Yuri Levada and his research team initially were leaning towards a theory that the Soviet person or Homo Sovieticus is a dying social archetype. However, they changed their position in the early 2000s and argued that the Soviet person continues to live on in modern Russian society. In other words, the Soviet man did not disappear but evolved into an "adaptable" Putin's man with equally twisted beliefs about social reality and their place in it. Such parallels with the now idealised late Soviet era were supposed to be one of Mr Putin's selling points. No tiresome political debate, fairly broad personal freedoms, shops full of food: wasn't that what people wanted? Instead, unthinkably, Mr Putin has been booed: first by an audience at a martial-arts event on November 20th, then at many polling stations, and now on the streets. The Soviet rhetoric conjured an anti-Soviet response.

Cala dzialalnosc rozumu naukowego poddac pod wladze rozumu politycznego, uformowanego przez ideologie komunizmu.” (Tischner, 1992). Thereby communist ideology eliminated all spontaneous, independent thought processes in an attempt to impose artificial controls on reality. The base of socialism was an unwritten contract; the citizen was not expected to interfere in public life, the State would guarantee a problem free life, neither poor nor rich. To this end, the State would tolerate almost everything; a poor work ethic (competition was completely squeezed because all suprus was immediately taken by the state), petty theft of communal property, irresponsible and inconsiderate behavior toward nature etc. The homo sovieticus became demoralized. According to the Russian scholar-educator Nikolay Nikandrov, the expression Homo sovieticus is an insulting name invented by the critics of Soviet power for the "new man" mentioned as part of the new anthropological construct whose development was declared in the Soviet Union ("Soviet people"). [17] Indifference to the results of his labour (as expressed in the saying "They pretend they are paying us, and we pretend we are working"). [ citation needed] As Yegor Gaidar, a prominent liberal economist, warned in 1994, “The carcass of a bureaucratic system can become the carcass of a mafia system, depending on its goals.” By the time his book appeared in 2009 his warning had become reality. In the past few years this “monstrous hybrid” has started to extend its tentacles into every sphere of public life where money can be made. Examples of violence against businessmen abound. This adds up to a Soviet-style policy of negative selection, where the best and most active are suppressed or eliminated while parasitic bureaucrats and law enforcers are rewarded. What Stalin wrought by repression and extermination, today's Russia achieves by corruption and state violence.Homo sovieticus was a „czlowiek zrodzony przez warunki istnienia komunistycznego (socjalistycznego) spoleczenstwa, bedacy nosicielem zasad istnienia tego spoleczenstwa, samym swoim osposobem zycia zachowujacy stosunki wewnatrz-kolektywne tego spoleczenstwa.” (Tischner 1992) Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a political scientist at King’s College London, rejects the ‘hopelessness’ and ‘Russophobia’ of such interpretations. She calls for ‘an emotionally intelligent’ approach that is focused on ‘empathizing with the Russian population, rather than pointing to where it went wrong’. In The Red Mirror, she attempts to diagnose the Russian condition without relying on Homo Sovieticus or assuming the superiority of its imagined foil, the liberal Western subject. She proposes that polling data like Levada’s can be stripped of its Cold War-era ideological foundations and retrofitted to produce a more convincing assessment of the collective psyche. ‘You can’t step twice into the same river—a classic saying’, she writes. ‘Or can you? . . . How can we use the insights in social psychology to arrive at a less biased understanding and give credit and the blame where they are due?’ Upon arrival on Russia's political scene, Vladimir Putin made it seem as if there was nothing wrong with being Russian or a former Soviet citizen. Furthermore, Putin validated early on the feelings of millions of people who regarded the dissolution of the Soviet Union to be one of "the greatest geopolitical catastrophes of the century". The following strengthening of the power vertical and the State becoming again a paternalist caretaker of its citizens under Putin's rule just hit home for most of the Russian population who did not know any better. An unauthorised protest against Russia’s anti-gay legislation takes place in Moscow, 2013. Photograph: Andrey Smirnov/AFP/Getty Images

Under Yeltsin, the oligarchs were shielded from competition by their political clout. Mr Putin simply flipped the formula, turning owners into vassals who were allowed to keep their property at his discretion. From now on it was the power of the bureaucrat, not the wealth of the owner, that guaranteed the ownership of an asset. The nexus between political power and property was never broken—as it must be in a functioning democracy. Cambra, Fernando P. de. Homo sovieticus. La vida actual en Rusia. - Barcelona: Ediciones Petronio, 1975. - 296 p. ISBN 84-7250-399-2 Historian Stephen Wheatcroft states that Soviet peasantry were subject to cultural destruction in the creation of the New Soviet man. [26] What is particularly tragic is that despite shared religion, cultural features, and common traditions, for the last 10 months, millions of Russians have been watching the suffering of Ukrainians (who dress similarly to them, live in similar panelkaneighborhoods, many of whom speak Russian as their first language) while expressing no regret or much empathy for the victims.

The term "Homo Sovieticus" was popularized with a negative connotation by Soviet writer and dissident Alexander Zinovyev, who wrote in his eponymous satirical novel-confession (1982): "In the west, smart and educated people call us Homo Sovieticus. They take pride in discovering this human subspecies and the beautiful name that they came up with." The concept of work was also very interesting. Man considered the work he did in his office or factory as essential to the harmonious functioning of the world. “Zaklad pracy, ktory go realizowal, wlaczal czlowieka w rozumnosc swiata.” (Tischner, 1992) 2.4 How the concept of freedom was conceived.

