The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition: 1989–2019

The self under communism and the self after communism

Ben Stanley

Department of Social Sciences, SWPS University

April 9, 2026

Today’s topics

Overview of today’s lecture

  • Transition and the self: four dimensions
  • Homo Sovieticus: the self under communism
  • Homo post-Sovieticus: the self after communism
  • Kon (1993): identity crisis and postcommunist psychology
  • Applying social-psychological theories to the communist and post-communist self

Transition and the self

Why transition challenges the self

  • The self we experience and express is highly variable and dependent on social circumstances
  • Processes of significant social dislocation and transition pose a challenge not only to institutions and social structures, but also to the individual’s:
    • Self-concept: a person’s understanding of their physical characteristics, group memberships and traits
    • Self-knowledge: knowledge of one’s own mental states, processes and dispositions
    • Self-esteem: positive or negative feelings that we have about ourselves
    • Social self: how we perceive ourselves in relation to others

Self-concept under transition

  • Self-concept: a person’s understanding of their physical characteristics, group memberships and traits
    • The emergence of new outlets for self-expression
    • The impact of transition on health, education
    • Abrupt changes in the ability to interact with others
      • How does being able to freely travel affect your notions of who you are?

Self-knowledge under transition

  • Self-knowledge: knowledge of one’s own mental states, processes and dispositions
    • Access to new information previously suppressed or unavailable
    • Changes in lifestyles creating (at least for some) more opportunity for self-reflection and self-contemplation

Self-esteem under transition

  • Self-esteem: positive or negative feelings that we have about ourselves
    • Changes in the prestige of groups to which individuals belong — a “redistribution of prestige”
    • Long-term unemployment or new forms of employment that are more (or less) fulfilling

The social self under transition

  • Social self: how we perceive ourselves in relation to others
    • Greater sense of personal efficacy in a world that allows more scope to decide who we are and what we do
    • Equally, the possibility of less of a sense of efficacy in a world which circumscribes it
    • Increased pluralism leading to a greater sense of possibility on the one hand, but disorientation on the other

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)
  • This term suggests that the communist system evolved a specific syndrome of attitudes, cognitions and perceptions, and a specific understanding of the self:
    • Completely devoid of individuality — finds life’s purpose and meaning in the collective
    • Activity motivated not by intellectual choices or emotional needs but by profound conformity, the wish to adapt to and merge with the majority
    • Realizes potential only within the collective; has the collective to thank for worldly achievements
    • Not unique to communist societies — mass society theorists have noted similar tendencies in Western societies — but communism saw a concerted attempt to create a “new man”

An escape from freedom (Tischner)

  • Homo Sovieticus is spiritually enslaved, and this enslavement deforms 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
  • 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 other words, homo Sovieticus is incapable of taking responsibility for his life decisions, or indeed of making these decisions
  • He is continually looking for some force which would define the framework for his activity, organise his life, give it meaning and put it in order

The communist idea of work

  • Top-down regulation and planning by the state was intended to give people a sense that they were participating in a process by which the world was given order and meaning
  • Work provided a feeling of security and rootedness in the “collective”
  • However, it also absolved people of any need of accountability or creative aspiration
    • Workers were there to complete the plan
    • The experience subordinated and incapacitated people rather than facilitating their moral and intellectual development
  • This system primed people to “receive,” not to “give”

Learned helplessness under communism

  • Since the act of working was perceived merely as a guarantee of humble but secure existence, people eventually began to show signs of “learned helplessness” (Marody 1987)
  • Two consequences:
    • People were unable to make long-term plans and to think and act in ways which could help them overcome the barriers they faced
    • This attitude led to the tendency to blame others for their own misfortunes and the consequences of their own decisions
  • Link to Kon (1993): Soviet economic and social life was a highly institutionalised inefficiency — every individual initiative being directly or indirectly punishable; the harder one tried, the more frustrated and helpless one felt

The sociological void (Nowak)

  • Another consequence of the communist era was the rise of what Stefan Nowak called the “sociological void”
  • In this conception of society, there is a sphere of personal relations outside of which everything else is the alien and hostile realm of the state
  • Notions of the common good disappear from social life; individuals derive their self-understanding from an attachment to “we” (the family and immediate social circle) in contrast to “them”
  • Anything which may be good for me and my immediate familial and social circle is positive, regardless of the consequences for society in general

