How’s Your Mood, Comrades?
Psychoanalysis, perestroika, and the collapse of the Soviet Union
Hannah Proctor
In his Memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev, who served as the Soviet Union’s last leader from 1985–1991, recounts a dream dreamt by his wife Raisa around the time of their marriage in September 1953, six months after the death of Stalin:
“She and I are at the bottom of a very deep, dark well, a ray of light glimmering somewhere high up. We are climbing the wall, helping each other. Our hands are cut and bleeding. The pain is unbearable. [Raisa] falls but I catch her, and we resume our slow upward climb. Finally, completely exhausted, we drag ourselves out of this black hole, and a straight, smooth, tree-lined alley opens before us. On the horizon we see an enormous bright sun, and the alley seems to flow into it, dissolving in its rays. We walk towards the sun. But suddenly out of nowhere terrifying black shadows loom over us on both sides of the road. What is that? And we hear “enemies, enemies, foes.” Our hearts are filled with anguish . . . Holding hands, we continue walking on the road towards the horizon, towards the sun . . .”
The reader is left to make sense of these dark holes and bright suns, which hang uninterpreted in his narrative. All he says is that many decades later she still remembered the dream. The implication is that both members of the couple accorded it great significance as their personal and political experiences unfolded in the years that followed. But what place do dreams have in world history?
On August 30th, 2022, the day Mikhail Gorbachev died, I was in Madrid. I had just taken a series of trains from London and was feeling exhausted. With a few hours to kill I wandered around the Museo del Prado staring at artworks in a daze. I was standing in front of a Poussin painting but I was thinking about someone I’d drunkenly slept with a few nights earlier. I was wondering if it had been a bad idea, not that it had been an “idea” exactly. I wasn’t sure where to go for dinner. I couldn’t decide how or what or whether to text this person. I was standing in front of a Poussin painting but I was thinking about my phone, about a distant bed, about someone else’s eyes.
Before Madrid, the last Poussin painting I had stood in front of on a pre-pandemic trip to the USA had been sold to the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the Soviet government in 1932 to help finance the First Five-Year Plan. Now, standing in the Prado in front of another Poussin, I looked at my phone to check for nonexistent messages and read instead that Mikhail Gorbachev had died. As I walked listlessly through the galleries I wanted to distract myself from my own small concerns so I listened to an interview with Gorbachev’s biographer William Taubman.
I remember finding it faintly ridiculous that I was the kind of person who would listen to a podcast about Mikhail Gorbachev to distract myself from mild romantic confusion. I also remember finding it faintly ridiculous how in the podcast discussion Taubman pinned the anecdotal to the historical, how the tiny details of one man’s life were treated as keys that could unlock the giant gates of history. An anecdote about Gorbachev’s adolescent approach to romance, in which he harshly criticized a schoolmate’s contributions to the wall newspaper in a group meeting just before trying to ask her out on a date, was taken to reveal something about his later “audacious” approach to the Soviet economy. But what is the “correct” way to make sense of the relationship of the individual to the historical? Are romances, feelings, and dreams incidental or consequential? What about those of figures about whom no biographies or obituaries were written?
When I returned home from Spain, I started reading Vladislav M. Zubok’s recent but already definitive tome Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2021). Zubok tells the story of the Soviet Union’s demise as something like a Shakespearean history play. Given Gorbachev’s identification with Julius Caesar, perhaps it could also be read as a tragedy, though with one major difference: the plot’s conclusion was never preordained. Zubok counters familiar narratives that treat the global triumph of capitalism as a foregone conclusion by insisting that nothing that unfolded in the Soviet Union between 1983 and 1991 was inevitable. Hapless and hubristic, by turns hopeful and hopeless, Zubok’s cast of fatally flawed characters stride and sometimes stumble across the stage of his narrative. Raisa Gorbacheva’s dream appears in the introduction to Zubok’s Collapse, as it does in Taubman’s Gorbachev biography, but the inner lives, even of the book’s main players, are not explored in depth. The textures and rhythms of the vast social world over which their actions had so much impact remain, for the most part, in the wings. Collapse traces the events that eventually resulted in the Soviet Union ceasing to exist, but it is not a description of what perestroika felt like to live through for the diverse range of people who populated the fifteen Soviet republics that were soon to become fifteen independent states—what of their romances, feelings, and dreams?
