It’s Raining New Men

Borat is an underinformed Western fantasy about a phenomenon whose roots go far deeper than anything Baron Cohen could have learned during his Astrakhan beach getaway. Nor did he need to know all that much, because the local yokel is, paradoxically, a common global phenomenon. What culture does not have yokels of its very own as reliable fodder for embarrassing, self-deprecating laughter? It is most visible as a reflection of the immigrant experience. Elsewhere I’ve argued that Borat is a variation on a familiar Jewish anxiety about backward relatives from the Old Country; Gene Yang’s 2006 graphic novel, American Born Chinese, explores a Chinese-American version of roughly the same anxieties. This does not mean that the yokel is just for immigrants. White, unhyphenated Americans have looked down on “white trash” since the country was young.²

But the USSR and its successor states provide a unique setting for such fantasies of national abjection because of the Soviet Union’s role as an unprecedented sustained, self-conscious experiment in synthetic, ideological, and utopian identity formation. As is so often the case, one could argue that the United States was the country’s rival when it came to such matters, but the American circumstances were significantly different, involving transoceanic colonization, the genocide of the indigenous population, race-based slavery, massive immigration, and an ideology that, while no doubt present, was soft-peddled by comparison to the Soviet project.³ Moreover, the Soviet experiment with identity cannot be separated from its remarkable, simultaneous project of rapid modernization. Before we can talk about the degeneration of Soviet identity, we need to look at its development, from Marxist, prerevolutionary utopianism through the first revolutionary decade’s rhetoric of the New Man, and on to the Stalinist development of the New Soviet Man.

First, let us address the terminological elephant in the room: should we really be saying “New Man” rather than “New Person”? After all, the Russian term is novyi chelovek, not novyi muzhchina (a phrase that would explicitly be about an adult male’s way of being in the world). The English phrase connotes a sexism that the Russian would seem to lack, although it is certainly worth remembering that the Russian word for “person” is masculine in gender. But I would argue that it is more in keeping with a feminist framework to use the word “man” rather than “person,” following the example of Lynn Atwood, who, in The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex Role Socialization in the USSR (1990), used masculine nouns and pronouns in her translations from the Russian because attempting “to rectify the male bias in the Russian language … would be totally misleading” (14). I choose to say “new man” rather than “new person” not despite the term’s sexism but because of it.

The new person included women, but it included them as an afterthought or as a variation on the male prototype, who would always be discussed first.⁴ One could, for example, talk about the “new woman” or “new Soviet woman” in reference or contradistinction to the “new chelovek [person],” but there was never any reason to do the same for the “new man” (adult male) and the “new person.” The new person was a man, unless otherwise specified. This should not come as a surprise, since it is in keeping with general usage in Russian (and, for that matter, English) at the time. It is also ideologically consistent, a homology to the Bolshevik approach to feminism: yes, women must be liberated from patriarchal servitude, but as a corollary to the overall liberation of the proletariat rather than as a goal unto itself.

The idea of the New Man is fundamentally utopian (despite Marx’s explicit denials of anything utopian about Marxism), based on the common utopian anthropology of human malleability. Belief in an unchanging human nature is intrinsically conservative and definitely incompatible with utopias, since, if people never change, there’s little point in trying to create a perfect system. Instead, appeals to human nature are a prominent dystopian or antiutopian trope, going back to Dostoevsky’s underground man.

Scholars have long treated the “New Man” and the “New Soviet Man” as interchangeable, but Anna Krylova persuasively argues for maintaining a distinction between the two. The New Man, she writes, is a creature of the pre-Stalin era, inspired by a “collectivist ethos of the Bolshevism of the 1910–1920s that rejected the ontological differentiation between the individual and his or her social milieu” (341). The New Man was not just collectivist but proletarian through and through, while the New Soviet Man of the 1930s would gradually phase out both of these values.⁵

One of the reasons this distinction has remained obscure has to do with the differences between public discourse in the 1920s and the 1930s. In the 1920s, the New Man was an idea to be debated and developed, a concept that was, as it were, up for grabs. When the New Soviet Man evolved in the 1930s, the shift in emphasis from, among other things, collectivism to innate talent, was developed in pedagogical journals and Stalin’s edits of Komsomol decrees. The public representation of the New (Soviet) Man started to change, but the processes that led to these changes were not, in themselves, public or even necessarily the result of a set of conscious decisions about the New Man per se.

