A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can be achieved “by the elimination of private property and its replacement by a community of property.” The happiness of all is expected as one of the end results of organizing society according to the communist principles.
The Soviet Union was one the countries where a Marxist revolution succeeded. However, the new organization of society did not bring the promised results. The new order resulted in what Gustaw Herling-Grudziński called “socialism without society” (Dziennik pisany nocą, vol. 1).
As Herling-Grudziński notices, the main object of the attack of Sovietism was social life, social consciousness, social bonds, etc. Similar observations were made by Alexander Zinoviev in The Radiant Future. Soviet socialism destroyed the products of the old civilization, which it depicted as “exploitative institutions of a class society.” This in fact could have been expected since Marxism promised a new kind of society built on “the principles of collective life.”
In reality, it was not so much the collective but state authorities which became the sole constructor of the new society. The so-called soviets (councils) had power only on paper, and their real role was to rubber stamp the decisions made by the Central Committee of the Communist Party which ran the Soviet state. Its power grew proportionally to the decline of the society, and this was not accidental but rather intentional.
One of the main tools in the hands of the state was education. Again, it was something already promised in The Communist Manifesto and carefully implemented in the Soviet state. It was to be a blessing of free and solid schooling, but became a powerful weapon used by the state in its fight against society.
The state schools not only distilled Marxist ideology into students’ minds but also undermined such basic social bonds as friendship and family. Zinoviev describes an incident, which was not unique in the Soviet reality, when students were forced to “denounce as an enemy of the people and a traitor” their school friend even though they knew that the accusations were false. “So they are taught cynicism, hypocrisy, and a propensity to betray their friends, rather than high civic qualities,” he concludes.
Stanisław Cat-Mackiewicz recounts that schools often collected surveys from children with the purpose to spy on their parents (Myśl o obcęgach). Well-known is the story of Pavlik Morozov, who at the age of thirteen denounced his father. Later he was killed by his relatives and so became a hero and a martyr of the Soviet Union. Even though some historians question the truth of the story, Pavlik Morozov was highly praised by the state and presented as an example to follow. Even if the story was untrue, it had symbolic value.
Cat-Mackiewicz also draws attention to the common attitude to the older generation which was full of pitiful disregard: “We say: ‘He does not understand; he is still a child.’ In Bolshevia they say: ‘He is an old man; he cannot comprehend it.’” Old people represented the old civilization with its so-called bourgeois institutions, the arch enemy of the Soviets. They were like the old generation of the Hebrews in the desert which had to die so that their children could inherit the Promised Land.
The system was set up in such a way that even family meals became rare occasions. “Family life, family meals disappear. The children eat at school, the parents in factories,” wrote Cat-Mackiewicz. What used to be a family affair, became another state-controlled event experienced in the collective, because the creation of the human collective was the ultimate goal of the Soviet ideology. “Away with individual life; away with any comfort, order, and tranquility of domestic life. They can lead to the bourgeois perversion.” That is how Cat-Mackiewicz describes the Soviet attitude to traditional family life.
Zinoviev states that also economic relations did the same also undermined the family and other social bonds. “In Soviet conditions, friendship yields to mutual benefit and the kind of typically Soviet complicity, something very petty and coarse. Something slimy.” People had to compete with others and constantly fight for privileges and benefits distributed by the state. But also those who wanted only to survive had to function within the system and so to wrestle with other people even for the basic products. Zinoviev continues, “There is a struggle between men and between groups of men. It does not derive from the states of mind of the individual but from the very fact of the existence together of large masses of people in the conditions of the Soviet Union. . . . The individual merely reflects the conditions of Soviet life. And in the mass he conforms to them. As for those who do not conform, they perish.”