While I was reading Zubok’s history of reforms, conspiracies, and coups, I coincidentally read three books by the French novelist Annie Ernaux, which also take place against the backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Simple Passion and Getting Lost trace her intense affair with a Soviet diplomat, a “faithful servant of the USSR” whom she met on a writers’ delegation to Moscow, Leningrad, and Tbilisi. The same man also makes a glancing appearance in The Years, her “impersonal autobiography” of a generation that dispenses with the “I” in favour of the “we.” Tobi Haslett characterizes the difference between Getting Lost and Simple Passion as that between the “slaughterhouse of subjectivity” and “the steak tartare,” in that the former consists of a diary of the affair as it was breathlessly unfolding, while the latter, which was retroactively condensed, is slimmer and more literary. If Haslett’s metaphor were extended that would make The Years something like the global beef market as told from the perspective of a cow.
In The Years, Ernaux describes the romantic image of perestroika and glasnost constructed from afar among her ’68-er generation in France and their somewhat patronizing sense of disappointment that reality failed to live up to dream after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989:
“ . . . the spectacle of their collective hunger for material goods, which showed no restraint or discrimination, antagonized us. These people weren’t worthy of the pure and abstract freedom we had devised for them. The sense of affliction we’d been accustomed to feeling about those who lived “under the Communist yoke” gradually turned into a disapproving observation of the use they made of their freedom. We liked them better when they were lining up for sausage and books, deprived of everything, so we could savour the luck and superiority of belonging to the ‘free world.’”
These distant historical events are told very differently in Simple Passion and Getting Lost in which they become enmeshed with her personal romantic experiences. Pining for her lover in January 1990 she writes grandiosely: “the greatest joy of all would be a conjunction of love and History, a Soviet (r)evolution in which we could meet again.” She notes of her diaries from the time that “the outside world is almost totally absent.” Preoccupied by anticipation and yearning, everything she sees is absorbed by her all-consuming passion. She thinks back on previous encounters with her lover, counting backwards in weeks, months, years. Gorbachev’s 1989 visit to Paris is significant to her only because it brought her lover to the city. She learns to read Cyrillic and reads Vasily Grossman’s epic anti-Stalinist novel Life and Fate to feel closer to her absent beloved and to fill time between rendezvous. When she describes historical events that unfolded during their affair— “the fall of the Berlin wall or the execution of the Ceausescus”—they are not so much conjoined with her love as subsumed by it: “Living in passion or writing: in each case one’s perception of time is fundamentally different.”
The Years seeks to construct a “common time,” while the novels of her affair show how experiences of time can be deeply subjective; dilated, constricted, or stretched by love or its absence. Intimacy sometimes swallows history. Ernaux reflects explicitly on the difference between historical time—the “current events of the period” that are recorded in archives—and the ephemeral “daily thoughts and actions” that characterize how time is experienced during a love affair. By writing about her passion, she attempted to capture all the personally significant yet historically inconsequential details, from “the socks he did not remove while making love to his desire to die at the wheel of his car.” Can histories of such experiences also be written? After all, for people living through the Soviet collapse even mundane daily interactions—including socks and sex, sausage and books—were impacted by the “current events of the period.”
“Exploring the significance of Freud during perestroika and immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union provides some insights into the specific ways understandings of the subjective and the historical become intertwined in moments of political upheaval.”
