Proceedings of the Tomsk Order of the Red Banner of Labor Polytechnic Institute named after S. M. Kirov

Vol. 182
1969

On the Question of Overcoming Private-Property Psychology in Contemporary Conditions

(Based on A. S. Ivanov’s novel “Povitel”)

L. S. Sysoeva

The social and individual consciousness of Soviet people was formed on the basis of a new socialist way of life. Together with the class antagonisms destroyed by socialism, the “ideals” of the philistine and the entire gallery of “types” born of private-property relations are also disappearing.

However, the formation of individual consciousness and the psychology of the personality, as the classics of Marxism point out, by no means proceeds in strict correspondence with the development of social being.

The development of consciousness as a whole, as well as of individual consciousness, as a rule lags behind the development of the material life of society and thereby becomes, as it were, isolated, detached from the material causes that gave rise to it, as a result of which a certain independence is formed in the stages of its development.

Under socialism, too, various factors influence the process of personality formation: not only belonging to a particular class or social group, but also personal living conditions, the nature of labor, features of upbringing, living traditions of the past, customs, habits, and so on.

Substantial differences in the individual development of people in a socialist society, which has not yet achieved complete social and cultural homogeneity, are natural.

The presence of contradictions in individual consciousness reflects the complex process of breaking down social relations on a fundamentally new basis and often testifies to the ongoing process of breaking, of “remaking” consciousness, of a personal “revaluation of values,” of the formation of socialist ideals, goals, and interests in the struggle against the habits of the past.

Survivals of the pre-socialist past, lying at the basis of the consciousness of particular individuals, are opposed to socialist ideology; a constant struggle is waged against them, and their prospect is complete destruction in the course of the formation of communist social relations.

In our time, when there is no material basis whatsoever for petty-bourgeois moods and views, the question must be raised ever more resolutely of the struggle against the remnants of bourgeois psychology and ideology in the consciousness of individual people, against the survivals of private-property psychology and morality that we have inherited from the old world.

A powerful weapon in the struggle to cleanse ourselves of the filth of the bourgeois order is not only material means, but also spiritual ones—in particular, imaginative literature. By aesthetic means one can come closest of all to the spiritual world of a person, to his psychology.

Of all spiritual means, aesthetic influence produces the most effective ethical resonance. It is precisely for this reason that art becomes one of the effective weapons in the struggle to educate the new person.

A. S. Ivanov’s first novel, Povitel, is devoted to the struggle against manifestations of bourgeois ideology and morality, against the remnants of private-property psychology. And in this sense the novel may be regarded “as a component part of the work of communist education.”¹

The main theme of this book is the theme of negation, the negation of the dark sides of life.

At the center of the novel stands the sinister figure of Grigory Borodin, driven by one single passion: enrichment, the desire to “make his way in the world,” to become “a solid master.”

This seems strange, at the very least, because we are not dealing with a character from a historical novel: the events of present-day life pass before us.

The remote Siberian village of Lokti is the place where the dramatic events in the life of three generations of the Borodin family unfold. In the history of the life of three generations of one family, A. Ivanov traces changes, gradations of the power-instinct of property at various stages of the social order: under capitalism, when the striving for wealth is the dominant and ordinary phenomenon, and under changed conditions, when the October Revolution had destroyed the material environment in which the microbe of property could have continued to develop—an organism capable of ruining a healthy organism with its morbid mold.

Pyotr Borodin, the founder of the proprietorial family traditions, is flesh of the flesh of the world of the moneybag, robbery, and exploitation. The instinct of acquisitiveness and enrichment, cultivated in the private-property bourgeois world, sits firmly in Borodin, “like a nail in a log,” and gives rise to one crime after another. This makes the image of the elder Pyotr Borodin repulsive, yet profoundly typical of prerevolutionary Russia.

One may find any number of literary parallels for this image, beginning with the “classical” miserly knight and ending with the images of kulaks in the works of Sholokhov, Panferov, Markov, Permitin, and others.