Whoever the New Man would be, his coming was heralded long before his arrival, and his character was the subject of spirited polemics by people who could make no claim to be his peer. Despite its optimism, utopian anthropology is haunted by a version of the same problem that plagues the very idea of the utopian system: an inability to imagine a convincing path from here (imperfection) to the utopian promised land. It is a problem of cause and effect: the ideal system will produce the ideal people, but the ideal people are not yet available to implement the ideal system, which must inevitably be constructed by men and women who are the flawed product of an imperfect world. The makers of the new world cannot be New Men; at best, they view the new world from the outside, like Moses in Moab.

The point is that whatever he would be, it was not simply “Russian.” New Russians would take decades more to appear and mean something entirely different (although Boris Akunin has Erast Fandorin’s now elderly son, an émigré in the United Kingdom, casually and disdainfully refer to the Soviets as “new Russians’ in 2000’s Altyn-Tolobas). The New Man was supposed to transcend the false consciousness of nationality in favor of his aggressively proletarian identity. Unfortunately for him, the New Man shared yet another flaw with his utopian roots: it was far easier to describe him satirically, in the negative light of dystopia, than to make a convincing, detailed portrait of this yet-to-be-seen paragon.

Old Dogs and New Ticks

Mikhail Bulgakov transformed the fable of the New Man into a cautionary tale about the dangers of social engineering in his 1925 short novel, Heart of a Dog. When Professor Preobrazhensky (Professor Transfiguration) transplants human glands to a common mutt named Sharik, the result is a crude, sloganeering self-identified proletarian who starts making a career in the new Soviet bureaucracy. Bulgakov attacks the ideology of the New Man on two fronts simultaneously: nature (what do you expect when your raw material is a dog?) and nurture (much of what the newly renamed Sharikov says and does results from the unself-conscious adoption of official discourse).

With the institution of the New Economic Policy (NEP) after the Russian Civil War, the New Man was haunted by a disturbing rival, who was both a holdover from the old world and potentially a harbinger of something even more crass: the NEPman, who was preoccupied with creature comforts and status rather than proletarian virtues and the building of communism. It is telling that Vladimir Mayakovsky’s famous satirical play on the subject, The Bedbug (1929), explicitly compares Prisypkin, its protagonist, to a blood-sucking parasite after scenes in which his grotesque materialism has been explicitly highlighted. The play jumps to the far future, when Prisypkin is on display in a zoo as Philistinius vulgaris, which is even worse than the bedbug found with him: “There are two parasites, differing in size but the same in essence: the famous Bedbugus normalis and—and the Philistinius vulgaris. Both have their habitat in the moldy mattresses of time. Bedbugus normalis, when it has guzzled and gorged on the body of a single human being, falls under the bed. Philistinius vulgaris, when it has guzzled and gorged on the body of all mankind, falls on top of the bed. That’s the only difference!”

Though the play’s critique of its own audience is devastating (Prisypkin looks out from the stage and addresses his viewers as “My people! My own people!”), it provides an implicitly optimistic frame that simultaneously emphasizes what is at stake. We know from the final scene that the NEPman has died out, but we are also reminded that, as a phenomenon, he is of historic importance because of the revolutionary context: he is an atavism that must be wiped out if the new men of the future are to come into being.

The discourse of the age of NEP (essentially, the 1920s) made it continually clear that the character of the new world was still in formation, lending to otherwise trivial questions the weight of history in the making. Moreover, the question of the new world’s character was rarely separate from concerns of the New Man who was to inhabit it. Just ten years into the postrevolutionary era, this problem would provide the ideological underpinnings of an emotional family drama: Yuri Olesha’s Envy.

Bulgakov satirized the New Man by imagining him as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster: with no real biological parentage, the New Man was a New Mutt resulting from the dubious social/scientific experiments of the class that conceived the Russian Revolution: the intelligentsia. Mayakovsky projects the genealogical problem forward, with Prisypkin’s prospective father-in-law imagining him as the guarantor of the next generation’s social status and well-being, while the denizens of the far future look at him as a terrifying missing link. In Envy, Olesha sticks firmly within the ten-year postrevolutionary frame of his 1927 publication in order to ponder just how New Men are made and who they actually are.