In her recollection of perestroika Ernaux describes forms of identification that developed between observers in the West and their Soviet peers: “We noted signs of their resemblance to ourselves, and the West in general: freedom of the press, Freud, rock and jeans, haircuts . . .” Ernaux’s inclusion of Freud in this list of phenomena characterizing the period of transition to the market economy indicates the centrality of psychoanalytic ideas to that context, whose popularity derived partly from their long suppression but also from the compelling theory of the psychosocial consequences of political repression they offered. But did Soviet people’s subjective experiences really resemble those of their Western contemporaries during this period? Ernaux distinguishes between the collective and the personal, but all lives and loves unfold within history. An interest in both individual subjectivity and mass psychology was a notable feature of public discourse during perestroika, though, of course, treating perestroika as a “common time” characterized by shared experience risks eliding the discrepancies and power relations that existed between Soviet individuals of different social groups, ethnicities, and nationalities (many of whom vehemently rejected being identified as “Soviet” at all). Exploring the significance of Freud during perestroika and immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union provides some insights into the specific ways understandings of the subjective and the historical become intertwined in moments of political upheaval.
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In the aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917, small psychoanalytic communities existed in cities that by the end of the Civil War in 1922 had become part of the USSR, including Moscow, Petrograd (renamed Leningrad following Lenin’s death in 1924), Rostov-on-Don, Kazan, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa. Psychoanalytic ideas circulated in artistic and literary circles. A psychoanalytic children’s home opened in Moscow in 1921, alongside a training program and outpatient clinic. The Interpretation of Dreams had already appeared in Russian translation in 1904 and in the early 1920s further translations were published by the State Publishing House as part of the Psychological and Psychoanalytic Library series. In the period of the New Economic Policy (1921–28), the compatibility of psychoanalysis and Marxism was energetically debated in print and at congresses with some committed Bolsheviks making political arguments in favor of Freud’s work, but the tenor of the discussions became increasingly hostile as the decade progressed. Individualistic, speculative, nonmaterialist, idealist—Freud’s ideas were attacked for being overly concerned with sexuality, insufficiently engaged with socioeconomic realities, and erroneously committed to a vision of the human subject as timeless and unchangeable. The supposed universality of the unconscious was, they claimed, undermined by Freud’s reliance on clinical work with Western European bourgeois patients whose psychic lives were identical neither to proletarians living under capitalism nor to the emancipated inhabitants of the communist future. The last report on the Russian Psychoanalytic Society appeared in 1930, the same year as the final publication in the book series by which time Stalin had consolidated his power.
But psychoanalytic ideas did not completely disappear from the Soviet Union after 1930. Around that time, a psychiatrist in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, where a small psychoanalytic community had existed since before the revolution, reportedly worked under a portrait of Pavlov by day which he flipped over to reveal a portrait of Freud beneath which he secretly met his analytic patients by night. In 1958, during the “thaw” period of de-Stalinization, when the easing of political repression and censorship allowed a degree of pluralism to return within medicine, a scientific session was hosted in Moscow on the “Problem of the Ideological Struggle Against Contemporary Freudism” where the necessity for critical engagements with psychoanalytic thought was debated. During the next two decades discussions of Freud took the form of “bourgeois criticism,” meaning references to his work could appear in print if framed by political condemnation. It was possible for scholars and scientists to receive permission to consult psychoanalytic books and journals in the restricted sections of libraries. In other instances, psychoanalytic concepts persisted without their psychoanalytic origins being explicitly identified. In Leningrad, Vladimir Nikolaevich Miasishchev promoted a dynamic form of psychotherapy reliant on a concept of neurosis; psychiatrists in Estonia conducted work on dreams; while the concept of the unconscious was central to the work of Georgian psychologist Dimitri Uznadze, whose theory of “set” proposed the existence of underlying mechanisms that determined perception and action. Between the 1930s and the mid 1960s, Uznadze and his colleagues, who built on his theories after his death in 1950, published their work in Georgian. Their geographical and linguistic marginality enabled them to maintain a degree of autonomy and to continue working outside of the then-dominant Pavlovian paradigm. Members of his school were instrumental in reigniting discussions of the unconscious in the Soviet Union during the period Leonid Brezhnev was in power (1964– 1982), conventionally characterized as the era of stagnation.
