The Slave Soul of Russia

Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780814776605
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Russie

Why, asks Daniel Rancour-Laferriere in this controversial book, has Russia been a country of suffering? Russian history, religion, folklore, and literature are rife with suffering. The plight of Anna Karenina, the submissiveness of serfs in the 16th and 17th centuries, ancient religious tracts emphasizing humility as the mother of virtues, the trauma of the Bolshevik revolution, the current economic upheavals wracking the country-- these are only a few of the symptoms of what The Slave Soul of Russia identifies as a veritable cult of suffering that has been centuries in the making.

Bringing to light dozens of examples of self-defeating activities and behaviors that have become an integral component of the Russian psyche, Rancour-Laferriere convincingly illustrates how masochism has become a fact of everyday life in Russia. Until now, much attention has been paid to the psychology of Russia's leaders and their impact on the country's condition. Here, for the first time, is a compelling portrait of the Russian people's psychology.

ONE
Introduction

Russian history offers numerous examples of the exploitation and debasement of human beings.

After the Mongols invaded in the mid-thirteenth century they extracted obeisance, financial tribute, and military assistance from the princes of Rus’ lands for at least the next century and a half. As the Mongols lost their grip, the Muscovite state expanded, its tsar enforcing unrestricted despotic rule over all citizens.

By degrees, starting roughly at the end of the fifteenth century, Russian peasants became more and more obliged to their landowning masters. From the late sixteenth century, they—that is, the vast majority of the rural Russian population—were bound from cradle to grave as serfs to their masters (or to the state directly), and they were not released from this form of involuntary servitude until 1861.

The Russian Orthodox Church, since the time of Peter the Great, was under the thumb of tsarist authority, and after the 1917 Revolution has endured periods of anti-religious persecution.

Russian women of all historical periods have been victimized by their men, whether they were being beaten for disobedience in accordance with the principles of the sixteenth-century Domostroi, or were holding down full-time jobs while at the same time being responsible for the bulk of household labor in the twentieth-century Soviet state.

For nearly three decades during the Soviet period of Russian history, forced labor was a way of life for the millions of inhabitants of the so-called gulag or system of concentration camps. Both Western and Soviet historians have acknowledged that this was outright slavery.¹ With the onset of collectivization in the 1930s an aspect of serfdom was reinstated, for a large portion of the Soviet population was restricted by means of an internal passport system to living in designated agricultural areas.

To this day ordinary Russian citizens, who often have difficulty obtaining the minimum goods and services necessary for subsistence, contribute to the production of certain goods and services which only an elite class, formerly known as the nomenklatura, has access to.

These facts are very diverse, and they are of course somewhat oversimplified. But a general picture emerges which is accurate—and appalling. The sheer quantity and diversity of suffering that has gone on in Russia, and still goes on there, boggles the Western mind.

The American psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler treated a class of masochistic neurotics whom he termed “injustice collectors.” I know of no nation which has collected more injustices for itself than has Russia.

What are the causes of the great suffering that goes on in Russia? Whence the Russian “need to suffer” (“potrebnost’ stradaniia”)²—as Dostoevsky put it? Who is to blame?—to ask the perennial Russian question.

Russia is customarily characterized as an “authoritarian” or “patriarchal” culture. This is no doubt true, but the very terms tend to attract blame toward those exercising “authority,” and draw analytic attention away from those over whom “authority” is exercised, that is, away from those who do the suffering and who might possibly be complicitous in the “authoritarianism.”

In the political and historical spheres, for example, this means (or has meant in the past) undue attention to leaders and inadequate attention to the servile psychology of subordinates and ordinary Russians. I am inclined to agree with Nicholas Vakar: “historians who have written that the tyranny of the Tsars conditioned the nation to accept the tyranny of the Communists have missed the fact that Russian habits of obedience have been the cause, not the result, of political autocracy.”³

In the gender sphere exaggerated attention to authority has meant a certain kind of male chauvinism, even among those feminist critics of Russia who are so busy blaming the pampered Russian male ego for female oppression that the female psyche goes unexamined.

