Which Direction? The New Russia in the Absence of Marx and Lenin

The title of Dmitri Shalin’s book Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Post-Communist Consciousness is an expression of the clash of the old regime of the Soviet Union that has been rooted in the minds of Russia’s population with the new “glasnost” and influx of information previously unavailable to Russia’s general populace and the Russian people’s search for their own identity in this chaos. The paradox that Shalin is speaking of is the socialist consciousness that existed under the regime of the Soviet government, the entire collectivist and social equality mindset, being usurped after the collapse of communism within Russia. Despite the deviation of the Soviet government on the issue of social equality in the Soviet Union, the idea of social equality still existed in the minds of the individual Soviet citizen; the individual perceived that the government was working to further the goals of socialism through the government’s propaganda and proclamations of the victory of socialism. The title encompasses the massive realization by the public that everything they knew after almost seventy years of Soviet rule was dispelled in a few short years during the collapse of the Soviet Union and that every aspect of their culture is under question.

The subject that has come into question in post-Soviet times is self-identity; basically what does it really mean to be Russian. This is a “paradox of post-communist consciousness” due to the fact that before the fall of the Soviet Union, the people of Russia perceived themselves as socialists first, Russians second and this can be best summed up as for the first time in Russia’s history, Russia is its own nation rather than a socialist empire. (Billington, Pg. 47) The collapse of communism was a devastating blow to the people of Russia because of the fact that their whole reality, the reality that communism had given them, simply collapsed around them and everything that they thought to be true became false causing a mass identity crisis within the Russian population. Under communism, the people of Russia were simply a portion of the larger population of global socialists and this was the only identity that they knew, but now since they are not united under the values of communism, the population is struggling to find common Russian values to unify them. This event can be best surmised by Denis Dragunskii in his article “The Sign of Our Times,” where he states that these “transformations” caused the “collapse of an entire life-style….compounded by a profound spiritual crisis being experienced by hundreds of millions of people.” (Dragunskii, Pg. 152) A huge vacuum was left in place of the Soviet regime and the title “Russia Culture at the Crossroads” aptly describes the struggle that Russians are going through trying to fill it with their view of what it truly means to be Russian.