During the first week of October 1979 a group of over 1,400 people met in the recently constructed modernist Chess Palace in Tbilisi, then capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, for the First International Symposium on the Unconscious, co-organized with colleagues in France. Two years previously the World Psychiatric Association had adopted a resolution condemning the political abuse of psychiatry, officially denouncing the systemic abuse of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals that had been documented in the USSR since the late 1960s. In the context of high-profile international campaigns against these practices led by prominent dissidents and their supporters, members of the French psychoanalytic community furiously debated the ethics of attending the Georgian conference; many chose to boycott while others pointed to the hypocrisy that official psychoanalytic associations continued to operate in right-wing Latin American dictatorships. Those who did attend were mostly Lacanians, some of whom sought to evade the theoretical constraints imposed by the organizers in their speeches, which included discussions of the Lacanian influence on the French women’s liberation movement, by bypassing the official translators to include forbidden words such as “sexuality” and “desire.” Although Edward Joseph, the American president of the IPA, cancelled at the last minute, Anna Freud sent her best wishes to the organizers by telegram. Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser both declined invitations, though the latter contributed a paper to a subsequent publication. The linguist Roman Jakobson, who had left Moscow for Prague in 1920 and was by then an emeritus professor at MIT, delivered his paper in Georgian.
A collection of papers accompanied the symposium, with contributions by scholars from the Soviet Union, other socialist states in the Eastern bloc including the DDR, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, as well as Western Europe and the U.S. The volumes’ editors emphasized the “pronounced heterogeneity and variety” of the contributions, which included discussions of dreams and art, hypnosis and phenomenology, neurology and group therapy. Michael Balint, Anna Freud, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Robert Wallerstein—papers engaged with work by psychoanalysts from a range of traditions, alongside discussions of Soviet theorists of the unconscious which, as symposium co-organizer Philip Bassin’s 1968 book The Problem of the Unconscious argued, were more influenced by Pierre Janet than by Freud. Many contributions by Soviet authors repeated criticisms typically leveled at psychoanalysis since the 1920s—noting its proximity to Western idealist philosophy and its “prescientific, mystically coloured irrationalism”—but the editors also insisted that the concept of the unconscious corresponded with the “theoretical notions and spirit” of Marxism and could be analyzed from the perspective of dialectical materialism. They were explicit that the Soviet attitude towards psychoanalysis since the end of the NEP period “made a mistake and threw the baby out with the bath water.”
Alongside discussions typical of Soviet scientific discourse including Lenin’s theory of reflection, Pavlovian conditioned reflexes, Aleksei Leontiev’s activity theory, and Uznadze’s theory of set, Soviet authors also engaged with the work of Western European psychoanalysts, including Lacan, who was presented as being more socially oriented than Freud. A paper by N. S. Avtonomova from the Academy of Sciences in Moscow discussed Jacques Lacan’s theory of the unconscious, arguing that he made the concept “open to rational grasping” by treating it as a language, though L. I. Filippov opined that while Lacan claimed to want to overthrow the subject in theory his work nonetheless clung to it in practice. Elisabeth Roudinesco, one of the French Lacanians to attend the event, remained skeptical about the long-term impact the discussions in Tbilisi might have on Soviet psychology given the hostility to Freudian thought and psychoanalytic practice that was still very much in evidence, but she did not foresee the dramatic social changes that were soon to unfold, changes that would not merely impact theoretical understandings of psychic life but that would have far-reaching implications for subjective experience itself.[1]
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Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and soon embarked on the reforms that would ultimately lead to the Soviet Union’s collapse. Descriptions of the period sound psychoanalytic even when not explicitly engaging with psychoanalytic concepts. Writing in 1995, historian Moshe Lewin observed that “the coup from above” launched by Gorbachev was soon followed by a “chaotic anti-system urge from below,” in terms that sound strangely like a description of a patient undergoing analytic treatment:
“When the controlling mechanisms began to weaken, all the woes of the country that kept accumulating under the heavy cover of the regime’s monopoly—all the wounds, neglect, and despair, and all that was in need of urgent mending—came up to the surface, with devastating effects and a multidimensional complexity. This was unavoidable, and actually indispensable, in the given situation: The country had to learn the full scope and depth of its problems, which it had not realized before.”
