There is a moment near the start of this book where Yu. V. Sychev states his method in a single borrowed sentence. Quoting Marx's sixth thesis on Feuerbach, he writes that "the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations." Everything that follows is an attempt to take that sentence seriously at close range — to ask how, concretely, the ensemble of social relations reaches down and shapes a particular person. Sychev's answer is the "microenvironment": the immediate social surroundings — the work team, the family, the study group, the Party or Komsomol cell — through which the great abstractions of society and the mode of production are refracted before they touch the individual. It is a real question, and for long stretches the book handles it with intelligence. But a study that opens on Marx's thesis about the ensemble of social relations, and then declines to describe one particular set of relations that its own author lived inside, has told you something before it has finished its argument. The interest of this volume lies exactly in what it can see and what it is licensed not to.
The spine and the catalogue say 1978, and that is the year of the English translation by Katharine Judelson for Progress Publishers. The copyright page carries a second date: the Russian original is © Izdatelstvo "Mysl" 1974. But the text that reaches us in English is not simply the 1974 book. It cites the 25th Congress of the CPSU, which met in February–March 1976; it quotes at length from Brezhnev's report to that Congress; and it speaks of "the Soviet Union's sixty years' history," a phrase that dates its final revision to 1977, the sixtieth anniversary of October. So the object in front of us is a mid-Brezhnev text, revised for export toward the end of the "developed socialist society" years, whatever the 1974 line on the copyright page suggests. That matters, because the book's frame is the ideological campaign of exactly those years: the "moulding the new man" that Sychev names in his opening pages as "the core of the CPSU's ideological work," and which the 25th Congress had just relaunched as a coordinated programme uniting "the ideological, political, labour and ethical aspects of education."
Sychev himself is a working sociologist, not an apparatus polemicist, and the book carries the marks of genuine empirical labour. Its data come in large part from case studies he took part in at the Perm Telephone Factory, conducted by that plant's Section for Research in the Sociology and Psycho-physiology of Labour — surveys of what workers liked and disliked about their jobs, how team relations tracked with productivity and turnover, how young recruits settled into a shop. This places the book alongside two others in this series that record the same event: the cautious, post-Thaw readmission of sociology and social psychology to a Soviet academy that had spent the Stalin decades treating both as bourgeois frauds. It should be read next to G. V. Osipov's Sociology (Progress, 1969) and B. F. Porshnev's Leninist Theory of Revolution and Social Psychology (Novosti, 1970), each of which is at bottom a licensing document — an argument that the new discipline has impeccable Marxist-Leninist credentials and may therefore be permitted to look at Soviet reality. Sychev's book is the applied, factory-floor member of that family. The question it raises is the family's question: which social objects was a Soviet sociologist licensed to examine, and which was he not?
The book's theoretical spine is a strong and defensible piece of Marxism, and it deserves to be stated at full strength before it is criticised. Against the reduction of personality either to biology or to the free-floating individual of liberal psychology, Sychev holds, with most of the Soviet philosophers he surveys, that "the essence of the individual personality is social" — that personality is, in the sharpest formulation he quotes, "the individualized embodiment of social relations." Society does not confront the individual as a distant abstraction; it reaches him through mediating links. The macroenvironment (the mode of production, classes, the state) sets the terms; the microenvironment (the small group in which one actually lives) transmits and refracts them. Between "the broad conditions of social being and the individual there exist connecting links," and the microenvironment is the chief of these. Man in isolation, Sychev writes in a nice phrase, "is no more than another Robinson Crusoe." This is not a trivial position. It is a serious attempt to give the sixth thesis on Feuerbach an empirical mechanism, and its insistence that the small group is a specific manifestation of the whole social order — not a private zone sealed off from it — is a genuine corrective to the individualism it is arguing against.
The doctrine turns political at a single hinge, and the hinge is the difference between two kinds of milieu. Under capitalism, Sychev argues, the microenvironment must be an alienated thing. Following Marx on estranged labour, and marshalling Soviet studies of the French working class, he holds that market relations poison immediate human contact, that "the idea of 'personal success'" breeds "crime and neuroses," and that "in these conditions man's microenvironment cannot help but be an alienated phenomenon." Under socialism the polarity reverses. "Public ownership and the absence of exploitation of man by man make possible the establishment of truly human relations." The socialist collective — above all the work collective — becomes the healthy microenvironment, the setting in which "the antagonism between the individual and society has for the first time been overcome." Capitalism atomises; socialism collectivises; and the whole weight of the argument rests on the reader accepting that the small groups of Soviet life were, in their essential character, the second kind and not the first.