Olesha’s New Man is only briefly given his own words and his own point of view, and even then it is in a letter accidentally stolen by his rival. Instead, he remains something of an anthropological curiosity to those who are unable to share in his Newness—an object of desire, admiration, and, of course, envy. The first half of the novel is narrated by Nikolai Kavalerov, a twenty-seven-year-old man who, despite his youth, is anything but new. An outsider quite literally looking in (into windows, into mirrors, onto soccer fields), Kavalerov has recently been taken in by Andrei Babichev, an older, overweight Food Trust functionary who found him lying drunk on the street. Andrei is working toward the complete transformation of everyday life, from the construction of superkitchens that will turn the family kitchen into a historical relic to the recipe for the perfect sausage to feed the laboring masses.

Structurally, Envy is a family drama, even a melodrama: Andrei Babichev has a brother, Ivan, his ideological opposite (or as opposite as one gets in the absence of actual political counterrevolution). Appalled by his brother’s “New World” and its assault on sentimentality and the domestic sphere, Ivan proposes a “conspiracy of feelings” to counter drab revolutionary rationalism. Ivan’s daughter, Valya, runs away from him and his mad ideas, to be protected by her uncle Andrei (who puts her up in an apartment). Andrei had also taken in another stray: the prototypical New Man Volodya Makarov, an accomplished athlete and would-be “Edison of the New World,” who clearly has a bright future. It is only when Volodya is out of town that Andrei happens upon the drunken, homeless Kavalerov, offering him the couch that he neglects to mention is normally occupied by Volodya. Envious of Andrei’s success, Kavalerov is driven to fury by the prospect of eviction upon Volodya’s return. After storming out, Kavalerov meets Ivan, joins Ivan’s “cause”—on which, more below—and is encouraged to kill the man who wronged him. (Ivan doesn’t know that the man in question is his own brother.) Ivan and Kavalerov soon encounter Valya, and Ivan drops to his knees and abandons his crusade. Kavalerov goes to the soccer match between the Soviets and the Germans, in which Volodya is the home team’s star player. Utterly discouraged, he leaves the game before it is over, gets drunk, and sleeps with his slatternly landlady, Annushka, only to find Ivan is there with them, offering a toast to indifference and proposing that the two men now get to take turns having sex with Annushka. The end.

What makes this tawdry plot so compelling—indeed, what actually drives it—is the explicit understanding on the part of all the men involved—Kavalerov, both Babichevs, and Volodya—that everything about their domestic arrangements can be interpreted only in light of the conflict between the Old World and the New, waged between the New Men and their Neanderthal-like presocialist precursors.⁶ At twenty-seven, Kavalerov seems to think of himself as roughly the right age to be the New Man (although, technically, he’s a bit too old) but blames his miserable existence on a world that has no room for his aesthetic insights and his personal point of view. He is as he says, “as old as the century,” in comparison to Volodya and Valya, whose exact ages are not specified, but who are coded as young in way that Kavalerov is not. By contrast, Andrei Babichev, indisputably too old be the New Man, is nevertheless part of the movement that gave him life.⁷ After a brief crisis of doubt, when Andrei wonders how he can have paternal feelings in this new, postfamilial world, he doubles down on this connection across male generations, allowing himself a typically parental pride in his “offspring.”

Ivan, though belonging to the same generation as Andrei, looks backward rather than forward, paradoxically projecting onto his daughter (a member of the younger generation) all the romantic qualities of a bygone era. But Valya chooses Andrei and Volodya over her own father—and, in Kavalerov’s mind, over Kavalerov himself, even if she doesn’t know of his existence. Volodya and Valya’s qualities as New People are frustratingly generic: their physical health, optimism, athleticism, and Volodya’s focus on the practical sciences. In fact, despite the number of ways in which Volodya is held up as a model of the new masculinity, both he and Valya suffer from a socialist version of the “terrible perfection” Barbara Heldt identified in her 1987 book of that title as the defining flaw of nineteenth-century Russian heroines: they are chronically underdescribed paragons of virtue.

Olesha’s most important contribution to the idea of the New Man was not his depiction, a task at which the author repeatedly proved unfit, but his discursive framing. In the absence of a fully fleshed-out New Man, Olesha gives us unparalleled access into the minds of the people who are obsessed with the New Man ideal. In Envy, despite how much the New Man is meant to be desirable, that desire is always tainted (i.e., turned into envy) by the anxieties that the very phenomenon instills in those around him. Olesha’s New Man exists not as a person but as an ambulatory reality distortion effect, given power by the libidinal energy invested in him by others.

