The self under communism and the self after communism
The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition
Transition and the self
Why transition challenges the self
The self we experience and express is not a fixed, interior object that remains constant regardless of circumstances. It is profoundly shaped by the social environment: by the groups we belong to, the roles we occupy, the norms we navigate, and the stories our society tells about who we are and what we are worth. Processes of significant social dislocation and transition therefore pose a challenge not only to institutions and social structures, but also to the individual. Today we examine this challenge along four dimensions of selfhood, each of which was profoundly destabilised by the communist period and by the post-communist transition.
| Dimension | Definition |
|---|---|
| Self-concept | A person’s understanding of their physical characteristics, group memberships, and traits — the mental map of who one is |
| Self-knowledge | Knowledge of one’s own mental states, processes, and dispositions — the capacity for accurate introspection |
| Self-esteem | The positive or negative feelings that a person has about themselves — the evaluative dimension of selfhood |
| Social self | How we perceive ourselves in relation to others — the relational and contextual dimension of identity |
Self-concept under transition
Transition affects self-concept in several connected ways. The emergence of new outlets for self-expression opens up the possibility of re-imagining who one is, while the impact of transition on health and education creates new opportunities and new deprivations that reshape group memberships. Abrupt changes in the ability to interact with others — for instance, the sudden possibility of free travel abroad — prompt citizens to rethink fundamental questions about their place in the world. Being able to move freely beyond the borders of one’s country does not merely change what one can do; it changes who one can be.
Self-knowledge under transition
Transition also transforms the conditions of self-knowledge. Access to new information previously suppressed or unavailable — about history, about politics, about the outside world — allows citizens to see themselves and their societies differently. Changes in lifestyles create, at least for some, more opportunity for self-reflection and self-contemplation, as the urgent material pressures of daily life under the planned economy give way to new possibilities and new forms of leisure. For others, however, the new demands of market competition leave even less time for introspection than before.
Self-esteem under transition
Transition produces profound shifts in the prestige attached to different social groups — what might be called a “redistribution of prestige.” Workers and Communist Party officials, who had occupied privileged positions under the old system, found themselves devalued; dissidents and entrepreneurs, who had been marginalised, rose in status. Long-term unemployment, which was a novel experience in societies that had guaranteed full employment, delivered a serious blow to self-esteem, while new forms of employment brought some citizens greater fulfilment and others greater insecurity and disappointment.
Homo Sovieticus: the self under communism
What is homo Sovieticus?
One of the terms most frequently used to describe the condition of societies in transition from communism is homo Sovieticus — “Soviet man” — developed by critics of the communist system to describe the syndrome of attitudes, cognitions, perceptions, and self-understandings that communist rule was alleged to have produced. The concept portrays an individual who is completely devoid of individuality, who finds life’s purpose and meaning in the collective, whose activity is motivated not by intellectual choices or emotional needs but by profound conformity and the wish to adapt to and merge with the majority, and who realises his potential only within the collective and has the collective to thank for any worldly achievements.
The tendencies the concept describes are not unique to communist societies — mass society theorists identified similar dynamics in the West — but communism represented a concerted attempt to create a “new man,” a systematic project of social and psychological engineering unlike anything seen in democratic societies.
An escape from freedom (Tischner)
The Polish philosopher and priest Józef Tischner, a close intellectual companion of the Solidarity movement, developed a penetrating philosophical critique of homo Sovieticus that drew implicitly on Erich Fromm’s earlier analysis of the “escape from freedom.” For Tischner, homo Sovieticus is spiritually enslaved, and this enslavement has deformed his attitudes and values to such an extent that he is no longer aware that the bondage exists. He treats it as something “normal” or even desirable, and he views attempts to free him in terms of threat and anxiety, which he tries to ward off by seeking new forms of enslavement.