Here is where the book's chosen instrument becomes an evasion, and it is worth being precise about how. Sychev has built a theory whose entire subject is the way immediate social surroundings form and deform the person — how the atmosphere of a group can warp a character, how conformism operates, how milieu produces or corrodes personality. He has, in other words, exactly the apparatus needed to examine the specific deformations that Soviet micro-environments were notorious for producing: the double life of public conformity and private dissent; careerism inside the institution; the pressure of the Party cell; the informing culture; the small economy of blat, the personal connections that ran the shortage society. He describes the mechanisms and then applies them in only one direction.
Consider his treatment of conformism. Sychev knows precisely what it is; he defines it with care as "purely outward agreement with the group, while there exists inner disagreement" — the stance of a person who "is ready to compromise his convictions and ideals so as to avoid an unfavourable situation." This is an exact clinical description of the Soviet double life, the outward assent that everyone performed and few believed. But having named it, he rules by fiat that it is a capitalist affliction: bourgeois psychology, he says, sees all agreement as conformism, whereas "it is precisely collectivism that emerges in socialist society as the diametrical opposite of conformism." The definition is universal; the diagnosis is geographically confined. The same move governs "adaptation." When a Western sociologist describes a worker adjusting to a new workplace, Sychev reads bureaucratic conformity; when a Soviet youth adjusts to his first work team, the identical process becomes benign "familiarization ... coloured by a spirit of socialist relationships." The category is turned on capitalism and turned off at the Soviet border.
The most revealing passages are the ones where the deforming machinery of the Soviet microenvironment is described openly — and praised. Sychev is candid that the socialist collective is an instrument of control. Its public opinion, expressed "at meetings, comrades' courts, in community news bulletins," provides "social control over the behaviour of the individual"; it is "an effective moral force, that can regulate relations between individuals and forestall the emergence of antisocial phenomena." He records approvingly that "the Communist Party calls upon the production collective ... to exert its positive influence on the individual's behaviour outside the factory as well, so as to regulate domestic and family relations." He quotes Makarenko to the effect that education must run through "a large collective ... when the term collective comes to embrace the whole of Soviet society," and he describes the guidance of the collective as "a totality of economic, technical, ideological and educational pressures and influences." A reader who had lived through the comrades' courts, the collective's licence to reach into a worker's home, the pressure to conform administered by the very small groups Sychev is celebrating, would recognise all of this. What is missing is any suggestion that a milieu with this much power over the individual might deform him — that the collective's "pressures" might be the source of the conformity, the careerism, the double life, rather than their cure. The book has the concept of the warping microenvironment and spends it entirely on the class enemy.
When Sychev does glimpse a Soviet failing, an escape hatch closes over it at once. He concedes, once, that a worker "feels oppressed by the atmosphere of cold relations and a sense of alienation" in a Soviet work team — and immediately frames it as a local matter of atmosphere, curable by better management. More systematically, he lays down the rule that governs every such admission: "Negative elements in people's behaviour can result from specific circumstances connected with violations of the principles of socialism in the context of particular collectives," from which "it is therefore wrong automatically to identify the essence of the social environment under socialism with concrete microenvironments." This is the theoretical device that makes the whole book safe. Any deformation that appears is a "violation" — a local lag, a lingering survival, a bad foreman — and never an expression of the system's essence, which remains by definition healthy. The macroenvironment that sets the terms for every Soviet micro-environment — the bureaucratic state, its hierarchy of rank and privilege, its monopoly of the Party over every collective — is precisely the one social relation Sychev's ensemble never gets round to naming. He has written a study of how the whole shapes the part while bracketing out the whole.
Even the book's own data push toward the finding it refuses. Sychev acknowledges, in his chapter on the labour collective, that "the interests of the individual and the specific collective at a certain stage need not necessarily coincide," and that when they diverge "the collective drops such individuals or the latter leave the collective." Here, for a sentence, is the collective as an engine of exclusion — expelling the person who will not align, or driving him out. In any other framework this would be the beginning of an inquiry into how a mandatory milieu disciplines its members. Sychev shuts it down in the next breath: these contradictions, he insists, "should not alter our picture of the increasingly firm-rooted collectivist consciousness of Soviet men and women," being merely "a certain disparity between unshakeable collectivist attitudes and assessments of collective relations". The collective may cast out the nonconformist, and it remains by definition healthy; the individual it expels is the problem, never the milieu that expelled him. It is the escape hatch again, and it is worth noticing that it always swings the same way.
