Bergman, Jay - The Idea of Individual Liberation in Bolshevik Vision

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DOI: 10.1177/0265691497027001031997 27: 57European History Quarterly

Jay BergmanSoviet Man

The Idea of Individual Liberation in Bolshevik Visions of the New

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Jay Bergman

The Idea ofIndividual Liberation in BolshevikVisions of the New Soviet Man

Among the promises the Bolsheviks made when they took powerin Russia in 1917 was that they would create a new and higherform of human being to inhabit the Communist utopia they pre-dicted. For the Bolsheviks, more than for the Jacobins in Francea century earlier, it was not enough to begin the world over

again, in the sense of radically refashioning social and politicalinstitutions. For the revolution the Bolsheviks advocated to be

morally and intellectually defensible, it had to bring with it insome fashion the ethical improvement of humanity, leadingeventually to the emergence of a new human being - what theBolsheviks referred to as the New Soviet Man - whose

superiorqualities and attributes would be the most obvious indication thata Communist society was preferable to all others. The NewSoviet Man, in other words, was the highest objective and theultimate justification of the revolutionary enterprise to which theBolsheviks devoted their lives.

In their eagerness to conceptualize and then to create such a

man, the Bolsheviks had several antecedents, all of them trace-

able to Western civilization, which has often revealed a fascina-tion with the moral regeneration and perfectibility of humanity.As Frank and Fritzie Manuel have demonstrated in their magis-terial study of utopias and utopianism in Western thought, it wasnot until modem times that those in the West who articulated a

vision of a regenerated humanity believed that, by radically trans-

forming human society, human beings themselves might be mademore virtuous. Previously, in ancient and medieval times, and

even into the Renaissance, moral goodness was envisionedalmost exclusively as a consequence of religious devotion, or of

living in a paradise or utopia that, in the absence of divine inter-

vention, was forever incapable of becoming a reality. But for theBolsheviks and other modern revolutionaries less encumbered

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than earlier generations by Christian notions of otherworldlysalvation, secular life contained within itself the possibility of itsown radical transformation. Nearly all of these revolutionaries,

including the Bolsheviks, fully shared the conviction of

Helvetius, the French philosophe, that human beings could be

made virtuous by manipulating their social and political environ-

ment.&dquo; While there was much about the Bolsheviks that was

utopian, in that they imagined all sorts of things that presently didnot exist and had little chance of being realized in the immediate

future, they differed from utopians such as Thomas More and

Tommaso Campanella - whom the Bolsheviks for otherreasons

included among their ideological antecedents - because theyconsidered the new people and new society they conjured in their

imagination not as fantasies totally disconnected from reality, butas projections of the present into the future. For the Bolsheviks,the New Soviet Man was not only a vision or a standard againstwhich the imperfections of humanity could be judged, but an

attainable goal, a more perfect facsimile of the Lenins, Trotskiis,

and other professional revolutionaries who were living as realindividuals within, rather than beyond, historical time.

S

The Western ideology which most closely prefiguredBolshevism in promising and predicting a new species of

humanity was, of course, Marxism. To be sure, Marx and Engelsoffered on several occasions the disclaimer that it was not for

them to describe in any detail how persons living under

Communism would differ from persons living under capitalism.Aclassless society, in their opinion, was too far in the future for

anyone, even persons as prescient as they believed themselves to

be, to understand completely. Nevertheless, scattered in the

writings of both men are comments on the Communist man of

the future that, taken together, suggest a poly-functional, multi-

talented, and socially-conscious individual, deriving pleasure and

satisfaction from giving pleasure and satisfaction to others, who,

byvirtue of

eliminatingof

everythingin life that enforces

economic and intellectual specialization, will be able to hunt inthe morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,

[and] criticise after dinner ... without ever becoming hunter,

fisherman, shepherd, or critic. Without private property and the

distinction between manual and intellectual labour to circum-

scribe what the individual can accomplish, human beings can, at

long last, become everything they wish to be. However, Marx



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Pavlovna to calculate their interests in a way that benefits all of

them are the very same qualities of the new men and women ofthe future.9 In fact,

throughthe

literaryartifice of Veras dreams

(particularly the fourth one), Chernyshevsky is able to indicatein considerable detail how these new people will actually live: ina series of urban enclaves, dotted with enormous glass andaluminum edifices, that are surrounded by verdant plains, where

everyone can enjoy his labour and have time left over for culturaland intellectual pursuits because the most difficult work is per-formed by machines. Many Bolsheviks found Chernyshevkys

vision inspirational, and several of them, including Lenin, con-sciously imitated Rakhmetov, Chernyshevskys prototype of the

professional revolutionary, in cultivating the qualities of hard-

ness, single-mindedness and courage that the tasks of conductinga revolution and creating a new society required.AlthoughRakhmetov - who was really an agent of revolution rather than

a product of it- was not a model of the New Soviet Man, he was

certainly a precursor of the kind of person the Bolsheviks

believed would be needed to create such a man.&dquo;It is fairly easy to distinguish the purely personal attributes of

the New Soviet Man. To a large degree, the Bolsheviks were in

agreement on many ofthem. Perhaps the most obvious aspect ofthe New Soviet Man was that, like a modern Prometheus, he

would use reason and logic, along with science and technology,to subjugate nature, thus transforming it from an alien forcethat threatened him into something he could use, at his dis-

cretion, for his own purposes. In fact, there were virtually nolimits to what the New Soviet Man could accomplish.Accordingto Nikolai Bukharin, once Communism is achieved, the tyrannyof nature over man will have vanished.&dquo;According toAnatolii

Lunacharsky, the Bolsheviks will create fighter-titans who willtransform the earth.3And according to Sergei Kirov, writing in

1922, well before he linked his political fortunes irrevocably to

Stalins,the Soviet

peopleone

daywill be

capableof embellish-

ing this wretched earth with monuments, such as our enemies

could never imagine, even in their dreams.4 L.M. Sabsovich, anofficial in Gosplan who in 1930 put to paper his vision of aCommunist society, imagined a society in which everythinghas been mechanized, and all the domestic chores that women

previously performed are done by machines.&dquo; In 1924 LeonTrotskii even ventured the prediction that under Communism:



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Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will

earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will haverebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste....

Through the machine,man

in Socialist society will command nature in itsentirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for moun-tains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will laydown rules for the oceans.6

Anumber of the Bolsheviks believed that the New Soviet Man

would be a beneficiary of his own ingenuity and intellect, trans-

forming not only nature but humanity itself. In what was perhapsthe ultimate

expressionof the rationalism and scientism

implicitin Bolshevism, several Bolsheviks, among them Alexander

Bogdanov, believed that, under Communism, people would be

capable of physical rejuvenation and resurrection, and a few ofthem even imagined that, through the application of science and

technology, humanity could be made immortal. Maxim Gorkii,for example, wrote in 1909 that people stronger than we are

may, in the future, defeat death, while Leonid Krasin in 1924

advocated the mummification of Lenins body in the expectationthat the creator of the Soviet state might eventually be made alive

again. Three years earlier, Krasin had spoken ofhis certainty thatadvances in science and technology would eventually make

possible the resurrection of historical figures.&dquo; Similarly, the

anonymous author of a Marxist pamphlet published in 1906, andreissued in Moscow in 1918 and again in Kharkov in 1923,calmly predicted that man was destined to populate the universe

and to make himself immortal. 18In keeping with Marxs vision of a Communist man who

hunts, fishes, rears cattle and engages in intellectual and artistic

pursuits, the New Soviet Man would also be versatile, capable of

appreciating literature, art, philosophy, poetry and music, even ifhe was not a writer, artist, philosopher, poet or musician. InBukharins words, the freedom to develop oneself is the highestform of freedom, and a Communist society would be superior toall others precisely in its capacity to promote a cultural revolu-

tion, a new orientation, new creative potentialities in people ... acreative enrichment of the personalities of those who labour asthe distinction between physical and intellectual labour dis-

appears.&dquo; Sentiments such as these can be found in the writingsof nearly every prominent Bolshevik - with the notable excep-tions of Lenin, who considered such speculation about the future