In this account, homo Sovieticus is incapable of taking responsibility for his life decisions, or indeed of making these decisions in any genuine sense. He is continually looking for some force that would define the framework for his activity, organise his life, give it meaning, and put it in order. The freedom that democratic transition brought was not, for such a person, experienced as liberation but as disorientation — a removal of external constraints that left a painful void.
The communist idea of work
The communist system transformed the meaning of work in ways that had profound consequences for the self-concept and motivation of citizens. Top-down regulation and planning by the state were intended to give people a sense that they were participating in a collective process by which the world was given order and meaning. Work provided a feeling of security and rootedness in the collective, and the party-state delivered on its side of the arrangement through guaranteed employment, subsidised housing, and social welfare provision.
However, this arrangement also absolved people of any need for accountability or creative aspiration. Workers were there to complete the plan, not to exercise judgment, take initiative, or develop their capacities. The experience of work under communism subordinated and incapacitated people rather than facilitating their moral and intellectual development. The system primed people to “receive” rather than to “give,” to comply rather than to innovate, to meet the minimum requirements rather than to exceed them. The popular saying that “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” captures the mutual bad faith that this arrangement generated.
Learned helplessness under communism
Mirosława Marody’s 1987 application of the concept of learned helplessness to Polish society under communism identifies two specific consequences of the system’s incapacitation of individual agency:
| Consequence | Manifestation |
|---|---|
| Inability to plan long-term | People were unable to make long-term plans or to think and act in ways that could help them overcome barriers; they became focused on immediate survival rather than long-term strategy |
| External attribution of blame | The tendency to blame others for one’s own misfortunes and for the consequences of one’s own decisions — a classic manifestation of the helplessness syndrome |
Kon’s analysis reinforces this diagnosis: Soviet economic and social life was a highly institutionalised inefficiency in which every individual initiative was directly or indirectly punishable. The harder one tried, the more frustrated and helpless one felt. The system created conditions in which the only rational response to initiative was to stop trying.
The sociological void (Nowak)
Stefan Nowak’s concept of the “sociological void,” developed in his surveys of Polish society in the 1970s, captures another distinctive feature of the social landscape produced by communist rule: the destruction of the intermediate sphere of civic associations and voluntary organisations that normally mediates between the family and the state. In Nowak’s conception of society, there is a sphere of personal relations — the family and the immediate social circle — outside of which everything else is the alien and hostile realm of the state. Notions of the common good disappear from social life, and individuals derive their self-understanding from attachment to a “we” (the family and close social circle) in contrast to “them” (the state and everything associated with it).
The logic that governs this private sphere is particularistic rather than universalistic: anything that is good for me and my immediate familial and social circle is positive, regardless of the consequences for society in general. This is the social structure that communism created by systematically destroying civil society while leaving the family relatively intact as the one sphere it could not fully colonise.
The culture of “quasi-activity”
A pervasive feature of communist regimes was the artificiality of much state and public activity. Elections were not really elections in a one-party state; decisions of parliament were not really decisions in a political system with no pluralism; commissions and expert bodies “ruled” on issues already resolved at the political level. This comprehensive simulation of public activity led to the systematisation of hypocrisy and deception and generated what Kon calls doublethink: the capacity to combine, sincerely and without guilt, absolutely incompatible beliefs about the same subject.
Doublethink was not merely a response to communist rule; it was an active cognitive accomplishment that citizens developed to navigate the impossible demands of a system that required them to publicly endorse what they privately doubted. Kon identifies it as one of the most permanent traits of Soviet mentality and as a precondition for survival in a totalitarian society. Its persistence into the post-communist period is among the most troubling legacies of the communist era, because doublethink is fundamentally incompatible with the demands of democratic citizenship, which requires citizens to form and express genuine preferences and hold their representatives accountable.
