The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (review)

It is almost a truism among those who trace Russian development to note that Russian public life privileged the collective while the individual received more attention in the West. This challenging book sets out to complicate this overused comparison. In the process, the author offers a surprisingly different analysis of Russian historical development in the twentieth century. Using a wide range of original sources, from Soviet social science studies to school manuals, Kharkhordin argues that the Soviet system did place value on the development of the individual; moreover, the methods employed to achieve this goal had deep roots in Russian culture. The ideal of this development, however, was not the autonomous individual of Western philosophy. Instead it was a person shaped by and dependent on the collective.

Kharkhordin bases his work on the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault, whose criticisms of Western Enlightenment thought have brought many to question the existence of the autonomous individual in the West. Foucault argues that Western culture operates like a panopticon, an elaborately hierarchical surveillance system that constrains independent action. Kharkhordin finds surveillance at the center of Soviet culture too; however, it is not the mighty and powerful state that is at the heart of this constant observance. Rather, the strength (and terror) of the Soviet system was that it made people oversee one another.

One of Kharkhordin’s most interesting theses is that the Bolshevik methods of surveillance had their roots in Russian Orthodoxy. In distinction to Western European Christianity, which abandoned public confessions in the fourteenth century, the Russian Orthodox church kept this practice as a means to discipline believers. Worshipers were encouraged to confess their sins to the community and then were prescribed public penance. The Bolsheviks adopted the same methods for party members in the first decade of the Soviet period. Offenders of party mores were required to confess their sins, and fellow members had to participate in this public shaming. If the confessions were contrite enough, offenders were allowed to make amends and stay in the party.

Methods devised for party members spread to society as a whole in the Stalin era. For Kharkhordin, the 1930s were not an era of atomized individuals or depersonalized masses. Stalinist agitational literature and educational techniques emphasized an individual approach to problem solving and the end to depersonalization. In background checks individuals were judged less by their social origins than by their current activities. However, this new stress on individual responsibility went hand in hand with a growth in collective surveillance. The educational ideals of Anton Makarenko, who developed his ideas in homes for runaway and abandoned youth, became central in this period. Makarenko believed that individuals were best disciplined by their peers. These ideas, adapted to schools and workplaces, contributed to the deadly atmosphere of the Great Purges. Everyone’s individual behavior was open to public scrutiny and each citizen was expected to be responsible for the purity of the collective.

Kharkhordin’s original reinterpretation of Soviet history continues into the Khrushchev era. For him this was hardly a period of flowering freedoms; instead, average citizens joined in efforts to enforce collective conformity. Those who stepped out of line, who adopted Western styles or non-conformist attitudes, found themselves ostracized, assaulted, and even imprisoned. This was a time of roving vigilante-style Komsomol gangs who attacked young people wearing unusual clothing. The government conducted well-publicized public trials against those who had the temerity to choose their own professions outside of officially sanctioned channels. Kharkhordin harbors no romance about the generation of the 1960s; he sees this as a bleak period where public inspections became routine. The Khrushchev era’s monitoring was “more meticulous and thorough in its attention to each individual than the more openly repressive Stalinist one it replaced” (298).

It was only in Brezhnev period that saw the development of wide-spread subcultures, groups of like-minded people who shared hobbies, politics, or consumption interests. Kharkhordin...