The New Soviet Man and His Gerontologist

One of the problems with using “new” as part of a term of art is that “new” should, in all fairness, have a short shelf life. This is not always the case, as any surviving elderly founders of the New Criticism can attest. But the term has much more obvious limitations when attached to human beings or entire generations—some of the men who populated Brezhnev’s famously geriatric Politburo may have been New Men or even New Soviet Men in their youth, but applying the term to them in 1980 would have seemed like the punch line to one of the many Brezhnev jokes that circulated in late Soviet urban folklore.

As mentioned above, Anna Krylova shows that the New Man was quietly replaced by the New Soviet Man beginning in the mid-1930s, with a shift in emphasis from proletarian and collective values to something much more vague. This vagueness was an appropriate attribute to go along with the nearly empty signifier “Soviet,” allowing it to stand for whatever values emerged at a given time. Strikingly, she notes that at the Tenth Komsomol Congress, Stalin chose the word “Soviet” to describe the youth organization’s members rather than “proletarian”: “foreshadowing the kind of revisions to be applied gradually to the Soviet state’s founding documents over the next thirty years, the Komsomol organization was to remake itself in the image of the ‘New Soviet Person.’ ” Note that this was in 1936, when future General Secretary Yuri Andropov, who would take office in 1982 at the age of sixty-eight, was twenty-two years old.

Fortunately for future old people throughout the Soviet Union, the New Soviet Man would, like his predecessor the New Man, discreetly change his name, in a move that presumably reflected the passage of time more than any actual ideological innovation. In the postwar years, he was simply the Soviet Man. What is important at this stage, and up until the point when the Soviet Man becomes the object of satire and contempt, is not the ideological or ethical content that attaches to the term (whether it involves collectivism, optimism, technocratic practicality, or dedication to an ideal) but the mere fact of the “Soviet Man” as a set phrase and immediately legible notion of something particularly Soviet.

After World War II, that “Soviet-ness” might often be based on pride in the victory over fascism, an indisputably worthy accomplishment that is difficult to assimilate to an ongoing character trait (aside from the pride itself). While every country probably has its own ideas about a national type, they are more often ethnic or religious or, in the case of the United States, the basis of more than a century of national mythmaking. The Soviet Man, like the Soviet citizen, is not national in this sense; he is supranational, based on an idea that is supposed to be more progressive than the mere fact of empire. When Serguei Oushakine notes in “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia” that young people have difficulty defining the “post-Soviet,” should we really be surprised? It took decades for any sense of a Soviet Man to come together, decades that involved the intellectual labor of party officials, pedagogues, journalists, and writers, and even then, the Soviet Man was something of a moving target. The Russian Federation is, like the Soviet Union, multinational, but it is so far unwilling to be either an empire or a thoroughly ideological state, while dismissing the simple goal of the general welfare of the population as somehow too boring. Post-Soviet Man’s lack of a fixed identity is as stable an image as we are likely to get for some time.

All of this is further complicated by the issue with which this chapter began: the movement from the positive Soviet Man to his abject double. What eventually would become the sovok first had to endure an intermediate stage of degradation, when Soviet Man was cast as Homo Sovieticus.

In theory, “Homo Sovieticus” could have been a neutral term, or even a positive one if it had been adopted voluntarily by the people it purported to describe. Mikhail Geller claimed that he encountered the phrase in a 1974 book titled Sovetskie liudi (Soviet people), which called the USSR the “fatherland of a new, more advanced type of Homo sapiens: Homo sovieticus.” Moreover, he claims that the term was used in the Soviet Union as part of a Latin instruction for future doctors, Homo sovieticus sum (Heller, 43, as quoted in Bogdanov).

Even if this is the case, it is a rather obscure example. According to Geller, it was the first Latin phrase the medical students learned. That’s all well and good, but it is also Latin: under what circumstance were they actually supposed to use these words? As a rare reference to the contemporary world in the instruction of a dead language for people who need to be able to understand their profession’s specialized vocabulary, it holds little promise as a transmissible meme, let alone as a term of art for pedagogy or propaganda.

Instead, the phrase makes much more sense historically as a diagnosis from afar and therefore as a phenomenon that is nearly always presented as negative. With one perestroika-era exception, it would never really catch on in the Soviet Union; Latin words were more likely to seem pretentious than anything else. But the very failure of “Homo Sovieticus” to spread internally among the Soviet population only sets in relief the eventual success of sovok, a much catchier (and native Russian) word whose meaning would overlap with its Latin counterpart quite significantly.