The culture of “quasi-activity”

  • A pervasive feature of communist regimes was the artificiality of much state and public activity:
    • Elections were not 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 led to the systematisation of hypocrisy and deception
  • Link to Kon (1993): doublethink — the capacity to combine, sincerely and without guilt, absolutely incompatible beliefs about the same subject — was one of the most permanent traits of Soviet mentality; a precondition for survival in a totalitarian society

Dignity, egalitarianism, and mediocrity

  • By providing material security and participation in giving meaning to social reality, the communist system also provided people with a sense of dignity and their place in the new social order
  • This sense of dignity was expressed in the striving for egalitarianism
  • However, in practice this mechanism limited the possibility of rising above a generally accepted level of mediocrity
    • To stand out would be irrational (it would ruin the “plan”) and would not serve one’s interests
  • Link to Kon (1993): primitive egalitarianism in wages and elimination of competition produced a “lumpen mentality” — blocking every individual effort to do better and to rise above the average; not permitting anybody to have more than yourself was psychologically easier than the improvement of general well-being

Limits of the homo Sovieticus syndrome

  • Homo Sovieticus emerges as a person devoid of ideals, extremely materialistic, whose consciousness has been completely determined by “existence”
  • However, thanks to individuals escaping to a private sphere or one not appropriated by the authorities — such as religion — the homo Sovieticus syndrome could not fully develop
  • The system forced people to bypass the law, seek weak points in legal regulations, and deliberately break the law — but the emergence of such a system arguably furnished people with practical preparation for participation in civil society and the market
  • Link to Kon (1993): 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 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 conceive of the homo Sovieticus phenomenon not as a “pure” syndrome, but as one which was realised in part, and exercised its influence in part
  • Normative dimension: diagnoses of “primitive egalitarianism”, “demanding attitudes towards the state”, and “learned helplessness” are deployed by critics of the welfare state everywhere, not only in CEE countries; they should be treated with critical scepticism

Kon (1993): identity crisis and postcommunist psychology

Kon’s starting point: global and local transitions

  • Kon (“Identity Crisis and Postcommunist Psychology”, Symbolic Interaction, 1993) situates the postcommunist identity crisis within a broader global transition:
    • From industrial to postindustrial society
    • From modern to postmodern culture
    • From materialist to postmaterialist values
  • 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: 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 a “cog” in the impersonal clockwork of the social mechanism
    • One-sided emphasis on collective, group belongingness, and collective responsibilities produced conformity detrimental to individual initiative and moral responsibility

From perestroika to catastroika

  • Perestroika was a nice but unrealistic utopia: combining radical economic reforms with democratisation in a country with no democratic institutions or market experience for three generations was impossible
  • The collapse of the Soviet state was experienced by many as a precipitous loss of identity:
    • The word “Soviet” had designated a civil and geographical status — now it was meaningless
    • Party membership, academic degrees, social prestige, and privileges had also disintegrated or lost legitimation
    • Individuals urgently needed new self-definitions framed in more personal, non-bureaucratic, individual terms — but this was an extremely difficult task

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 → St Petersburg) had all become unstable
  • This personal experience generalises:
    • 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: a combination of
    • Lack of historicity (“before us there was nothing valuable”)
    • Maximalism (“everything or nothing”)
    • Impatience (“everything immediately”)
    • Negativism (“everything is bad and should be changed”)
  • Widespread among revolutionary visionaries of 1917 and rooted in the messianic attitudes of the Russian intelligentsia — many post-communist anti-communists 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
  • Adolescent syndrome is hardly compatible with economic efficiency and liberal democracy

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
    • Social differentiation is feared as a threat to stability and equilibrium
  • Communist egalitarianism strengthened this: abolition of private property and collectivisation generated an “extremely vicious, militant, and envious lumpen mentality”
    • Not permitting anybody to have more than yourself was psychologically easier than improving general well-being
  • Two strategies: competition (“I’m better, I’ll prove it by working harder”) vs. 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

Privileges versus rights

  • Soviet social identities were rooted not in the universalistic principle of human rights but in the particularistic principle of group privileges
    • Each social group, strata, or substrata had its own set of privileges — some legal and open; some illegal and secret
    • Privileges were connected to hierarchical status and were often bigger than salary; to use your privilege was both your right and your duty
  • The loss of one’s status meant losing all privileges — which fused status, identity, and material interest inseparably
  • The acute sense of identity loss in postcommunist Russia is more than a little tinged with nostalgia for lost privileges, not just lost security
  • People were fighting not for universal rights but for quasi-estate privileges — constituting a serious barrier to market reforms and advances in human rights