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a waste of time, and Stalin, whose notions of individual liberation

were, to a great extent, sui generis - and there are similar paeansto the virtues of versatility in the writings of Soviet philosophersand political theorists of the 1950s and 1960s.Z~

Along with physical and intellectual capabilities that farexceeded those of ordinary men, the New Soviet Man would be

exemplary in his personal habits and manners.Among the other

qualities that the New Soviet Man would possess were: polite-ness and civility, which Lenin and Trotskii considered a

necessary corrective of the boorishness for which they often

upbraided the Sovietmasses

(and for which Lenin laterrecom-

mended removing Stalin from his position of General Secretaryof the Communist Party);2 conciseness and precision in bothoral and written discourse, whichAlexei Gastev encouraged byissuing appeals urging Russians to be less prolix in their lan-

guage;z2 and punctuality in personal affairs, which Gastev andP.M. Kerzhentsev considered so important that in 1923 theyestablished a League of Time - the members of which were

required to wear wristwatches-

to eliminate the Oblomovism(or lethargy) they believed was characteristic of the Russian

people.23 The immediate objective of their efforts was to makeSoviet workers more productive, more efficient and more reliablein reporting to work, but productivity, efficiency and reliabilitywere also qualities the New Soviet Man would manifest in the

future.

It is important to bear in mind that, in the view of most

Bolsheviks, versatility, politeness, punctuality, verbal brevity,physical prowess and an ability to subjugate nature would becharacteristic of everyone living in a classless society, not just ofthe men; under Communism there would be a New Soviet

Woman as well as a New Soviet Man. With the elimination of

class struggle and economic exploitation, it would be possible,for the first time in history, for men and women to live with one

another as

equals,and to

recognizeall of the ways in which men

and women, despite their biological differences, were the

same.After many years in which men regarded women primarilyas instruments of their own gratification, men and women could

finally share in the common destiny of humanity. It is certainlytrue that many Bolshevik feminists, such asAlexandra Kollontai,

argued strenuously both before and after the Bolshevik Revo-

lution that the problems of working women were sufficiently



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different from those ofworking men to warrant institutions with-in the Bolshevik Party established specifically for the purpose of

alleviatingthem.24 In fact, because of the

specialdiscrimination

they endured, working women probably would anticipate their

emancipation in a Communist society with a greater sense of

urgency than most men would. But these Bolshevik feminists

also agreed with their male colleagues in the Party that, because

capitalism victimized workers regardless of gender, the capitalistsystem should be overthrown in a revolution in which men as

well as women participated.And once men and women, working

together, created Communism, the terms of their emancipationwould be nearly identical, differing only in the requirement thatthere be institutions, such as day-care centres, that guaranteedwomen the time away from childrearing they would need to

pursue their own emancipation on equal terms with men. In thecontext of explaining why individual liberation was paramount,more important for a woman than the love she might feel for a

man, Kollontai enumerated the qualities women would possess

under Communism,

... self-discipline instead of emotionalism; recognition ofthe value of freedom

and independence instead of submission and a faceless person; assertion of

individuality instead of the naive attempt to absorb and reflect the alien nature

of the beloved; insistence on the right to earthly happiness instead of the hypo-critical donning of the mask of virtue; and finally, a willingness to put the

expression of love in a subordinate place in ones life. Before us stands not amate - the shadow of a man; before us stands a person - a Female Human

Being.25

Elsewhere in the same work Kollontai defined the New Soviet

Woman as, a human being possessing a characteristic value,with her own individuality, who asserts herself .26 It is hard to

imagine many Bolsheviks, male or female, prior to the Stalin eraeither challenging this description or denying that it applied

equallywell to the New Soviet Man.

But there is another aspect of the New Soviet Man on which

the Bolsheviks strongly, and sometimes vehemently, disagreed.Because they inherited from both Marxism and the Russian

intelligentsia a commitment to social justice as well as to the

emancipation of the individual, and because Marxism and the

intelligentsia never really made clear which of these two objec-tives was more important, there were several questions the



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Bolsheviks had to answer before they could begin to create asocialist society and then, sometime later, a Communist one.Was individual liberation an end in itself, an objective that

took precedence over all others, or was it something to be valuedas a means to an end, for what it contributed to the welfare of

humanity as a whole? Could the individual, in pursuing his

emancipatory agenda - whether it included mastering nature,developing particular talents and abilities, or finding satisfactionin leisurely or recreational pursuits - ever come into conflictwith persons who were doing the same thing? Could the indi-viduals

pursuitof his own liberation ever work to the detriment

of the classless society in which he lived? Indeed, does a classless

society have interests or requirements of its own, and, if so, what

is the proper relationship between these larger social interests

and those of the individual? If, for some reason, these two sets of

interests were to conflict, would the individual voluntarily sacri-fice his interests to those of society? Would the individual ever

have to be coerced to support the larger social interest, or would a

measure of friendly persuasion achieve the same result? Orwould the options of altruism, persuasion and coercion berendered moot by an inherent identity of social and individualinterests?An analysis of how the Bolsheviks answered (orevaded) these questions may make what the Bolsheviks actuallydid after taking power in Russia in 1917 more understandable.Anumber of the Bolsheviks considered the liberation of the

individual an end in itself and the ultimate justification of

Communism.Although he never said so explicitly, Trotskii, forone, clearly believed this. Not only are his writings filled with

promises of Communism as a system in which there is respectfor the personal dignity of every individual, it is also thecase that Trotskii seemed to reserve his loftiest rhetoric for

descriptions of the personal attributes and abilities that the trulyliberated individual, living under Communism, would possess.2In Literature and Revolution, for example, Trotskii concludes an

exposition of the role of literature and the arts in the creation ofCommunism with an eloquent statement of the humanistic

goals that the New Soviet Man, liberated from the exigencies of

economic struggle, will finally be able to accomplish:

Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his busi-

ness to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost



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precision, purposefulness and economy m his work, his walk, and his play....Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instmcts tothe heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of

his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, tocreate a higher social biologic type, or, ifyou please, a superman.... Man willbecome immeasureably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will becomemore harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The

forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will

rise to the heights of anAristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.And above this ridgenew peaks will rise.28

So convinced was Trotskii that individual liberation was the

paramount objective of Communism that in 1918 he charac-terized as a lord of creation anyone who had familiarized him-

self with the conquests of the mind; in Trotskiis formulation,even persons who had not created lasting works of literature andart were individually liberated ifthey were reasonably conversantabout those who had.29

Nikolai Bukharin, writing in 1934, after Stalin had removedhim from power,

expressedvery similar ideas. In his Culture in

Two Worlds-

which Bukharin intended as a valedictory state-ment of the Marxist objectives to which he had devoted his life-

he stressed that the creative freedom he favoured could only beachieved under Communism and that this freedom was the

only thing that makes possible the development of all human

capabilities, talents, and passions; in Bukharins opinion, whatthe liberated individual is able to accomplish as a result of his

freedom is valuable not only for what it may contribute to societyas a whole, but also for its own sake, as an end in itself.3 In 1935,as Bukharins political fortunes deteriorated further, he usedthe precious little freedom that was left to him to prepare for

publication in Izvestiia a series of articles in which he located the

superiority of socialism and Communism precisely in the value

they placed on the emancipation of the individual,

... the freedom to develop oneself is unlimited and it is utilized fully onlyunder communism.... Socialism enriches the individual person and elevates

the intellectual aspects of it.... The individual person, individual mitiative,

abilities, knowledge, intellect, will, and character all develop on the basis of a

triumphant socialist economy.&dquo;

