As the Iron Curtain began to open a crack—a byzantine visa system was still in place, and the activities of visiting foreigners were highly restricted, but some people were now welcome to come in for some reasons—Western psychotherapists began to visit and teach. Carl Rogers came in 1987. It was both bizarre and earth-shattering that Rogers, a founder of humanistic client-centered therapy and the pioneer of nondirective counseling, would be the first major Western psychologist to lecture in the Soviet Union: his approaches rested first on placing the person at the center of things, and, second, on not
telling the person what to do. An organizer of his visit recalled that Rogers himself pointed this out, saying, "What you have asked us to do here is dangerous . . . because if people learn to empower themselves, they may not do what you want them to do. It may not fit in this culture."16
Rogers proceeded to lead some of the strangest groups he had ever encountered. Following a large lecture at Moscow University, he planned to spend four days working with a group of no more than thirty people. The roughly fifty people who crowded into the room and another dozen who congregated outside the door spent the first day screaming and fighting one another for a spot in the group. Rogers was, he wrote later, "horrified"—he italicized the word. "Rarely, if ever, have I heard such vicious hostility directed personally toward present members of the group."17 On day two, he noted, "It became evident that many of their personal problems relate to the great frequency of divorce. In this educated and sophisticated group, it is similar to the United States. One woman spoke of the way in which she and her husband had gradually worked toward a better and seemingly more permanent relationship. She was definitely the exception. Nearly everyone else spoke of 'When I left my first husband'; 'I have a problem with my child by my second marriage'; 'If I leave my second wife.' There was talk of the insecurity and estrangement of children of previous partnerships; the difficulty of maintaining relationships with one's children when they are at a distance; the interference of ex-wives and ex-mothers-in-law—the whole gamut."18 Even after the room had settled down, Rogers continued to be taken aback by his students' inability to listen to one another. Yet the formal debriefing several days later convinced Rogers that as therapists his students had been deeply affected by the suggestion that they should hold back judgment and even guidance. Indeed, they attempted to conduct what should have been a formal and formulaic meeting of an "academic council" in Rogerian fashion, a feat Rogers himself called "extravagant." As people, though, the Russian participants seemed to sadden the great therapist: he and his
co-facilitator noted "a certain 'lostness' . . . a pervading sense that there should be more to life, a deep despair about ever finding it."19
Virginia Satir, the world's most famous family therapist, came the following year. Pulling people one by one onto the stage from a crowded auditorium, she explained the most basic tenets of her approach, her belief in the fundamental goodness of every person: "I know he is a wonderful man. Why do I know this? Because he is a man at the station of life, and he is the only one exactly like him in the whole world."20 Viktor Frankl came and lectured on existential therapy. The psychologists of Moscow were catching a glimpse of the twentieth century's professional conversation before the last of its great participants were gone. Rogers died in 1987; Satir in 1988; Frankl lived for another decade, but by the time he visited Moscow he was already in his eighties.
Arutyunyan tried to hear and learn all of it, all at once, before she came to the realization that to help a human being, she had to choose a single framework for understanding him. This was when she concluded that the flawed, complicated, and sometimes frightening human of psychoanalysis was her choice. It would be a while before she knew that psychoanalysis, too, had its different schools, each of which represented a different vision of the person.
gudkov's second invitation to work with Yuri Levada was twenty years in coming. After two decades of home-based seminars, Levada was reassembling his team as part of an official Soviet institution. In July 1987 the Central Committee decreed that "in order to study and deploy the public opinion of the Soviet population on the most pressing socioeconomic issues" a new center would be created under the auspices of the trade union authority and the labor ministry. This and subsequent documents made it clear that the future All-Union Public Opinion Research Center would not in fact be merely a research institution: it was expected to actively devise and implement strategies for shaping public opinion.21 The choice of overseeing agencies was logicaclass="underline" centrally controlled trade unions and the labor ministry were in charge of the human resource that was all the Soviet
people—who, the thinking went, would now be properly monitored and directed.
The new center began in chaos and confusion. The trade unions allocated half a million dollars—hard currency—to buy the latest computer equipment, and the sociologists were promptly swindled out of the entire sum by a con man posing as a Canadian technology supplier.22 On the bright side, there was the staffing: Levada knew exactly what needed to be studied, and he had all his people with him to conduct the research.
Levada's hypothesis, formed over the course of more than three decades working not only in the Soviet Union but also, in the 1950s, in newly communist China, was that every totalitarian regime forms a type of human being on whom it relies for its stability. The shaping of the New Man is the regime's explicit project, but its product is not so much a vessel for the regime's ideology as it is a person best equipped to survive in a given society. The regime, in turn, comes to depend on this newly shaped type of person for its continued survival.
Levada hypothesized a detailed portrait of Homo Sovieticus. The system had bred him over the course of decades by rewarding obedience, conformity, and subservience.23 The successful member of Soviet society, suggested Levada, believed in self-isolation, state paternalism, and what Levada called "hierarchical egalitarianism," and suffered from an "imperial syndrome."24 Self-isolation was a key strategy for both the state and the individuaclass="underline" as the Soviet Union sealed itself off with the Iron Curtain, so did the Soviet citizen separate himself from everyone who was Other and therefore untrustworthy. Ideology supported these separations by stressing "class enmity," but keeping one's social circle small was also a sound survival strategy during the era of mass terror, when excessive trust could prove deadly.25 The belief in a paternalistic state, and an utter dependence on it, were bred in Homo Sovieticus by the very nature of the Soviet state, which, Levada wrote, was not so much a complex of institutions, like the modern state, but rather a single superinstitution. He described it as a "universal institution of a premodern paternalistic type, which reaches into every corner of human existence."26 The Soviet state was the ultimate parent: it fed, clothed, housed, and educated its citizen; it gave him a job and gave his life meaning; it rewarded him for doing good and punished him for doing wrong, no matter how small the transgression. "By its very design, the Soviet 'socialist' state is totalitarian because it must not leave the individual any independent space," wrote Levada.27 This description of totalitarianism echoed Hannah Arendt's explanation of how totalitarian regimes employ terror: "It substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions."28 Robbed of his individuality and therefore the ability to interact meaningfully with others, she wrote, man became profoundly lonely, which made him the perfect creature and subject of the totalitarian state.29