Doublethink

  • Kon identifies doublethink (Orwell) 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, without reflection
    • Doublethink is incompatible with individual integrity, self-realisation, and moral responsibility
  • Yet paradoxically, doublethink was also a stimulus for reflection: what language and reasoning did one have to use in a particular case?
  • The promptness with which Soviet intellectuals converted to anti-communism in 1989 is itself evidence of doublethink — people who can change their beliefs overnight shall do so again and again; they are not to be trusted

Traditionalism and nationalism

  • Post-communist traditionalism is a drive not to the real historical past but to an idealised, imaginary past — a conservative utopia simultaneously expressing disillusionment, a reaction to 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 inflated, they naturally turn to ethnic identity as an identity of last resort
    • Ethnic/national identity is often interpreted not as common cultural heritage but as blood unity, negatively defined through common enemies (nashi vs. ne-nashi)
    • Negative identities based on hatred seem stronger and more virulent than positive ones based on love and cooperation
  • For the multinational Soviet Union, where social conflicts had been ignored, denied, or brutally suppressed for decades, this was a truly explosive issue

Prospects and generational differences

  • The situation differs sharply by generation:
    • Older generation: bureaucratic skills suddenly became useless; cultural capital must be accumulated anew; more likely to experience transition 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 (early 1990s): 63% of respondents aged 25 and under expressed positive attitudes toward private property and market economy, vs. 19% of those 60 and over
  • Both generations are discovering, however, that primitive capitalism is more compatible with chauvinism and fascism than with liberal democracy — the danger of a “national Bolshevik state” was real by Weimar standards

Social-psychological theories and the communist self

Social identity theory and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Homo Sovieticus represents a collective identity priority over individual identity
  • The communist system created an imposed social categorisation — individuals found “life’s purpose and meaning in the collective”
  • Ingroup/outgroup dynamics: strong “we” (family, close friends) vs. “them” (the state)
  • Sociological void: identity formed in opposition to the state rather than with it
  • Post-transition identity crisis: former social categories lost meaning and prestige
  • Status anxiety: homo post-Sovieticus experienced downward social mobility and loss of valued group membership
  • Link to Kon: the collapse of “Soviet” as a civic identity, and the flight to ethnic identity as “last resort”, are classic social identity dynamics — identity threat → social creativity (redefining the comparison group) or social competition (nationalist mobilisation)

System justification theory and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Despite the oppressive nature of communism, many rationalised and justified aspects of the system — homo Sovieticus as “client of communism” rather than true believer
  • Post-communist nostalgia reflects system justification processes:
    • Security, stability, and egalitarianism as retrospective justifications for the system
  • Post-communist dissonance: difficulty reconciling past system justification with new democratic values
  • Link to Kon: the privileges system was genuinely valued — people simultaneously protested against the privileges of higher strata while deeply convinced that their own privileges were right and just; system justification operated at each tier of the hierarchy

Social learning theory and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Communist systems created specific adaptive behaviours learned through observation and reinforcement:
    • Learned strategies: public compliance, navigating bureaucracy through informal networks, operating in dual realities
    • Workers were there to complete the plan without creative aspiration — learned passivity
    • Intergenerational transmission: behaviours and attitudes passed to new generations
    • Limited models of democratic participation — few examples to observe and imitate
  • Link to Kon: the reorientation of personal interests away from work and public affairs into private worlds of intellectual interests, music, or drinking was itself a learned adaptive strategy — a way of managing the impossible demands of doublethink

Collective memory theory and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • The concept of homo Sovieticus itself functions as a collective memory framework: used to explain transition failures and justify policies
  • Generational memory differences: a generation brought up in a new reality vs. those with direct experience of communism
  • Link to Kon: the “adolescent syndrome” of postcommunist politics 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; collective memory is inverted but the cognitive structure is the same
  • Doublethink made communist-era collective memory inherently unstable: official and unofficial versions of the past coexisted, and their sudden reversal in 1989 left citizens without reliable narrative anchors

