The Making of New Soviet Man

Abstract

The new Soviet regime inherited a large, heterogeneous and backward Empire from its Tsarist predecessors. It also inherited a distinctive and deeply-rooted pattern of orientations to government, which we have termed the ‘traditional Russian’ political culture. It may be helpful at this point briefly to recall some of its essential features. Representative institutions, as we have noted, were weakly articulated and ineffective; levels of popular participation were low; and governing style was centralised, bureaucratic and authoritarian. Popular political attachments, in consequence, were highly personalised; and political knowledge and experience, outside an extremely limited circle, was virtually non-existent. The scope of government was unusually broad: it extended not only to those spheres of life in which other governments of the time were active, such as public order and taxation, but also into economic entrepreneurship and control, religion and morals, and the detailed administration of justice. It was based, finally, upon a society of a highly ‘traditional’, gemeinschaft character, in which there was a strong tradition of group solidarity together with its converse, a suspicion of outsiders; a greater degree of reliance upon face-to-face relations than upon anonymous procedures;