This rationalization of misfortune by means of guilt, if habitualized, can obviously have self-destructive effects. In isolated instances, however, it may be a perfectly adaptive and normal response. The Archpriest Avvakum, who often utilized such rationalization in his autobiography, was also often the victim of beatings and eventually was burned to death, while Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who only rarely resorts to it (namely, in his Gulag Archipelago)82 was actually quite adept at escaping victimization.
Avvakum and Solzhenitsyn were two different individuals with differing degrees of masochism in (roughly) the same culture. In addition to individual variation in masochistic behavior, however, there is also cultural variation. Different cultures offer quantitatively and qualitatively different opportunities to feel guilty and to be victimized. There is precious little discussion of this cultural dimension in the psychoanalytic literature proper.83
No two cultures have identical expectations regarding guilt. In late twentieth-century America, for example, the typical individual earns a relatively honest living, obtains goods and services for the prices advertised, loses or gains wealth in reasonably understandable and orderly fashion, etc. True, this may sound like an idealized caricature to an American law-enforcement officer who is busy chasing criminals. But anyone who has ever lived in, say, Soviet Russia—and who consequently has experienced the pressing need to be illegally employed in order to make an adequate living, to give bribes in order to obtain goods and services, to engage in various forms of falsification and corruption in order to accomplish the simplest of life’s tasks—will understand how much more common the experience of guilt must have been under the Soviet regime. As Nancy Condee and Vladimir Padunov put it: “From the lowest menial worker to the highest party official, everyone survives because everyone breaks the rules. Being alive is proof of guilt.”84 This insight, which is of considerable psychoanalytic value, was apparently a commonplace among the Muscovite intelligentsia during the late Soviet period.
The Soviets, however, did not invent Russian guilt. Guilt has always been a hallmark of Russian culture. Consider, for example, the way Russians say goodbye. One expression, “Do svidaniia,” is fairly superficial and rather like English “See you,” or French “Au revoir.” The more traditional “Proshchai,” however, expresses deep emotion. There is no English equivalent. Etymologically, the word is a request to be forgiven, an exhortation that the addressee relieve the addresser of an accumulated burden of guilt. The one who says “Proshchai” may or may not have committed certain sins, but nonetheless acts as though the sins are there, and hopes that the other person will nonetheless not think badly of him or her. This guilty attitude inherent in uttering “Proshchai” has been analyzed in a very interesting article by the philologist V. N. Toporov.85
“Proshchai” fitted into a general pattern of asking forgiveness (“prosit’ proshcheniia”) on certain threshold occasions among the peasantry. Ethnographer M. M. Gromyko devotes an entire chapter to this practice in her recent book. She observes, for example, that when a peasant set out on a long journey, he customarily gathered together all who were close to him and, bowing down before them, asked each one for forgiveness. At the end of the Maslenitsa holidays (which often included considerable sexual licentiousness), individuals were supposed to beg each other’s forgiveness. This usually occurred on the last Sunday before Lent, a day which was termed “proshchenyi den’” (forgiving day) in many areas.86
“Only God is without sin,” according to traditional peasant belief, and everyone else is guilty of some sin or other. “There is no getting away from guilt,” asserted the peasant. Numerous such proverbs may be found in Dahl’s collection, and in other collections:
Even the righteous one falls/sins seven times per day (I pravednik semidzdy v den’ padaet [ili: sogreshaet]).
The day (spent) in sinning, the night in tears (Den’ vo grekhakh, noch’ vo slezakh).
Unintended sin lives in everyone (Nevol’nyi grekh zhivet na vsekh).
Everything in the world happens because of our sins (Vse na svete po grekham nashim deetsia).87
If indeed everything happens because of one’s sinful nature, then one is motivated to welcome, or even provoke misfortune, that is, one is more likely to behave masochistically than if this guilt-ridden attitude were absent.88
These internal psychological attitudes are important, but external social structure can also foster masochistic events. Chronic guilt seeks an object. In most Western countries, for example, the average middle-class masochist has to exercise some ingenuity, short of hiring a dominatrix, stepping out onto a busy freeway, or committing a crime outright, in order to find punishment. In Russia, on the other hand, you don’t have to be very provocative at all. There’s always a line to stand in, a restaurant to refuse you admission, a bureaucrat to abuse you, an icon to bow before, a sin to repent for, a bathhouse to beat yourself in, an informer to report on you, an official who demands a bribe, and so on. Indeed, unless you are a privileged member of Russian society (e.g., you are included in the Soviet nomenklatura or its post-Soviet derivatives), it is very difficult to go about daily life without experiencing considerable pain. One might almost say that, in such a cultural environment, it helps to be a masochist.
This is precisely my point. In a country where the opportunities for experiencing guilt and suffering are legion there is strong psychological pressure on individuals to choose masochistic solutions to everyday problems. The Russian soul is a slave not only because certain psychological dynamics in early ontogeny universally favor the development of masochistic attitudes (they do), but also because cultural expectations and social organization in the adult world push the individual toward masochism.
Americans who go to Russia (either Soviet or post-Soviet) for an extended period of time like to say they are there “for the long haul.” Whatever their motives for being there, they do recognize that they are going to experience hardship and deprivation. Russians who come to the West, on the other hand, express no such sentiment about the West. They may miss their homeland, they may even disapprove of many aspects of life in the West, but I have never heard a Russian visitor or emigré say that life in the West is a hardship, or that they are in “for the long haul.”
Ergo, Russian society and culture must offer an overall greater opportunity for suffering than does the West. This is true regardless of whether any given individual who happens to be living in Russia actually takes advantage of the opportunity. Moral masochism may be a phenomenon intrinsic to the individual psyche, but it can also be encouraged or discouraged by the sociocultural milieu. Moral masochism is an individual matter, but a culture of moral masochism is constituted by individuals in their interaction with an environment that encourages specific tokens of that masochism.
The Swaddling Hypothesis Revisited
There is a feature of early ontogeny in Russia that, although not unique to Russia, is not often encountered (anymore) in the developed countries of the West. I have in mind another potential source of masochism, the traditional Russian practice of swaddling infants.