Social capital theory and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Communist regimes systematically altered social capital structures
  • The “sociological void” (Nowak) directly reflects depleted bridging social capital
  • Homo Sovieticus exhibits strong bonding capital but weak bridging and linking capital:
    • Insufficient civil activity and lack of interest in public affairs
    • Limited trust beyond immediate social circle
    • “Anything which may be good for me and my immediate familial and social circle is positive” — bonding logic applied to the exclusion of all else
  • Link to Kon: the privileges system itself 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 and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Living under communism required managing contradictions between rhetoric and reality
  • Transition created massive dissonance between previous beliefs/behaviours and new context
  • Dissonance reduction strategies:
    • Selective memory: romanticising certain aspects of communist life while forgetting others
    • Reframing the past: justifying previous behaviours in light of new values
    • Rationalising continued reliance on corrupt and informal practices
  • Link to Kon: doublethink is, at its core, 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 and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • 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:
    • Public compliance culture: the culture of “quasi-activity” and performative participation
    • Fear of standing out: to stand out would ruin the “plan” and not serve one’s interests
    • Sophisticated awareness of social monitoring
  • Link to Kon: Kon describes the Soviet “monolithic personality” ideal — strong man, made from one block, uncompromising, without doubts or internal contradictions — as militarist and psychologically dysfunctional; when confronted with unexpected social change, this personality type either suffers a neurotic breakdown or opposes any innovation at all costs

Learned helplessness and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Homo Sovieticus is incapable of taking responsibility for life decisions — a legacy of uncontrollable outcomes creating passivity:
    • External attribution: tendency to blame others for own misfortunes
    • Fatalistic outlook: inability to make long-term plans or overcome barriers
    • Dependency on authority: continually looking for some force to define the framework for activity
  • Link to Kon: 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; the Communist Party, like an authoritarian mother, knew your “rational needs” better than you did yourself; now, after transition, “nobody seems to care — people feel more uncomfortable, vulnerable, and helpless than ever before”

Just world theory and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Communist ideology promoted a narrative of ultimate historical justice for the working class
  • Transition outcomes challenged belief in a just world
  • Egalitarianism was central to homo Sovieticus’s sense of justice and dignity:
    • Perception of injustice when former outsiders experienced upward mobility
    • Demand for state intervention to regulate inequalities
    • Seeing foes in everyone who has achieved higher social status
  • Link to Kon: Kon analyses envy as rooted in the belief that one person’s gain is inevitably somebody else’s loss — 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 and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Transition created powerful relative deprivation experiences:
    • Changed reference groups: comparison to Western standards created deprivation
    • Status loss: downward social mobility for those whose communist-era skills became obsolete
    • Resented outgroup advancement: upward social mobility of those previously marginalised
    • Temporal comparison: current situation compared unfavourably to communist-era security
  • Link to Kon: Kon explicitly analyses this — the acute sense of identity loss is “tinged with nostalgia for lost privileges”; the transition dynamic in which former insiders (the proletarians) become outsiders while former outsiders (dissidents, Western-oriented intellectuals) become prestigious is a classic fraternal deprivation scenario; the result is resentment, not reform

Terror management theory and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Communist collapse created profound existential crises beyond economic challenges
  • Loss of the predictable world order and invalidation of the communist worldview triggered anxiety-buffering responses
  • Link to Kon: Kon’s analysis of traditionalism as a flight to an idealised, imaginary past, and of nationalism as an identity of “last resort”, are classic TMT responses to worldview invalidation; when the communist meaning system collapsed, citizens invested more heavily in alternative worldviews offering symbolic continuity — national identity, religious revival, nostalgic reconstruction of the Soviet past; the danger Kon identifies (national Bolshevism, fascism) is precisely what TMT predicts when mortality salience meets a population without a stable secular meaning system

Contact theory and homo (post-) Sovieticus

  • Communist era intergroup contact was characterised by state management:
    • Limited authentic contact: relationships restricted to immediate social circle
    • Alien and hostile outgroups: notions of the common good disappear
    • New pluralism experienced as alienating and disconcerting rather than enriching
  • Link to Kon: Kon analyses how ethnic/national identity functions as a negatively defined identity — nashi (“ours”) vs. ne-nashi (“not ours”) — 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; post-transition pluralism felt threatening precisely because the capacity to engage with genuine diversity had been structurally suppressed