Implicit in these and other articles Bukharin composed in themid-1930s was that belief that, however harsh and unpromising



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the Soviet Union might appear at the present time, sometime inthe future, probably under Communism, the idea of individual

liberation would re-emerge, rendering Stalins triumphover

Bukharin, and over the humanistic principles Bukharin claimed

to champion, a pyrrhic one.It must be borne in mind that, while exercising political power,

both Trotskii and Bukharin expressed ideas that were in manyways at variance with those they advocated after their politicalcareers within the Soviet system had ended. Many times in the

early 1920s Trotskii and Bukharin stressed the notion that, until

pure Communism was established in the Soviet Union (oranywhere else), the duty of the individual was to suppress his

individual interests and desires and to support the collective insti-

tutions- principally the Party, the army and the trade unions-

through which the Soviet state was maintained. For instance, in a

speech delivered in 1923 Bukharin emphasized how essential it

was that the Soviet government transform Soviet workers as

quickly as possible into obsequious and highly disciplinedlabour machines who, in the interests of the state, would carryout unquestioningly the orders and directives of their superiors.32Similarly, in TheABC of Communism, which Bukharin co-

authored with Evgeny Preobrazhensky in 1924, he wrote of the

necessity of labour discipline based upon the strictest mutual

control. That the workers would willingly submit to this disci-

pline would in no way mitigate the loss of individuality and indi-

vidual choice thisdiscipline

entailed.3

As for Trotskii, one recalls his celebrated dictum, first pro-claimed in 1924 but implicit in many of the policies he advocated

earlier, that one cannot be right against the party, one can be

right only with the party and through the party, because historyhas not created any other parties able to make real what is right.34In 1920, Trotskii even dismissed the notion of the sacredness

of human life, claiming it was nothing but Kantian-priestly,

vegetarian-Quaker gossip.35 So emphatic, in fact, was Trotskiisemphasis on the primacy of collective endeavour in the Soviet

Union from 1917 to 1924 (when the Bolsheviks were not onlyconsolidating power but presumably also creating the pre-conditions for the eventual construction of Communism) that

one can reasonably wonder how he expected a system that was

conditioning its citizens to follow unswervingly collective entities

such as the Party and the army to be able, at some point in the



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future, to reverse habits and practices developed over many yearsand to inculcate in people a respect for the individual and a

commitmentto

pursuethe

objective of individual liberation. Inexplaining Trotskiis failure to address this point (whichBukharin and many other Bolsheviks ignored as well), one mightspeculate that, prior to being stripped of their positions of power,Trotskii and Bukharin were simply so preoccupied by theimmediate tasks of consolidating power and defending the Sovietstate- for which collective institutions such as the Party and the

army were certainly required - that they were unable to recog-

nize how inappropriate these same collective institutions mightbe to the task of emancipating the individual person and creatingthe New Soviet Man.

Still, Trotskii and Bukharin never repudiated individual libera-

tion as an objective, however much the means they adopted toachieve it may actually have worked to its detriment. Nor did

they ever reject the notion that under Communism the interestsof the individual would be paramount, and that the interests

of a Communist society would consist primarily of fostering indi-vidual liberation - to this extent, the interests of the individual

and society would be the same. Other Bolsheviks, however,envisioned the relationship between Communism and individualliberation differently. If, in Trotskiis and Bukharins scenario,Communism was a precondition of the liberation of the indi-

vidual, in the view of Bogdanov, for example, a Communist

society was notonly

a

prerequisiteofindividual liberation but the

object of this liberation as well. In this latter conception, thewelfare of a Communist society was always paramount, and

everyone who lived in such a society would voluntarily and freelydevote himself to advancing its interests.

According to Bogdanov, societies were essentially systems for

organizing human and material resources, and a Communist

society was best able to perform this task because all of its

constituent elements (that is, the individuals living in it) wouldfunction harmoniously. The ultimate goal of a socialist revolu-tion was a kind of universal collectivism, and the proletariat was

uniquely capable of achieving it through the collective labour it

performed under capitalism; unlike the labouring poor of slave-

holding and feudal societies, the industrial working class wasable to develop a sense of what Bogdanov called comradely co-

operation, an ability to work together on behalf of common



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68

objectives, which the New Soviet Man would eventually inherit.36In contrast to what happened in earlier societies, where indi-

viduals energieswere

either dissipatedin the

pursuit of purelypersonal goals, or mobilized by an authoritarian state to enhanceits power, in a Communist society everyone would collaborate

freely on goals from the pursuit of which everyone would benefit.In a book published in 1914, Bogdanov explained how thisethic of collegiality that would exist under Communism makes

possible the great tasks, such as the transformation of nature, inwhich the New Soviet Man would be engaged:

The struggle against the endless spontaneity of nature [requires] a fusion of

personal lives into one colossal whole, harmonious in the relation of its parts,

systematically grouping all elements for one common struggle....An

enormous mass of creative activity, spontaneous and conscious, is necessary to

solve this task. It demands the forces not ofman but of mankind, and only in

working at this task does mankind as such emerge.&dquo;

In this way the New Soviet Man would resemble a cell in a living

organism, and like a cell in an organism he would be inseparable(though certainly distinguishable in the functions he performed)from everyone else in society who enable the society as a whole

to survive.3$

In his futuristic novels, Red Star and Engineer Menni, both

written before the Bolshevik Revolution, Bogdanov described the

New Soviet Man and his society in some detail. In this society,which is located on Mars, most

vestigesof

individualityhave

been eliminated: the houses the Martians inhabit are identical,children are reared communally in special Childrens Colonies,there is unisex clothing and a single language, and the only publicmonuments the Martians erect are intended to commemorate

significant events rather than the exploits of individuals. 39At one

point in Engineer Menni, Netti, the Martian physician whom

Bogdanov uses to express his own views, draws a distinction

between what he sayswas

the historical mission of thebourgeoisie on earth, which was to create a human individual, anactive being inspired with self-confidence, and the present task

of the proletariat, which is to gather these active atoms [ofsociety], bind them together with a higher bond [and] fuse them

into a single, intelligent human organismThis is not to suggest that Bogdanov rejected the principle of

individual liberation. However, by reversing the relationship in a



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Communist society between the individual and society fromwhat it was for Trotskii and Bukharin, he downgraded its impor-tance significantly. If, for Trotskii and Bukharin, individualliberation was an end in itself, and Communism the politicalsystem that most easily facilitated it, for Bogdanov, the interestsof a Communist society took precedence over everything else,even the liberation of the individual. But because, under

Communism, the individuals interests would always be identicalto those of society, and because everyone who was living underCommunism would be aware of this, the individual could

commit himself toserving

his

society cognizantthat in

doingso

he would also be assisting in his own emancipation. Bogdanovexpressed this idea, however elliptically, in Red Star: The whole

[society] lives in each and every one of us, in each tiny cell of the

great organism, and each of us lives through the whole.4A

decade later, in an article describing the education he favoured in

a Communist society, he claimed that only collectivism createsthe conditions for the systematic development of individual

abilities.42And in 1920 he noted that the collectivism hefavoured did not entail the submission of the minority to the

majority, but rather its complete agreement with the majority.&dquo;To be sure, this natural harmony of interests Bogdanov antici-

pated was different from that which utilitarians such as Benthamand Mill claimed to exist in a perfectly self-regulating society,where everyone who is capable of calculating his interests

rationally is allowed, within limits, to pursue them.Although

both Bogdanov and the utilitarians posited a congruence of indi-vidual and social interests in the societies they favoured, in