In a letter sent to the journal Ogoniok in May 1989, a woman from Kyiv noted that whenever Gorbachev met with Soviet people, he would always open with the question, “How is your mood, comrades?” to which they would invariably reply “Good.” She remarked that this response seemed not only disingenuous but impossible given the material hardships of the present and social reckonings with the past that people were experiencing. How were people supposed to be in a good mood if they had just discovered the details of their grandparents’ repression under Stalin? How were people supposed to be in a good mood if they were unable to access medical care, if they had to queue for hours to buy food, if they could not breathe fresh air? She framed the opening up of discussions of the past in positive terms, suggesting that this reckoning was primarily psychological, but she nonetheless concluded that “after reading and seeing all these things, normal people can’t be in a good mood.” In this moment of confusion and crisis, many people (at least among the urban intelligentsia) turned to psychoanalysis in an attempt to make sense of their wounds, neglect, and despair, in an attempt to work through the experiences that had been opened up for public scrutiny.
A year before the letter appeared in Ogoniok, in June 1988, Aron Belkin had published a laudatory article on Freud in the popular journal Literaturnaia gazeta, arguing that Freud’s insights regarding individual subjectivity were pertinent to Soviet society: “the recovery of society as a whole, like that of an individual, requires the overcoming of internal resistance, the mastery of fear, the acknowledgment of one’s mistakes and an understanding of their origins.” Unlike the translations that were published in the 1920s, the first publication of Freud’s works released in the 1980s was not with a state publisher but facilitated by an entrepreneur running a newly permitted small business enterprise known as a cooperative. Marat Akchuran printed 100,000 copies of a translation of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in spring 1989, based on a text that had been found in a provincial library. With upfront funding from amateur book clubs, the entire print run sold out in advance. Cooperatives, however, were not permitted to publish books and copies of the essays were seized by the authorities. Sherry Turkle, who visited the Soviet Union on various trips in the late 1980s, noted of this episode that “publishing Freud became a symbol not only of the right to repressed knowledge, but of individual economic rights in the marketplace of ideas.” When a state publishing house did finally release a collection of Freud’s works later that year, with an introduction by Belkin, it sold over a million copies.
The upsurge of interest in psychoanalysis in this period was not an isolated phenomenon but part of the chaotic and enthusiastic ferment of the times that included a renewed interest in subjectivity and psychology, alongside the revival of religious, spiritual, and nationalist discourses. Bootleg editions of Freud’s texts could be found jostling for space on street stalls beside cigarettes and porn, portraits of saints and portraits of Lenin, decorated Easter Eggs and reproductions of Rembrandt paintings. Ukrainian television mystic and hypnotist Anatoly Kashpirovsky became a celebrity across the Soviet Union in the late 1980s performing long, televised “seances.” Psychologists formed samizdat reading groups to discuss publications associated with the human potential movement and Gestalt therapy, as well as psychoanalysis, while underground philosophy seminars discussed Freud alongside a range of figures previously dismissed as bourgeois, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Walter Benjamin—as Georgi M. Derluguian notes in his unsurpassed account of the Soviet Union’s demise, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (2004) of the Brezhnev-era intelligensia: “almost everything was eagerly consumed because of acute informational shortage and the presence of a large educated audience. The intellectual value of a text was judged to be in reverse proportion to that given it by official Soviet ideology.” Improvised forms of “wild” psychoanalytic therapy, sometimes covertly practiced in people’s apartments, were advertised on handpainted signs in alleyways, practices that moved into the open after 1991. In Moscow alone, three psychoanalytic institutes opened in the 1990s and psychoanalytic institutes and associations also formed in former Soviet republics beyond Russia, including Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Kiosks sold translations of Norman Vincent Peale’s Christian self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking, self-help workshops and personal growth seminars flourished, psychotherapists hosted popular TV talk shows, while a therapist in 1990s St. Petersburg placed a newspaper advert offering “psychoanalysis, tarot readings, harmonization of sexual feelings, and removal of the evil eye.”
