Soviet New Man vs. Homo Sovieticus: Multiple Masculinities in Soviet Political Humor

• In Event: 308 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Masculinity

Abstract

The process of defining a nation, its history and vision for the future tends to foster national ethnocentrism and chauvinism. In the process of nationalist myth-making, men as soldiers, heroes, visionaries, and political leaders are elevated to symbols of the collectivity and the nation’s historical legacy, while women and ethnic or national others are often blamed for failures and misfortunes of the collective. Such was particularly the case in Soviet Russia, where Communist Party ideologists argued that once pure communism would be realized, Russian, Ukrainian, and other national figures would be replaced by the “New Soviet Man”, an ideal Soviet citizen with superhuman strength, brilliance, and devotion to the Communist Party who would supersede any cultural, ethnic, or linguistic differences. Many perceived this ideal as an unrealistic goal. Specifically, Aleksandr Zinovyev argued that the Soviet system produced the opposite of what it intended, dubbing the resulting anti-hero “Homo Sovieticus”, who was in many ways the opposite of the Soviet New Man. The Russian anekdot, a short humorous (and at times politically subversive) narrative that was highly popular during the late-Soviet era, is a site that reveals the incongruity between the Party word and practice. In conducting a paired content and discourse analysis of 1,290 Soviet-era Russian anekdots, this paper demonstrates how this genre both (1) reveals a crisis in Soviet-era Russian masculinity that produces alternative, competing masculinities, and (2) contributes to a hierarchy of cultural citizenship by defining racial, national, and gendered groups as “other” to cope with perceived inequities.

Author

• Michelle Hannah Smirnova, University of Missouri - Kansas City