Bogdanovs Communist society the individual advances his owninterests as a consequence of choosing to advance the larger social

interest, while in the self-regulating society of Bentham and Millthe individual advances the larger social interest as a consequenceof choosing to advance his own interests. Moreover, in the

utilitarians scenario the individual is unaware that his actions,

rationally calculated, will benefit society as well as himself; in

Bogdanovs, by contrast, the individual recognizes what the con-

sequences of his actions will be. Indeed, Bogdanov believed thatthis ability to discern the results of actions and behaviour wouldbe one of the principal attributes of the New Soviet Man - just asthe congruence of individual and social interests would be one of

the distinguishing features ofCommunism



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70

Several other Bolsheviks envisioned the relationship of theNew Soviet Man to society in similar terms. Like Bogdanov,Gorkii considered individual liberation a laudable objective; in a

letter he wrote to E.A. Kuskova in 1929, he proclaimed thatwhat is important to me is the rapid all-round developmentof human personality.&dquo; But because, in Gorkiis view, the

proletariat, as a class, was inclined to favour collectivist solu-tions to its problems, the members (or the descendants) of the

proletariat who will eventually establish Communism will recog-nize that their emancipation consists precisely of advancing the

larger interests of society.6 In 1908 Gorkii explained this idea in

the following way:

Not I but we - here is the basis for the emancipation of the individual.

Then, finally, man will feel himself to be the incarnation of all wealth, of all the

worlds beauty, of all experience of humanity, and spiritually the equal of all

his brothers.... The individual person is integrated only when heroes dis-

appear, and people are tied to one another by feelings of mutual respect....These feelings inevitably strengthen in everyone an awareness of the unity of

human experience, and they create a sense of solidarity that makes possible the

achievement ofcommon objectives.&dquo;

In a similar vein,Alexandra Kollontai imagined the New

Soviet Man and the New Soviet Woman as creatures motivated

primarily by a desire to enhance the welfare of the society in

which they lived. In much the way that Gorkii and Bogdanov

did, Kollontai acknowledged the validity of individual liberation,and she also recognized that Communism was its essential pre-requisite : Only in the new social labour order, in which the

concern of society will be directed to the creation of conditions

favourable to the flourishing of personality, will the social

atmosphere be formed in which the realization of the higher moral

person, now inaccessible to us, will be possible. 48 But because thevirtues of those creating Communism will include a capacity for

altruism and an ability to recognize the primacy of collective

endeavour, there will be a tendency - an entirely laudable one,

according to Kollontai - among those actually living underCommunism to elevate the welfare of society above the interests

of any particular individual. 49 With the creation of Communism

there will come into existence a new generation ... independentand courageous and with a strong sense of the collective: a



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71

generation which places the good of the collective above allelse.S~

What, then, would be the fate of the individual, the emancipa-tion of whom Kollontai always claimed to champion? HereKollontai seemed to shift her position. In 1905 she insisted thatunder Communism personal desire will coincide with social

imperatives - which suggests that individual liberation wouldbe a concomitant of any and all efforts to serve the larger socialinterest.&dquo; By 1921, however, she had concluded that, even under

Communism, these desires and social imperatives could conflict,and that if they did, The needs and interests of the individualmust be subordinated to the interests and aims ofthe collective. 112

Evidently, in 1921 individual liberation did not have as high a

priority on Kollontais ideological agenda as it did in 1905; by1921 she had determined that there were, in fact, circumstances

when the interests (and the emancipation) of the individualwould have to be sacrificed to the interests of society. The reasonfor the change in her position, it seems, is that, over the years, she

became much less confident than Bogdanov and Gorkii that thenatural harmony of interests they all anticipated would extend to

every circumstance or situation.As a result, she was more willingthan Bogdanov and Gorkii to concede that in a Communist

society there would be at least the possibility of conflict. In

Kollontais view, however, there was no reason to be alarmed bythis, since in those relatively infrequent instances when a con-fluence of individual and social interests did not exist, the indi-

vidual would recognize this and prevent any conflict that mightensue simply by subordinating his own interests to those of

society. Conflict, it seems, was something that Kollontai wantedat all costs to avoid, and instead of acknowledging that conflict,

properly managed and adjudicated, could be beneficial to indi-viduals and societies alike, she claimed that the New Soviet Man

and Woman would be virtuous precisely in their capacity to pre-vent it, mostly by subordinating their own interests to the largersocial ones if ever (or whenever) these diverged.ACommunist

society, in sum, would be completely harmonious: the natural

harmony of interests Kollontai envisioned in the society as awhole would obviate most conflicts, while the altruism she

imagined in the New Soviet Man and Woman would prevent allothers.&dquo;

Many of the themes that Bogdanov, Gorkii and Kollontai



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72

stressed in describing the New Soviet Man are evident as well inwhat Lunacharsky had to say on the same subject. Like the

others, Lunacharsky saw virtue in the liberation of the individual,and like the others he believed that this liberation was trulypossible only under Communism. The first duty of a free andcollective order, he wrote in 1909, would be the realization ofthe possibility for each and everyone to develop himself.&dquo;&dquo; Butbecause the proletariat, as a class, is conditioned by the collectivenature of the work it performs (and also by the proximity of theslums in which it lives) to recognize the nobility of collective

endeavour,it

is able to establisha

Communist society in whichindividuals devote themselves to furthering the common good;in Lunacharskys phraseology, it is able to proceed from I to, We . ss In typically florid language, Lunacharsky described in1918 what exactly it was that made Communism as a politicalsystem, preferable to every other.ACommunist society, he

claimed, would be one,

... where everyone actually works not for someone else who uses his labour,but in order to make his own payment to the general fund, to the common

temple, in which he can live and can pray to the great and to the beautiful. Onlyin such a society is it actually possible to have truly educated people, only therecan man reveal what is in his own heart and stop saying, with Maupassant,that man is always a solitary being and that even his best friends will alwaysremain an enigma to him.... Peoples hearts will be joined with others in an

atmosphere of brotherhood, in an atmosphere in which people love one anotherand help one another. 56

To demonstrate that this kind of collectivism would not result

in individual distinctiveness being obliterated, Lunacharskyresorted to many of the same intellectual expedients - some

might call them semantic sleights of hand - that Bogdanov,Gorkii and Kollontai had used. Quite fortuitously, there wouldbe an identity of individual and social interests under

Communism, so that the individual would actually ennoble him-self by working for the common good. In 1904 Lunacharskypromised that in the future we will construct a social order inwhich the interests of the individual and those of society will bein complete harmony.5 Should this harmony of interests cease toexist or simply fail to apply in any particular situation, however,the individual would properly make the interests and the welfareof society his priority; in 1909 Lunacharsky said that in a



18/37

73

Communist society there would be collective projects requiringthe individual to sacrifice at least some of his interests, and heeven claimed that persons living in such a society would give uptheir lives ifthe interests of society somehow required it. S8

But Lunacharsky, unlike Kollontai, was not content simplyto acknowledge the necessity, at times, of individual acts of

altruism, which, while preventing conflict, might also jeopardizethe emancipation of the individual. Instead, he attempted to safe-

guard this emancipation by distinguishing what he said weretwo very different, and even opposite and mutually exclusive,kinds of individualism. There was, he said, a micropsychicindividualism, predominant mainly in capitalist societies, that

fostered the self at the expense of others, the petty at the expenseof the profound, and all that was imitative and ephemeral atthe expense of everything that was creative and permanent.Needless to say, Lunacharsky rejected this kind of individualism

entirely, and he was pleased to predict that it would have no

place in a Communist society. But there was also a better kind

of individualism, which Lunacharsky called macropsychic,that he said would characterize the New Soviet Man. This indi-

vidualism, as it happened, was concerned with greater thingsthan the individual himself: the macropsychic individual would

recognize the triviality of his own needs and interests - indeedhe would even recognize the triviality of his own existence - in

comparison with the great and enduring collectivities around

him, and he would happily and enthusiastically devote his entire

life to protecting them. In the macropsychic individual, heclaimed, the &dquo;I&dquo; is identified with some broad and enduringWe&dquo; . 1 59