Obsessed by a thirst for wealth, Pyotr Borodin kills a horse-dealer gypsy for the sake of a cherished little sack of gold; fearing retribution, he drives his wife Arina to her death and is ready to kill his own son. Just as dodder sucks the life-sap from young plants, so the passion for wealth took from Pyotr all good feelings and destroyed the human being in him. First the wolfish laws of the world of small proprietors, and then the whirlwind of revolutionary events, which reached even the remote village, transformed both Pyotr Borodin’s household and his private-property aspirations into dust.

However, this image bears a great semantic burden in the novel. It appeared on the pages of the novel as a result of the writer’s desire to show that the roots of the survivals of capitalism in the consciousness of individual people lie in the past.

Pyotr Borodin passed out of life together with the old world, but he left an heir on earth, brought up in the kulak spirit, infected with the dodder of personal enrichment and domination over people.

Private property, in the figurative expression of Evgeny Permyak, “the old witch,” wove her ruinous web in the soul of Grigory Borodin. Grigory’s psyche, his personality, was stewing in the atmosphere of a thirst for enrichment. It is precisely for this reason that, although he left his son no inheritance of real wealth, Pyotr Borodin nevertheless managed to leave an heir in spirit. Owing to the stability of a psyche once formed, “one can be an owner while possessing nothing except the desire to possess, acquire, gain, and enrich oneself.”²

Over the subsequent pages of the novel, the writer traces the actions and clashes with the world of Soviet reality of a person with the microbe of ownership in his soul. One event after another follows in the novel: the partisan struggle against the Kolchakites, the attempt to create a village commune, the organization of a collective farm; the storms of the Great Patriotic War die down, and peaceful labor on the land resumes again. Only the dreadful little world of Grigory Borodin’s soul remains unchanged—with its insistent passion to become a master, with its hope for the return of former times, when it would once again be possible to put the cherished leather pouch to use.

The insatiable thirst for personal possession, whose satisfaction cannot be achieved under the conditions of nascent socialism, drives Grigory to crimes, each more terrible than the last, just as once happened with his father.

Secretly, cowardly covering his tracks, he tracks down Andrei Veselov’s partisan detachment. Together with the kulak Terenty Zerkalov and his gang, he sets fire to collective-farm buildings in the hope that in this way it will be possible to do away with the hated collective-farm system, which has prevented him from acquiring his own shop, workers, and horses.

Grigory’s entire social essence manifests itself at the front. Deep-rooted individualism and petty proprietary interests place Borodin outside the interests of the Motherland, the people, and all Soviet society. Proprietary egoism has stifled in him the feeling of civic duty and pushed him to yet another crime: he refused to carry out his commander’s order, which involved danger to his life.

Borodin’s gallery of crimes does not end with his betrayal in the Great Patriotic War. At this point the author did not put a full stop and did not remove Grigory from the stage. For people like Borodin exist in our own day as negligent chairmen of collective farms, as major and petty swindlers who deceive the state.

“Borodinism” exists under various sauces to this day as well. The author was not afraid that he would blacken Soviet reality by making Borodin the chairman of a collective farm.

It is entirely possible that he, having returned from the front, could have been elected chairman of a collective farm: most of the men were at the front, Andrei Veselov had perished, Tikhon Rakitin had not yet returned. And none of the collective farmers knew that beneath the gloomy shell there lurked the vile soul of a criminal and traitor. The new position did not change Grigory’s wolfish essence in the least; it only called forth from him a crooked smirk: “Chairman, master—even if I’m managing what belongs to others.”³

He did not have long to “manage what belonged to others.” Striving to accuse an honest person, Evdokia Veselova, of stealing collective-farm grain, Borodin exposes himself.

The desired awakening, enlightenment, and understanding of reality never came to Grigory Borodin. Thus he departs, in spiteful despair, because “they prevented him from living.”

² E. Permyak. The Old Witch. Roman-gazeta, No. 24, 1961, p. 43.
³ Anatoly Ivanov. Povitel. Novosibirsk, 1965, p. 397.