Dignity, egalitarianism, and mediocrity
By providing material security and participation in giving meaning to social reality, the communist system provided many citizens — particularly those from rural and working-class backgrounds — with a genuine sense of dignity and their place in a new social order. This sense of dignity was expressed in a striving for egalitarianism. However, the egalitarian ethic was bound up with a powerful pressure toward conformity and mediocrity: to stand out through exceptional effort or talent was not merely socially risky but was experienced as a violation of the egalitarian social contract. Standing out would also be irrational, as it would ruin “the plan” and would not serve one’s interests.
Kon adds a sharper diagnosis: primitive egalitarianism in wages and the elimination of competition produced a “lumpen mentality” that blocked every individual effort to do better and rise above the average. The logic was not the improvement of general well-being but the prevention of inequality. Not permitting anybody to have more than yourself was psychologically easier than raising everyone’s level. This disposition, rooted in both precommunist peasant culture and communist reinforcement, is a significant obstacle to the kind of dynamic market economy that post-communist transitions aimed to create.
Limits of the homo Sovieticus syndrome
Homo Sovieticus emerges from these descriptions as a person devoid of ideals, extremely materialistic, whose consciousness has been completely determined by “existence.” However, the strong version of the thesis must be qualified in several ways. Thanks to individuals escaping into a private sphere or into one not appropriated by the authorities — most notably religion — the homo Sovieticus syndrome could not fully develop. The Catholic Church in Poland, the Lutheran churches in the Baltic States, the literary and artistic underground in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and the informal economic networks that developed throughout the bloc all represented domains of life that preserved capacities for independent thought, individual initiative, and social trust.
Paradoxically, the communist system itself furnished people with practical preparation for participation in civil society and the market. The everyday experience of bypassing the law, seeking weak points in legal regulations, and navigating informal networks turned out to be a useful school for post-communist entrepreneurship and self-reliance. As Kon observes, few individuals ever took the ideological fiction of “Soviet man” seriously: it was mostly lip service, a diffuse normative statement telling people what they were supposed to be, not what they actually were.
A critical note on the concept
The term homo Sovieticus suggests that communists succeeded in creating a total “communist man,” yet the extent to which communism actually reshaped human mentalities tends to be exaggerated by the proponents of this thesis. Legacies of the past themselves build upon earlier legacies; social transformations are the products of many generations, not just one. We should therefore conceive of the homo Sovieticus phenomenon not as a “pure” syndrome but as one that was realised in part and exercised its influence in part.
There is also a normative dimension to the concept that should make us cautious. Diagnoses of “primitive egalitarianism,” “demanding attitudes towards the state,” and “learned helplessness” are deployed by critics of the welfare state everywhere, not only in Central and Eastern European countries. They can serve to pathologise legitimate demands for social security and collective provision, and should therefore be treated with critical scepticism.
Kon (1993): identity crisis and postcommunist psychology
Kon’s starting point: global and local transitions
Igor Kon’s 1993 essay “Identity Crisis and Postcommunist Psychology,” published in Symbolic Interaction, situates the postcommunist identity crisis within a broader global context of transition. Three parallel shifts frame the local drama:
| Global transition | Character |
|---|---|
| From industrial to postindustrial society | A shift in the economic and occupational basis of social life |
| From modern to postmodern culture | A shift in the cultural forms through which meaning is made |
| From materialist to postmaterialist values | A shift in what citizens prioritise and value |
In pre- and early industrial societies, social identities were given or achieved once and forever: any substantial change of identity after adolescence was considered abnormal. Modern and postmodern societies have reversed this, so that identity crises and uncertainties about the self are now common phenomena far beyond adolescence. Postmodern self-identity is supposed to be individual, flexible, self-directed, and pluralistic — but Soviet culture was oriented precisely toward the opposite.
Soviet culture and the stable, bureaucratic self
Soviet culture and personality were systematically oriented not toward innovation and change but toward stability and continuity. Official Communist ideology was for many decades staunchly conservative; attempts to reconsider Marxist-Leninist dogmas were punishable as revisionism; every innovation looked suspicious and potentially dangerous. Soviet ideology promoted stable, institutionalised, fixed, openly bureaucratic social identities instead of individual self-development and self-direction.
