A Humanism of Hatred, a Humanism of the Heart: Political Language, Public Morality, and Socialist Personhood in the Soviet Union

Abstract

This dissertation traces the conceptual evolution of humanism in Soviet political, cultural, and philosophical discourse, from its surprising origins under Stalin to its abortive revival amidst Gorbachev’s reform campaigns. In contrast to recent literature centering on the inner lives and subjectivity of Soviet citizens, it shifts focus to the categories and concepts through which ideals of socialist personhood were discursively constructed at a societal level. Humanism, while not the only such concept, became crucially important in the decades after Stalin’s death in 1953, when the Communist Party strove to decouple the dictator’s legacy from the broader Soviet project. At the same time, this dissertation shows, the persistence of Stalin-era and pre-revolutionary definitions of humanism hindered efforts to employ the concept as a basis for re-legitimating socialism. Through an examination of Soviet official ideology, dissident thinking, and cultural media of various genres and forms, it argues that the Party leadership’s steadfast promotion of a singular understanding of humanism concealed a diverse and fiercely contested intellectual field. Contests over the scope and meaning of humanism cut across all spheres of Soviet life during the post-Stalin decades, helping reshape ideals of socialist personhood and serving as an officially sanctioned outlet for the articulation of reformist aspirations.

Few terms have as complex an etymology or as many definitions as humanism. Originally a German coinage for the study of antiquity, the word acquired a new sense in the nineteenth century as a broad “philosophy of man” that was adopted across Europe, including by Karl Marx. Despite this Marxist pedigree, humanism was sooner an epithet than an expression of praise in the early USSR. This dissertation begins by revealing the writer Maxim Gorky’s role in embracing humanism as a tool of antifascist alliance building in the mid-1930s. Having rescued the term from its use as a cudgel in literary polemics of the 1920s, Gorky reconceptualized humanism as a proletarian value connoting resistance to Nazi cultural nihilism and predicating love for humanity on hatred for the enemies of socialism. In doing so, he underwrote Stalin’s 1934 pivot to a Popular Front with European social democrats, a temporary expedient that nevertheless cemented humanism’s place in the Soviet ideological lexicon for good.

By tracking the long-term consequences of this 1930s conceptual revolution, my project uncovers previously hidden continuities between the Stalin and post-Stalin periods. Party efforts to draw a moral line under the dictator’s legacy after his death in 1953 were hindered by Gorky’s definition of humanism, as well as the concept’s historical associations with Renaissance thought and universal (rather than class-based) love for humanity. At the same time, the concept’s ambiguity made it attractive to reform-minded intellectuals and dissidents in search of a new basis of legitimacy for the Soviet project. Cultural depictions of World War II, for example, painted an emotionally nuanced picture that complicated the Party’s narrative of the war as a humanistic crusade against Nazi barbarity. In the 1970s, the dissident movement cited human rights abuses as evidence of the state’s betrayal of its humane values, countering official conceptions of humanism with appeals to personal “humaneness.” Ultimately, I demonstrate, contests over humanism served to consolidate a socialist ethic of compassion transcending the cultural “thaws” and “freezes” of the post-Stalin decades, preserving a humanistic undercurrent within official ideology that resurfaced amidst Gorbachev’s reforms of the 1980s.