This failed proprietor evokes not a shadow of sympathy in us, unlike Grigory Melekhov (M. Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don), who likewise did not side with Soviet power, with the poorest Cossackry, and committed so many grave crimes against the people. The source of sympathy for Melekhov lies in the fact that this image is tragic. Grigory Melekhov is a wavering nature. He strives to grasp the truth: “With whom should one be, which path should one take? Such monstrous enlightenments: ‘Against whom am I going? Against the people? Then who is right?’” were often found in the hero of And Quiet Flows the Don. It seems that he is about to realize who is right, to break through to an understanding of the truth and firmly take the one and only path—the path of Soviet power. Yet this enlightened man was not born in Melekhov. He was crushed by the old, petty, estate-bound, wolfish element that had been nurtured in him by the propertied milieu in which he grew up. In this contradiction of Grigory Melekhov, in the possibility of two opposite exits from it, in the passionate expectation within him of the truth of the Soviet path, lies the source of the reader’s sympathy for him.

The tragedy of Grigory Melekhov consists precisely in the unrealized possibility of taking the right path, of atoning for his crimes before the people—a tragedy that in reality became the lot of many who wavered, a tragedy happily avoided by other waverers who chose their path together with Soviet power.

In Grigory Borodin there were no hesitations, no doubts tearing at the soul of Grigory Melekhov. Borodin avoided all the complex interlacings of the “time of troubles”: the imperialist war and the revolution, the civil war. He successfully sat it out in remote Lokti, thanks to village elder Zerkalov’s bribe with valuables from the purse of the murdered Gypsy. If Grigory had been at the front, in the trenches among soldiers, perhaps his soul would have freed itself from the tenacious clutches of the “old witch.” The author shows his hero in circumstances in which the seeds of property, sown by his father in Grigory’s soul, could have taken firm root. Borodin was and remained on the other side of the barricade; his path diverged from the straight road into the collective farm.

The collapse of the renegade’s designs, just like the “failure” of Pyotr Storozhev (N. Virta, Loneliness), is perceived by us not tragically, but as a natural phenomenon of our life, as the purification of our reality from the survivals of bourgeois consciousness.

Is an image like Grigory Borodin legitimate in our literature? Does the writer not fall into an extreme by placing at the center of the novel the depiction of a “splinter” of the old world? Is the chain of the main hero’s crimes an expression of the social essence of the image, or a consequence of the pathological character of the novel’s main hero?

A. Ivanov has created an image unusual in our literature; the dark colors are too thick, too hyperbolized in the delineation of this image for us to be able to find today a double of Grigory Borodin. Yet how are we to explain such phenomena in our life as acquisitiveness, the fetishization of one’s own farm, careerism, bureaucratism, and fraud of every kind? In our view, these are varieties of “Borodinism,” concentrated by the author in a single image.

To some critics the image of Borodin seems untypical, contrived, while the conflict of the work seems artificial and dragged out in its resolution.

“Reflecting on the fact that the action of the third part of the novel takes place after the Patriotic War, one involuntarily asks oneself: what is it that sustains Grigory’s hatred for those around him? After all, even many well-to-do fellow villagers of Grigory Borodin understood the meaning of the new life, broke with the old. Why, then, did Grigory Borodin not act in the same way? After all, one cannot forget that in our country there has been liquidated

the economic basis itself, which contributes to the formation of private-property views and psychology”^4), O. Khailov quite legitimately asks. Other theoreticians, on the contrary, approach the analysis of social relations dogmatically. They believe that under socialism, as in the period of transition to it, a struggle is being waged against the bourgeois class, in which are included... thieves, idlers, hooligans, and so forth.

In defending the legitimacy of the conflict in A. Ivanov’s work, we wish to emphasize that the image of Grigorii Borodin testifies not to the existence of antagonistic classes in socialist society, but is a typical reflection of acute contradictions in the sphere of consciousness.

In connection with the fact that the development of people’s ideas and psyche possesses a relative stability and independence, and because the formation of a new psychology and consciousness lags behind the development of new social relations, the reeducation of people—that is, of their views, habits, skills, and so on—requires incomparably more time than the replacement of one social system by another.

The conflict between the entrenched old and the new manifests itself in an especially acute form when society undergoes fundamental changes within a comparatively short historical period. In the forty years of the existence of Soviet power it was impossible fully to overcome all the old views, habits, mores, and customs that had taken root under conditions of private-property relations over the course of many hundreds of years.

The figure of Grigorii Borodin, entangled in acquisitive instincts, reminds us that antagonistic contradictions exist in the realm of ideology, which are echoes of the recent acute class struggle.

