Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 16 – The Tolkovatel
portal over the last several years has focused on the origins of the characteristics
of post-Soviet man, including his suspiciousness about everything new, his
hierarchical approach to all things, his unhappiness with his life, and his
believes in dark forces and conspiracies.
And it has pointed to how the
post-Soviet man compensates for this by an elevated sense of exceptionalism and
to the origins of these values not in Soviet times but rather in the Russia of
the 18th and 19th centuries (See ttolk.ru/2016/08/17/александр-ахиезер-когда-в-россии-появ/.
Cf. windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/03/window-on-eurasia-archaic-revivals.html
and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/11/russian-authoritarianism-from-below.html).
Today, the review blog excerpts a
new article by Sergey Patrushev and Lyudmila Filippova of the Moscow Institute
of Sociology entitled “The Dualism of Mass Consciousness and the Typology of
Mass Politics” published in the latest issue of Politicheskaya nauka (inion.ru/files/File/PN-Patrushev-Philippova-2017-1.pdf.
The selected passages are at
After recounting the characteristics
of “post-Soviet man” offered earlier by Yury Levada and Lev Gudkov (nataliabaranova.livejournal.com/127841.html?thread=366177),
Patrushev and Filippova seek to answer “why Europe achieved the creation of ‘a
political man’ while Russia didn’t?”
And they make the following
argument: “The sources of the dualism of mass consciousness in Russia are to be
found not in the ‘totalitarian’ Soviet past but in much earlier historical
periods. The investigation of the creation
of Russian political consciousness highlights the way in which a number of tendencies
have reappeared in our days in a cyclical fashion.”
“In Russia of the second half of the
18th and the 19th centuries, political consciousness [in
Russia] was formed under conditions of a split, first between the numerically
dominant peasant population and the small nobility and then between modernist
and anti-modernist worldviews,” Patrushev and Filippova say.
Because of this split, “political
and pre-political consciousness coexisted at the same time although the latter
predominated.”
“The traditional culture of the Russian
peasants” was simultaneously “loyal and inclined to revolt,” while “various
groups of the nobility represented conservative, liberal and revolutionary
types of political consciousness.” But
what is most important is that “the process of Europeanization stimulated
anti-modern attitudes” in reaction.
And that took the form of
superficial adoption of European values while even greater attachment to
archaic ones, leading to a kind of ‘’doublethink’” in which people might appear
to be Europeanized but in fact had become more archaic, a pattern that has
re-emerged in post-Soviet times, the two sociologists say.
“The technology, forms of
organization of work, and social ideals borrowed from European peoples,” they
continue, “in a paradoxical way were reproduced in society with deeply rooted
stereotypes of thought and behavior. This paradoxical combination of
Europeanism and the archaic” is fully reflected in Russians’ approach to public
and political life.
And this has resulted in a sharp difference between
Western Europe and Russia. “In Western Europe, civil society formed on
agreed-upon principles as a result of which” people recognized the reciprocal
nature of rights. But in Russia, “civil society did not take shape, and the
main principle of social organization was collectivity (sobornost),” which forced the individual to “dissolve” himself in
the whole.
It
is this “contradiction between superficial modernism and deep archaism” [which]
forms the essence of the dualism of present-day Russian political
consciousness,” Patrushev and Filippova say. But the resulting “alienation from
politics leads to an institutional trap” from which Russians have not been able
to escape.
“The
alienation from politics and from the powers,” they continue, “remains one of the
key characteristics of Russian mass political consciousness” which also retains
“elements of paternalistic dependence on the powers that be.” Nearly two-thirds of Russians “don’t feel
responsible for what happens in the country, and 78 percent don’t expect the
state to help them.
“In
the apathetic nature and inertia of the mass strata, in their weakness and
inability ‘to challenge’ the existing order of things” explains why the powers
that be can count on relative stability for most of the time.
“Correspondingly,”
they say, “the powers that be are interested in the preservation of the dualism
of political conscioiusness by a combination in political discourse of
traditionalist and modernizing elements.
The reverse side of the tendency of the depoliticization of the masses
is the growing dependence of the authorities” on conflicts within the elites.
“The
political elites are not capable of developing a stable agreement on the main
issues of the development of Russian society,” and that, “in combination with the
other important characteristic of mass consciousness – a refusal to take
responsibility – produces an institutional trap” neither can easily escape.
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