to emigrate at any price.
All this is quite natural. The country has neither economy nor the law or moral order. The internal moral standards and rules of self-regulation has been undermined long ago, by the hypocrisy of the Communist elite and also by the too strong external control. To cheat or to evade all-powerful Soviet state was risky but not amoral; in a sense, that was your only chance to experience freedom. Now the external control is loose and there are neither moral restrictions nor role models. There is much public talk about morality, universal human values and religious renaissance but the real situation is that of the complete anomie, lawlessness and normlessness.
Old Communist bureaucracy is bankrupt, but the so-called democrats are not better. Some of them are seen as irresponsible chatterboxes, capable for nothing but false promises. Others, after taking power, proved to be even more corrupt than the previous rulers; the level of corruption and cynicism today is much higher than under Brezhnev, when the officials were at least afraid to lose their privileged positions. Before 1985 the Soviet Union was the most hypocritical country in the world, now it is the most cynical. The fear of legal punishment and the shame of public blame practically disappeared, everything seems permissible. And some radical intellectuals, who had initiated social changes, are now sending valuable advice to the compatriots from abroad, where they have found safe places for themselves and their children.
The only practical moral lesson the young people are receiving today, is that everyone should fight for himself, or, as Ilya IIf and Evgenij Petrov have put it long ago, - the rescue of the drowning men is the duty of the drowning men themselves. For a survival in time of a general catastrophe, this rule is better than the learned helplessness. But is it a moral imperative?
Primitive, wild capitalism is more compatible with chauvinism and fascism than with a liberal democracy and moral tolerance. The block of the Communist hard-liners and extreme-right chauvinists is already formed, and the national-socialist ideology is widely propagated. By classical Weimar standards, the country is pregnant with fascism, and sooner or later the baby will be born.
However, this is not inevitable. The world has changed since the 1920/30s. The same global forces of post-industrialism, that had undermined the Communist dictatorship, are now working against isolationism and fascism. Traditional opposition between dependence (bad thing) and independence (good thing) must give way to the principle of voluntary interdependence, which is today not only ethical and political but also an ecological imperative. New generations of Russians, Ukrainians and others, whatever their feelings today, want to live in a free, peaceful and open world, which should be democratic and pluralistic.
But this optimism is, alas, not for the present generation. In the near future, as a reaction to economic hardships and moral disillusionment, I see growing nostalgia for the glorious Communist past and the emergence of primitive conservative moralization as a substitute for the difficult and intellectually sophisticated autonomous morality.
Notes
1. Daniel Bell, "The Measurement of Knowledge and Technology", in E. Sheldon and W. E. Moore, eds. Indicators of Social Chancre. New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1968, p, 149. On the educational implications of this idea see I. Tallman, R. Marotz-Baden and P. Pindas, Adolescent Socialization in Cross-Cultural Perspective. The Minnesota University Press 1983; I. S. Kon, "The Relay Race of Generations: Notes on the Upbringing of Youth", in Murray Yanowitch, ed. New Directions in Soviet Social Thought. New York, M. E. Sharpe, Inc. 1989.
2. William Simon, paper in this issue
3. Norbert Elias, The Society of the Individuals. Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 129
4. This was convincingly demonstrated by V. A. ladov, ed. Sotsialno-psikhologicheskij portret inzhenera. Moskva, Mysl, 1977; K. Musdybaev, Psikholoqia otvetstvennosti, Leningrad, Nauka, 1983
5. See Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton University Press 1990
6. See V. A. ladov, "The social personality type". Soviet Education, vol. 31, # 9 (Sept. 1989)
7. Murray Yanowitch,. Introduction. "Social Psychologists on Education and the Workplace". Soviet Education. A Journal of Translations. 1989, vol. 31, # 9, p. 5
8. V. O. Kliuchevskii, Pis'ma. Dnevniki. Aforismy i Mysli ob Istorii (Letters. Diaries. Aphorisms and Thoughts about History). Moskva, Nauka, 1968, p. 344
9. G. L. Smirnov. Sovietskii___Chelovek; ___Formirovanie Sotsialisticheskogo Tipa Lichnosti. Moskva, Politizdat, 1980, pp. 231-251.
10. Alexander Zinoviev, Homo Sovieticus. The Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston - New York, 1982, p. 197.
11. See George M. Foster, "Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good", American Anthropologist. 67, 2 (April 1965), pp. 293 - 315. See also James Dow, "The image of Limited Production: Envy and the Domestic Mode of Production in Peasant Society", Human Organization, 40, 4, (Winter 1981), pp. 360 - 363; Siegfried-Rudolf Dunde, "Symptom Oder Destruktivkraft: Zur Funktion des Neides in der Gesellschaft", Sociologia - Internationalise 22, 2, (1984), pp. 217 -- 233.
12. See Lewis A. Coser, Greedy Institutions. N. Y.: Free Press, 1974
13. Rose Laub Coser, In Defence of Modernity; Role Complexity and Individual Autonomy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 138.
14. K. Marx
15. I have discussed this issue in the article "Dialektika razvitija natsij", Novyi mir. 1970, # 3. See also "Nationalism today: its origins and nature. A dialogue between Ernest Gellner and Igor Êîï." - Social Sciences, 1989, vol. XX, # 4
16. Edward L. Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways", The Russian Review, v. 45, (1986), p. 128.
17. Ibid., p. 169
18. Mir mnenij i mnenia î mire. Sluzhba VP, Bulletin # 8 (August 1992), p. 6.
19. Mir mnenij i mnenia î mire. Sluzhba VP, Bulletin # 2 (February 1992), p. 1.
20. Mir mneni'i i mnenia î mire. Sluzhba VP, Bulletin # 9 (November 1991), p. 4.
21. Mir mnenij i mnenia î mire. Sluzhba VP, Bulletin # 9 (November 1991), p. 6.
22. See James L. Gibson and Raymond M. Duch, Postmaterialism and the Emerging Soviet Democracy. Paper presented at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC
23. Ronald Inglehart, Democratization in Global Perspective. Paper presented at the annual meetings of Midwest Political Science Association. Chicago, Illinois, April 9 -11, 1992, ð. 35.
24. V. Magun, Motivatsia truda i trudovaya moral v postsotsialisticheskom rossijskom obshchesve i ikh predystoria. Moskva, Institut sotsiologii RAN, 1992; V. S. Magun, A. Z. Litvintseva, Uroven zhiznennykh pritjazanij i strategii ikh realizatsii u uchashchikhsja shkol i proftekhuchilishch. Moskva, 1992 (Unpublished manuscripts, quoted with permission).
© Igor S. Kon
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