Was There a “Simple Soviet” Person? Debating the Politics and Sociology of “Homo Sovieticus”

• Published in: Slavic review Vol. 78; no. 1; pp. 173 - 195
• Main Author: Sharafutdinova, Gulnaz
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 2019
• Subjects: Cold War; Communism; Cultural anthropology; Ideology; Mass media; Personality; Political attitudes; Political parties; Politics; Prominence; Psychology; Social psychology; Society; Sociological research; Sociology; Teams; New York; United States > US; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics > USSR; Russia
• ISSN: 0037-6779; 2325-7784
• DOI: 10.1017/slr.2019.13

Intellectual efforts to understand post-Crimean Russian society have brought to prominence explanations that emphasize psychological and attitudinal legacies of Soviet society. The recent revival of the term homo sovieticus (or Soviet man) in the media and intellectual discourse is a good illustration of this trend. Yurii Levada's late-Soviet sociological research project on the “simple Soviet man” serves as a frequent reference point in these discussions. In this article, I explore the ideological and analytical foundations of the Levada project and juxtapose the sociological construct developed by Levada and his team with the interpretative approach developed by Natalya Kozlova, another Soviet scholar who dedicated her life to studying Soviet society. I argue that essentialist and deterministic views of individual personality underpinning the Levada project that guide the current use of the Soviet man category are more politically and ideologically driven rather than being based on the state of the art in social psychology.