Homo Sovieticus

Homo Sovieticus (pseudo-Latin for "Soviet Man") is a sarcastic and critical reference to a category of people with a specific mindset that were allegedly created by the governments of the Eastern Bloc. The term was coined by well-known Soviet writer and sociologist Aleksandr Zinovyev as the title of his book of the same name. Zinovyew also coined a newspeak-style abbreviation homosos (гомосос). A similar term in Russian slang is sovok (совок), which is derived from Soviet but also means scoop.

Characteristics

The idea that the Soviet system would create a new, better kind of person was first postulated by the advocates of the Soviet system; they called it the "New Soviet man". Homo Sovieticus, however, was a term with negative connotations, invented by opponents to describe what they said was the real result of Soviet policies. In many ways it meant the opposite of the New Soviet man, someone characterized by the following:

• Indifference to the results of his labour (as expressed in the saying "They pretend they are paying us, and we pretend we are working"), and lack of initiative.
• Indifference to common property and petty theft from the workplace, both for personal use and for profit. A line from a popular song, "Everything belongs to the kolkhoz, everything belongs to me" ("все теперь колхозное, все теперь мое" vse teper kolkhoznoye, vse teper moye), meaning that people on collective farms treasured all common property as their own, was sometimes used ironically to refer to instances of petty theft. The Law of Spikelets, which made stealing from the collective punishable by ten years’ imprisonment, was a failed attempt to break this attitude.
• Isolation from world culture, created by the Soviet Union's restrictions on travel abroad and strict censorship of information in the media (as well as the abundance of propaganda). The intent was to insulate the Soviet people from Western influence; instead, "exotic" Western culture became more interesting precisely because it was forbidden. Soviet officials called this fascination "Western idolatry" (идолопоклонничество перед Западом idolopoklonnichestvo pered Zapadom).
• Obedience or passive acceptance of everything that government imposes on them (see authoritarianism).
• Avoidance of taking any individual responsibility on anything.
• According to a former US ambassador to Kazakhstan, a tendency to drink heavily: "[a Kazakh defence minister] appears to enjoy loosening up in the tried and true Homo Sovieticus style – i.e., drinking oneself into a stupor."

See also

• Soviet people
• New Soviet man

Further reading

• Cambra, Fernando P. de. Homo sovieticus. La vida actual en Rusia. - Barcelona : Ediciones Petronio, 1975. - 296 p. ISBN 84-7250-399-2
• Aleksandr Zinovyev (1986). Homo sovieticus. Grove/Atlantic. ISBN 0-87113-080-7. 
• Edward J. O'Boyle (January 1993). "Work Habits and Customer Service in Post-Communist Poland". International Journal of Social Economics 20 (1). 
• (Polish) Józef Tischner (2005). Etyka solidarności oraz Homo sovieticus. Kraków: Znak. p. 295. ISBN 83-240-0588-9. 
• Ragozin, Leonid (9 May 2005). "Thorny legacy of 'Soviet Man'". BBCRussian.com. 
• "The long life of Homo sovieticus" The Economist, Dec 10th 2011