Much individual masochism in Russia is enacted in relation to the collective, as opposed to another concrete person. The collective does act on the individual, but the individual is an actor as well—in contexts ranging all the way from Slavophilic sobornost’ to Stalinist totalitarianism.2 The collective cannot itself act without some cooperation from the individual. In Russia such cooperation often takes the form of sacrifice, suffering, or humiliation.
For example, the individual Russian peasant in tsarist Russia would on some occasions be obliged literally to bow down before the collective. Here is the ritualized utterance of a young bride newly arrived in the village of Podzovalovo, Orlov province, in 1898, as she repeatedly bowed in all four directions to the crowd surrounding her, first from the waist, the second time a little lower, the third time almost to the ground: “I bow low to the beautiful girls, to the young married women, to the bachelor fellows, to the grandfathers, to the uncles, to the grandmothers, to the aunties! To the matchmaker men and the matchmaker women, to all in one swoop! I beg you to accept me into your fold, and if not, to drive me away!” The first and second time around this servile act was met with silence by the collective, the third time around, that is, after a grand total of twelve bows, it was greeted with an enthusiastic chorus of song, followed by more servile utterances by the young woman. Those dissatisfied with the woman’s performance heckled her: “Little mother, submit and bow lower!”3
My concern here will not be to judge what constitutes too much or too little exercise of power by the collective, or to estimate to what degree the individual should or should not act in servile fashion toward, or sacrifice himself or herself to the collective. Rather, I will simply attempt to examine the underlying psychodynamics of individuals who characteristically welcome humiliation, suffering, or defeat specifically at the hands of the collective in Russia.
By collective I mean any group of psychological importance to the individual, be it the nuclear family, the extended peasant family, the artel or other work collective, the tsarist rural commune (“obshchina” or “mir”), the Orthodox church congregation, temporary get-togethers (e.g., “posidelka,” “khorovod”), the schoolroom, the Soviet Komsomol, the military unit, the Soviet village or collective farm, the Party, the tsar’s court, the Motherland, and so on. There are (or were) many kinds of collectives in Russia, and any one individual could belong to several collectives simultaneously. Here I will be concerned with various collectives within Russia, as well as with Russia herself.
The family is of course the most basic type of collective, the fundamental “cell” (“iacheika”) of society, as the Soviet sociologists used to say. That this is so can be seen in the directionality certain metaphors take. The Russian tsar was customarily referred to as “little father” (“batiushka”), but the father in the traditional peasant family was not normally called “tsar.” Similarly, Russia itself is called “mother,” but mothers are not called “Russia.” This directionality may seem extremely obvious, yet it is usually neglected.
One reason why the moral masochism of the individual in Russia has not been overly visible is because Russians prefer to emphasize the collective rather than de-emphasize the individual. Sometimes the de-emphasis of the individual is even denied, as in this statement by the Soviet writer A. Ivanov: “The chief feature which the Slavophiles valued in the Russian people was not smirenie at all, but the communal spirit, or as we would put it today, the feeling of collectivism as opposed to the individualism and egoism of the bourgeois West.”4 In fact, however, the “communal spirit” implies smirenie, collectivism entails masochism of the individual. The two are logically connected, even if conscious attention is directed toward one at the expense of the other. The bride who bowed down twelve times before her collective was expressing “communal spirit” and was behaving masochistically.
Russians like to emphasize their collectivism by making a grandiose metaphor of the ordinary pronoun “we” (Russian “my”). Late in 1991, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, writer and critic Viktor Erofeev commented: “What was imported in Western Marxism will vanish…. But Communism will not disappear, inasmuch as the spirit of collectivism is at the heart of this nation. The nation will always say ‘we’ rather than the Anglo-Saxon ‘I’.”5
Erofeev’s metaphor may seem hackneyed to the Westerner, but it is both true and affectively loaded for the ordinary Russian. Russians have always emphasized the “we” at the expense of the “I.” Evgenii Zamiatin satirized this emphasis in his distopian novel We, Vladimir Kirillov glorified it in his revolutionary poem “We,” and Aleksei Peskov attempted to analyze it historically in his 1992 essay “We.”6 The Russians love a title with this word in it: “Time and We” (an emigré journal); “The World and We” (the international page in Moskovskie novosti); “Hellenism and We” (a chapter title in Viacheslav Ivanov); “Dostoevsky and We” (a chapter of Berdiaev’s book on Dostoevsky); I and We (la i my, the title of a 1969 book by psychiatrist Vladimir Levi); “Bread and We” (a title on the front page of Literaturnaia gazeta, 11 August 1993), and so on. During the “liquidation of illiteracy” (“likbez”) campaign in the early Soviet period a favorite slogan was the pun “Raby—ne my” (either “Slaves are not us” or “Slaves are mute”). As it turned out, of course, education did not eliminate slavishness.
Russian collectivism can take gigantic proportions. For example, for many millions of Soviet individuals the Communist Party was everything. It was an enormous machine, and individuals were mere “cogs” (“vintiki,” to use Mikhail Heller’s metaphor). People actually believed such slogans as “The Party is our steering wheel” (“Partiia—nash rulevoi”), or “The Party is the mind, honor, and conscience of our epoch” (“Partiia—um, chest’ i sovest’ nashei epokhi”)7—as if individuals did not have their own minds and consciences to guide them.
Indeed it was considered best if they did not. If the party was everything, then the individual was nothing, morally. To quote Vladimir Mayakovsky’s long poem deifying the Party with Lenin at its head:
Although Mayakovsky proclaims that there will be no more slaves and masters in his country (“bez rabov i gospod”), his utter self-abnegation as a “zero,” or at best a tiny particle (“chastitsa”) within the collective, is a most effective propaganda for slavishness.
Any Westerner who has visited Russia for an appreciable length of time knows how it feels to be treated as a “zero” by the collective. Consider, for example, the abuse accorded to individuals in crowds. On a bus, in a train, or in a crowded subway, one has to expect a certain amount of pushing, elbowing, even punching from others as they struggle to get wherever they are going. The remarkable thing, from a Western viewpoint, is that no one seems to mind. The abuse is just accepted by Russians as normal. Furthermore, it is not individuals who are perceived as pushing and shoving other individuals. Wright Miller has captured this phenomenon: