There was some serious work in that direction in the 1920s, but with Stalin’s ascent to power, left-wing education and indoctrination were in fact stamped out, to be replaced with Russian crypto-nationalism, imperial and militarist sentiment, and most notably an Asian-style cult of the god-king. In fact, by the end of his life Stalin had uprooted or completely subverted virtually every institution that the 1920s’ Old Bolshevik leaders introduced (with the sole exception of the repression apparatus, which he expanded while purging most personnel) - from the “New Economic Policy” and legal free abortion (!) to the avant-garde artists’ organizations and the Comintern. I’m not necessarily saying that those institutions were good (although the NEP objectively worked well enough); I’m saying that, since around 1930 and until the end, Soviet leadership only paid lip service to genuine radical indoctrination/reeducation, preferring the old staples of nationalism, feudal loyalty and leader-worship.
Later, in the Brezhnev era, an official cargo cult of sorts was formed around Marxist phraseology and such, but no-one gave a shit whether, say, the “Marxism-Leninism” classes at universities were even functioning as propaganda. In fact, it was rather counter-productive as propaganda, as people began to mock even the several objective, verified achievements that it trumpeted—like the space program or the considerable infrastructure investment. The system became too stagnant even to attempt self-replication through indoctrination.
So there. The USSR was mostly an ineffective (if somewhat orderly) conservative regime that would have shat its collective pants if a New Soviet Man suddenly appeared in flesh. And hey, a handful did appear, more or less by accident; e.g. Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, Vasily Grossman (Socialist Realist writers!), Sakharov, the Strugatsky brothers, numerous other good people who advocated left-wing ideas and got suppressed by an ostensibly socialist system. Oh, well, for the wider Warsaw Pact, I guess Zizek also counts as a New Soviet Man :)
P.S.: lengthy quote incoming! Orwell’s praise of left-wing indoctrination in Homage to Catalonia.
In practice the democratic ‘revolutionary’ type of discipline
is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers’ army discipline is
theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of
a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that
replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the
bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been
tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were
only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you
did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of
comradeship.
Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say
instantly that this would never ‘work’, but as a matter of fact it does ‘work’
in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly
improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up
to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was
acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had
all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in
getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job.
‘Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness—on an
understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but
it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.
The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the
militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear.
And it is a tribute to the strength of ‘revolutionary’ discipline that the
militias stayed in the field-at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing
to keep them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be shot--
were shot, occasionally—but if a thousand men had decided to walk out of the
line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript army in the same
circumstances—with its battle-police removed—would have melted away. Yet the
militias held the line, though God knows they won very few victories, and even
individual desertions were not common.
Hadn’t NEP originally been conceived as a temporary policy for the interim when the society was going to be slowly transformed into communism, after radical immediate implementation of communist economics attempted in the first years after the revolution visibly failed?
There was some serious work in that direction in the 1920s, but with Stalin’s ascent to power, left-wing education and indoctrination were in fact stamped out, to be replaced with Russian crypto-nationalism, imperial and militarist sentiment,
Well, the many far left movements had a militarist element (directed against the bourgeois) to them from the very beginning. Also the nationalism didn’t start going until WWII, and only after it became clear that appealing to people to fight for communist ideals wasn’t working.
Well, the many far left movements had a militarist element (directed against the bourgeois) to them from the very beginning.
They sure had a culture of violence, as in street fighting and insurgency etc, but under Stalin it turned into proper militarism, as in: approval of army hierarchy and officer-caste ethics as not merely necessary but laudable; formal expressions of loyalty turning organization-based rather than class-based; displaying the expected World Revolution (in films, lectures, etc) as being in essense a conventional war, with near-identical armies facing off and some aid from working-class sympathizers—rather then the preceding image of a massive popular rebellion… A somewhat-revisionist Russian historian, Mark Solonin, describes how the massive military build-up was accompanied by this gradual shift in propaganda from “revolutionary violence” to “Red militarism”.
Also the nationalism didn’t start going until WWII
Believe me, it did! It was crypto-nationalism in the 30s, but back then Stalinist propaganda already began to lionize the historical achievements and the “properly” anti-feudal, anti-bourgeois sentiment of the Russian Volk. It appropriated 19th century authors like Pushkin who were previously fashionable to reject as retrograde. There’s a sharp contrast between the 1920s’ propaganda line on Imperial Russia (backward, miserable, completely lost but for the Communist guidance), the lambasting of “Russian chauvinism” as a right-wing deviation and the insistence that all Soviet nationalities should harmoniously melt into a purely political whole—and the 1930s’ quiet suppression of all that, with Old Russia called less a benighted rural wilderness and more a supremely talented nation, naturally predisposed towards communism, that only needed to overthrow Tsarism to assume its rightful place of world leadership. I’ve read a few Russian studies about the relationship between Stalinism, Soviet culture and propaganda; they offer a far more nuanced view than the one you cite.