Individuality was systematically abused as “bourgeois individualism.” The individual was conceptualised as a “cog” in the impersonal clockwork of the social mechanism, whose value lay in their contribution to the collective rather than in their individuality. The one-sided emphasis on collective belonging, group membership, and collective responsibilities produced a conformity detrimental to individual initiative and moral responsibility. The distinctive Soviet ideal was the monolithic personality: the strong Soviet man, made from one block, uncompromising, without doubts or internal contradictions. This ideal was militarist and, as Kon observes, psychologically dysfunctional: when confronted with unexpected social change, a personality built to this specification either suffers a neurotic breakdown or opposes any innovation at all costs.
From perestroika to catastroika
Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, launched in the mid-1980s, were a nice but unrealistic utopia: combining radical economic reforms with democratisation in a country with no democratic institutions or market experience for three generations proved impossible. The collapse of the Soviet state was experienced by many citizens not as liberation but as a precipitous loss of identity.
The word “Soviet” had designated a civil and geographical status; with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it became meaningless. Party membership, academic degrees, social prestige, and privileges had also disintegrated or lost their legitimation. Individuals urgently needed new self-definitions framed in more personal, non-bureaucratic, individual terms, but the capacity to construct such definitions had been systematically suppressed by the very system that had just collapsed.
Loss of identity: the personal dimension
Kon illustrates the identity crisis through his own experience: “Who am I? In the past, while travelling abroad, I would usually mention my formal Soviet identity first. Now I do not know even the name of my country.” National identity (Russian? Jewish?), political identity (ex-Party member), and even geographical identity (Leningrad had become St Petersburg) had all simultaneously become unstable.
This personal experience generalises to a political phenomenon of considerable consequence: people who could not translate their uneasiness into theoretical concepts would want to take revenge on someone who, they think, had ruined their country and stolen their glorious past and their solid social identities. The loss of identity is not merely psychological; it is politically dangerous.
Adolescent syndrome
Kon identifies an “adolescent syndrome” in postcommunist politics, which combines four characteristic features:
| Feature | Content |
|---|---|
| Lack of historicity | “Before us there was nothing valuable” |
| Maximalism | “Everything or nothing” |
| Impatience | “Everything immediately” |
| Negativism | “Everything is bad and should be changed” |
This syndrome was widespread among the revolutionary visionaries of 1917 and rooted in the messianic attitudes of the Russian intelligentsia. Many post-communist anti-communists, Kon notes, exhibited the same mindset in reverse: 70 years of Soviet history were completely wrong and everything done then should be remade as soon as possible. The adolescent syndrome is hardly compatible with economic efficiency or liberal democracy, both of which require the capacity to live with imperfection, to compromise, and to accept that change happens slowly and partially.
The envy problem
Kon identifies envy as a distinctive feature of postcommunist psychology, rooted in precommunist peasant culture and reinforced by communist egalitarianism. In pre-industrial Gemeinschaft societies, ingroup members are extremely sensitive to the successes of their own kind: one person’s gain is believed to be somebody else’s loss, and social differentiation is feared as a threat to stability. Communist egalitarianism strengthened this disposition: the abolition of private property and collectivisation generated what Kon calls an “extremely vicious, militant, and envious lumpen mentality.” Not permitting anybody to have more than yourself was psychologically easier than improving general well-being.
Kon distinguishes two strategies for responding to another’s superior performance:
| Strategy | Logic |
|---|---|
| Competition | “I’m better, I’ll prove it by working harder” |
| Envy | “I’m better, and I will not permit him to have more than I have” |
Envy, disguised as social justice, is a powerful enemy of social and economic change, and post-communist politics has been profoundly shaped by the second strategy.
