The heart of a dog essay

Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 2017

The concept of the New Soviet Man remains a topic of on-going scholarly interest for a number of reasons: it reflects a vital part of Russian history, it remains associated with positive and negative connotations that still need to be explored, and it functions as a crossroads for different scholarly perspectives. It remains a topic of interest also because there are still a number of unexplored questions about the concept from the perspective of the history of ideas and philosophy. This article focuses on the reconstruction of the ethical concept of a New Soviet Man over time. It argues that there were three periods in the history of this concept: The first period – between the 1900s and 1930s – can be called the period of theoretical reflection on the nature of a New Man. The second period – from the 1930s to the 1950s – can be characterized as the period of the development of norms of Soviet morality. The third period – since the 1960s – is marked by the transition of ethical thought from the ideology propagating socialist morality to moral theory and Marxist scientific ethics. This article argues that the process of forming a new type of man was not a continuous and unilineal process of change throughout the entire period of socialism. On the contrary, this dramatic process can be successfully analyzed with the help of the ethical concept of the New Soviet Man.

Studies in Soviet Thought

Recent developments in Soviet thinking about morality are far more interesting than any which have occurred since the death of Stalin. In contrast to the traditional moral instrumentalism and consequentialism which judges government policies according to whether they promote the desired ends, a narrowing of the concept of acceptable or moral behavior on the part of the State is occurring, accompanied by signs of an emerging recognition of the sanctity of the individual. By contrast, the definition of moral behavior on the part of the individual is being expanded to include a variety of activities hitherto condemned as inimical to the moral code of the New Soviet Man. According to the October 15, 1988 issue of Komsomolskaja Pravda,

RUDN Journal of Russian History, 2019

The article examines theoretical preconditions, as well as the political and ideological priorities of Bolshevik eff orts to engineer of the "New Man" in the early Soviet period. The author shows the Marxist origins of the Bolshevik project and their transformation in the works of V.I. Lenin and other leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. It describes the principal mechanisms and tools used to design the New Man, as well as practice of social mobilization and exposure to the political culture of Bolshevism. Emphasis is given to the role of the legacy of World War I in the Bolshevik institutionalization of social engineering, coercion and violence to create new human material. The article also shows disagreements among the Bolshevik leadership during the period from 1917 until the late 1920s regarding the ways of designing the New Man in the context of the proletarian culture, the role of the moral character concept for an ideal communist person as the builder of new society. Analysis is given to the gender aspect of the problem, the Bolshevik vision of the ways to design the New Woman and reshape the old way of life. The article traces the transformation of the Bolshevik leadership's vision of the New Man and the New Woman throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The author singles out two stages in the Bolshevik engineering of the New Man in the early Soviet period (1917-mid-1920s, late 1920s-mid-1930s), and describes the project's evolution.

RUDN University of Russian History, 2019

The article examines theoretical preconditions, as well as the political and ideological priorities of Bolshevik efforts to engineer of the “New Man” in the early Soviet period. The author shows the Marxist origins of the Bolshevik project and their transformation in the works of V.I. Lenin and other leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. It describes the principal mechanisms and tools used to design the New Man, as well as practice of social mobilization and exposure to the political culture of Bolshevism. Emphasis is given to the role of the legacy of World War I in the Bolshevik institutionalization of social engineering, coercion and violence to create new human material . The article also shows disagreements among the Bolshevik leadership during the period from 1917 until the late 1920s regarding the ways of designing the New Man in the context of the proletarian culture, the role of the moral character concept for an ideal communist person as the builder of new society. Analysis is given to the gender aspect of the problem, the Bolshevik vision of the ways to design the New Woman and reshape the old way of life. The article traces the transformation of the Bolshevik leadership’s vision of the New Man and the New Woman throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The author singles out two stages in the Bolshevik engineering of the New Man in the early Soviet period (1917 - mid-1920s, late 1920s - mid-1930s), and describes the project’s evolution.

Telos, 1985

The period of the First Five-Year Plan (1928)(1929)(1930)(1931)(1932) was one of the darkest in Soviet history. It was intended to lay the foundations for massive rationalisation of agriculture and industry, and was executed with merciless cruelty. Yet during the time when mass collectivisation was forced onto the rural populace with devastating results (deaths from the ensuing starvation as a result of famine and exile have been estimated at five million for the year 1933 alone 1 ), Pravda published a statement promising to 'raise the cultural level of the worker-peasant masses'. 2 Though it would be reasonable to suppose that the Soviet state had more pressing matters to attend to, as Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown, the drive against so-called 'rightists' (liberals) was a crucial part of a general whipping-up of class war. As a result, the human cost of collectivisation was kept as quiet as possible in the cities, while -as an antidote to its possible discovery -militant proletarian factions were allowed hitherto unprecedented control over the arts. 3

A revolutionary as a "beautiful soul": Lev Tolstoy's path to ethical anarchism Lina Steiner 1 2 3 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".

Ethics in Progress, 2013

This article penetrates the idealistic, Marxist concept of the 'new Soviet man', linking it with the notion of eugenics. Departing from a reconstruction of the history and specificity of the eugenic movement in Russia since the late 19th century until the installation of Joseph Stalin as the only ruler of the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism paradigm of Soviet natural sciences is being evoked as a theoretical frame for Soviet-specific eugenic programme. Through referring to a number of chosen – both theoretical (classic Marxist works) and practical (chosen aspects of Soviet science and internal politics) – issues and cases, the concept of the 'new Soviet man' is being confronted with an original reading of eugenics, understood in neo-Lamarckian terms of direct shaping human beings through environmental conditions (comprehending the GULag system of labour camps, pseudo-medical experiments and other) and intergenerational transfer (through inheritance) of acquired traits.

In this paper I would like to address one of the main features of communist ideology which is its one-dimensional conception of the person that totally undermined the spiritual dimension of human beings and that resulted in a rationally constructed political and social order. Such an approach can be called an anthropological error. It accorded with instrumental Cartesian rationality that gave primacy to a self-liberating intellect – the constructor of both the person and the world outside. I look at some philosophical and political consequences of this type of reasoning about humans and their goals in Soviet-type systems that produced what Milosz aptly called the captive mind. This conception proved to be destructive and self-refuting, both politically and morally. The intellectual foundations of communism can be found in modernity, in mass consciousness, and in philosophical and political rationalism. The rise of science and rationalism provided the scientific foundation for the social and political order and, consequently, led to a perspective that combined Enlightenment rationalism with Hegelian historical determinism. Totalitarianism represents the culmination of a modern historical trend towards the elimination of the political; it treats the commonwealth as a product of human construction.