ABSTRACT

This chapter examines systematic efforts on the part of Soviet authorities to formulate, shape, and enforce a specific personality type in the Soviet population. It begins with a brief overview of stereotypes about the Russian psyche as it appeared to foreign observers and surveys the precursors of Soviet psychology in prerevolutionary Russia. The chapter describes the Soviet era and the competing political-psychological projects for raising a New Soviet Man. The New Soviet Man had to be a supremely discursive creature capable of verbalizing his innermost feelings and thoughts. The chapter analyzes the model Soviet personality envisioned by Stalin and the evolution of this model in post-Stalinist Russia. Sexuality, senility, mortality—all natural phenomena that could not be readily squeezed into an ideologically correct schema—were suspect in Soviet psychological culture. The chapter discusses the implications that decades of Soviet efforts to mold human psyches have for the current project of forming a democratic society in Russia.