The lead section of this article may need to be rewritten. Use the lead layout guide to ensure the section follows Wikipedia's norms and is inclusive of all essential details. ( February 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Homo sovieticus nie mo ze byc sam. Wsród targajacyg nim leków jest i strach przed wolnoscia, przed koniecznoscia, indywidualnego wyboru, przed znalezieniem sie na zewnatrz ludzkiego zbiorowiska.” (Zinoviev, 1984) Zamiast tworczej inicjatywy, rodzi sie biernosc, zaleznosc i podporzadkowie wobec biurokratycznego aparatu który jako jedyny dysponen i decydent, jesli nie wrecz posiadacz ogolu dobr wytworczych stawia wszystkich w pozycji mniej lub bardziej totalnej zaleznosci, jakze podobnej do tradycyjnej zale znosci pracownika-proletariusza w kapitalizmie. Stad rodzi sie poczucie frustracji lub beznadziejnosci, brak zaaganzowania w zycie narodowe, sklonnosc do emigracji, chocby tak zwanej emigracji wewnetrznej.” (Tischner, 1992) Many Westerners and ex-Soviets (the ones younger or simply fortunate to be better oriented in matters of history and truth) scoff at the Homo Sovieticus for possessing the naivete of a blind kitten. Not Alexievich. There isn’t an ounce of ridicule in her approach. Instead, there is a profoundly humanist understanding of immeasurable loss and confusion, of deracinated personhood, and of a perpetually shifting system of ideological coordinates that only amplifies this disorientation. At work you say one thing, at home another, you pretend to do your job, your employer pretends to pay you, in public you pretend to be atheist while at home you teach your kids to say the namaz, and on and on it goes, this neverending umbilical cord of duplicity, chaining a person to the regime of lies.Sharafutdinova grew up in the republic of Tatarstan, an oil-rich region with a majority Tatar population, and received her PhD from George Washington University. Her first book, Political Consequences of Crony Capitalism inside Russia (2010), examined the rise of corruption in the provinces. As privatization and free elections were introduced simultaneously in the early 90s, access to power meant access to property, and vice versa. Sharafutdinova identifies two political models that emerged: ‘centralized and noncompetitive’, the system favoured by the tight-knit Tatar elite, and ‘fragmented and competitive’, which characterized the Nizhnii Novgorod region under Yeltsin ally Boris Nemtsov. In the latter, politicians aired corruption scandals over the course of nasty campaigns, leading many voters to see elections as elite infighting and to respond with apathy and protest voting. As competitive democracy delegitimized itself, the Tatar model looked increasingly appealing. Popular disillusionment with democratic institutions united the self-interest of Putin’s circle with the desires of an alienated public. This, Sharafutdinova argues, is why most Russians didn’t mind when Putin abolished regional gubernatorial elections in 2004 (according to polls) and why his popularity remained high even as oil prices dropped. Indifference to common property and to petty theft from the workplace, either for personal use or for profit. [7] A line from a popular song, "Everything belongs to the kolkhoz, everything belongs to me" (" всё теперь колхозное, всё теперь моё" / vsyo teperь kolkhoznoe, vsyo teperь moyo), meaning that people on collective farms treasured all common property as their own, was sometimes used ironically to refer to instances of petty theft: "Take from the plant every nail, you are the owner here, not a guest" (" Тащи с завода каждый гвоздь - ты здесь хозяин, а не гость" / taschi s zavoda kazhdyj gvozd' - ty zdes' hozyain, a ne gost'). Among Mr Putin's rediscovered Soviet symbols, none is more important than that of Russia as a great power surrounded by enemies. Having promoted a version of history in which Stalin represents Russia's greatness (his repressions just an unfortunate side-effect of a cold war forced upon him by America), Mr Putin has employed one of Stalinism's favourite formulas: Russia as an isolated and besieged fortress. 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. Russia was much freer in the 1990s than it became under Mr Putin. But the change was gradual rather than sudden, and was based on a relationship between money and power inherited from a previous era. The privatisations of the 1990s put property in the hands of the Soviet officialdom and a small group of Russian oligarchs. As Kirill Rogov, a historian and analyst, has observed, the real problem was not that the accumulation of capital was unfair—it usually is—but that clear rules of competition and a mechanism for transferring property from less to more efficient owners were never established.

The bureaucracy's main resource is participation in the rent-distribution chain. While this allows it to channel money towards sensitive regions and factories, it also increases the country's addiction to oil and gas and fans paternalism. Mr Putin has worked hard to build up the image of the state as the sole benefactor, taking credit for rising incomes generated by high oil prices. As he stressed at the United Russia congress, only the state and its ruling party are capable of sorting out people's problems. “No one else is responsible for affairs in a village, town, city or region or the whole country. There is no such force.”In a number of his works, Levada described the negative personal qualities inherent in the Soviet man and, summing up many years of research, expressed confidence that the Soviet man as a type of personality did not disappear with the collapse of the USSR, but continues to exist in modern Russia and be reproduced in new generations. Moreover, according to the scientist, cynicism and an increase in the level of aggression were added to such negative features as social hypocrisy, paternalism, suspicion and isolationism. According to Levada, these negative changes were again the result of restrictions on public freedoms, as well as distorted economic and moral incentives introduced by the new Russian authorities. As one of the surveys of the study showed, by 2004, the number of people who believe that Russians are no different from residents of other countries has significantly decreased and the number of those who consider Russia a "besieged fortress" surrounded by enemies has increased. [15] Lynne Atwood. The New Soviet Man and Woman, Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR. Palgrave Macmillan London, 1990. In their articles and lectures , the well-known sociologist Yuri Levada and members of his group Levada Center attributed the following to the typical negative features of Homo soveticus: [13] [14] [15]