ABSTRACT
In the last analysis, the attempt to build a socialist society is an effort to emancipate human nature, mutilated and humiliated by class society. In this crucial respect the Soviet experiment conspicuously failed. If censured for the apparent inability to catch up with the more spectacular Western measures of affluence, the Soviet system can always point to the appallingly backward starting-point, to the indisputable lessening of the distance dividing it from its capitalist competitors, and to many achievements in eradicating the most extreme forms of material poverty. No excuses, however, can be mustered for the servility and obsequiousness of the ‘new socialist man’, Soviet style. The harshest of modern totalitarian regimes created, as its lasting product, men and women terrified by the prospect of freedom, unused to having views, to defending them, and to accepting responsibility for their convictions. The ‘ideal Soviet man’ turned out to be the petty-bourgeois average man writ large. The petty bourgeois mistaken for ‘socialist man’ is organically incapable of imagining an existence different from his own, and therefore all criticism portends a replacement of his present security, however meagre and shabby, by the uncharted, and so terrifying, waters of history.
