Abstract
The new Soviet regime inherited a large, heterogeneous and backward Empire from its Tsarist predecessors. It also inherited a distinctive and deeply-rooted pattern of orientations to government, which we have termed the ‘traditional Russian’ political culture. It may be helpful at this point briefly to recall some of its essential features. Representative institutions, as we have noted, were weakly articulated and ineffective; levels of popular participation were low; and governing style was centralised, bureaucratic and authoritarian. Popular political attachments, in consequence, were highly personalised; and political knowledge and experience, outside an extremely limited circle, was virtually non-existent. The scope of government was unusually broad: it extended not only to those spheres of life in which other governments of the time were active, such as public order and taxation, but also into economic entrepreneurship and control, religion and morals, and the detailed administration of justice. It was based, finally, upon a society of a highly ‘traditional’, gemeinschaft character, in which there was a strong tradition of group solidarity together with its converse, a suspicion of outsiders; a greater degree of reliance upon face-to-face relations than upon anonymous procedures;
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Notes and Reference
N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (London, 1969 ) p. 67.
As noted by E. H. Carr, ‘The Bolshevik Utopia’, in The October Revolution: Before and After (New York, 1969 );
and by Roger Pethybridge, ‘Social visions 1917–21’, in The Social Prelude to Stalinism (London, 1974 ).
Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin (London, 1975) p. 322.
Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution (London, 1972) p. 202.
Ya. M. Shafir, Gazeta i Derevnya (Moscow, 1923) pp. 49–50 and 3–4.
Ya. Yakovlev, Nasha Derevnya (Moscow, 1925) p. 125.
M. Ya. Fenomenov, Sovremennaya Derevnya (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925) pp. 39 and 95–6; Yakovlev, Nasha Derevnya p. 125.
S. A. Andronov et al. (eds), KPSS vo glave Kul’turnoi Revolyutsii v SSSR (Moscow, 1972 ) p. 40.
Robert Conquest (ed.), Religion in the USSR (London, 1968) pp. 13–25;
David E. Powell, Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union (London, 1975) pp. 24–6.
The standard scholarly study of this process is John S. Curtiss, The Russian Church and the Soviet State 1917–50 (Boston, 1953 ).
V. I. Pogudin, Ideologicheskaya Deyatel’nost’-Moguchee Orudie Kommunisticheskoi Partii v Bor’be za Sotsializm (Moscow, 1975 ) p. 25;
Mark W. Hopkins, Mass Media in the Soviet Union (New York, 1970) Chapters 2 and 7.
N. A. Petrovichev et al. (eds), Partiinoe Stroitel’stvo. Uchebnoe Posobie fourth ed. (Moscow, 1976) pp. 301–3; Pravda (13 September 1977) pp. 2–3.
See, for instance, N. S. Afonin (ed.), Politicheskaya Agitatsiya v Trudovom Kollektive (Saransk, 1976) p. 29; Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniya no. 4 (1976) p. 81.
See A. L. Unger, ‘Politinformator or agitator: a decision blocked’, Problems of Communism, XIX (September-October, 1970 ) 30–43.
N. I. Mekhontsev et al., Lektor i Slushatel (Moscow, 1975 ) pp. 16–18.
L. I. Brezhnev, Leninskim Kursom, vol. 5 (Moscow, 1976 ) p. 545.
O. E. Kutafin, Postoyannye Komissii Mestnykh Sovetov po delam Molodezhi (Moscow, 1974 ) pp. 4–14;
E. Vasil’ev (ed.), Formirovanie Novogo Cheloveka (Moscow, 1974) pp. 61–77; Ezhegodnik Bol’shoi Sovetskoi Entsiklopedii 1977 pp. 22–5.
For a good general discussion of these points, see Nigel Grant, Soviet Education third ed. (Harmondsworth, 1972);
and Urie Bronfenbrenner, Two World of Childhood: US and USSR (London, 1971).
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© 1979 Stephen White
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White, S. (1979). The Making of New Soviet Man. In: Political Culture and Soviet Politics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16138-6_4
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