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Psychoanalytic ideas began to recirculate as part of a more general outpouring of previously suppressed materials, and the decades-long suppression of psychoanalysis was described as being symptomatic of Stalinism, but Freud’s ideas were also used to make sense of that outpouring and of the experiences of political repression that preceded it. Valery Leibin, who had attended the symposium in Tbilisi and later became a psychoanalyst, wrote just prior to the USSR’s collapse that psychoanalysis “posed a potential threat to a political culture that gave birth to a repressive apparatus of massive suppression of alternative thought.” Two books detailing the history of psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union were published in the 1990s: Martin A. Miller’s Freud and the Bolsheviks and Alexander Etkind’s Eros of the Impossible. The latter, first published in Russian in the recently renamed city of St. Petersburg in 1993, was, as historian Catherine Merridale noted, an “instant success among a public eager for new information, controversy, and a fresh interpretation of Russia’s long enslavement.” Etkind addressed the historical moment in which his book was written in its opening lines: “History written from within a society is . . . subjective, particularly when it is written in the depths of a crisis of historic proportions; but it is just this subjectivity that is needed in a period of change.”
One of Freud’s more nuanced early Soviet critics, Lev Vygotsky, complained that psychoanalysis “directly reduces the higher mental processes—both personal and collective ones—to a primitive, primordial, essentially prehistorical, prehuman root, leaving no room for history.” Yet during perestroika, the renewed interest in the unconscious was explicitly bound up with discussions of history; the repressed returned. Memoirs, histories, and previously unpublished literature about Stalinist repression and other historical events were widely read and energetically debated. “Glasnost,” Sventlana Boym observed, “marked not the end of history but its rediscovery and its passionate rewriting.” Previously taboo topics such as the economic reforms of the NEP period, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (the non-aggression agreement between the USSR and Nazi Germany signed in 1939), and the legacies of the Khrushchev era were openly discussed in the press. Memoirs describing the torture and brutality that characterized interrogation procedures during the Stalinist terror and the horrific conditions in labor camps were published in major journals and newspapers. For the first time, Soviet historians openly asked how many people died as a result of the collectivization of agriculture, described the horrors of the 1930–33 famines in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, discussed the deportation of people accused of being kulaks, and debated whether the policy in Ukraine was explicitly anti-Ukrainian and therefore genocidal.
“During perestroika, the renewed interest in the unconscious was explicitly bound up with discussions of history; the repressed returned.”
In 1989, before the publication of Eros of the Impossible, Etkind and social psychologist Leonid Gozman published an essay analyzing the psychological basis of Soviet power and its disintegration, comparing Soviet society to a neurotic in need of psychoanalytic treatment. For Etkind and Gozman, the latter of whom would soon become a “liberal” politician, join the Union of Right Forces, and has recently been tried and convicted in absentia for his criticisms of the Russian military’s actions in Ukraine, to understand perestroika it was necessary to understand the psychological legacies of both Stalinism and the thaw under Khrushchev. They argued that while the thaw was greeted by joy and elation, perestroika was instead characterized by fear, anger, distrust, and despair. The mood among comrades—a word that would soon disappear from everyday speech—was anything but good. To diagnose the distinctive pathologies of Soviet society they placed it on the couch. When Stalin was in power people’s intense feelings of fear were “displaced into the unconscious” and transformed into love. Only after Stalin’s death and the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, during which Khrushchev condemned Stalinism in his infamous “secret speech,” could repressed feelings about “the amoral, the dangerous, the traumatic” aspects of Soviet life during the past three decades come to the surface. The loosening of political repression precipitated a concomitant loosening of psychic repression: “Everything that people saw but were afraid to understand, felt but did not admit to themselves, guessed but could not say—all this came out into the open.” Their emphasis on the thwarted hopes of the Khrushchev era gestures towards the possibility that Soviet history could have taken an alternative course.
