by Stefano Caprio

Nostalgia for the Soviet simplification of the world, even shared by the opposition, is pervasive while ‘making America great again’ resonates in the Caucasus or Siberia as much as the infantilized world of Massachusetts.

 

After the elections in Georgia, Moldova and Uzbekistan in recent days, the outcome of the American grand finale of the electoral process is awaited, which this year has touched almost all regions and major nations, against a backdrop of war tensions that make citizens' choices contributions in one sense or another to the great “global electoral war”, side by side in hybrid mode with the soldiers on the ground or the victims under the rubble, along with the drones and missiles that swoop down from the sky on cities and also devastate homes, schools and hospitals.

The choice of the US president is particularly significant for the possible prospects of war or peace in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and many other regions of the world. It remains to be understood how the countries concerned will react, especially those in the Russian world dramatically split between East and West.

In the past few days, a debate has been held between the two candidates in the run-off for the presidency of Moldova, who answered ten agreed questions without a moderator, failing to find one that could be considered acceptable and neutral for both contenders, the outgoing president Maia Sandu and the pro-Russian Aleksandr Stoianoglo, the latter from Gagauzia who would like to reunite with Moscow before even Chişinău, or even Bucharest and Brussels.

The outcome of the confrontation seems to have given a slight preference to Sandu, who tried to illustrate the results of the efforts made in the past five years to improve the lives of Moldovan citizens. Stoianoglo, however, replied rather generically that Moldova needs more, and both avoided explicitly stating their international references, in order to show themselves concerned only with the good of their citizens.

However, one revealing element clearly indicated the substantial difference between the two: the Romanian language with which they discussed, the country's official language, which Sandu masters to perfection, while Stoianoglo expresses himself with a clear Russian pronunciation in the background.

This detail immediately provoked a reaction in all the Moldovan citizens watching the debate, recalling times gone by. Stoianoglo, a 57-year-old politician, magistrate and former attorney-general of Moldova from 2019 to 2021, is actually a character resurfacing from the last century, a typical sovok, as the so-called homo sovieticus is defined, according to the abbreviation of the Russian term sovetskij.

And this is the reality that is shaping up today, the effect of wars and elections: a return to Soviet times and the universal cold war, beyond victories or defeats in the field or at the ballot box.

According to a definition in the 1993 London New Statesman magazine, the sovok is ‘a man who loves birch trees, and believes they only grow in Russia, likes to forbid anything, says no to everything, and works in offices with leatherette-clad doors’.

This sounds like a description of what is happening between Moscow, Tbilisi, Chisinau and Tashkent, beyond the individual personalities of the protagonists of the political disputes.

One would have thought that thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, these attitudes of closure and estrangement from the rest of the world would no longer exist, but instead we are still tied to those times, when there were no smartphones or even computers, not to mention internet connections, and the world was fixed in the ‘traditional values’ of the populations arrayed against each other.

From Putin to Stoianoglo, via the Georgian Ivanišvili, the Uzbek Mirziyoyev and many others, today those who prefer to conceive of the world as a confrontation between ‘us and them’ predominate, and this also applies to a large extent to the highly civilised Western countries from Europe to America.

In Russia, sovok actually means the dustpan for collecting sand or rubbish, and is therefore a derogatory term in use since the 1950s after the death of Stalin, when the sovki (plural of sovok) were contrasted with the stiljagi, those who assumed the Western ‘style’, wore jeans and loved rock music and jazz, unlike the Soviets who were framed in the bleak ways of life imposed by Stalin's totalitarianism.

It is no coincidence that some Russian politicians today claim that the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the fashion for jeans, which ‘squeeze the legs and make men unattractive to women’, as Duma Speaker Vjačeslav Volodin puts it. Hence the definition of homo sovieticus among sociologists, which corresponds negatively to the Western boomer.

The Soviet anthropological type was in fact an explicit project from the time of the Bolshevik revolution, when the People's Commissar for ‘enlightenment’ (prosveščenie, actually Minister of Culture) Anatolij Lunačarskij proposed to ‘mould’ young children, ‘bend’ adolescents and ‘tear apart’ young people to obtain reliable new generations, as seems to be one of the main concerns of Russian educational policy today, which dresses kindergarten children in military uniforms, complete with fake grenades on their belts.

Soviet ideologue Nikolai Bukharin proposed to ‘turn people into living machines’, and the idea of ‘social engineering’ was propagated through literature, film and mass demonstrations, such as those in Russia over the next few days for the great holiday of 4 November, People's Unity Day, which commemorates the victory over the Poles and the West at the beginning of the 17th century, and also recalls the feast of the October Revolution on 7 November, the beginning of the winter period.

The Soviet new man truly appeared in the 20th century, and it seems that he has never disappeared, not only in the personalities of the over-70s such as President Putin and Patriarch Kirill, but also in later generations and neighbouring countries, despite the radical changes in society in recent decades at all latitudes.

There is nostalgia for the Soviet simplification of the world, which was welcome even in the opposing camp, and ‘make America great again’ resonates as much as a reminder of the infantile world of Massachusetts as that of the Caucasus or Siberia.

The twentieth-century man, endlessly re-proposed in digital algorithms, is not an intrepid fighter for the happiness of all mankind as he is described, but a hypocritical opportunist and liar, who is incapable of living independently and entrenches himself behind stale ideological and pseudo-religious proclamations, who is afraid of responsibility and contamination with the different; this is the sovok.

In Russia, this regression back to Stalinist times is accentuated by the crisis in social services and the distribution of basic necessities, which are increasingly lacking and increasingly expensive, to the point of the almost complete disappearance of butter from shops and supermarkets, where it is kept under lock and key to prevent theft.

In Soviet Russia, butter and olive oil were replaced by shoddy and foul-smelling peanut or seed oils, which gave the cuisine an unmistakable character that could only be assimilated with copious flows of vodka, also of poor quality.

The crudeness of the forms of communication of that time is reproduced quite blatantly today by the style of President Vladimir Putin, the classic Soviet gopnik (‘street boy’) who solves world problems by covering all opponents with insults, and using his hands instead of opening any kind of dialogue, which is after all the typical form of communication of modern social networks.

One of the most prominent sociologists of the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, Jurij Levada, supported the permanence of Soviet-style social anthropology even after the end of the totalitarian regime, and in 2004, shortly before his death, he founded the Levada-Centr, the most important analytical and population survey centre in Russia.

In 2016, its members had published research showing that young people who had lived during the last periods of the Soviet regime, the 50-year-olds of today, are not very different from the previous generations of parents and grandparents.

The Soviet Union has disappeared, but the Soviet man has remained, taking his revenge today in the East and the West, in the universal war of empires old and new, looking to the past rather than the future.

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