The tradition this series speaks from had examined the corrosion of the Soviet individual four decades before Sychev, and with the same tools he uses. Christian Rakovsky — a founder of the Soviet Ukrainian state, later broken as a Left Oppositionist — wrote in 1928 the classic analysis of what the Soviet apparatus does to the people inside it. Trotsky quotes him in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): "By means of demoralizing methods, which convert thinking communists into machines, destroying will, character and human dignity," Rakovsky wrote, "the ruling circles have succeeded in converting themselves into an unremovable and inviolate oligarchy." That is a description of a microenvironment deforming its members — the Party cell as Sychev never lets himself see it. It answers in advance the claim that the antagonism between individual and society had "for the first time been overcome": Trotsky's whole chapter on Soviet social relations is a demonstration that the antagonism had been recreated, in the form of a privileged stratum whose "social and moral alienation from the popular masses" was the ruling fact of Soviet life.
Trotsky also meets Sychev's central claim head-on — the claim that the socialist workplace is the healthy milieu against the alienated capitalist factory. Writing of the Stakhanovite whose privileges set him apart from his workmates, Trotsky observes that "their individual enjoyment of all kinds of material goods on a background of general scarcity surrounds them with a ring of envy and ill will, and poisons their existence. Relations of this kind," he concludes, "are farther from socialist morals than the relations of the workers of a capitalist factory, joined together as they are in a struggle against exploitation." This is the exact inversion of Sychev's thesis, argued from the same premises. Inequality of income and rank, Trotsky shows in his chapter on the collective ship whose passengers still travel first, second and third class, does not evaporate because the vessel has been declared common property. The "collective" that Sychev treats as the solvent of alienation was, for the tradition he does not cite, one of its principal sites.
And behind both stands the thesis Sychev quoted at the outset. Marx's point in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach is that if the human essence is the ensemble of social relations, then you cannot understand a person without an honest inventory of all the relations that hold him — including the ones it is uncomfortable to name. Sychev keeps the epigraph and drops the discipline. The relations he inventories are the flattering ones: comradeship, cooperation, the friendly work team. The relations that any Soviet reader could have supplied — the hierarchy of the nomenklatura, the dependence of every collective on the Party organiser, the informing, the blat without which nothing could be obtained — are absent not because Sychev's method cannot reach them but because his method reaches them all too well, and reaching them was not permitted.
None of this makes the book worthless, and it would be a poor reading that left it there. Sychev's insistence that personality is socially formed, that the small group is a genuine and understudied level of that formation, and that it must be understood as a manifestation of the whole social order rather than a private enclave, is sound Marxism and remains a useful corrective to the individualism of much Western social psychology. His empirical instinct is real: the Perm surveys, for all that they are pressed into an edifying frame, contain honest findings — that dissatisfaction with work is driven far more by its content and conditions than by the "socio-psychological" atmosphere managers could adjust, a result Sychev reports even though it cuts against the therapeutic optimism of his own conclusion. His survey of the Soviet debate on the structure of personality — Tugarinov, Kon, Buyeva, Platonov — is a fair and informative guide to a serious body of thought that produced, in its best hands, genuine science. As with Levitin's One Is Not Born a Personality elsewhere in this series, the thing to say plainly is that the discipline underneath the ideology was real, and that some of its practitioners were doing first-rate work under conditions that dictated what they could conclude.
The book is best read, then, as two things at once: a competent sociology of the small group, and an unintended document of its own limits. Sychev built an instrument precisely calibrated to detect how a milieu forms and deforms the people caught in it. That the instrument was aimed only outward — that it could diagnose the loneliness of the Londoner but not the double life of the Muscovite, the alienation of the capitalist factory but not the "pressures" of the collective that could follow a Soviet worker home — is the most eloquent thing about it. The microenvironment turned out to be exactly the level of analysis at which a Soviet sociologist could work honestly and still never arrive at the system. Read with that in view, the book tells the truth twice: once in what it says about the individual and the small group, and once, against its will, in what it cannot bring itself to say.