The nature of socialist society does not generate any nonsocialist ideas, conceptions, or morals: from the essence of the socialist system there follows no law-governed existence of a psychology and morality alien to socialism. But the possibilities for the existence of residual forms of the old consciousness are connected with a number of objective conditions, contradictions, and difficulties (including material ones) in the life of socialist society, since it emerged from the depths of capitalism, develops under conditions of the peaceful coexistence of states with differing social systems, and bears upon itself the “birthmarks,” traditions, and prejudices of the old world from whose depths it emerged.

In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx wrote of the first phase of communism: “What we have to deal with here is not such a communist society as has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, one that is just emerging precisely from capitalist society and that therefore, in every respect—economic, moral, and intellectual—still bears the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it came.”^5

Consequently, the image of Grigorii Borodin arose as a reflection of the antagonistic contradictions existing in our society, between the socialist worldview and the survivals, the “birthmarks,” of capitalism, whose bearers are not classes or social groups of people, but individual backward personalities. These remnants and relapses of bourgeois consciousness inflict harm not only on people’s material life, but also exert an obstructive, decomposing influence on the psyche of the younger generation. The active bearers of dark instincts

^4 O. Khailov. “The Defeat of Grigorii Borodin.” Zvezda, 1959, No. 2, p. 230.
^5 K. Marx and F. Engels. Selected Works, vol. II, 1955, p. 13.

of the past seek to infect the youth with the spirit of individualism, skepticism, and passivity. A striking example of this is the flawed character of the younger Petr Borodin, into whom his father tried to instill his misanthropic views.

Having eliminated the social source of the emergence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois views, habits, skills, etc., socialism nevertheless does not destroy the objective possibility of a revival—and, at certain moments in life, an intensification—of the surviving remnants of capitalism.

As a consequence of the insufficient level of development of the productive forces, socialism is limited by the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right,” i.e., under socialism a certain material inequality is preserved as a result of observing the socialist principle of equality: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his labor.”

The same principle of distribution according to labor, applied to people who are unequal in their abilities, opportunities, family situation, etc., produces a certain actual inequality in the material well-being of the members of society.

This principle of distribution, used as an objective necessity in the first phase of communist society and giving rise to a certain inequality, Lenin, following Marx, called remnants of “bourgeois right.”

Under socialism, Lenin wrote, “bourgeois right,” while abolished in relation to the means of production, “nevertheless remains in its other part, remains as the regulator (determinant) of the distribution of products and the distribution of labor among the members of society”².

The principle of material incentive is the only correct one at this stage of society’s development; however, it preserves differences “in wealth.” “Differences in wealth will remain, and unjust differences as well,” wrote Lenin³.

These “unjust differences,” which socialism is not yet able to eliminate, under certain conditions may, to one degree or another, nourish backward views, encourage private-property, egoistic, grasping attitudes, give rise to individualistic tendencies, the opposition of personal interests to public ones, obscure the sense of social duty, and so on.

Among such objective possibilities that contribute to the preservation of survivals of the past in the consciousness of individual people, we may include the existence in our country of individual peasant farmers, non-cooperative handicraftsmen and artisans; the existence of difficulties caused by the elemental forces of nature (crop failure), calamities, misfortunes brought by war; and the existence of ideological influence from capitalist countries.

Such causes may also include certain moments of subjectivism that testify to violations of the principles of socialism: leveling, arbitrariness, bureaucratism, improper management by kolkhoz leaders, violation of the principles of material incentive, distortions in price policy, and so forth.

Owing to the objective causes present in our society that explain the tenacity of private-property aspirations and psychology, the struggle against them is protracted and long-lasting.

As Lenin said, “the enormous force of habit in petty-bourgeois management can be overcome only by a long and stubborn struggle.”