Privileges versus rights
One of the most important structural features of Soviet social organisation was that social identities were rooted not in the universalistic principle of human rights but in the particularistic principle of group privileges. Each social group, stratum, or substratum had its own set of privileges — some legal and open, some illegal and secret — attached to its position in the nomenklatura hierarchy. These privileges were often bigger than salary, and to use one’s privilege was both a right and a duty.
The loss of one’s status therefore meant losing all privileges, which fused status, identity, and material interest inseparably. Kon argues that the acute sense of identity loss in postcommunist Russia is more than a little tinged with nostalgia for lost privileges, not just lost security. Post-communist citizens were in many cases fighting not for universal rights but for quasi-estate privileges, which constituted a serious barrier to both market reforms and advances in human rights.
Doublethink
Kon identifies doublethink — George Orwell’s term for the capacity to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously without awareness of the contradiction — as one of the most permanent traits of Soviet mentality. Combining, sincerely and without guilt, absolutely incompatible beliefs about the same subject was an absolute precondition for survival in a totalitarian society. Complete, conscious rejection of official values was also socially and psychologically dysfunctional; it was easier to use the official language automatically and without reflection, while reserving private judgment for the intimate sphere. Doublethink is fundamentally incompatible with individual integrity, self-realisation, and moral responsibility.
Yet paradoxically, doublethink was also a stimulus for reflection: the constant need to decide which language and reasoning were appropriate for a particular context required a kind of continuous situational awareness. The promptness with which Soviet intellectuals converted to anti-communism in 1989 is itself, for Kon, evidence of doublethink: people who can change their beliefs overnight shall do so again and again, and are not to be trusted as stable interlocutors in democratic debate.
Traditionalism and nationalism
Post-communist traditionalism, in Kon’s analysis, is a drive not to the real historical past but to an idealised, imaginary past — a conservative utopia simultaneously expressing disillusionment, a reaction to the contradictions of modernisation, and the continuation of the Brezhnev era’s social inertia. The greatest danger of traditionalism is its link with primitive and militant nationalism. When most people’s social identities are lost or destabilised, they naturally turn to ethnic identity as an identity of last resort.
Ethnic or national identity is often interpreted not as common cultural heritage but as blood unity, negatively defined through common enemies. The Russian concepts of nashi (“ours”) and ne-nashi (“not ours”) capture this negative logic precisely. Negative identities based on hatred seem stronger and more virulent than positive ones based on love and cooperation: they are easier to mobilise, more emotionally compelling, and more resistant to disconfirming evidence. For the multinational Soviet Union, where social conflicts had been ignored, denied, or brutally suppressed for decades, this was a truly explosive issue — and the dangers Kon identified in 1993, including what he called the potential for a “national Bolshevik state,” have in the decades since proved all too real.
Prospects and generational differences
Kon observes that the situation differs sharply by generation:
| Generation | Experience of transition |
|---|---|
| Older generation | Bureaucratic skills suddenly became useless; cultural capital must be accumulated anew; transition is more likely to be experienced as tragic loss |
| Younger generation | Not heavily vested in the communist world of privilege; more apt to see transition as a challenge; ready to experiment with new opportunities and identities |
Survey evidence from the early 1990s that Kon cites illustrates the gap: 63% of respondents aged 25 and under expressed positive attitudes toward private property and the market economy, compared with just 19% of those aged 60 and over. Both generations were discovering, however, that primitive capitalism is more compatible with chauvinism and fascism than with liberal democracy, and the danger of an authoritarian-nationalist synthesis was, by Weimar standards, real.
Summary
The self under communism was shaped by a comprehensive project of social engineering that promoted collective over individual identity, stability over change, conformity over initiative, and particularistic privileges over universal rights. The resulting syndrome — captured, with appropriate qualifications, in the concept of homo Sovieticus — left post-communist citizens ill-equipped for the demands of democratic citizenship and market participation. Kon’s 1993 analysis anticipated many of the political pathologies that have since become prominent features of post-communist politics: the adolescent syndrome of maximalist anti-communism, the envy logic that disguises itself as social justice, the nostalgia for lost privileges, the instability of ideological commitment that doublethink produces, and the flight to negatively defined ethnic and national identities when the communist meaning system collapsed. Applying the social-psychological theories we have studied earlier in the course to this material shows how powerfully each theoretical lens illuminates a different facet of the same complex phenomenon — and how the communist legacy continues to shape the political and psychological landscape of Central and Eastern Europe more than three decades after the events of 1989.
