Pryanikov Recalls Eight Insights of Soviet-American Sociologist Vladimir Shlyapentokh

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 29 – Russian journalist and commentator Pavel Pryanikov recalls eight fundamental insights that the late Soviet-American sociologist Vladimir Shlyapentokh (1926-2015) offered about Soviet and Russian society. Many of these, he suggests, help to explain why Russia is the way it is today.

            The eight (newizv.ru/article/general/29-07-2021/antiamerikanizm-ot-zavisti-sotsiolog-otsenil-sovremennuyu-rossiyskuyu-elitu) include:

 

1.      Perestroika happened because Mikhail Gorbachev and some in the elite wanted it to. It was not a response to any pressure from below because even the opponents of the Soviet regime at most wanted socialism with a human face not a radical dismantling of the entire communist system.

 

2.      “The new anti-Americanism of the present-day Russian   elite is a manifestation of envy on the part of ineffective people who have been forced to run an underdeveloped country without having anything to offer to change it for the better.”

 

3.      “The causes of any mysterious behavior in the USSR are to be found either in sex or in the KGB.”

 

4.      “The boldest people in the Soviet semi-underground were young Russian women while the most cowardly were elderly Jewish men.”

 

5.      “Moscow liberals in their hatred of social equality and desire to separate themselves from Marxism look like troglodytes in the West.”

 

6.      “Approximately a third of the Soviet intelligentsia was made up of secret collaborators of the KGB.”

 

7.      Imputing to others motives that in fact are behind their own actions has “always been widespread among the liberal intelligentsia.”

 

8.      “A feeling of one’s own dignity almost completely disappeared in Russia after 1991, and the dominance of absolute cynicism led to a situation in which people almost stopped assessing their behavior in moral terms.”