{"id":83112,"date":"2021-01-03T17:05:29","date_gmt":"2021-01-03T15:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=83112"},"modified":"2021-01-03T15:34:59","modified_gmt":"2021-01-03T13:34:59","slug":"10-05-59","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=83112","title":{"rendered":"The American Soviet Mentality"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The American Soviet Mentality<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

IZABELLA TABAROVSKY<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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ussians are fond of\u00a0quoting Sergei Dovlatov<\/a>, a dissident Soviet writer who emigrated to the United States in 1979: \u201cWe continuously curse Comrade Stalin, and, naturally, with good reason. And yet I want to ask: who wrote four million denunciations?\u201d It wasn\u2019t the fearsome heads of Soviet secret police who did that, he said. It was ordinary people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Collective demonizations of prominent cultural figures were an integral part of the Soviet culture of denunciation that pervaded every workplace and apartment building. Perhaps the most famous such episode began on Oct. 23, 1958, when the Nobel committee informed Soviet writer Boris Pasternak that he had been selected for the Nobel Prize in literature\u2014and plunged the writer\u2019s life into hell. Ever since Pasternak\u2019s\u00a0Doctor Zhivago<\/em>\u00a0had been first published the previous year (in Italy, since the writer could not publish it at home) the Communist Party and the Soviet literary establishment had their knives out for him. To the establishment, the Nobel Prize added insult to grave injury.<\/span><\/p>\n

Within days, Pasternak was a target of a massive public vilification campaign. The country\u2019s prestigious\u00a0Literary Newspaper<\/em>\u00a0launched the assault with an article titled \u201cUnanimous Condemnation<\/a>\u201d and an official statement by the Soviet Writers\u2019 Union\u2014a powerful organization whose primary function was to exercise control over its members, including by giving access to exclusive benefits and basic material necessities unavailable to ordinary citizens. The two articles expressed the union\u2019s sense that in view of Pasternak\u2019s hostility and slander of the Soviet people, socialism, world peace, and all progressive and revolutionary movements, he no longer deserved the proud title of Soviet Writer. The union therefore expelled him from its ranks.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few days later, the paper dedicated an entire page to what it presented as the public outcry over Pasternak\u2019s imputed treachery. Collected under the massive headline \u201cAnger and Indignation: Soviet people condemn the actions of B. Pasternak<\/a>\u201d were a condemnatory editorial, a denunciation by a group of influential Moscow writers, and outraged letters that the paper claimed to have received from readers.<\/span><\/p>\n

The campaign against Pasternak went on for months. Having played out in the central press, it moved to local outlets and jumped over into nonmedia institutions, with the writer now castigated at obligatory political meetings at factories, research institutes, universities, and collective farms. None of those who joined the chorus of condemnation, naturally, had read the novel\u2014it would not be formally published in the USSR until 30 years later. But that did not stop them from mouthing the made-up charges leveled against the writer. It was during that campaign that the Soviet catchphrase \u201cne chital, no osuzhdayu<\/em>\u201d\u2014\u201cdidn\u2019t read, but disapprove\u201d\u2014was born<\/a>: Pasternak\u2019s accusers had coined it to protect themselves against suspicions of having come in contact with the seditious material. Days after accepting the Nobel Prize, Pasternak was forced to decline it. Yet demonization continued unabated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of the greatest names in Soviet culture became targets of collective condemnations\u2014composers Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev; writers Anna Akhmatova and Iosif Brodsky; and many others. Bouts of hounding could go on for months and years, destroying people\u2019s lives, health and, undoubtedly, ability to create. (The brutal onslaught undermined Pasternak\u2019s health. He died from lung cancer a year and a half later.) But the practice wasn\u2019t reserved for the greats alone. Factories, universities, schools, and research institutes were all suitable venues for collectively raking over the coals a hapless, ideologically ungrounded colleague who, say, failed to show up for the \u201cvoluntary-obligatory,\u201d as a Soviet clich\u00e9 went, Saturday cleanups at a local park, or a scientist who wanted to emigrate. The system also demanded expressions of collective condemnations with regards to various political matters: machinations of imperialism and reactionary forces, Israeli aggression against peaceful Arab states, the anti-Soviet international Zionist conspiracy. It was simply part of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Twitter has been used as a platform for exercises in unanimous condemnation for as long as it has existed. Countless careers and lives have been ruined as outraged mobs have descended on people whose social media gaffes or old teenage behavior were held up to public scorn and judged to be deplorable and unforgivable. But it wasn\u2019t until the past couple of weeks that the similarity of our current culture with the Soviet practice of collective hounding presented itself to me with such stark clarity. Perhaps it was the specific professions and the cultural institutions involved\u2014and the specific acts of writers banding together to abuse and cancel their colleagues\u2014that brought that sordid history back.<\/span><\/p>\n