It is precisely the writer’s desire to draw attention to the tenacity and danger of the psychology and morality inherited from the old world that explains—

is becoming clear, one would think, the resolution of the conflict in the novel, so long drawn out. For the “Gratsianshchina” (“The Russian Forest,” L. Leonov), still alive today, masks with revolutionary phrases its ideological hostility, its rejection of Soviet reality. The “Gratsianshchina” and the “Borodinshchina” have the same roots; they are in the past, in the old, pre-revolutionary world. Only the former is covered with an intelligentsia shell, while the latter appears in its crude form, not covered by external propriety and erudition. The obvious alienness of Gratsiansky to our ideology in his preaching of the inevitability of war, of the impossibility of understanding anything in the historical process. Gratsiansky is a masked enemy, a bearer of bourgeois ideology aimed at undermining the foundations of the new world.

Today the long and stubborn struggle against the dark spots in people’s consciousness is acquiring ever greater intensity, because the communist principles of life arouse heightened civic intolerance toward bourgeois survivals.

Yevgeny Permyak fights the psychology of “grabbing” in the novel The Old Witch. Serafima Ozheganova managed to extract great benefit for herself from her daughter’s marriage. A large house, a vegetable garden, pigs, even mirror carp bred by the steelmaker Kireev “for amusement”—all of it became sources of income for the acquisitive Serafima. Another character of the novel, Vetoshkin, arouses still greater disgust.

This cynical old man bred guinea pigs in his “little mansion,” even entrusted them to an experienced livestock specialist, and then sold them to the state at exorbitant prices.

E. Permyak raises the question: what gave rise to “this leprosy, this spiritual decay of Vetoshkin, who delights in his cynicism?” Where, after all, do people like Serafima Ozheganova come from; what nourishes their souls? What gives rise to insatiability, to the passion for profit?

And the reason is still the same “old witch,” mistress private property, which has built a nest in the soul of Ozheganova, Vetoshkin, and even the steelmaker Vasily Kireev. Even in our own time there appear “great schemers” dreaming of three million and of their own dacha between Gagra and Sukhumi. “Tonap”—a shareholding partnership headed by the burned-out swindler Khristoforov—is nothing other than a gang of grabbers plundering the Soviet state. Arkady Vasilyev’s satirical novel Monday Is a Hard Day introduces us to the active members of “Tonap.”⁸

In G. Markov’s new novel Father and Son we encounter enemies of a much larger caliber than Grigory Borodin, whose proprietorial aspirations, in essence, degrade to the level of psychology, without having a clear political formulation.

Former tsarist officers Kibalnikov and Ots, at whose hands the Party cell of the Vasyugan Commune perished, took refuge in the remote depths of the Middle Ob region. The sworn enemies of Soviet power for a long time adhered to the line of conduct prescribed to them in life: “to go deeper among the people, to hide among them, to play the peasant until the proper time, and to fear only one thing—the wasting away of hatred for the communists.”⁹

However, now, when they have waited things out “safe and sound,” the more energetic and resourceful Grigory Vedernikov, their ally in the bandit raid on the Vasyugan communards, offers them a new tactic of sabotage against the Soviet state: “We must change our skin, join the Party, worm our way into the state apparatus, take command—

⁸) A. Vasilyev. Monday Is a Hard Day. Moscow, 1962.
⁹) Georgy Markov. Father and Son. Molodaya gvardiya, 1965, p. 317.

... “... posts”^10). A former tsarist officer and rake, now prospering in the position of head of the interdistrict state office “Sibpushnina,” pours grist into the mill of capitalism: “Do not hurry with industrialization; do not recut the village from head to toe,” for “abroad they need a Russia that is obedient, powerless, and without major independent aims”^11).

Thus, we become convinced that “Borodinism” still seeps into our life; and in this sense the figure of Grigory Borodin acquires profound generality and typicality. The image of Borodin gains great typicality not only against the background of our society, but also of the countries of people’s democracy that are building socialism at home and are passing through a complex period of their social development, when all private-property survivals make themselves especially felt.

Consequently, through the example of the image of Grigory Borodin, the author of the novel Povitel resolves a major social task: he shows the necessity of identifying the bearers of private-property traditions, the “birthmarks” of former socioeconomic formations, and the necessity of a persistent, stern struggle against them as a struggle for the purity of the communist relations now taking shape.

^10) Ibid., p. 318.
^11) Ibid., p. 319.

1. Program of the CPSU. Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1961, p. 121. ↩

2. V. I. Lenin. Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 94. ↩

3. V. I. Lenin. Ibid., p. 93. ↩