If we are to discuss the homo sovieticus, it is essential to know what we are talking about. Can this notion really work as a scientific concept? Does it have any analytical purchase? The expression has been often used as a pejorative term, a slur that is meant to refer to all the negative aspects of the Soviet historical experience, which allegedly made an irreversible impact on the post-Soviet people. In its most extreme forms, it may even be deemed racist. The homo sovieticus is envisioned as some kind of an “orc” from the “Soviet Mordor.” He is evil and repulsive by his very nature.
The origins of the term appear to be somewhat obscure, but it is often associated with the book entitled Homo Sovieticus, published in 1981 by the Soviet philosopher Alexander Zinoviev. Zinoviev was stripped of his citizenship and deported from the USSR for his dissident activities. The book is certainly a fun read, a lengthy exercise in sad irony, with multiple witty comments, repeatedly comparing and contrasting the Soviet and Western lifestyles. However, it is hardly a scientific undertaking.
Another intellectual giant that is usually brought up in connection with the history of the term is Yuri Levada. This renowned Russian sociologist gave a public lecture on the subject of the homo sovieticus in 2004. The historical context is impossible to ignore here too. At that point, the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Putin’s subjugation of independent media had signaled that Russia’s post-Communist transition was taking a new direction. The initial hopes that Russia would quickly become a liberal democracy, built along the Western template, were not about to materialize. Consequently, Russian sociologists were wondering whether the impact of the Soviet historical experience on the Russian people was strong enough to hinder a transition towards a “normal” political and economic system.
However, this sociological take was also criticized on the grounds of homo sovieticus being too broad a category, lumping too many things together and implicitly assuming there had existed a single Soviet “anthropological” type of human being. Of course, it is true that the Soviet system had powerful socialization mechanisms, which left a deep imprint on anyone who was forced to go through them. For instance, there was the conscription into the Soviet army. Thus, many young men, from Lithuania to Tajikistan, ended up sharing the same tough experience, to which they could still relate decades later, even after the Soviet empire itself imploded. This meant certain common understandings, cultural references, and practices, which the subsequent post-Soviet generations would not share. In this sense - and in several other important respects - it is not unreasonable to speak of post-Soviet countries as a historical category, which would then also logically include the three Baltic states, though the latter are highly allergic to this designation. Post-Soviet here operates in very much the same way as post-colonial, serving as an umbrella term for a broad array of countries that are otherwise drastically different from each other.
Yet, the very fate of the Soviet Union and the subsequent post-Soviet trajectories of development suggest that the mechanisms of totalitarian socialization never got anywhere near creating a homogenous Soviet society. “A new historical community of people, the Soviet people,” which Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed at some point, was but an ideological myth. The post-Communist fate of the Central Asian former Soviet republics was drastically different from that of the Baltic states, and both, in turn, had differed from the Eastern European post-Soviet states like Belarus and Ukraine. And even Belarus and Ukraine have been much more different than an outside observer, unfamiliar with the region, could ever imagine. The 2020 protests in Belarus, which suddenly gave the country a new level of international visibility, prompted Western journalists to look for quick analogies and compare the situation in Belarus with the Ukrainian popular revolutions of 2004 and 2013. In fact, few things are more analytically counter-productive than trying to understand Belarus based on the Ukrainian experience. Despite their cultural and geographical proximity, the two post-Soviet countries had been exact opposites of one another on more than one key counts, most importantly, in terms of their political culture, regime type, and political economy.
This diversity of the post-Soviet development trajectories suggests that the potential of understanding these countries via their shared Soviet past and the alleged homo sovieticus as a sociological or anthropological category is, indeed, limited. There is no doubt the Soviet experience was a powerful shaping factor in many ways, but the pre-Soviet legacies were equally crucial in terms of things like political culture, work ethics or propensity towards rule-based behavior. For some countries, the Soviet era was in many ways a continuation of the previous historical period, which reinforced and exacerbated the pre-existing tendencies. Thus, the Russian tradition of imperial autocracy clearly did not start in 1917, and the Bolshevik revolution and totalitarian state-building often developed some of the older social structures that dated back to the Romanov empire if not earlier.
So, does the term homo sovieticus have any analytical purchase at all, and, if so, what could its value added be? If we were to give it the benefit of the doubt, in the end, we could assume that it refers to certain patterns of behavior that were conditioned by the Soviet institutional structure, and that continued to bear an impact on the social and political life of the post-Soviet period. That is not an altogether unreasonable assumption. The patterns of behavior or traits that are usually identified in connection with the homo sovieticus include political and economic paternalism, cynicism and “double-think,” i.e., disbelief in any political values - because values amount to nothing and “everybody lies” - the associated disbelief in political participation (because “politics is a dirty business and no good has ever come of it”), and ultimately disbelief in the individual, in his/her ability to succeed in life and to transform the environment around him/her. In this sense, the homo sovieticus is the opposite of the “American dream,” of the vision of an active, successful, and prosperous individual, a “self-made (wo)man.” In contrast to that, the homo sovieticus is never self-made. He is always critically dependent on some murky semi-formal structures, be it the Communist Party, or the post-Communist “mafia state,” to borrow a term from Bálint Magyar.
In some sense, this corresponds well to the collective experience of the late Soviet period, when nepotism was omnipresent and upward social mobility was severely restricted by what Milovan Đilas called the rise of “the new class,” the privileged stratum of the Communist party bureaucracy that formed the new “aristocracy” of the Soviet society. Thus, for example, if one wanted to go into prestigious areas like diplomacy, one normally had to be a son of a “party aristocrat,” (the daughters were somewhat less appreciated in that trade).
Mutatis mutandis the post-Soviet period inherited these legacies, even absent Marxism-Leninism, in which, by the end of the Soviet era, no one had genuinely believed - not even its high priests. This Soviet cynicism continued to operate through the homo postsovieticus, who was now ruled by the former party nomenklatura, KGB officers, or state-owned farm (sovkhoz) directors. The Soviet inherited patterns of behavior could probably explain a lot in terms of how the post-Soviet institutions were crafted and how the post-Communist patrimonial, authoritarian regimes cemented themselves.
Yet, this is not the full picture. We know that patterns of behavior can alter depending on the specific institutional settings. That is a commonplace sociological observation. Thus, post-Soviet people tend to do quite well when placed in a different social environment, let’s say, as a result of their emigration to the West. The homo sovieticus, it seems, vanishes without a trace in the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.
We know from sociologists the relationship between institutions and human behavior is always a two-way street. Institutions condition people but, at the same time, people continuously reproduce the existing institutions. This is Anthony Giddens’ famous notion of structuration. But their parallel evolution is also not a linear process. Sometimes, there are critical junctures, that is, important historical events that reshape the institutional settings in such a way as to encourage and strengthen certain patterns of behavior.
This is arguably what happened in Belarus in 1994, when Aliaksandr Lukashenka was elected president. His political message was, in essence, very simple: LET’S GO BACK. To the Belarusians, who were disoriented and frustrated by the post-Communist transition, this appealed for two principal reasons. First, the experience of the Soviet modernization and urbanization in Belarus led to an increase in living standards in the second half of the 20th century, and for many the Soviet period represented (relative) welfare and stability. Second, Belarus’ cultural and political elite was nearly wiped out in the Stalinist purges, decapitating the nation intellectually and stalling the process of nation-building.
Consequently, Belarus was often portrayed as the “most Sovietized of the Soviet republics” and the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich allegedly referred to Belarus as the “Vendée of the Perestroika,” alluding to that one French province that remained staunchly royalist during the Revolution. So, when Lukashenka arrived with his promise to turn the clock back, his neo-Soviet message appealed to many. And it was in the regime’s interest to preserve and strengthen the Soviet patterns of behavior. The paternalist authoritarian model typically operates by making as many people as possible crucially dependent on it.
Yet, as we do not yet have a time machine, one can never truly go back and enter the same river twice. (Re)building the USSR in a single (and rather small) republic - to paraphrase the old Bolshevik formula - was clearly impossible. While trying to survive economically, Belarus’ regime sowed the seeds of its own death, contributing to the rise of an educated and independent middle class that would eventually challenge it. The 2020 pandemic and the ensuing protests brought fascinating examples of what the Belarusian sociologist Henadz Korshunau calls “horizontal sociality,” i.e., societal solidarity and spontaneous self-organization along the decentralized network model. This is in fact the opposite of what the homo sovieticus archetype is allegedly supposed to represent. That is, an atomized society of cynical individuals, who are at the same time both collectivist when comes to their rejection of the power of individual to act independently and to bring about positive change, and individualist in the sense of lacking basic solidarity, empathy, and moral norms. Thus, 2020 in Belarus brought a strong challenge to the post-Soviet regime that had built itself on many Soviet-inherited patterns of behavior. All the difficulties notwithstanding, one can hope that Belarus’ post-Soviet experience will ultimately inoculate it against paternalistic authoritarianism and move it further towards a different institutional setting, where new patterns of individual and collective behavior are stimulated.
Dr. Aliaksei Kazharski received his PhD from Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia) in 2015. As a doctoral student, he spent time as a guest researcher at the University of Oslo (Norway), University of Tartu (Estonia) and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (Austria). He has also been a visiting researcher at the University of Vienna and has worked as a researcher and lecturer at Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic) and Comenius University in Bratislava. Aliaksei’s doctoral dissertation was published by Central European University Press as a monograph in 2019 (Eurasian Integration and the Russian World: Regionalism as an Identitary Enterprise). He has also contributed to the work of regional think tanks and debate platforms such as the GLOBSEC Policy Institute and Visegrad Insight. Aliaksei’s main areas of research have been Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, regionalism and regional integration, and identity in international relations. He has published his scholarship on these subjects in Geopolitics, Problems of Post-Communism and other academic journals with an international impact.