Social-psychological theories and the communist self
Social identity theory
Homo Sovieticus represents a collective identity priority over individual identity. The communist system imposed a social categorisation in which individuals found “life’s purpose and meaning in the collective.” Ingroup/outgroup dynamics produced a strong “we” (family, close friends) versus “them” (the state), and in Nowak’s sociological void, identity was formed in opposition to the state rather than with it. The post-transition identity crisis saw former social categories lose their meaning and prestige, generating status anxiety as homo post-Sovieticus experienced downward social mobility and the loss of valued group memberships.
The collapse of “Soviet” as a civic identity, and the flight to ethnic identity as an identity of “last resort,” are classic social identity dynamics: identity threat leads to either social creativity (redefining the comparison group) or social competition (nationalist mobilisation).
System justification theory
Despite the oppressive nature of communism, many citizens rationalised and justified aspects of the system, behaving more as “clients of communism” than as true believers. Post-communist nostalgia reflects system-justification processes: security, stability, and egalitarianism are retrospectively invoked as justifications for the system that produced them. Post-communist citizens also experience dissonance in reconciling past system justification with new democratic values.
Kon’s analysis deepens the picture: the privileges system was genuinely valued by its beneficiaries, who simultaneously protested against the privileges of higher strata while remaining deeply convinced that their own privileges were right and just. System justification operated at each tier of the hierarchy.
Social learning theory
Communist systems created specific adaptive behaviours learned through observation and reinforcement: public compliance, navigating bureaucracy through informal networks, and operating in dual realities. Because workers were there to complete the plan without creative aspiration, learned passivity became the dominant model. These behaviours and attitudes were transmitted across generations, while limited models of democratic participation meant few examples were available to observe and imitate.
Kon adds that the reorientation of personal interests away from work and public affairs into private worlds of intellectual life, music, or drinking was itself a learned adaptive strategy — a way of managing the impossible demands of doublethink.
Collective memory theory
The concept of homo Sovieticus itself functions as a collective memory framework that is used to explain transition failures and justify policies. Generational memory differs sharply: a generation brought up in a new reality does not share the direct experience of communism that shapes older cohorts. Kon’s adolescent syndrome is itself a collective memory phenomenon: the new anti-communists’ insistence that 70 years of Soviet history were completely wrong mirrors the Bolshevik insistence that all previous history was prehistory. The collective memory is inverted, but the cognitive structure is the same. Doublethink made communist-era collective memory inherently unstable, because official and unofficial versions of the past coexisted, and their sudden reversal in 1989 left citizens without reliable narrative anchors.
Social capital theory
Communist regimes systematically altered social capital structures. Nowak’s “sociological void” directly reflects depleted bridging social capital. Homo Sovieticus exhibits strong bonding capital (within the family and immediate circle) but weak bridging and linking capital:
Kon’s insight complements this analysis: the privileges system was a form of corrupted linking capital, connecting citizens to the state through group-specific access rather than universal rights. Its collapse removed what weak linking capital had existed without replacing it.
Cognitive dissonance theory
Living under communism required managing contradictions between rhetoric and reality. Transition created massive dissonance between previous beliefs and behaviours on the one hand, and the new context on the other. Typical dissonance-reduction strategies include selective memory that romanticises certain aspects of communist life while forgetting others, reframing the past to justify previous behaviours in light of new values, and rationalising continued reliance on corrupt and informal practices.