It is hardly necessary to point out the fatuousness of

Lunacharskys argument. If it is intellectually defensible (thoughperhaps empirically indeterminable) to posit a natural harmonyof interests in a society that does not yet exist, and if it is also

intellectually defensible (though perhaps questionable ethically)to assert that individuals in a society should be prepared undercertain circumstances to sacrifice their interests, or even their

lives, in the service of some larger social interest, it is simplypreposterous, and also a perversion of language, to claim that

sacrificing an individual or his interests is actually an expressionor an affirmation of individualism. By juggling his categoriesand amending his definitions, Lunacharsky may have made it



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74

possible psychologically for himself to continue to pose as a

champion of individual liberation, but his intellectual gymnasticsalso had the effect of reducing the notion of individual liberation

to absurdity.Still, Lunacharsky valued the idea of individual liberation,

however much his attempts to reconcile it with what he saw as

the requirements of a Communist society may have trivialized it

or rendered it meaningless.And Lunacharsky, like Bogdanov,Gorkii and Kollontai, always believed that every New Soviet

Man would be endowed with a unique combination of qualitiesand

attributes,so that in a Communist

societyindividual diver-

sity would always exist.But individual diversity, so predominant in the visions of

Trotskii and Bukharin, and still visible, though partiallyobscured, in those of Bogdanov, Gorkii, Kollontai and

Lunacharsky, is practically nonexistent inAlexei Gastevs. Of

all the Bolsheviks, Gastev was probably the most insistent in

arguing that Soviet workers should regiment themselves for

maximum industrial efficiency, and in keeping with this objec-tive he advocated the application of Taylorism, a concept ofindustrial management developed in the USAthat stressed the

rationalization of labour through the imposition of uniform rulesand procedures. In the 1920s, as the director of the CentralInstitute of Labour, and as a participant in the movement for the

Scientific Organization of Labour (Nauchnaia OrganizatsiiaTruda, commonly known as NOT), Gastev tried to increase

industrial productivity in the Soviet Union by using methods thathe thought were consistent with Taylorism, such as photograph-ing workers in an effort to eliminate unnecessary motions ButGastev went well beyond Taylorism in his belief that, to achievethe levels of productivity to which the Bolsheviks aspired, theRussian worker would have to be regimented to the point where

he would be little more than a machine, lacking those aspects of

personality, such as spontaneity, creativity and intuition, thatmake human beings individually and collectively unique.To be sure, there were others in the Soviet government, and

many outside of it as well, who advocated the mechanization of

humanity. In his celebrated novel Cement, Gladkov depicted the

New Soviet Man as possessing many of the qualities ofmachines: one of the characters in the novel, who works in a

cement factory and is presented as a prototype of the New Soviet



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75

Man, says that when Im with a machine, Im an enginemyself .6 Similarly, L. Sosnovskii, the editor of Bednota,reminded his readers in the early 1920s of the necessity of seek-

ing and finding new men ... [who] must be welded into a cohortof steel.62And Vsevelod Meierkhold, as part of the effort tocreate an October in the Theatre to complement the politicalrevolution of 1917, recommended the creation of new anddifferent human beings who, in the precision and co-ordinationof their movements, would be high velocity men, much like theworkers of the future that Gastev - whom Meierkhold greatlyadmired - was trying to create.63 Clearly, Gastevs ideas reso-nated deeply in Bolshevik culture, and in Russian culture

generally in the early twentieth century, which gave rise tointellectual and artistic movements such as Futurism and

Constructivism that exalted technology as a liberating force inthe history of humanity. Lenin was only the most prominent ofthe many Bolsheviks who helped to establish in the Soviet Uniona cult of the machine, which played a prominent role in Soviet

politics and culture.But it was Gastev, more than anyone else, who saw that thiscult of the machine could lead to the dehumanization of man, a

process he lauded as both socially and economically beneficial.

According to Gastev, industrial labour by itself should havemade Russian workers efficient, punctual, singleminded, atten-

tive, and orderly - just like theAmerican workers he so

admired, and whose superiority as a class he considered the

single most critical factor in the expansion of theAmerican econ-omy. But since Russian workers were actually cynical, lethargicand lackadaisical, and given to prolonged periods of daydream-ing, the Soviet state would have to intervene to eliminate thesetraits, which Gastev attributed not to capitalism but to what heconsidered defects in the Russian national character. 64

The result would be a world in which there was no longer anydifference between human beings and machines.As Gastev

imagined them, the new men and women of the future, havinggrown out of iron, would have nerves of steel and muscles likeiron rails, and would be so devoid of individuality, so lacking inthe distinctive characteristics that foster a sense of individual

identity, that there would be no reason to give them names.65 In1919 Gastev predicted that proletarian psychology would becharacterized by a striking anonymity permitting the classifica-



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76

tion of an individual proletarian unit [the term Gastev used to

designate an individual worker] asA, B, C, or 325, 0.075, 0, andso on.66And in 1921 he even deemed the protection of the indi-vidual just a minor problem with which the new people of thefuture would scarcely concern themselves. 17 The followingexcerpt from the same article, cited above, in which Gastevrecommended replacing names with letters or numbers revealshow strongly he favoured the elimination of individuality thatwould follow the regimentation and mechanization of humanity:

The methodical, constantly growing precision of work, educating the musclesand nerves ofthe proletariat, imparts to proletarian psychology a special alert-

ness, full of distrust for every kind of human feeling, trusting only the instru-

ment, the apparatus, and the machine.... The psychology of the proletariat is

already being transformed into a new social psychology where one human

complex works under the control of another.... This psychology reveals a new

working-class collectivism which is manifested not only in relations between

persons but in the relations of whole groups of people with whole groups ofmechanisms.... The manifestations of this mechanized collectivism are so

foreign to personality, so anonymous, that the movement of things, in which

there is no longer any individual face but only regular uniform steps and faceslacking expression, lyricism, emotion, and a soul, is measured not by a shoutor a smile, but by a pressure gauge or a speed gauge.68

In his lengthy poem, Express, a Siberian Fantasy, Gastevdescribed even more vividly how utterly without individuality theNew Soviet Man would be. The poem describes the journey of an

express train, The Panorama, as it crosses Siberia at some

unspecified time in the future.Although many of the cities thetrain passes, such as Kurgan, Krasnoiarsk, Irkutsk and