Analogous statements could be made for other spheres of Russian life. Little effort has been made to understand just how the Russians manage to consistently get themselves into situations where they appear to have no choice but to submit and to suffer. How did Russians come to acquire their well-deserved epithet of “long-suffering people” (“terpelivyi narod”)? Or, to utilize an alliterative epithet recently invented by poet Andrei Voznesenskii, why has Russia always been a “country of suffering” (“strana stradan’ia”)?⁴

The Soviet prose writer Vasilii Grossman proffered his controversial notion that the “Russian soul” is by nature a “slave” (“raba”).⁵ This is a metaphorical characterization of the phenomenon in question, not an explanation of it. But, frankly, literary artists have exerted more effort in this area than anyone else, and their explorations have been very fruitful. Grossman is hardly alone. All of Dostoevsky’s major novels, for example, offer insights into masochism. The poetry of Blok is filled with suffering welcomed by the sufferer. Much of Solzhenitsyn’s writing glorifies suffering behind prison walls. And so on.

The literary imagery of Russian self-abnegation can be wide-ranging, even flamboyant. It is hardly falsifiable (in the Popperian sense), but at the same time it is highly interesting. Take, for example, the Russian Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov, who in his essay on “the Russian Idea,” declares: “our most attractive, most noble aspirations are imprinted with a thirst for self-destruction [zapechatleny zhazhdoiu samor-azrusheniia].” “We” (Russians), Ivanov says, act as though other peoples are terribly stingy, and we try to prove ourselves a selfless people, a “self-immolating people,” a “butterfly-Psyche” longing for a fiery death.⁶ Ivanov uses the imagery of downward movement in an attempt to convey what he means. Russians have a “love for descent,” they are inclined to voluntary subordination of the will to another (as in the religious practice of washing another’s feet, or in the sectarian’s utterance “You are greater than I”). The “law of descent” (“zakon niskhozh-deniia”) is the essence of “Russian soul,” and the lowly, humiliated, but enlightening Christ is the perfect model for this Russian tendency. It is as if the words “imitation of Christ” (“upodoblenie Khristu”) were inscribed on the forehead of the Russian nation. It is as if Russians were born Christian: “Hic populus natus est christianus.”⁷

These very heterogeneous images explain nothing, but they offer a treasure trove to the scholar seeking explanations. They make it easier to go about asking blunt questions: How do Russians endure their pain? What mental processes permit them to go on living even as they perceive themselves as victims? Might there be a widespread mentality which encourages their victimization? Do they have some secret need or wish to suffer, or even to destroy themselves? If so, what is the ontogenetic background to the wish in individual Russians? Why is the wish so difficult to dislodge?

These are psychological questions, and they have not been answered in any substantive fashion in the past. They are of particular interest to the psychoanalytically oriented scholar. Of course other scholars, too, have taken an indirect interest. Considerable historical, philosophical, political, anthropological, and sociological research has been devoted to patterns of exploitation, subjugation, and even self-destruction in Russia. But psychological, and in particular, psychoanalytic study has been very scarce.

What I am proposing to do here is to construct a psychoanalytic model of the mentality behind both slavish behavior and its cultural signification in Russia.

The social practices and cultural phenomena in question exist at the level of the collective, not at the level of the individual. That is, they are sociocultural facts. But such facts depend on the actions of individuals, and individuals have feelings about what they are doing collectively. An individual who regularly participates in a social practice has a persisting attitude toward, a mentality concerning what he or she does (or signifies doing, or fantasizes doing) in his or her social environment. That mentality, or aspects of it, may be shared with other members of the collective. To the extent that sharing takes place, or to the extent that the shared mentality contributes to social developments and signifying practices, the mentality deserves the attention of historians, literary scholars, linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others who study human collectives.

