FORMATION OF THE SOVIET MAN: CULTURAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL FACTORS

ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ СОВЕТСКОГО ЧЕЛОВЕКА: КУЛЬТУРНЫЕ И ФИЛОСОФСКИЕ ФАКТОРЫ

Парфенов Василий Андреевич

студент, кафедра русской философии и культуры, Санкт-Петербургский Государственный Университет,

РФ, г. Санкт-Петербург

Наумова Екатерина Игоревна

научный руководитель, д. филос. наук, доц., Санкт-Петербургский Государственный Университет,

РФ, г. Санкт-Петербург

ABSTRACT

This article highlights the cultural and philosophical a priori that influenced the formation of the new Soviet human. The issue is considered from a historical point of view, the concept of the human ideal in Antiquity is analyzed, a comparative analysis of the Ancient Greek concept with the Soviet reality is carried out. The Soviet man is seen as a product of a dualistic reality: from the point of view of ideology and from the point of view of reality.

Keywords: upbringing, soviet human, values, communism.

Ideas about the ideal person originated in ancient Greece. They are reflected in the concept of kalokagathy. A. Gurevich noted that "the knowledge of various epochs of history [...], perhaps not directly and explicitly connected with our time, gives us the opportunity to see both unity and diversity in a person. Discovering repetition in history, encountering all the same human needs and manifestations, we understand the structure and functioning of society more deeply" [6, p. 56].

The ancient Greek concept of kalokagathy, upon closer examination, gives us an understanding of how Soviet ideologists deconstructed the concept of an ideal person, in which areas steps were taken to ensure that this ideal was certainly accomplished. Firstly, the term kalokagatii is inherently political, since the main task of the ancient "education" is to educate a citizen of the polis, and the goal of this task is the common good. This statement also correlates with the ideological goals of Soviet managers: the general utopian ideas of antiquity were aimed at even more utopian ideals, but of a different socio-political system. Secondly, it was impossible to achieve Soviet "kalokagathy" without striving for it in all areas, starting with the support of a citizen with powerful social institutions of education, ending with the ideological content of everyday life up to culinary preferences. Thoroughness and universal substantive and symbolic study of reality have become one of the main criteria for working on a new person's project.

The conditions for the formation of the ideals of the Soviet man should be seen in several components. Firstly, these are historical circumstances that provoked a powerful turn in the development of our state. Secondly, it is a "vacuum" social reality, which was formed as a result of this turn and became the main one for layering and conscious creation of artificial ideals. In a word, the ideals of the Soviet man are the result of a dichotomy. They are a consequence of the contemplation of social reality, which was formed, including artificially, by those who saw this reality. e. Durkheim wrote about the social nature of the institute of religion as follows: "... just collective ideals fixed on material objects ... they are only a hypostasized collective force, that is, moral force; they are created from ideas and moods awakened in us by the spectacle of society, and not from sensations coming from the physical world"[7, p. 224]. The French sociologist considered religion to be the dominant institution that exerts a decisive influence on other institutions: "religion gave life to everything essential in society" [10, p. 14]. But how is it possible to build a religion in a society that has just mostly abandoned the oppression of the monarchy, one of the principles of which was Orthodoxy? The task was to be able to unite a huge number of ideologically savvy people around themselves without resorting to the ideal of the supernatural, which, judging by the works of E. Durkheim, is more than possible, since the nature of religion is deeply social. The Bolsheviks who came to power also understood this.

The situation that developed in post-revolutionary society required the execution of a new person's project: it was necessary to assemble a construct of such a person who would create and maintain a new type of culture. "The slogan is proclaimed: the reorganization of man!". After the October Revolution, which was essentially a coup with the participation of the party, it became clear that the attitude towards the people could not be equal as long as there were class and ideological enemies within the people, and therefore the cultural revolution became another reflection of the class struggle, but in a softer and more lasting concept. The restructuring of thinking, the reorganization of spiritual life, and in the end, the education of a new person from an early age is a much more difficult task than the search and elimination of individual "enemies" within the working class.

The cultural revolution is usually associated in Soviet historiography not with the beginning of the Bolshevik power, but with the end of the 20s, when the Bolshevik view of the reorganization of man acquired concrete forms: the radicalization of science and art, the change of the working intelligentsia from "white" to "red", the introduction of practical and faster education in accordance with the needs of industry. But the cultural revolution itself was largely reduced to its initial and first step: the change of some managers to others. And since the proletarian revolution had stepped over the bourgeois one, this caused a number of problems, the essence of which was reduced to largely unformed views of new people who came to the administration in a short time. After all, if "only a hundred years after the bourgeois revolution can we talk about its final formalization," then what about the proletarian one? It should be noted here that the goal of educating a new person did not come from the revolution, but from the new political system, because, as Bukharin wrote, "the revolution overturned the old relations between people, without creating new forms instead." This means that there was no cultural impulse in the revolution, there was only a political impulse. The revolution turned out to be already accomplished and finished, so cultural transformations had to be solved at the expense of other resources. Strictly speaking, the division of reality into pre- and post-revolutionary is not entirely true, because there were signs of the old and new regime both there, just as a 17-year-old man waking up on the day of his coming of age does not feel that his life has been transformed beyond recognition. Mikhail Reisner, the founder of the psychological theory of law, wrote about the nature of revolution as follows: "The revolution itself does not create anything. She opens the exit and clears the way. But what creates in it are hidden classes, forces accumulated before the revolution..." [9, p. 278]. However, the fact that not quite a Soviet man had to create himself was quite obvious.