In psychoanalysis, Etkind and Gozman argued, the “cure for neurosis lies in consistent recognition of the material which has been displaced as painful,” but such a recognition often results in resistance on the part of the patient: “Psychoanalysts know that the more forcefully something is displaced from the consciousness, the greater the emotional effect of recognising it.” The authors characterized the artistic, creative, social, and erotic fervor that they claim erupted during the thaw in psychoanalytic terms as a moment of catharsis and insight. But the analysis was interrupted before the treatment was complete, leaving the patient uncured. Brezhnev was no Stalin but under his leadership the public reckoning with the Stalinist past that had been briefly inaugurated was again closed down. Gorbachev, a “new doctor,” returned Soviet society to the couch, attempting to renew the treatment, but the patient was now close to breakdown as it faced “a new neurotic trauma” in the difficult new conditions ushered in by the transition to the market economy: “The patient is suffering, he feels sick, and the prospects of a new, human life being opened up inspire him less and less.” Sometimes it is unclear whether they are talking metaphorically or literally. They suggest that late Soviet society is metaphorically sick—dysfunctional, repressive, chaotic—but the implication is that such a society creates real neuroses among its inhabitants, neuroses that require therapeutic care as well as political reform.
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History also shaped the experiences of people seeking therapeutic help from psychoanalysts in the former Soviet Union in the period following its collapse. Discussing her clinical work conducted during the 1990s, Russian psychoanalyst Maria Timofeeva identified many examples of patients haunted by the Soviet past— children of prosecutors, of former labor camp prisoners, of mothers who’d had affairs with NKVD officers. She used the term “totalitarian objects,” introduced by the Czech analyst Michael Šebek, to describe the internalization of experiences of growing up in a system where many people were both victims and perpetrators of violence. Their dreams, she claimed, still betrayed fears of an omnipotent state and were populated by good yet passive parental figures.
The analyst Marina Arutyunyan, one of four protagonists of Masha Gessen’s The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017), who began seeing clients clandestinely in Moscow in the mid 1980s, recalled treating a woman who expressed concerns about her eleven-year-old daughter who, though not otherwise difficult, kept having accidents. One time she set their curtains on fire. On another occasion she locked her grandmother—the patient’s mother—outside on their apartment balcony on a freezing cold day. The three women lived together. Although the patient was kind to her daughter, the grandmother was extremely cruel and controlling and the patient complied obediently with even her most unreasonable demands. Arutyunyan thought the girl’s behaviour was an expression of the aggression towards the grandmother that her mother was suppressing. Through their sessions, the woman came to acknowledge that she wished her mother would die and expressed guilt for transferring her negative feelings to her daughter.
Then a new discovery shifted the narrative of intimate family dynamics from the realm of the personal into that of the political: the patient discovered that her mother had worked as a gulag guard. This revelation recast the grandmother’s behaviour; the family home suddenly appeared like a replica gulag. The gulag archipelago may have collapsed but its punitive and oppressive structures lived on in interpersonal relationships. Carceral dynamics were not left in the past but repeated in post-Soviet domestic spaces. The balcony incident recalled a torture technique used in Soviet labor camps in which prisoners were forced to stand outside their barracks in the cold. This incident seems to suggest that without therapeutic work repressive dynamics could outlive the institutions in which they originated, but does it equally imply that the larger scale brutalities of history might also risk being repeated? Were the new generation of psychoanalysts treating social as well as individual pathologies?