But a mentality is first and foremost an object for psychological study. It persists in the face of historical and environmental change. For example, when Alexander II liberated the peasants from serfdom, the psychology of peasants did not just suddenly change—as Merezhkovskii understood when he said that “the liberty of slaves is a slavish liberty, little better than voluntary slavery.”⁸ Similarly, when Soviet power disintegrated, Russians did not suddenly become different people.⁹

What I am going to call a slave mentality¹⁰ is something that psychologists, and in particular psychoanalysts, will be interested in. If I go so far as to speak of the Russian slave mentality, then I mean for historians, literary scholars, anthropologists, Slavists generally, and culture theorists to take an interest as well. But the primary focus of this study is nonetheless psychoanalytic.

One thing should be emphasized: in no way is the term “Russian slave mentality” (or the more poetic “slave soul of Russia,” or the more clinical “Russian masochism”) meant to imply that only Russians have such a mentality, or that all Russians have such a mentality, or even that the slave mentality is the most important psychological feature shared by significant numbers of Russians.

But there is a consensus among highly diverse observers—native Russians as well as foreign visitors, impressionistic literary artists as well as rigorous scholars, historians as well as commentators on the current scene—that there exists a widespread attitude of submissiveness toward authority and a tendency toward self-defeating and self-destructive behavior in individual Russians. Russians do not merely suffer. They have concocted for themselves a veritable cult of suffering.

It may be objected that masochistic attitudes and behaviors have simply been unavoidable in Russia, for reasons quite outside of the individual’s control, and that it is therefore unfair to tag them with the derogatory-sounding epithets “slavish” or “masochistic.” Why blame the victim? Why require heroism from an individual in an unbearable situation?

This objection is certainly valid when a victimized individual plays no role whatsoever in his or her victimization. An upstanding Soviet citizen who is suddenly and unexpectedly arrested by the KGB, for example, is not necessarily a masochist. But even a social system which is oriented toward victimizing individuals requires a certain amount of cooperation from those individuals, and to the extent that individuals do cooperate they are behaving more or less masochistically. Russian dissident V. Gorskii observed: “The rejection of freedom does not leave man unpunished. It turns him into a slave of necessity.”¹¹ But (and I am sure Gorskii would agree) a slave of necessity is no less a slave. In other words, the easiest or most adaptive solution in a specific situation may well be the masochistic one, but that does not make it any less masochistic. Medical researcher V. D. Topolianskii emphasizes this important point in a recent interview with Literaturnaia gazeta:

In the context of a totalitarian government the nontraditional choice requires courage. Here an essential question arises: what do you call those people who attempted to fight the system? Were they people who behaved self-destructively (after all they knew they were in danger of being repressed), or were they persons who were trying to preserve their integrity amidst the general collapse? Official [Soviet] psychiatry insisted that the actions of Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Gri-gorenko fell under the category of paranoia insofar as these individuals were characterized by an inability to make compromises. But I am strongly inclined, on the contrary, to label those who opted for compromise as the ones with self-destructive behavior. For, in a situation of unfreedom, compromise is always a betrayal of the self [predatel’stvo samogo sebia]. It has always seemed to me that a readiness to compromise and, consequently, to carry out assignments handed down from on high, is itself self-destruction [samorazrushenie].¹²

This is an essentially psychoanalytic insight. If in place of every occurrence of the word “self-destructive” we read instead “masochistic,” then the passage would sound like a straightforward psychoanalytic interpretation of individuals acquiescing to the authoritarianism of the Soviet regime.

Masochism, like the heroic resistance Topolianskii speaks of, is an individual matter. Masochism is not a phenomenon of the faceless masses—although the self-destructive behavior of groups is itself an observable phenomenon in Russia, and a legitimate object of sociological study. Russians may sometimes seem to resemble a herd of lemmings headed into the sea, but that does not make the individual lemming any less interesting.

Psychoanalysis is, quite literally, analysis of the individual psyche. The collective is something else again. Many Russians feel that the collective is the most important thing in the world, but in psychoanalysis the individual reigns supreme. This is certainly one reason why there was a long history of hostility to psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia.

In any case, psychoanalysis understands that the individual who knuckles under to the collective is betraying himself or herself. The psychoanalyst cannot but observe that such submission, however understandable in context, is a form of masochism.

Masochism and the Slave Image

It is important to define the central concept of this book fr...