A century earlier envy was also common. Among the peasantry, for example, there were those enterprising individuals (“predpriimchivye liudi”) who managed to acquire large amounts of land and/or other property,23 but not without provoking resentment among neighbors. The communal envy portrayed in the classic ethnographic descriptions confirm Smith’s assertion24 that today’s attitudes are pre-Soviet in historical origin. Semenova-Tian-Shanskaia, for example, describes the envy which richer peasants had to deal with in the late tsarist period:
Those who are somewhat richer complain bitterly about their fellow-villagers’ attitude toward them. “They hate you (envy you) constantly, saying: ‘what makes you think you’re better than we are, hold on, aren’t you getting a little uppity, taking it into your head to plant a little apple tree? Ha! You’ve decided to plant a garden, think you’re a landlord, eh? We sit hungry, and he plants a garden, and even fences it off!’” Then they smash the fence and drag off the apple tree that has been planted. Or if the apple tree grows up and produces apples, they feel obliged to make raids on it.25
Such envy must have been very common, to judge from just some of the numerous proverbs gathered on the subject by Dahclass="underline"
The neighbor interferes with sleep because he lives well (Sosed spat’ ne daet: khorosho zhivet).
It’s not offensive that the wine is expensive, but it’s offensive that the inn-keeper is getting rich (Ne to obida, chto vino dorogo, a to obida, chto tseloval’nik bogateet).
Beat to death the one who lives better than we do (Ubei togo do smerti, kto luchshe nashego zhivet).
The envious one will not spare his own two eyes (Zavistlivyi svoikh dvukh glaz ne pozhaleet).26
Not only the one who submits to such envious attitudes is behaving masochistically, but sometimes, as the last item indicates, the envious person himself or herself can be engaged in a masochistic enterprise as well. If the envious peasant set fire to his neighbor’s hut, for example, his own was likely to burn down too, since the peasants’ wooden huts were built exceedingly close to one another.
A masochistic attitude toward the collective is of course not the only thing that prevents the individual from “sticking out” in Russia. There are likely to be other reasons as well, depending on the situation. A would-be family farmer in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period, for example, is thwarted by a host of daunting problems. Where will the fertilizer, seeds, tractors, and other items necessary for farming be obtained? How much should be invested in livestock? What crops would bring a profit, what crops should be avoided? Will government policies change in the midst of farming operations?—And so on, to name a few of the issues cogently discussed by Hedrick Smith.27 But the existence of non-psychological factors does not rule out psychological factors, including masochism. When Smith asked state farm director Dmitrii Starodubtsev in 1989 why the new opportunities for leasing land were not catching on, the reply took a curiously psychological form:
“You see,” he said, “the land was confiscated from the peasants in the thirties, even in the twenties. Sixty years ago. So the new generation never owned the land. They are not used to the land. They are afraid of it. It has become alien to them. The livestock they are willing to take. To breed animals, that’s OK. But the land, they’re afraid of it. Our people have lost the feeling of being masters of the land.”28
With the image of “masters of the land” Starodubtsev raises, perhaps unintentionally, a sadomasochistic issue: if the peasants are not “masters of the land,” perhaps they are its slaves instead? And given the maternal significance of “land” (“zemlia,” e.g., “matushka zemlia”) which is so prevalent in Russian tradition, perhaps Starodubtsev is suggesting that would-be farmers fear having to deal with an old maternal image. I will have more to say about such imagery.
A Post-Soviet Antimasochistic Trend?
It is true that efforts are now being made in Russia to reduce the importance of the collective and to emphasize the value of the individual. Psychoanalyst Aron Belkin observes that perestroika encouraged people to emerge from their previous “inhibited, infantile state,” to “think independently, to get to know themselves and their environment, to evaluate for themselves their attitude to the historical past and to their native land.”29 Belkin believes that psychoanalytic therapy itself can help individuals who have suffered under a totalitarian system gain some sense of their own freedom and autonomy. To get rid of one’s “slave psychology” (part of which is masochism—a term Belkin avoids), one might try some free association.
In the late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian media there are numerous references to something called “sovereignty of the person” (“suverenitet lichnosti”). This represents a major change of approach to human relations among Russians. The very phrase, however, is a metaphor based on the idea of a collective: “sovereignty” is (in Russian as in English) an attribute of a state. Lidiia Grafova, in a fascinating article under this rubric, introduces further collective metaphors in her attempt to convey her disgust at the masochism in an individuaclass="underline" “I don’t know about you, reader, but I personally discover with shame something totalitarian in myself.” Or: “Can we be free from our internal slavery and fear?” Again, “something totalitarian” and “slavery” are collective, not individual phenomena. But it is clear that Grafova has personal freedom in mind, as when she deconstructs the metaphor of “sovereignty of the person”: “the secret wish of Soviet people [liudei] (not only republics) is to gain independence.”30
Soviet psychologist Boris Kochubei made a particularly explicit and eloquent statement of the importance of the individual in an article that appeared at the end of 1990. According to Kochubei, socialism failed in Russia because it intensified the already native collectivist mentality of Russians: “From an underdeveloped ‘I’ in Russian culture we moved to a complete repression of the ‘I’ in the name of the ‘we.’” After lamenting the “primitive collectivism” and the tendency toward “identification of the self with the group” among his fellow citizens, Kochubei declares: “It’s high time to understand that there is nothing apart from the single, private person (the very one that people call a philistine and a clod), with his small happiness and his big sorrow.” Everything else—the Party, the class, the nationality, the government, the Motherland, all of society itself—exists only for the individual. Only in a society which places the individual above all else is there a chance that “reason and conscience” will prevail.31
Some Theoretical Considerations
What is a collective, from the viewpoint of the individual? How do psychoanalysts characterize the individual’s conscious and unconscious attitudes toward the collective?
For one thing, the collective is itself like an individual, and a very special individual at that. It tends to get personified, and the personification is usually maternal in nature. Semiotically speaking, the collective is an icon of the mother.