From Stalinist Terror to Collective Constraints. 'Homo Sovieticus' and the 'Soviet People' after Stalin

Thomas M. Bohn, Rayk Einax, Michel Abeßer

"A flock of migrating birds was flying south, and a small but proud bird said: 'I want to fly to the sun'. He flew higher and higher up, but soon burnt his wings and was thrown down to the bottom of a deep ravine. Therefore, let us raise a toast: regardless of how high we may fly, let none of us ever leave the collective."

In Leonid Gaidai's 1967 comedy 'The Caucasian Prisoner', a young folk-lorist named Shurik travels the Caucasus in order to explore the local cul-ture and customs. The success of his scientific endeavour, is however lim-ited to learning various drinking toasts. One toast, playing on the myth of Icarus, became commonplace during the Brezhnev era, and was a part of many joyful get-togethers. Playfully ironic in the film, the toast was em-bedded in a broader social context, which explains its popularity. Central to its meaning is the satirisation of the late Soviet social contract, which has been described as a "little deal" (Millar) or an "organized mass consensus" (Zaslavsky). In this regard, 'de-Stalinisation' meant the replacement of physical terror with collective social constraints.

While this Russian Icarus refers to the protective function of the col-lective, the Polish-American writer and sociologist Jerzy Kosinski ad-dresses another dimension. His novel 'The Painted Bird' (1965) depicts the four-year odyssey of a small boy during the Second World War and his encounter with Lekh, one of the locals in the disputed border area between Poland and the Belorussian Soviet Republic. Lekh, an unconventional loner and outsider yearning for a free and unrestrained life, is blinded by his love for the 'stupid Ludmila' who lives in the woods and offers her sexual services to the men of the village for free. On one occasion when Ludmila disappears for a longer time, Lekh, driven to despair, sacrifices the most valuable thing he owns-his caged birds. One by one, he releases them back into the wild. Lekh paints them and watches on as they got torn to pieces by their fellow birds. The intended moral of the story becomes clear when put into the context of the author's own biography. Following a study trip to the Soviet Union, Kosinski published a sociological study in 1962, entitled 'No Third Path'.

In this text he argues that the physical terror which had been employed against the individual under Stalin had been replaced from 1953 onwards by collective constraints. In his book, Kosinski reserved a prominent place for Warwara, an enthusiast for literature, who was banned from the journalistic profession after deviating from the party line on cultural questions. Warwara explains her fate by recounting a childhood experience with that very same painted bird: a group of youngsters painted a sparrow red, in the expectation that he would be admired by his fellow sparrows. But the grey swarm instinctively attacked and killed him. Here, the painting of a being striving for freedom symbolises a form of individualism which is considered inopportune-the innocent bird is transformed into an outsider. For the perpetrators, the killing is justified by distrust and a hatred for deviation from the norm. The 'Painted Bird' can thus be read as a dramatic parable for the Sovietisation of living conditions. The isolation of deviants and the criminalisation of non-conformism replaced the mass-violence of the Stalin era.

While the toast from the 'Caucasian Prisoner' refers to the protective aspect of the collective, the metaphor of the 'Painted Bird' portrays the martial enforcement of conformism within the collective. Only by exam-ining both of these dimensions together can we arrive at a better under-standing of the complex relationship between the individual and the col-lective under 'Real Socialism'. For Khrushchev the collective constituted a means o