Konstantin Bogdanov and Maja Soboleva, among many others, trace the term back to a 1962 study by Joseph Novak (Homo sowjeticus). Even in early scholarly works that used the phrase to describe a phenomenon that the authors considered negative, the words themselves had yet to become a term of abuse, nor were they on any reasonable path to becoming part of the Russian vocabulary. All that would change with the publication of Alexander Zinoviev’s novel, Homo Sovieticus.

Zinoviev is one of the more vexing figures of the late Soviet emigration. Though immensely prolific and quite well-known throughout his life, he has faded into obscurity since his death in 2006. This is probably because of the highly tendentious nature of his work and the impossibility of pigeonholing him into any particular category. The head of Moscow State University’s Logic Department, he was a dissident throughout the 1970s. When his first two satirical novels were published in the West, Zinoviev became persona non grata, and he emigrated to Munich in 1978. He continued to write scathing anti-Soviet fiction and nonfiction through the 1980s but was appalled by Gorbachev and perestroika. In his later writings, he praised Stalin and collectivization while raging against the West.

Before this ideological shift, Zinoviev wrote Homo Sovieticus (published in Russian in 1982 and in English in 1985). The book is an example of Zinoviev’s favorite genre, the combination novel/satire/political tract, with characters identified according to type (“Critic,” “Cynic”) rather than actual names. Though technically a work of fiction (with the premise that the narrator is a KGB agent in the Western émigré community, writing back to his superiors), Homo Sovieticus is more concerned with taxonomy than character or plot. As Zinoviev writes in his preface: “This book is about Soviet Man. He is a new type of man, Homo Sovieticus. We will shorten him to Homosos. I have a dual relationship with this new being: I love him and at the same time I hate him; I respect him and I despise him. I am delighted with him and I am appalled by him. I myself am a Homosos. Therefore, I am merciless and cruel when I describe him. Judge us, because you yourselves will be judged by us” (5).

Zinoviev, in telling us his attitude toward his chosen subject, is both prefiguring the manner in which the sovok, Homo Sovieticus’s next iteration, will be handled by his compatriots, and instructing the reader. I have titled this book Soviet Self-Hatred, a term I stand by, but self-hatred does not have to mean the complete absence of self-love. Homo Sovieticus is meant to prompt both groans of embarrassments and smiles of recognition.

Yet even in this preface, the terminology proves to be fraught with meanings intended and unintended. The move from “Soviet Man” to “New Man” to “Homo Sovieticus” is not just a matter of listing synonyms but rather of switching both semantic registers and discursive categories. “Soviet Man” could still be a mere placeholder, while “New Man” evokes the socialist/utopian traditions discussed earlier in this chapter. “Homo Sovieticus” is not just Latin; it is a biological term that suggests both an evolutionary process and the rise of a separate species. Given the Marxist emphasis on nurture over nature, this is deeply ironic, but considering the Stalin-era conflation of the sociological with the biological (as in the idea of the “hereditary proletarian”), it is also appropriate in its inappropriateness. The scientism implied by “Homo Sovieticus” is the logical conclusion of the quasi-biological, quasi-anthropological approach to the inhabitants of socialism that is inherent in the phrase “New Man.” No wonder Zinoviev is so happy to appropriate the term as the title of his novel. Literalizing the metaphor of utopian socialist anthropology, it recasts the discourse of social progress as one of speciation.

Homo Sucker

But is Homo Sovieticus the next step in human (social) evolution, or a cautionary tale of Lombrosian degeneration? Homo Sovieticus becomes that much harder to take seriously as an evolutionary advance by the third sentence of the book, when Zinoviev offers his Russian abbreviation for the cumbersome Latin: Homosos (Gomosos). The word is undeniably polemical, particularly since “Homosov” would be a more obvious contraction.

In Russian, “Homosos” cannot be pronounced with a straight face. Gomosos sounds dangerously similar to Gomosek, a common Russian slur for “homosexual” (not the worst one, certainly, but not exactly a compliment). Sos is the Russian root for “suck,” and can be found in another word that is similar to Gomosos: pylesos—vacuum cleaner, literally dust-sucker. And, not to put to find a point on it khuesos (cocksucker). So Gomosos sounds like “Man sucker” or “Homo sucker” (but not Agamben’s “Homo sacer”).