On June 3,\u00a0The New York<\/em>\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>published an opinion piece that much of its progressive staff found offensive and dangerous. (The author, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton,\u00a0had called to send in the military<\/a>\u00a0to curb the violence and looting that accompanied the nationwide protests against the killing of George Floyd.) The targets of their unanimous condemnation, which was gleefully joined by the Twitter proletariat, which took pleasure in helping the once-august newspaper shred itself to pieces in public, were\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u2019 opinion section editor James Bennet, who had ultimate authority for publishing the piece, though he hadn\u2019t supervised its editing, and op-ed staff editor and writer Bari Weiss (a former Tablet staffer).<\/span><\/p>\n

Weiss had nothing to do with editing or publishing the piece. On June 4, however, she\u00a0posted a Twitter thread<\/a>\u00a0characterizing the internal turmoil at the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>as a \u201ccivil war\u201d between the \u201c(mostly young) wokes\u201d who \u201ccall themselves liberals and progressives\u201d and the \u201c(mostly 40+) liberals\u201d who adhere to \u201cthe principles of civil libertarianism.\u201d She attributed the behavior of the \u201cwokes\u201d to their \u201csafetyism<\/a>\u201d worldview, in which \u201cthe right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It was just one journalist\u2019s opinion, but to Weiss\u2019 colleagues her semi-unflattering description of the split felt like an intolerable attack against the collective. Although Weiss did not name anyone in either the \u201cwoke\u201d or the older \u201cliberal\u201d camp, her younger colleagues felt collectively attacked and slandered. They lashed out. Pretty soon, Weiss was trending on Twitter.<\/span><\/p>\n

SCREENCAPTURE COURTESY IZABELLA TABAROVSKY<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

As the mob\u2019s fury kicked into high gear, the language of collective outrage grew increasingly strident, even violent. Goldie Taylor, writer and editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, queried in a since-deleted tweet why Weiss \u201cstill got her teeth.\u201d With\u00a0heads rolling<\/a>\u00a0at the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u2014James Bennet resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was reassigned to the newsroom\u2014one member of the staff\u00a0asked<\/a>\u00a0for Weiss to be fired for having bad-mouthed \u201cher younger newsroom colleagues\u201d and insulted \u201call of our foreign correspondents who have actually reported from civil wars.\u201d (It was unclear how she did that, other than having used the phrase \u201ccivil war\u201d as a metaphor.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Mehdi Hasan, a columnist with the Intercept,\u00a0opined<\/a>\u00a0to his 880,000 Twitter followers that it would be strange if Weiss retained her job now that Bennet had been removed. He suggested that her thread had \u201cmocked\u201d her nonwhite colleagues. (It did not.) In a\u00a0follow-up tweet<\/a>\u00a0Hasan went further, suggesting that to defend Weiss would make one a bad anti-racist\u2014a threat based on a deeply manipulated interpretation of Weiss\u2019 post, yet powerful enough to stop his followers from making the mistake.<\/span><\/p>\n

All of us who came out of the Soviet system bear scars of the practice of unanimous condemnation, whether we ourselves had been targets or participants in it or not. It is partly why Soviet immigrants are often so averse to any expressions of collectivism: We have seen its ugliest expressions in our own lives and our friends\u2019 and families\u2019 lives. It is impossible to read the chastising remarks of Soviet writers, for whom Pasternak had been a friend and a mentor, without a sense of deep shame. Shame over the perfidy and lack of decency on display. Shame at the misrepresentations and perversions of truth. Shame at the virtue signaling and the closing of rank. Shame over the momentary and, we now know, fleeting triumph of mediocrity over talent.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is also impossible to read them without the nagging question: How would I have behaved in their shoes? Would I, too, have succumbed to the pressure? Would I, too, have betrayed, condemned, cast a stone? I used to feel grateful that we had left the USSR before Soviet life had put me to that test. How strange and devastating to realize that these moral tests are now before us again in America.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a collectivist culture, one hoped-for result of group condemnations is control\u2014both over the target of abuse and the broader society. When sufficiently broad levels of society realize that the price of nonconformity is being publicly humiliated, expelled from the community of \u201cpeople of goodwill\u201d (another Soviet clich\u00e9) and cut off from sources of income, the powers that be need to work less hard to enforce the rules.<\/span><\/p>\n

