Since the state controlled every thing and every person, Soviet society had a simple vertical structure, rendering the Soviet citizen's thinking fundamentally hierarchical. Even though the exact systems of rank and privilege were secret, the basic logic according to which the state doled out goods and comforts in exchange for valued services ruled every person's life. At the same time, official ideology extolled equality and the state punished those who had, or wanted to have, too much. For Homo Sovieticus this translated into the value of equality within groups—a strictly enforced conformity at one's station in life. This was what Levada termed "hierarchical egalitarianism."30 This term was an example of what Levada called "antinomies"—a philosophical concept that refers to the contradiction between statements either of which appears reasonable. Homo Sovieticus's world, according to Levada, was shaped by pairs of antinomies. The most important of these may have been what Levada called "the imperial syndrome." On the one hand, the USSR, like the Russia that preceded it, was incontrovertibly an empire. Its strength, breadth, and size were all sources of citizen pride. Every schoolchild knew that the Soviet Union occupied the largest territory of any country in the world—one-sixth of the Earth's landmass.
Broad is my native land
Many there are forests, fields, and rivers.
I know of no other country
Where man breathes so freely
This was a popular patriotic song that clearly made the connection: the Soviet person's wonderful life was a function of the very size of his country. On the other hand, every Soviet citizen was constantly made aware of his ethnic origin, which was immutable and contained on every document that referred to him. Only members of the single largest ethnic group—the Russians—could occasionally forget who they were. "So Homo Sovieticus is by his very nature, genetically, frustrated, faced with the impossible choice between an ethnic and a superethnic identity," wrote Levada.31
The antinomies required Homo Sovieticus to fragment his consciousness to accommodate both of the contradictory positions. Levada borrowed George Orwell's term "doublethink." Homo Sovieticus, like the characters of 1984, could hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. These beliefs ran on parallel tracks, and so long as the tracks indeed did not cross, they were not in conflict: depending on the situation, Homo Sovieticus could deploy one or the other statement in the antinomic pair, sometimes one after the other, in quick succession.
But the most important thing Levada believed about Homo Sovieticus was this: his was a dying breed. He had been formed by the one-two punch of the Revolution and the Great Terror: the first event brought its ideals and values, and the second taught Homo Sovieticus to conform in order to survive. But now, thirty years after the death of Stalin, the people so shaped were dying off. Their children and grandchildren would be different. That, in turn, would mean that the regime could no longer rely on them to ensure its survival through their behavior. And that would mean that the regime—the USSR as it existed—would collapse. This was a far cry from what the trade union authority, the labor ministry, and the Central Committee had in mind, but this was what Levada wanted his team now to prove: that Homo Sovieticus conformed to his description and that the
phenomenon of Homo Sovieticus was bound to an older generation, which would mean that Homo Sovieticus would soon cease being the dominant social type in the Soviet Union, which would mean the end of the Soviet Union itself.
the task of proving that a certain social type existed, was dominant, and would soon die off was so circular that it verged on impossible. But this was not the biggest problem with the study. The biggest problem was that none of Levada's sociologists had ever done anything like this before. They had faithfully attended the seminar for twenty years. They had read their Western sociologists. Some of them, like Gudkov, had been lucky enough to work with some data in their official jobs. But none of them had ever done a survey, a poll, or any kind of field research.
They were theoreticians, so they had an idea of how a questionnaire ought to be designed. They were certainly well-versed in choosing samples—and for the first time ever, they would be allowed to do this. But what would they do with the data? None of them had been trained in statistical analysis: they would have to train themselves. The lack of computers made the setup look more farcical than tragic. It took them two years to be able to design and implement their study. On second look, the idea that they knew how to design a survey also seemed suspect. In Western sociology, which they had been studying, surveys inevitably built on earlier surveys, and, more important, on the terms of long-running public conversations. The problem was similar to the challenge of adapting the MMPI, except in this field there was no MMPI to adapt. In the Soviet Union, there had been no public, precisely because there had been no conversation: "One Man of gigantic dimensions" must speak with a single voice, and only when called upon.
How do you bring up a topic that has never before been discussed? How do you elicit the opinions of people who have not been entitled to hold opinions? How do you have conversations for which there is no language? Gudkov began to think of their group as a geological expedition setting out to determine the makeup of a monolith. They would have to begin with an exploratory explosion, a man-made disturbance that would expose the nature of Soviet society. Gudkov invented a tool for doing just this. Ask people "what should be done" with certain deviant groups. It was not hard to be a deviant in Soviet society, and many people were—people who listened to rock music, for example (they were generally referred to as "rockers"), and hippies (the term was still in circulation in the late 1980s because there was still a subculture of people wearing long hair and singing to acoustic guitar). Offer respondents a range of options, from "leave them alone" to the Leninist "liquidate." Gudkov figured that such questions would tease out the limits of tolerance and, more to the point, help measure the levels of underlying aggression.
The results of this part of the questionnaire surprised the group. Homo Sovieticus was clearly opening up to the world, feeling reasonably peaceful toward even the most deviant of groups, like the homosexuals: fully 10 percent believed that homosexuals should be "left to their own devices," another 6 percent thought they should be "helped" (the questionnaire did not specify what kind of help they should receive), and a third thought that homosexuals should be "liquidated."32 Considering that homosexual conduct was a crime punishable by up to three years in prison, Gudkov thought this level of aggression was low. More than 20 percent of respondents wanted to "liquidate" rockers, and nearly 8 percent wanted to "liquidate" alcoholics. But then a whopping 27 percent wanted rockers to be left alone, and more than 50 percent wanted to see alcoholics get help. In the absence of any data that could be used as reference, the researchers concluded that these results reflected a trend toward greater tolerance. The highest proportion of those who wanted to "liquidate" homosexuals was found in respondents older than fifty and younger than twenty: adults of working age were markedly less aggressive.33