So who is the Homosos, according to Zinoviev? We can extract a catalogue of often contradictory characteristics from the author’s quirky and nonlinear book.

Homosos is a collectivist:

Our involvement in the life of a collective in almost all the important and unimportant areas of our life: that is the foundation of our psychology. The soul of the Homosos lies in his participation in collective life. Even the ideological processing which we protest about so often looks different from over here. It looks like a means of involving the individual in collective life. Ideology unifies the individual consciousness and unites millions of little “I”s into one huge “We.” (84)

Homosos is a spiteful internationalist:

I am a healthy Homosos: that is, a supranational creature. And a healthy Homosos is glad whenever any nation comes to grief. (37–38)

Homosos is patient and resilient:

Food prices have gone up. Will the Homosos arrange a protest demonstration? Of course not. The Homosos has been trained to live in pretty dreadful conditions. (197)

Homosos is deferential to authority:

The Homosos always tries to put a spoke in the wheels of anyone disrupting the customary forms of behaviour; he toadies to the powers-that-be; he is on the side of the majority of his fellow-citizens who are approved by the authorities. (197)

Homosos is a creature of ideology rather than morality:

If one looks at the behaviour of the Homosos from the viewpoint of some abstract morality, he seems to be a completely immoral being. The Homosos isn’t a moral being, that’s true, but it isn’t true to say that he is positively immoral. In the first instance he is an ideological being. And on that basis, he can be either moral or immoral, according to circumstances. Homososes are not villains. Among them there are many good people. But the good Homosos is a man who either doesn’t have the opportunity to cause other people harm or who finds no special need to do so. But if he has the opportunity, or is compelled, to do evil, he will do it not less but even more thoroughly than the most inveterate villain. (198)

Homosos is not all bad:

The Homosos is not only an agglomeration of shortcomings. He also possesses numerous valuable traits. Or, to be more precise, he possesses qualities which are either good or bad according to the circumstances and depending on the criteria of evaluation applied. One and the same quality will manifest itself as good in some circumstances and as bad in others. For some people the quality will be, or seem to be, a good one; for others, bad. Among the mass of Homososes one can discover all the characteristics known to humanity, but in specifically Socialist (Communist) forms and proportions. While the Homosos reflects in himself the properties of his social entity, he is at the same time only a partial function of that entity. (198)

Homosos is the future:

Evolution-wise the Homosos is not decadent. On the contrary, he is the highest product of civilization. He is superman. He is universal. If need be, he can commit any frightfulness. Where it is possible, he can possess every virtue. There are no secrets which he cannot explain. There are no problems which he cannot solve. He is naive and simple. He is vacuous. He is omniscient and all-pervasive. He is replete with wisdom. He is a particle of the universe that bears the whole universe within itself. He is ready for anything and anyone. He is even ready for the best. He awaits it, although he doesn’t believe in it. He hopes for the worst. He is Nothing; that is to say, Everything. He is God, pretending to be the Devil. He is the Devil, pretending to be God. He is in every man. Gentle reader, look into yourself and you will see there at least the embryo of this crown of creation. For you yourself are human. You yourself are Homosos. (198–99)

Homosos, then, approaches what would come to be called the sovok, but with much less emphasis on culture, decorum, manners, and taste. Instead, what the two have in common is their ambiguous status as a category that is obviously disdained as a negative other, but at the same time accepted as a ruefully accurate description of the self.

Perhaps my earlier dismissal of the phonetic similarity between “homo sucker” and “homo sacer” was too hasty. Homo sacer, as elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, is the man who has been excluded from all social and legal life as a citizen; he can be killed, but he cannot be used as a ritual sacrifice. Homo sucker (Homosos) exists entirely as a social phenomenon—he is constructed by the political/ideological system into which he is born. His is only bios (“qualified life,” political life); no wonder so much late- and post-Soviet postmodernism focuses on the physiological, the life of the unmediated body (Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Erofeyev, Valeria Narbikova, Yuri Mamleev): as an alternative to Homosos, zoe (bare life, the life of the animal, nonpolitical body) starts to look positively attractive.

The opposite of Homo sacer, Homosos is the sacrifice demanded of the late-/post-Soviet subject as the price of entry into a post-Homosos world. At times as charming as he is embarrassing, he anchors the subject in a network of connections from which extrication is essential. But wherever Homosos goes, he remains Homosos, bringing along with him the system that produced him. Sacrifice is impossible; indeed, as we shall see when we get to the sovok, the more one attempts to abandon the stigmatized identity, the more one proves just how good a fit that identity is.