Novosibirsk, are still run by capitalists, there are others- mostlyin the regions of Siberia closest to European Russia - where lifeand work are organized on a co-operative basis. Once those wholive in these co-operative settlements defeat the capitalists andtake control of all of Siberia, they will reap the benefits of the

skyscraper platforms, blast furnaces and other monuments to

technological proficiency that the capitalists previously con-structed. There is much about what Gastev describes in the poemthat is mindboggling. Not only are the human beings who live inand around these co-operative settlements very much like

machines, or automated producers, who go about their dailybusiness without expressing, or even feeling, any emotions, but

many of the farms, factories and houses where these automatons



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77

live and work are in some sense alive, able to run or marchfrom one location to another. In Gastevs Siberia, the distinction

between animate and inanimate has been virtually obliterated,and the human beings who inhabit this utopia of hypermodernity,with its speeding railroads and automated sidewalks and

elevators, are really an amalgam of organic and inorganicmatter.69 In Gastevs phraseology, all the little souls living inSiberia have been drowned in metal, and there is being forged in

fiery crucibles everywhere a single great one that will enable

every human being to act on the basis of that which most directlyserves the interests of society. 70But in Gastevs Communist society of the future there is

neither a natural harmony of social and individual interests, nor

are there any interests the individual has to sacrifice in serving his

society, because in such a society there are really no individualsat all, only animated machines who are programmed or con-ditioned to act in every instance in a way that is socially usefuland productive. Because in Gastevs society an authoritarianstate is conspicuously missing, it is not clear how, in the absenceof external coercion, these New Soviet Men and Women are pro-

grammed or conditioned to behave as they do. But the monotonyand uniformity of their behaviour, as well as the absence of anyinternal motivation to explain their behaviour, are striking proofthat, for Gastev, individual emancipation, as a concept and an

objective, was an absurdity.&dquo;For this reason, Gastev and the other leaders of NOT were

severely criticized in Pravda in 1923 for transforming the

living person into an unreasoning and stupid instrument without

any general qualifications or sufficient all-round development. 12And Bogdanov (though not Bukharin or Trotskii) criticizedGastev for confusing the work habits the Bolsheviks hoped toinculcate in the proletariat with the culture and society theyhoped the proletariat would eventually create; Gastevs prescrip-

tion for the future, he complained, would reduce human beingsto participants in a military drill.&dquo; In the early 1920s Bolshevism

still retained in its aspirations enough of the individualism it hadinherited from the intelligentsia for its leaders to recoil in horrorwhen visionaries such as Gastev pointed out where the collec-tivism they were practising was likely to lead. But for those in the

Party and in the country who were truly concerned about theliberation of the individual, the worst was yet to come.



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78

The Stalinist version ofthe New Soviet Man was different in a

number of ways from all previous ones. However much

Trotskiis and Bukharins emphasison

individual liberationcaused the Communist society they envisioned to differ from the

more collectivist conceptions entertained by Bogdanov, Gorkii,Kollontai, Lunacharsky and Gastev, all of these Bolsheviks

imagined the New Soviet Man largely as a beneficiary, ratherthan as an instrument, of history; for them, the New Soviet Man

was the highest expression of the promise in Bolshevism that

history would yield a new social order superior to every other that

preceded it. But for Stalin, the New Soviet Man was not a con-

sequence or a concomitant of Communism. Rather, any man in

the Soviet Union who was actively engaged in buildingCommunism was, to one degree or another, a New Soviet

Man, and any woman who was supporting a Soviet man in thisendeavour was herself a New Soviet Woman. Because, by 1936,the Soviet Union (in Stalins estimation) had achieved socialism,and was about to enter a transitional phase from socialism to

Communism, there was no longer any reason, in Stalins view, to

confine the New Soviet Man to the realm of fantasy; all theSoviet people had to do if they wished to see what the men and

women of the future would be like was to look around them at

the categories of people the Soviet government singled out for

praise and recognition.As a result, the Soviet people would

recognize the extent to which they themselves had been trans-

formed, along with their society, since the October Revolution of1917.AsAndrei Zhdanov proclaimed in 1946:

With each day our people attain an even higher level. Today we are not the

people we were yesterday, and tomorrow we will not be as we were today. We

are already not the same people we were before 1917. Russia is not the same

and our character has changed also. 74

Because the Soviet Union, by Stalins own analysis, had reachedin the 1930s a point in its historical development where it

resembled Communism more than it did capitalism, Stalin could

properly forbid any further speculation on the future: ifthe future

was already implicit in the present, then any discussion of a

future beyond the one that already existed would be unnecessaryand, from Stalins perspective, potentially harmful politically. 71Whom did Stalin consider New Soviet Men in the Soviet



24/37

79

Union in the 1930s?And what qualities did these persons possessthat justified Stalins consideration of them as prototypes of theuniversal Communist human

beingthat would exist once

Communism was established everywhere? Judging by the publicpraise and economic rewards that were lavished on them, one can

legitimately include among the ranks of Stalins supermen the

Stakhanovites, who shattered existing norms of industrial pro-ductivity, the aviators who established national and internationalrecords for transcontinental flight, and the various mountaineers,

parachutists and long-distance skiers whose exploits in exceeding

what were previously thought to be the limits of human abilitywere exalted in the Soviet press with a degree of hyperbole other-wise reserved for Stalin himself. 76

It is important to bear in mind that, beginning in the mid-

1930s, virtually all of the Soviet citizens whom the governmentsingled out for commendation were honoured primarily as indi-viduals. Their achievements were extolled as a consequence of

individual excellence, and even in undertakings such as coal

mining, in which individual achievement was impossible withoutthe contributions of others, only the individual hero was recog-nized : although Stakhanov could not possibly have mined 14times the normal allotment of coal without the assistance of the

timberers who fortified the shaft in which he worked, the latterwere completely ignored in the celebratory rites that followed.&dquo;

Indeed, one of the reasons the Soviet press stressed the exploitsof Soviet pilots such as Chkalov, Beliakov and Baidukov, ratherthan representatives of other professions, was that aviation, by its

very nature as a solitary enterprise, was conducive to individualheroism. The feats of these men were essentially the feats of

single individuals, and because the nature of their achievements

was consistent with what Stalin believed would be the heroism of

the New Soviet Man, he could point to the fact that Soviet pilotshad crossed the North Pole or traversed the length of the Soviet

Union in record time as proof of the superiority of Communismand of the Soviet system as a whole.

In a peculiar way, Stalin restored to the New Soviet Man theelement of individual initiative that, to one degree or another,

Bogdanov, Gorkii, Kollontai, Lunacharsky and Gastev hadremoved. The accomplishments of the Stakhanovites, pilots,mountaineers, parachutists and skiers were not so much a con-

sequence of their physical prowess - although their strength,



25/37

80

endurance, quickness and manual dexterity were all generouslyacknowledged. Rather, such people were singled out either

implicitlyor

explicitlyas New Soviet Men because

they daredto

ignore or to challenge conventional wisdom, because theyrefused to be bound by commonly accepted notions of what was

humanly possible. What Piatakov maintained about theStakhanovites applies equally to the others: they were people who

challenged and overturned existing norms.&dquo; In Stalins concep-tion, the New Soviet Man was someone, anyone, who, by virtueof his willingness to challenge authority, placed himself outside

the existing hierarchies in which he lived and worked.And to theextent that the Soviet state chose to characterize many of those

who actually did this as models for everyone else to emulate, it

had some reason for believing that the attributes of these indi-

viduals would eventually be shared by the population as a whole.

Although not everyone in Stalins Communist society of thefuture would be a Stakhanovite, a pilot or a skier, all of its inhabi-tants would possess the temperament and, in particular, the indi-

vidual initiative, that mining coal, flying airplanes and racingdown mountains required. 79

But the individualism Stalin seemed to favour bore little

resemblance to the individualism that was implicit in the aspira-tions of the Russian intelligentsia, or even in the Bolshevism ofTrotskii and Bukharin. Although the heroes Stalin exaltedacted as individuals when they violated existing norms or rulesof procedure, they did so only with the blessing of Stalin himself,and the fact that this blessing was sometimes granted retro-

actively in no way lessened or eliminated its necessity; if Stalinhad not approved of what Chkalov and Stakhanov had done,undoubtedly they would not have been rewarded as they were,and they might even have been reprimanded, punished or shot.In point of fact, the particular groups of people in the SovietUnion that Stalin singled out as New Soviet Men were treated

both by Stalin and by his epigones in the Soviet press as littlemore than children, whose childlike, irrational and almost

instinctive proclivity for challenging authority, common senseand conventional wisdom was politically acceptable only becauseStalin sanctioned it. In Stakhanovs reminiscences of the

occasion in November 1935 when he and the other originalStakhanovites visited Stalin in the Kremlin, Stakhanov capturedthe essence of Stalins attitude when he described how the Soviet



