25b: Homo Sovieticus

As the Soviet state approached its fiftieth birthday in 1967, it could look with pride on some of its accomplishments. Soviet power had been firmly established everywhere in the old Russian empire. A network of Eastern European client states protected the USSR from the capitalist West. The military/industrial complex built at such cost by Stalin had enabled the Soviet Union to prevail in the Great Patriotic War. Even though Stalin was temporarily forced to spout "patriotic" Russian rhetoric at the time, eventual victory only reinforced the regime's prestige. After the war, Soviet technology caught up with American when the USSR produced a nuclear bomb in 1949. In 1957, the USSR even passed the United States in the space race by launching Sputnik, the world's first satellite. Around the world, undeveloped countries and revolutionary movements looked to the USSR for political and financial support. International capitalism had not yet been defeated, but it appeared to be retreating, especially in eastern Asia, as Red China increased in influence.

But on balance, time would show the USSR had failed more than it had succeeded. Once, Communist intellectuals had theorized about producing a "homo Sovieticus," or "Soviet Man" - a  happy, hard-working soul bred and reared to serve the Soviet state. Although the concept of homo Sovieticus was pushed so hard that it was taught in all Soviet medical schools, it was a joke. Living standards in the cities remained poor, and in the countryside, positively wretched - even after the improvements made under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. The proletarians appointed by Lenin to  hold their dictatorship lived in cramped, miserable apartments and toiled long hours at ill-paid jobs. What dreams they still had were for things even poorer Westerners had: radios and refrigerators, and perhaps someday a cheap little car. In general Soviet city dwellers would have settled for stores stocked with good food, decent consumer goods, and no lines. The peasants were worse off yet. Forced by Stalin into massive collective farms, they were expected to feed the USSR by following often ridiculous plans established by the Communist Party. If the crop failed, the state would take its cut first and leave the peasants to starve, if need be - just as in the days of War Communism. Medical and cultural conditions were appalling too, and moving to the city was not only improbable, it was illegal. Simply put, the peasants had reverted to serfdom.

From Peter the Great's time on, Russia had embraced Western culture; before long Russian poets, painters, and scientists were among the world's finest. Indeed, the Bolshevik party itself was founded not by workers or peasants. Lenin and most of his cohort were the well educated spawn of middle and upper class Russian families, effectively denied a place in public life by institutionalized Tsarist idiocy. Many of the intelligentsia had once cared deeply about the October Revolution: they believed that the Bolsheviks' commitment to education for all included all forms of education. And indeed, this was one area where Communist deeds backed up Communist words. The literacy rate skyrocketed under the Soviets, while thousands of people who would never have seen the inside of a lecture hall got to receive a college education. What Soviet college students were allowed to learn, they learned well.

Yet the Soviet culture, especially under Stalin, became an intellectual desert. True Communists were men and women of action, not words. The Soviet Union's most promising students were invariably shuttled off into programs which produced military hardware. Sometimes talented inventors were placed in special prison camps to make sure they could focus upon their work.  Meanwhile, "Socialist Realism" was the only recognized form of art. Mediocrity (or worse) reigned, as prizes were awarded to novels about cement or the nicest statue of Lenin. Anyone who spoke out against the Soviet state was removed from society - either executed (as under Stalin), or sent to a psychiatric hospital, as under Khrushchev and his successors.  Ever resourceful, the Russian people managed to maintain somewhat its vivid intellectual life, but it had to be very well hidden. Soviet science was further plagued by an outbreak of charlatans claiming that Communist science had transcended the laws of genetics. The laws of genetics ultimately won, but only after the Soviet scientific world was set back by a generation. Foreign technology was ridiculed. By the time the Soviets came to appreciate Western advances in computer science, the West had gotten too far ahead to catch up with.

For years and years, the Soviet people had been told that living conditions would improve drastically as Communism came ever closer. Lenin had said it, Stalin had said it, Khrushchev had said it, and now Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was saying it. The Soviet people finally concluded that saying something over and over again did not necessarily make it true. The Communist Party had degenerated from a mass movement of people devoted to building a new society, into a club for bureaucrats and other weasels. The Romanovs and their noble friends had been kicked out and executed, only to be replaced by a new Communist nobility: the nomenklatura - privileged offspring of men who had risen to power under Stalin. Was this what the Soviet people fought and died for by the millions in the Great Patriotic War?  The so-called "homo Sovieticus," or "Soviet Man" turned out to be a grim, disaffected cynic who felt no loyalty whatsoever to the Soviet State. There was little chance that the Soviet people would rise up against their masters. - As is clear from Russian history, the people are used to strong, authoritarian leadership from people like Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great. Lenin and Stalin certainly fit this category too. But the structure of Communism had become so rotten that very little would be required to make it fall in.