Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 2, 1993 TAG: 9304020447
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CHANGE-AVERSE
THE POLITICAL turmoil now threatening to throw Russia into a state of dangerous chaos may well have its roots, as most experts observe, in the inevitable confusion of replacing one governing system with another.Many Russians believe, however - and many who've watched and contemplated Russian history believe as well - that an equally important source of the present crisis is sovok.
Sovok is not a word I know, and those who do say it is difficult to translate. Dictionaries make it, literally, "a spade." But its slang usage - the way in which Russians in the Congress of People's Deputies and on the streets use it - would be, roughly, the "Soviet mentality."
Thus, as applied to the current upheaval in Russian politics, it is used to describe a complex of attitudes, ideas, expectations and reactions especially characteristic of the Russian people. They may be wholly unconscious that they are guided by sovok, say those who know, but the attitude is as fundamental to their daily life as rational planning or thinking.
This, in summary, is explained in a story out of Moscow by Justin Burke in the March 24 issue of The Christian Science Monitor. Burke reports that sovok has become a commonplace explanation amongst Russian observers for the ups and downs, the decisions and reversals of Russian governance. Above all, it explains the inability to bring a degree of predictable order out of the emerging Russian political system.
Centrist legislator Oleg Rumyantsev argues that sovok "is a special mentality brought up by the Soviet system with all its anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, traditionalism and conservatism."
Though more than a year has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, he and other liberals contend, the sovok attitude remains deeply entrenched in Russian thinking. "This is the cultural environment of the majority of the people."
Pyotr Filipov, a member of the Russian parliament, says the mentality dominates the Congress of People's Deputies and helps explain both its hostility to the economic changes sought by President Boris Yeltsin and its inability to agree on alternative policies.
Rumyantsev believes that the clash between Yeltsin and the Congress has less to do with politics, as so many Americans appear to think, than with economics. Many conservatives, he believes, cannot bring themselves, despite widening economic troubles, to accept Yeltsin's radical reforms, and consider them a force for destruction instead of a necessity in building a new society.
"We are not facing a revival of the Communist Party," he says, "or a communist takeover," as such doom-bearers as Rep. Newt Gingrich want to believe. "We are facing the return of `the Soviet mentality,' a return to the mentality of the sovok."
Filipov adds: "The majority [of those burdened with sovok] are for private property and a market, but they are against free prices and competition. People aren't used to risk and they don't want to risk. They feel they deserve to be paid for just showing up to work."
Some go further, contending that sovok, though perhaps greatly reinforced by 70 years of a police-state political system, has still deeper roots in a thousand years of Russian autocracy, a stagnant economy and a system that doggedly suppressed all efforts at change in a culture dominated by a tiny few and dependent on the labor of millions of serfs.
The Soviet Union was always more Russian than Marxist, they argue, a reflection not only of the oppressive paranoia of Stalin but of the inability of Russians, after a millenium of oppression, to face and accept any change of any sort.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.