At its core, doublethink is an institutionalised cognitive-dissonance-management strategy: the Soviet system created a stable mechanism for holding incompatible beliefs simultaneously. Transition did not dissolve this capacity but redirected it. Overnight conversion to anti-communism is the same mechanism operating in reverse.
Social influence and conformity
Homo Sovieticus is defined partly through “profound conformity, the wish to adapt to, and merge with the majority.” Communist systems relied heavily on conformity mechanisms: a public compliance culture expressed in the “quasi-activity” of performative participation; a fear of standing out rooted in the conviction that doing so would ruin the plan and not serve one’s interests; and a sophisticated awareness of social monitoring. Kon’s analysis of the “monolithic personality” ideal — strong, uncompromising, without doubts or internal contradictions — describes the extreme endpoint of this conformity regime: a personality that either suffers neurotic breakdown or opposes any innovation when faced with change.
Learned helplessness
Homo Sovieticus is incapable of taking responsibility for life decisions, reflecting a legacy of uncontrollable outcomes that created passivity. This manifests in external attribution (blaming others for one’s own misfortunes), a fatalistic outlook (inability to make long-term plans or overcome barriers), and dependency on authority (continually looking for some force to define the framework for activity).
Kon documents learned helplessness as a survival strategy: people with ideas and ambitions were vigorously weeded out, the USSR was fundamentally a country of petty bureaucrats, and the Communist Party, like an authoritarian mother, knew your “rational needs” better than you did yourself. Now, after transition, “nobody seems to care,” and people feel more uncomfortable, vulnerable, and helpless than ever before.
Just world theory
Communist ideology promoted a narrative of ultimate historical justice for the working class, and transition outcomes challenged this belief in a just world. Egalitarianism was central to homo Sovieticus’s sense of justice and dignity, generating a perception of injustice when former outsiders experienced upward mobility, a demand for state intervention to regulate inequalities, and a tendency to see foes in everyone who has achieved higher social status.
Kon’s analysis of envy as rooted in the belief that one person’s gain is inevitably somebody else’s loss is itself a just-world-violation response. Communist egalitarianism institutionalised envy as power through the collective farm and the suppression of independent farmers. The post-transition collapse of egalitarian just-world beliefs produced the “lumpen mentality” of resentment that blocked reform.
Relative deprivation theory
Transition created powerful relative deprivation experiences of several kinds:
Kon analyses this dynamic explicitly: the acute sense of identity loss is “tinged with nostalgia for lost privileges.” The transition dynamic in which former insiders (the proletarians) became outsiders while former outsiders (dissidents, Western-oriented intellectuals) became prestigious is a classic fraternal deprivation scenario whose political result is resentment rather than reform.
Terror management theory
Communist collapse created profound existential crises beyond the strictly economic challenges. Loss of the predictable world order and invalidation of the communist worldview triggered anxiety-buffering responses. Kon’s analysis of traditionalism as a flight to an idealised, imaginary past, and of nationalism as an identity of “last resort,” are classic terror-management responses to worldview invalidation. When the communist meaning system collapsed, citizens invested more heavily in alternative worldviews offering symbolic continuity: national identity, religious revival, and nostalgic reconstruction of the Soviet past. The danger Kon identifies — national Bolshevism, fascism — is precisely what terror management theory predicts when mortality salience meets a population without a stable secular meaning system.
Contact theory
Communist-era intergroup contact was characterised by state management: authentic contact was limited to the immediate social circle; outgroups were experienced as alien and hostile as notions of the common good disappeared; and the new pluralism of the transition period was experienced as alienating and disconcerting rather than enriching. Kon analyses how ethnic and national identity functions as a negatively defined identity — nashi versus ne-nashi — rooted in the absence of genuine multicultural contact. Positive identities based on shared civic values had been destroyed by the communist regime; the contact needed to build cross-group trust had been systematically prevented; and post-transition pluralism felt threatening precisely because the capacity to engage with genuine diversity had been structurally suppressed.