Terror was the other tool in the hands of the state. Nadezhda Mandelstam was the wife of Osip Mandelstam, a renowned Russian poet, who was arrested for writing a sarcastic poem about Joseph Stalin and eventually died in one of the Soviet camps. In Hope against Hope, she describes how the Soviet terror lead to “a loss of mutual trust” which was “the first sign of the atomization of society in dictatorships of our type, and this was just what our leaders wanted.” She points especially to the Soviet system of mass surveillance which produced a huge number of informants for whom denunciation was just another way to obtain certain privileges or benefits. “After 1937 people stopped meeting each other altogether, and the secret police were thus well on the way to achieving their ultimate objective. Apart from assuring a constant flow of information, they had isolated people from each other and had drawn large numbers of them into their web, calling them in from time to time, harassing them and swearing them to secrecy by means of signed statements. All such people lived in eternal fear of being found out and were consequently just as interested as regular members of the police in the stability of the existing order and the inviolability of the archives where their names were on file.”
The uprooting of the old social bonds and customs did not lead to a new radiant future, but rather to a social collapse and a destruction of morality. As noted by Herling-Grudziński, both the rulers and the ruled quickly lost any faith in communism, yet “they were forced to pretend that they still believed in communism and to act accordingly.” This meant that the attitude that penetrated the collective life was hypocrisy. Collective life nothing but a pretense slowly gnawing the fabric of life both individual and social.
Zinoviev laments that “in the past, Russian man was noted for his kindness. But now no trace of any such kindness persists. The dominant attitude of Russian man towards his fellows is now made up of malice, intolerance, envy, schadenfreude, hatred and so on. I am not talking about exceptional situations when people are for a time ripped out of the fabric of their social existence, but daily situations of ordinary life.” The psychology of “Soviet man” is shaped by the Soviet everyday reality. “Our norm comprises the most repugnant qualities of human nature without which it is impossible to survive in Soviet social conditions.” As men adapt to biological conditions, so men adapt also to political conditions in order to survive. In the end, all that is left, are “fear, malicious pleasure, a desire to keep yourself in favor.”
According to Alberto Moravia (Impressioni e riflessioni; quoted by Herling-Grudziński), all the manifestations of private and individual life had to be opposed and limited because they constituted a counterweight to the state, and the state needed as much power as possible to fulfill its promises of creating a new classless collective of happy people. Herling-Grudziński cites Albert Camus claim that for the Soviets “man became just a raw material of history which can be shaped in any desired way,” and, he adds, that it was precisely this assumption about “plasticity of human nature,” which inevitably lead to the omnipotent supremacy of the Soviet state. It was the state where Kafkaesque nightmares became reality. The enormous disproportion between the power of the state on the one hand and the weakness of individuals and social institutions led to numbing “loneliness of men in the face of higher powers, of inaccessible and impenetrable authorities” (Herling-Grudziński).
Mandelstam concludes that the collapse of social life and individual liberty was the terrible price which people had to pay for the Bolshevik’s “attempts to build the perfect society.” Zinoviev adds that it is the price which people have to pay whenever a state elevates ideology over reality and tries to mold reality according to ideology, regardless of cost and empirical data. Of course, continues Zinoviev, the Soviet state could not exist without its Marxist ideology since it was a creature of this ideology and it fed on this ideology. The Marxist ideology was the Soviet religion which did not have to be proved to be true. One could say, that the putrefaction of the Soviet society and the eventual collapse of the Soviet state proved its ideology to be false.
The results of the social experiments of the Soviet state led Ludwig von Mises to a sobering observation: “To seek to organize society is just as crazy as it would be to tear a living plant to bits in order to make a new one out of the dead parts. An organization of mankind can only be conceived after the living social organism has been killed. The collectivist movements are therefore fore-doomed to failure. It may be possible to create an organization embracing all mankind. But this would always be merely an organization, side by side with which social life would continue. It could be altered and destroyed by the forces of social life, and it certainly would be destroyed from the moment it tried to rebel against these forces. To make Collectivism a fact one must first kill all social life, then build up the collectivist state. The Bolshevists are thus quite logical in wishing to dissolve all traditional social ties, to destroy the social edifice built up through countless centuries, in order to erect a new structure on the ruins. Only they overlook the fact that isolated individuals, between whom no kind of social relations exist, can no longer be organized” (Socialism).
Bogumil Jarmulak, a Pastor in Poznan, Poland, is Presiding Minister of Anselm Presbytery in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.