26/37

81

leader looked down on [him] with the eyes of a father and a

teacher, leaving the clear impression that without Stalins stembut benevolent

paternalism,Stakhanov could not

possiblyhave

mined as much coal as he did.8And in his speech to the

Stakhanovites, Stalin, for his part, went out of his way to charac-terize the heroes assembled in front of him as simple and shy[people] who, despite their amazing accomplishments, requireda father-figure like Stalin to explain the larger political andhistorical significance of what they had done.8Although the

people Stalin recognized as New Soviet Men were truly dis-

tinguishable as individuals, and the contributions they made toSoviet society were genuinely unique, their individualism, asStalin interpreted it, was essentially that of a child.And just like

children, in whom disobedience rarely assumes a political dimen-

sion, Stalins New Soviet Men willingly acknowledged the

permanence and the legitimacy of Soviet dictatorship. Soinvolved were they in mining coal, climbing mountains or jump-ing out of airplanes that none of them ever thought to ask how

best the Soviet people should be governed.This, then, was Stalins New Soviet Man, at least as he was

presented to the Soviet people in the 1930s: a heroic, energetic,wilful and childlike naif, whose willingness to take risks and to

defy conventional wisdom was exceeded only by his blinddevotion to Stalin. In the 1940s and early 1950s, however, Stalinfelt compelled to indicate how the New Soviet Man would liveonce his exertions on behalf of socialism and the Soviet state had

stopped, whether at the end of his work day or at the end of hislife. To be sure, Stalin never stated his preferences directly.Nowhere in his written works, at any rate, is there a descriptionof the domestic arrangements within which the New Soviet Man

would spend his leisure time. But by examining (in much the

way that Vera Dunham has done) the kinds of characters thatwere presented in the middlebrow literature the regime tendedto favour towards the end of the Stalin

era,one can infer the

domestic qualities and attributes that would make the NewSoviet Man a model citizen as well as a model worker.82

Paradoxically, the New Soviet Man at home - as opposed tothe New Soviet Man at work - would be a self-interested, con-

formist, unheroic and anti-intellectual Communist meshchaninwith predominantly consumerist aspirations; the pink lamp-shades, mauve wallpaper and scalloped doilies would be only the



27/37

82

external manifestations of a deeply private and socially conserva-tive sensibility that was based upon the principle that those who

giveto their

society throughtheir labour are entitled to receive

appropriate compensation in the form of creature comforts muchlike those Stakhanov and the original Stakhanovites receivedin 1935.&dquo; In keeping with Stalins smug observation at theceremonies at which these rewards were presented that life hasbecome more joyous, the figures in middlebrow Soviet fiction inthe 1940s and early 1950s express the belief that there is a privatesphere of life which is no less important to the Soviet citizen than

the time he spends serving the larger interests of society-

a

belief that the Soviet government, in the interest of preservingpolitical stability, was prepared to recognize.8 In the Sovietnovels that depict, as it were, the private lives of the New SovietMan and Woman, this belief is expressed in a variety of ways,sometimes with a high degree of literary skill, sometimes not, butnowhere with greater clarity than in Cherkasovs The Day Beginsin the East, which was serialized in Oktiabr in 1949. In

Cherkasovs story, which takes place during the Second WorldWar, the heroine, who works as a gold prospecter, explains whyshe so desperately wants a house of her own, even as theGermans are approaching Stalingrad, threatening the very exis-tence of the Soviet state:

We must buy a house! ... We are fed up with living in back yard wings and

dragging ourselves from flat to flat. We have a whole trunkful of honorary

awards!Andwe

have two medals also! Where should I put them? On top of theicon? Yes? We will certainly build a house and thats all there is to it. I want to

live properly as a person should. Thats how it is!8

At first glance, it might appear that the attributes and qualitiesStalin preferred in the New Soviet Man and Woman are contra-

dictory. The very same people who labour so heroically infactories suddenly become self-seeking and small-minded petit-

bourgeoisie once they retire from their jobs, or simply go homefor the night. But this combination of qualities is actually con-sistent with Stalinism as a whole; just as the New Soviet Man isboth heroic and complacent, idealistic and acquisitive, and

cognizant of the larger social interest as well as his own,Stalinism combined economic modernization (for which

heroism, idealism and a sense of the social are often required)and political and social conservatism (which can foster com-



28/37

83

placency, acquisitiveness and the cultivation of private interests).Furthermore, this dualism in Stalinism between economic

modernization and political and social conservatismwas

implicitas well in the agenda of autocratic reformers in Russian historywho preceded Stalin, such as Peter the Great,Alexander II and

Stolypin. Perhaps the ultimate paradox in the evolution of theNew Soviet Man as he was envisioned by the Bolsheviks is that

the closer the Bolsheviks came in their own estimation to creatinga society that was different from all those in history that precededit, the more they depicted the people who would populate

this society in ways that reflected a tradition of autocraticmodernization that anyone familiar with Russian history would

immediately recognize. Like the Petrine shipbuilder or engineerwhose technical ingenuity helped to strengthen the tsarist

system he supported, the Stakhanovite exceeded his normswhile remaining politically loyal to the Soviet regime. Indeed,one suspects that Stalin, who was well aware of how much his

political and economic policies resembled those of Peter the

Great, was equally aware of the extent to which he anchoredthe New Soviet Man, who was previously just an ethereal

figment of the Bolshevik imagination, in the realities of theRussian past.And conversely, one suspects that neither Peter,

Alexander II or Stolypin would have found Stalins vision of theNew Soviet Man in any significant sense inconsistent with theirown notion of how the subjects of a modernizing autocracyshould act.

With Stalins death in 1953, and the ascendancy ofKhrushchev that followed it, the New Soviet Man assumed once

more the role he had previously served, namely as an object of

aspiration, realizable only in the future.86 Not even Khrushchevs

prediction that the Soviet Union would achieve Communism by1980 could make the New Soviet Man the reality (or the per-ceived reality) he had been under Stalin. But for the entire course

of Soviet history, from the hopeful beginnings of 1917 to theignominious collapse of 1991, the vision of the New Soviet Manwas an integral part of Soviet mythology, serving to legitimizethe Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet system just as muchas it inspired and energized the Bolshevik leadership, and verypossibly the Soviet populace as well, to make the dream of a

Communist, classless society a reality.But if this vision was a source of political legitimacy for the



29/37

84

Bolsheviks, it also helped to erode that legitimacy by establishinga standard of perfection against which the harsh realities of life in

the Soviet Unioncould be

judged.As it

happened,the

Bolsheviks created not a New Soviet Man but a New Soviet

Leviathan, which could neither create a perfect human being,nor provide a reasonable measure of material security for the

imperfect, but very real human beings who inhabited it. Pre-

occupied, even obsessed, at times, with creating a new man forthe future, the Bolsheviks easily brutalized the individuals they

governed in the present. Indeed, the Bolsheviks frequently justi-

fied the suffering they inflicted on the Soviet people on thegrounds that any undertaking so noble as the creation of a perfectman and a perfect society sanctioned any means that were

necessary to complete it. However much the Bolsheviks (with the

obvious exceptions of Gastev and Stalin) championed the con-

cept of individual liberation, they were prepared in the name of

Communism to sacrifice the interests, and sometimes the lives,of millions of individual human beings because they thought that

in doing so they were hastening the creation of a higher form ofhuman personality. But this personality was, in actuality, only an

abstraction, even when Stalin saw many of its attributes pre-

figured in particular categories of the Soviet population.The Bolsheviks objective of individual liberation was ethically

flawed in other ways, not just in the brutal methods that were

adopted in the pursuit of it. Equally deficient, from the perspec-tive ofWestern liberalism, was the concept itself, the very notion

of individual liberation-

which the Bolsheviks inherited from

Marxism and the Russian intelligentsia - as a process of self-

realization and self-fulfilment. Obviously, neither Gastev nor

Stalin advocated individual liberation as the Bolsheviks generallydefined it. Gastevs New Soviet Man was essentially a robot or an

automaton, and Stalins was little more than a child.As for

Bogdanov, Gorkii, Kollontai and Lunacharsky, while they all

claimed to be committed to the emancipation of the individual,their willingness in most circumstances to subordinate the indi-

viduals interests to those of Communist society as a whole makes

one sceptical of just how firm and lasting their commitment

actually was. (Bogdanovs perceived identity of social and indi-

vidual interests in a Communist society seems to have been most-

ly a rhetorical device to mask his preference for the interests of

society over those of the individual.) But even if their belief in



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individual liberation was as genuine as that of Trotskii and