Homo Sovieticus’s more neutral-sounding precursor, Soviet Man, had one important last gasp in the final years of the Soviet Union. Yuri Levada, the preeminent Soviet/Russian sociologist of his time, led a five-year research project between 1989 and 1994 using opinion surveys to understand the “simple Soviet man.” Levada and his team had assumed that they were writing the epitaph for a dying breed but would conclude that Soviet Man still walked among the living.

This was a strange twist for Homo Sovieticus, who began his life as a political aspiration (the New Soviet Man), was cleverly reframed as political satire by Zinoviev, but had never been a good fit with actual sociological research. In an article in Slavic Review as well as a blog post with the Wilson Center (both published in 2019), Gulnaz Sharafutdinova argues that the project was undermined by the tensions between empirical research and a clear political agenda:

Empirically grounded and methodologically robust, it was a scientific project that claimed to explain social reality. Like any scientific endeavor conceived in a positivist tradition, it sought to be ideologically neutral, and derived its authority and legitimacy from that alleged neutrality.

But it was not neutral. It combined a specific view of what human beings were about with a historically contingent theory of how the communist system operated and a vision of how the two, the individual and the system, were interconnected. (“R.I.P. ‘Soviet Man’ ”)

Levada’s efforts yielded a great deal of data and were integral to the subsequent work of Boris Dubin and Lev Gudkov. But in taking “Soviet Man” seriously as something real rather than discursive, the Levada group ended up reifying an ideological construct. As Sharafutdinova writes, “essentialist and deterministic views of individual personality underpinning the Levada project that guide the current use of the Soviet man category are more politically and ideologically driven rather than being based on the state of the art in social psychology” (“Was There a ‘Simple Soviet’ Person?,” 173). In a 2001 article, Levada defined the Soviet person as “isolated,” “simplified,” easily “mobilized,” and subject to “doublethink” (dvoemyslie) (8–12).

Levada himself did not call his subject “Homo Sovieticus,” but the term repeatedly crops up in the literature about Levada, most notably by Sharafutdinova herself. As a social scientist, Levada avoided the inflammatory terminology in which Zinoviev reveled yet came to similar, depressing, and essentialist conclusions about his people’s capacity for democratic politics and independent thought. Sharafutdinova takes issue with the Levada Center’s work on methodological grounds but in her “R.I.P. ‘Soviet Man’ ” blogpost is at least as troubled by Soviet Man’s political ramifications in an era of increasing authoritarianism: “Such interpretations engage a circular logic of codetermination of Russia’s authoritarian regime and the human material that allows the system to exist in the first place. The circular method of argumentation absolves Russia’s political and economic elites of any responsibility for the condition of Russia’s state institutions, society, or economy.”

Both her complaint and her critique are valid, but in her objection to Levada’s and the Levada Center’s Soviet Man research, she focuses on the flaws in the Soviet Man as sociological model. I would argue that the problem is not with the Soviet Man as a category but with the attempt to deploy him outside of his natural habitat. Like the sovok who came after him, both the neutral-sounding Soviet Man and the obviously polemical Homo Sovieticus make sense only in the realms of the imaginary and the symbolic. They function as ideology, not as meaningful sociological categories, and their import lies in their deployment (ranging from acceptance to rejection), and not in any capacity to describe living people or populations.

As Soviet identities moved from glory to stigma, the terms involved faced a serious memetic obstacle. On the positive side, the nomenclature is simple, immediately legible, and, most important, linguistically productive: the variations on “new man” simply follow the phraseological model established by the New Man himself: New Man, New Soviet Man, Soviet Man. “Homo Sovieticus” was a jarring linguistic intervention. Not only was it Latin (a language that has shallow roots in Russian culture) and phonetically unappealing; it was an import, and not a particularly sexy import at that. “Homosos” was definitely a step forward, but the source of its attraction was also an obstacle to its widespread adoption: it manages to be ideologically anti-Soviet and an implied dirty joke at the same time. By the mid-1980s, all these terms would be swept into the dustbin of history, or rather, history’s dustpan. For it is the dustpan (sovok) that became the most widespread term for deriding the Soviet person as the Soviet project was on its way out.