But while the policy in the USSR was by and large set by the authorities, it would be too simplistic to imagine that those below had no choices, and didn\u2019t often join in these rituals gladly, whether to obtain some real or imagined benefit for themselves, or to salve internal psychic wounds, or to take pleasure in the exercise of cruelty toward a person who had been declared to be a legitimate target of the collective.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Olga Ivinskaya, who was Pasternak\u2019s lover and companion during those years, the party brass, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, was only partly to blame for the nonpublication of\u00a0Doctor Zhivago<\/em>. The literary establishment played an important role as well. Reading over her recollections of the meetings at the Writers\u2019 Union, it is hard not to suspect that some of its members were motivated not so much by fear of reprisals or ideological fervor but by simple conformity and professional jealousy. Some, I imagine, would have only been too happy to put spokes in the wheels of a writer whose novel\u2014banned at home, but published abroad\u2014was being translated into dozens of languages and who had been awarded the world\u2019s most prestigious literary prize.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the regular people\u2014those outside prestigious cultural institutions\u2014participation in local versions of collective hounding was not without its benefits, either. It could be an opportunity to eliminate a personal enemy or someone who was more successful and, perhaps, occupied a position you craved. You could join in condemning a neighbor at your cramped communal flat, calculating that once she was gone, you could add some precious extra square meters to your living space.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet even among this dismal landscape, there were those who refused to join in this ugly rite. A few writers, for example, refused to participate in demonizing Pasternak. And is it karma or just a coincidence that most of these people\u2014many of them dissidents, who were outside the literary establishment\u2014remain beloved among Russian readers today, while the writings of the insiders, ones who betrayed and condemned, have been forgotten?<\/span><\/p>\n

The mobs that perform the unanimous condemnation rituals of today do not follow orders from above. But that does not diminish their power to exert pressure on those under their influence. Those of us who came out of the collectivist Soviet culture understand these dynamics instinctively. You invoked the \u201cdidn\u2019t read, but disapprove\u201d mantra not only to protect yourself from suspicions about your reading choices but also to communicate an eagerness to be part of the\u00a0kollektiv<\/em>\u2014no matter what destructive action was next on the\u00a0kollektiv<\/em>\u2019s agenda. You preemptively surrendered your personal agency in order to be in unison with the group. And this is understandable in a way: Merging with the crowd feels much better than standing alone.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Those who remember the Soviet system understand the danger of letting the practice of collective denunciation run amok. But you don\u2019t have to imagine an American Stalin in the White House to see where first the toleration, then the normalization, and now the legitimization and rewarding of this ugly practice is taking us.<\/span><\/p>\n

Americans have discovered the way in which fear of collective disapproval breeds self-censorship and silence, which impoverish public life and creative work. The double life one ends up leading\u2014one where there is a growing gap between one\u2019s public and private selves\u2014eventually begins to feel oppressive. For a significant portion of Soviet intelligentsia (artists, doctors, scientists), the burden of leading this double life played an important role in their deciding to emigrate.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those who join in the hounding face their own hazards. The more loyalty you pledge to a group that expects you to participate in rituals of collective demonization, the more it will ask of you and the more you, too, will feel controlled. How much of your own autonomy as a thinking, feeling person are you willing to sacrifice to the collective? What inner compromises are you willing to make for the sake of being part of the group? Which personal relationships are you willing to give up?<\/span><\/p>\n

From my vantage point, this cultural moment in these United States feels incredibly precarious. The practice of collective condemnation feels like an assertion of a culture that ultimately tramples on the individual and creates an oppressive society. Whether that society looks like Soviet Russia, or Orwell\u2019s\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>, or Castro\u2019s Cuba, or today\u2019s China, or something uniquely 21st-century American, the failure of institutions and individuals to stand up to mob rule is no longer an option we can afford.
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Izabella Tabarovsky<\/strong> is a contributing writer at Tablet and a researcher with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center focusing on the politics of historical memory in the former Soviet Union.<\/em><\/span>
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The American Soviet Mentality IZABELLA TABAROVSKY ussians are fond of\u00a0quoting Sergei Dovlatov, a dissident Soviet writer who emigrated to the United States in 1979: \u201cWe continuously curse Comrade Stalin, and, naturally, with good reason. And yet I want to ask: who wrote four million denunciations?\u201d It wasn\u2019t the fearsome heads of Soviet secret police who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83112"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83124,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83112\/revisions\/83124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}