For an illustration, let's turn to the two articles of the magazine "Revolution and Culture" of those years. In the first of them, Bukharin writes a bout the new man as a practically and inevitably accomplished project: a "brave, working, cultured labor fighter" should be formed from the proletariat [2, p. 7]. Such a form of obligation seems to exclude the other side and the possibility that a labor fighter will not be at all brave, not working and not cultured. In the second article, another author says in general from the position of expert opinion: "We, Marxists, know perfectly well that ... the revolution of everyday life occurs not as a result of moral sermons, but as a result of changes in material conditions"[1, p. 13]. Here we should turn to the construction "we, Marxists, know", which is logically not required at all and is not suitable for the basis of further words, which are presented as eternal and immutable truth.

The main problem that pursued the construction of the Soviet man is that this process was initiated and led not by the masses, which the newspapers so often mentioned, but by the new elites, about whom there was not a word in the same newspapers, since their presence in such a context was denied. This means that cultural reality was formed artificially and was deprived of the declared opportunity and openness, about which Kerzhentsev wrote: "every independent initiative in the field of cultural construction always found an answer in support of local and central Soviet institutions" [8, p. 6]. From that moment on, the Soviet government exerted a decisive influence on the formation of the Soviet man, his upbringing and ideals, which, if they did not exist, then they should have been invented. In Goltzman's words: "Whoever holds power creates culture"[4, p. 22].

Another problem was that the project of a new person was constantly updated, which means that it did not have a one-time clear definition, and despite the rigidity of the wording, there was no list of qualities of a new person: they seemed to be formed along the way, with new performances of ideological designers. Despite the fact that at the 25th Party Congress Brezhnev noted that the Soviet man was the most important result of the past decade, the incompleteness of this project remained his constant companion. Suslov also noted this: "the Soviet man has not yet been formed completely, he does not yet meet all the requirements of the party"[3, p. 9]. And already at the sunset of the Soviet country, Chernenko spoke about the need to form a new person: "the formation of a new person is not only an important goal, but also an indispensable condition for communist construction" [3, p. 9].

Thus, the world of the Soviet man was split in two: the first world was a world of ideals, which had to be built in accordance with communist ideologies; the second world was a world of real practical activity with the inaccessibility of a large number of social benefits: problems of shortage and lack of variety of food, queues for apartments and cars. These two worlds revolved and depended on each other, but they could not get closer to the end. According to the researcher of Soviet culture V.V. Grishina: "Soviet ideologists, in order to translate the project of a new person into the reality of Soviet existence, needed to change the worldview of a person, from the contemplative paradigm of thinking inherent in the majority of the rural population of the Soviet Union, to move to an activist one, the carriers of which were the working class and its representative in the person of the Communist Party. The majority of the pre–revolutionary inhabitants of Russia – the peasantry, the nobility, the priests - were in the paradigm of a contemplative worldview"[5, p. 23].

The impossibility of correlating what is and what is due progressed in the USSR with each new decade. The ideal world of the Soviet man was redesigned into a world of everyday conflict with reality, and hence the lack of faith in the present, goal-setting only in the future of the distant future. Contextually speaking, the world of the Soviet man became a world of love for the distant as love for the best representatives of humanity, which communism will be able to build, impossible in the current realities.

Soviet realities severed the party from the people, proclaiming the elite as an a priori expert in assessing morality and culture: "the party is the mind, honor and conscience of our era," and as V.V. Grishin writes: "The inner content of the Soviet man did not correspond to the proclaimed ideals. Marxism in the Soviet interpretation in the absence of critical introspection, internal mechanisms of development, which were displaced by a priori slogans"[5, p. 24].

References:

1. Asmus V. Marxism and cultural tradition / Revolution and Culture, -1927, —No.3, — pp. 10-16
2. Bukharin N. Cultural tasks and the fight against bureaucracy / Revolution and Culture, -1927, — No. 2, — pp. 5-12
3. Geller M.Ya. Machine and cogs. The history of the formation of the Soviet man. — M.: MGIK, -1994, — 337 p.
4. Goltsman A. Reorganization of man. — M., 1924, — 245 p.
5. Grishin V., Kolobova M. The Marxist human project and its Soviet implementation // Bulletin of the NSTU named after R. E. Alekseev. The series "Management in social systems. Communication technologies". – 2014. – No. 1, – pp. 19-24.
6. Gurevich A. Categories of medieval culture. — M., — 1984, — 285 p.
7. Durkheim E. Elementary forms of religious life: the totemic system in Australia. M., - 2018. — 736 p
8. Kerzhentsev P. M. Towards a new culture. — Petersburg, — 1921, — 91 p.
9. Reisner M. Old and new / Krasnaya nov. — 1922, — №2 (6), — pp. 276-285
10. Kenneth D. Allan. Research in classical sociological theory: a vision of the social world. — Pine Forge Press, - 2005. — p. 112