There was some serious work in that direction in the 1920s, but with Stalin’s ascent to power, left-wing education and indoctrination were in fact stamped out, to be replaced with Russian crypto-nationalism, imperial and militarist sentiment, and most notably an Asian-style cult of the god-king.
In fact, by the end of his life Stalin had uprooted or completely subverted virtually every institution that the 1920s’ Old Bolshevik leaders introduced (with the sole exception of the repression apparatus, which he expanded while purging most personnel) - from the “New Economic Policy” and legal free abortion (!) to the avant-garde artists’ organizations and the Comintern.
I’m not necessarily saying that those institutions were good (although the NEP objectively worked well enough); I’m saying that, since around 1930 and until the end, Soviet leadership only paid lip service to genuine radical indoctrination/reeducation, preferring the old staples of nationalism, feudal loyalty and leader-worship.
Later, in the Brezhnev era, an official cargo cult of sorts was formed around Marxist phraseology and such, but no-one gave a shit whether, say, the “Marxism-Leninism” classes at universities were even functioning as propaganda.
In fact, it was rather counter-productive as propaganda, as people began to mock even the several objective, verified achievements that it trumpeted—like the space program or the considerable infrastructure investment. The system became too stagnant even to attempt self-replication through indoctrination.
So there. The USSR was mostly an ineffective (if somewhat orderly) conservative regime that would have shat its collective pants if a New Soviet Man suddenly appeared in flesh.
And hey, a handful did appear, more or less by accident; e.g. Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, Vasily Grossman (Socialist Realist writers!), Sakharov, the Strugatsky brothers, numerous other good people who advocated left-wing ideas and got suppressed by an ostensibly socialist system. Oh, well, for the wider Warsaw Pact, I guess Zizek also counts as a New Soviet Man :)
P.S.: lengthy quote incoming! Orwell’s praise of left-wing indoctrination in Homage to Catalonia.
Hadn’t NEP originally been conceived as a temporary policy for the interim when the society was going to be slowly transformed into communism, after radical immediate implementation of communist economics attempted in the first years after the revolution visibly failed?
Well, the many far left movements had a militarist element (directed against the bourgeois) to them from the very beginning. Also the nationalism didn’t start going until WWII, and only after it became clear that appealing to people to fight for communist ideals wasn’t working.
They sure had a culture of violence, as in street fighting and insurgency etc, but under Stalin it turned into proper militarism, as in: approval of army hierarchy and officer-caste ethics as not merely necessary but laudable; formal expressions of loyalty turning organization-based rather than class-based; displaying the expected World Revolution (in films, lectures, etc) as being in essense a conventional war, with near-identical armies facing off and some aid from working-class sympathizers—rather then the preceding image of a massive popular rebellion… A somewhat-revisionist Russian historian, Mark Solonin, describes how the massive military build-up was accompanied by this gradual shift in propaganda from “revolutionary violence” to “Red militarism”.
Believe me, it did! It was crypto-nationalism in the 30s, but back then Stalinist propaganda already began to lionize the historical achievements and the “properly” anti-feudal, anti-bourgeois sentiment of the Russian Volk. It appropriated 19th century authors like Pushkin who were previously fashionable to reject as retrograde.
There’s a sharp contrast between the 1920s’ propaganda line on Imperial Russia (backward, miserable, completely lost but for the Communist guidance), the lambasting of “Russian chauvinism” as a right-wing deviation and the insistence that all Soviet nationalities should harmoniously melt into a purely political whole—and the 1930s’ quiet suppression of all that, with Old Russia called less a benighted rural wilderness and more a supremely talented nation, naturally predisposed towards communism, that only needed to overthrow Tsarism to assume its rightful place of world leadership.
I’ve read a few Russian studies about the relationship between Stalinism, Soviet culture and propaganda; they offer a far more nuanced view than the one you cite.
The lesson is probably that when you create a culture of violence, it tends to get out of the hand and go towards its own attractors.
Sounds reasonable.