Bukharin, their notion of the kinds of things a truly liberated indi-vidual would do in a Communist society was seriously con-

stricted.All of these Bolsheviks, and Trotskii and Bukharin as

well, espoused a purely cultural and aesthetic individualism thatis traceable historically to the Renaissance: they all believed thatthe highest expression of a persons humanity was the fulfilmentof his individual potential; whether that took the form of writingnovels, climbing mountains, buildings bridges or conductingscientific research was less important than the fact that activitiessuch as these fostered a sense of individual

uniquenessand self-

worth. But there is another kind of individualism, more politicalthan cultural and aesthetic, to which these Bolsheviks were more

or less oblivious: an individualism that not only acknowledges,but recognizes the inevitability and desirability of politicaldifferences and disagreements, an individualism that allows

people to express unpopular opinions without retaliation, or fearof retaliation, from their government. Only an infinitesimal

number of Bolsheviks espoused this political individualism aswell as the more aesthetic and cultural variety favoured byTrotskii, Bukharin and the others, and among foreign Com-munists only Rosa Luxemburg comes to mind as one who under-stood that freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the onewho thinks differently. 87 In the last years of their lives, Trotskiiand Bukharin finally came to accept this, but the lateness of theirconversion hardly makes them the best exemplars of a kind of

individualism that for most of their political lives they vehementlyrejected.For this reason, one can properly question whether the

aesthetic and cultural individualism to which the Bolsheviks were

committed (or claimed to be committed) would have resulted inthe emergence of a human being who was truly free. Further-

more, the fact that the individual liberation the Bolsheviks

espoused was actually afairly

limited one

strongly suggeststhat

the entire enterprise of creating a New Soviet Man was flawed,perhaps fatally, from the very beginning, and that the Russian

people, and the other peoples of the former Soviet Union, arebetter offtoday without any such vision of a perfect human beingto divert them from the essential task of improving their lives inthe immediate future. In 1991 Viktor Erofeev, a Soviet novelistand critic, attempted to explain to Westerners why the collapse of



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the Soviet Union was so troubling to the Soviet people, even tothose who welcomed it:

All this

[political turmoil]is not

comprehensibleto Westerners

becausethey have never lived in a system which claimed to be creating a perfectnew man, which celebrated the possibility of man. You [Westerners] are onlyasked by your state to be yourself. But here the collapse has created a crisis of

humanism, the collapse of the state has left man small, humiliated, vulnerable.Thats why people sometimes seem indifferent, why political proclamations aretaken more broadly.&dquo;

Although Erofeev was surely right in claiming that the crisis theSoviet Union was

experiencingwas

spiritualas well as

politicaland economic in its dimensions, there is good reason to questionhis implication that the Soviet people were better off before theSoviet system collapsed because the system provided them with avision of human perfection to which they could aspire. Studyingthe New Soviet Man as the Bolsheviks envisioned him from 1917

to 1953 reveals, if nothing else, the dangers of intellectuals seek-

ing and using political power to realize a vision of the future that,

in the Soviet case,was

not justan

abstraction, but a flawedabstraction as well.

Notes

The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Professors Barbara Clements,George Kline and Marshall Shatz in the preparation of this article.

1. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, reprinted in Michael Foot and Isaac

Kramnick, eds, The Thomas Paine Reader, (London 1987), 109. Paine, of course,was writing at the time of theAmerican Revolution. But the sentiments he

expressed were shared by the French Revolutionaries and, in particular, theJacobins. It is revealing of the different emphases of the French and RussianRevolutions that while the Jacobins spoke in the 1790s of remaking the world,Maiakovsky claimed in 1917 that the Bolsheviks would remake life, Lunacharskyin 1918 that they would create a new man, and Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, also m

1918, that the proletarian culture the Bolsheviks would foster would make possiblethe emergence of a new human being possessing entirely new and differentemotions and ideas.

(V.F. Shishkin,Velikii Oktiabr i

proletarskaiamoral

(Moscow1976), 20-1, quoted in Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and

ExperimentalLife in the Russian Revolution (New York 1989), 38;A. Lunacharsky,Mir obnovliaetsia (Moscow 1989), 141; Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, Pod znamenem

"Prolekulta", Proletarskaia kultura, 1 (July 1918), 3.)Although the Jacobins cer-

tainly considered human perfection a welcome consequence of the economic and

political changes they advocated, only marginal figures in the French Revolution,such as Hupay and Mercier, fleshed out a coherent vision ofa new man living in astate of perpetual happiness. The Supreme Being that Robespierre called on all



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Frenchmen to worship was, of course, divine, not human. See, e.g., James

Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins ofthe Revolutionary Faith (New York

1980), 79-83; and Crane Brinton, The Jacobins (New York 1930), 137-83.

2. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western

World (Cambridge, MA1979).3. Ibid., 33-114.

4. C.A. Helvtius, De lEsprit, or Essays of the Mind (London 1810). Trotskiisretort to parsons of all religious creeds that the Bolsheviks were engaged in creat-

ing a real paradise on earth for the human race rather than a paradise in the

world to come was one that other Bolsheviks could support. Quoted in Ren

Fueloep-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism:An Examination of Cultural

Life in Soviet Russia (New York 1965), 76.

5.As Leszek Kolakowskii has pointed out, the Bolsheviks claimed to know not

only what the future would be, but how to achieve it. (Leszek Kolakowskii, Needfor Utopia, Fear of Utopia, in Seweryn Bialer and Sophia Sluzar, eds, Radicalism

in the ContemporaryAge, Volume 2: Radical Visions of the Future (Boulder, CO

1977), 7.) Since utopias are by definition unattainable, the Bolsheviks cannot

properly be considered utopians.6. For example, Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property,

and the State, reprinted in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 26

(New York 1976), 189.

7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, reprinted in

Collected Works, op. cit., 5, 47.Also in The German Ideology, Marx and Engelscommented that in a Communist society there will be no painters, only men and

women who, among other things, paint. Op. cit. 5, 394.

8. N.A. Dobroliubov, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow 1956), 283.An

analysis of the intelligentsia can be found in Marshall Shatz, Soviet Dissent in

Historical Perspective (New York 1980), 12-63.

9. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What is to be Done?, trans by Michael Katz (Ithacaand London 1989), 211.

10. Ibid., 359-60.

11. Katerina Clark has noted the resemblance between the positive heroesextolled in Soviet literature, particularly in the Stalin era, and the myths of the

princes and the saints and of the warrior-knights of the byliny that were a part of

Kievan and Muscovite culture. (Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as

Ritual (Chicago 1981), especially 46-67.) Many of these positive heroes, such as

Korchagin in How Steel was Tempered, were in fact fictional equivalents of the

New Soviet Man. But it would be wrong to conclude that this aspect of old

Russian culture influenced the Bolsheviks in the same way, and to the same extent,

as the intelligentsia did. There is no evidence that the Bolsheviks- however mu

Bergman, Jay - The Idea of Individual Liberation in Bolshevik Vision

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