The term was first used by Russian writer Aleksandr Zinovyev:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus
http://www.economist.com/node/21541444
Sovok was a product of Communist civilization.
This term is not offending any particular group (everyone can be turned into a sovok by proper brainwashing):
Fortunately, being a sovok is just a sickness of character - you can cure this.
But is a communist state / communist society which does not (as a side effect of its very existence) turn people into sovoks even possible?
Or maybe acquiring such typically sovok negative character traits is inevitable when living in a communist society?
What do you think? Especially I'm asking our ideological supporters of communism from this forum.
In my opinion there were a number of things which contributed to the general feeling of indifference which arose in the late 1960s/early 1970s, culminating in the ultimate indifference: regime change. They all pretty generally relate to social policies, with the most notable (and in my opinion the most important) being that the communist ruling elite stopped cultivating the idea that society was going somewhere. The 1977 Soviet Constitution claimed that the USSR had succeeded in creating an "advanced socialist society," something the country had been collectively working toward since its inception 50 years before. But with that attainment came no meaningful change in social or political life: the relationship between man and machine, and man and man (and man and woman, for that matter), and man and party became ossified in the model of the Socialist Offensive years. Further, the elite spelled out no goal for society to move toward; it was simply existing, and people were meant to be happy that it was existing. Is it so surprising, then, that members of society took cues on indifference from the Brezhnev administration?
All of the harsh measures, the authoritarian rule, the elite guiding hand of society, was justified until that point by issues like managing the transition of a proto-capitalist society through the capital accumulation stage into socialism, the incredible external and internal threats the regime faced, and the need to organize the country into a modern state and society from its backwards origins. They were both justified and accepted as tough but necessary restraints so that the future could be brighter and freer. But when almost none of that was relaxed, when involvement in the decision-making aspects of society [aka, the whole point of socialism] never came about despite supposedly having achieved the Big Goal, I think people stopped having a reason to care about building, protecting, and helping a society that they were uninvolved and uninvested in.
Further down that road, problems with central economic planning led to a faulty quota system as well as the remnants of Stakhanovism. Uninformed by factory floor capabilities or social needs, workers simply met volume quotas and stopped work. Their products were often shoddy, and work was a chore and not a socially-involved action. Again, I feel that the Soviets missed one of the central points of socialism: that products must be produced for their immediate use by society based upon the needs of society,
not for trading in the marketplace. And further, workers (and even managers) had zero input in anything involving production, from volume to design to safety and workplace "benefits." With these decisions being made far away for the benefit of people far away, how could the worker be expected to care about what he was making?
Similar problems existed in the collective farms, although the problem was correctly identified there but incorrectly addressed. The collective farms (kolkhoz), unlike the state farms (sovkhoz) did not have direct access to the tractor facilities, and nearly always had inadequate farming tools. Workers operated in "squads" on both types of farms, but the
sovkhozy possessed more equipment and their squads were responsible for vastly smaller tracts of land per farm. These two elements combined to make the
kolkhozy both inefficiently planted and harvested. Workers, in the rush to meet their outlandish quotas (again set by people who know nothing about the operations), carelessly ploughed and planted crops, and always found themselves unable to harvest and process the food they had managed to grow. Again, why care? The
kolkhozi failed to drastically raised the standard of living of the peasantry, who continued to be referred to as such even into the "socialist" period of the late USSR. Had decision-making occurred at the local level, and products been distributed according to need and not been produced for trade afar, this would not have been nearly the issue it was. Workers, communities, and tractor stations could have responded to local necessities to improve production and quality of product, and the peasantry would not have remained so poor, restrained as they were by the market relations which the Soviet government allowed to persist to their detriment. I'm not talking about the black market, I'm talking about the fact that farms were paid for the produce they made, but only at depressed prices since the government insisted on subsidizing food prices, and thus could afford to pay less for the food. It was a persistent problem throughout the Soviet period, and it could have been done away with. It was a faulty market which the Soviet government deliberately preserved, either failing to understand or remaining indifferent toward the fact that as a market, it bred inequality, and kept the peasantry from enjoying most of the benefits of the socialist system. Indeed, it kept them peasants instead of simply workers.
The very concept of "building the New Soviet Man" was a faulty one. The Bolsheviks put the cart in front of the horse with this idea. As Marxists they should have understood that man is shaped by his material relations, and that to change the man you must change his material relations with other people. They set out to do precisely the reverse: they imagined that if they changed the man, he would in turn be motivated to change his relations with other people. It should have been apparent that this would fail. Having failed to significantly change the way man materially related to other men (that is, his relationship to the machine, production, and society did not significantly change from capitalism), the initiative to advance man significantly beyond what he is capable of in capitalist relations also failed. As others in this thread have noted, the behavior you describe is prevalent in capitalist society already.
How could the communists have succeeded? See the above paragraphs of criticism.
I hope this answers your question somewhat.
