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Zinoviev's 'Homo Sovieticus': Communism as Social Entropy
| Article
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16187 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
3,457 Words |
| Author
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Tomislav Sunic
Tomislave Sunic, a Croatian political theorist, has
contributed a long essay to Yugoslavia: The Failure of
Democratic Communism (New York, 1988). |
Students and observers of communism consistently encounter the same paradox: On the one hand they attempt to predict the future of communism, yet on the other they must regularly face up to a system that appears unusually static. At academic gatherings and seminars, and in scholarly treatises, one often hears and reads that communist systems are marred by economic troubles, power sclerosis, ethnic upheavals, and that it is only a matter of time before communism disintegrates. Numerous authors and observers assert that communist systems are maintained in power by the highly secretive nomenklatura, which consists of party potentates who are intensely disliked by the entire civil society. In addition, a growing number of authors argue that with the so-called economic linkages to Western economies, communist systems will eventually sway into the orbit of liberal democracies, or change their legal structure to the point where ideological differences between liberalism and communism will become almost negligible.
The foregoing analyses and predictions about communism are flatly refuted by Alexander Zinoviev, a Russian sociologist, logician, and satirist, whose analyses of communist systems have gained remarkable popularity among European conservatives in the last several years.
According to Zinoviev, it is impossible to study communist systems without rigorous employment of appropriate methodology, training in logic, and a construction of an entirely new conceptual approach. Zinoviev contends that Western observers of communism are seriously mistaken in using social analyses and a conceptual framework appropriate for studying social phenomena in the West, but inappropriate for the analysis of communist systems. He writes:
A camel cannot exist if one places upon it the criteria of
a hippopotamus. The opinion of those in the West who
consider the Soviet society unstable, and who hope for its
soon disintegration from within (aside that they take their
desires for realities), is in part due to the fact that
they place upon the phenomenon of Soviet society criteria
of Western societies, which are alien to the Soviet society.
Zinoviev's main thesis is that an average citizen living in a communist system--whom he labels homo sovieticus--behaves and
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