Arutyunyan, who first read Freud in the restricted section of her university library in the 1970s, recalled having been taught by Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria when she was a student in Moscow, a living link to the first generation of Soviet psychoanalysis (Luria had hosted psychoanalytic discussions in Kazan and later became secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in Moscow in the 1920s). Luria died in 1977 and many of his colleagues from the 1920s emigrated, were victims of Stalinist repression or, in the case of Sabina Spielrein, the Holocaust. (Spielrein had been the patient and lover of Carl Jung in Switzerland before training as a psychoanalyst and influencing Freud’s theorization of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She returned to the Soviet Union in the 1920s where she conducted clinical studies with children, first in Moscow and later in Rostov-on-Don where she was shot along with her two daughters by a Nazi death squad in July 1942.) Although some of the new generation of Russian analysts, such as Belkin who had worked with psychotherapists in Irkutsk in Siberia, recalled being covertly introduced to Freud by older mentors and tattered editions of psychoanalytic works published in the 1920s circulated quietly, self-taught analyst Sergei Agrachev observed in 1996 that the long period during which psychoanalysis was neither openly practiced or published meant that he and his colleagues were “like the mammoths that are discovered intact and frozen in the permafrost.”
Formal psychoanalytic training relies on existing analysts to act as training analysts, but in post-Soviet countries, as with the first generation of analysts to which Freud belonged, there was no previous generation to perform this role. Instead, those who wanted to train either travelled to the U.S. or embarked on forms of “shuttle analysis” with analysts in Germany, the Netherlands, or the Czech Republic, faxing their cases through to their supervisors. They would leave their own clients to spend chunks of time in other cities where they would attend daily sessions, rarely conducted in their first language. The interruption of the psychoanalytic lineage created temporal and spatial interruptions in the present with gaps in treatments and trainings necessitated by the reliance on geographically distant training analysts. The long years during which psychoanalysis could not be openly practiced nor new psychoanalytic works published or translated created a generation of analysts and patients without immediate ancestors, a peculiar situation that paralleled the broader experience of transition in which people born in one country and social system suddenly found themselves in a completely new reality cut off from the one in which they and their forbears had grown up.
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On August 19th, 1991, the clinical psychologist Mary Watkins, who has since published widely on psychological approaches to social justice, arrived in Moscow from the U.S. to speak at a conference called “Dreaming in Russia,” organized by Dutch Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak. Sitting on a bus from the airport to the conference venue she saw long queues of cars outside petrol stations and tanks on the highway. It was only when she reached her destination that she was informed that the tanks on the streets were not an ordinary feature of daily life in the Soviet capital but that she had arrived in the city on the first morning of the attempted coup by Communist Party hardliners. She describes herself sitting with colleagues from Russia, Estonia, Lithuania and Armenia (the latter three countries had declared sovereignty from the USSR in 1988, 1989 and 1990 respectively), watching as martial law was announced on TV. Unable to contact the U.S. or its embassy either by phone or fax and incapable of accessing outside news, she and her fellow Americans had no way of leaving. The sixty delegates, who preferred to be referred to as “local” rather than Soviet people, turned up for the conference regardless and attended daily dream groups as planned.
A young Russian woman dreams of a foreboding patch of blackness in the corner of a room, which she overpowers by imagining a blue sky; a Lithuanian man dreams of a large black spider attacking him in bed and attacking it with his hands. Watkins reported that the dreams dreamt in the context of the coup had shared characteristics: the dreamer is assailed by a dark external force and seeks to vanquish it. She observed that for Russian and non-Russian dreamers alike the Soviet state was experienced as totally “other” with no reflection on Russian imperialism or on possible forms of complicity with power. Instead, the attendees all spoke of perestroika as their first experience of freedom. Among the conference attendees was Adolf Kharash, who reported on his clinical work with survivors of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. Chernobyl, along with the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–89) and the 1988 Armenian earthquake, became an exemplary late-Soviet catastrophe, the traumatic impact of which was literal for many individuals and metaphorical for the broader society. V. N. Buzin recalled that the first permitted Soviet psychoanalytic association to open during perestroika was attached to the Society of Afghan War Veterans, but since its therapeutic goal involved adaptation to existing social norms, analysts concerned with the “emancipation of the individual” refused to join.[2]
“Many Western psychoanalysts who visited the Soviet Union during perestroika noted anxiously that their colleagues seemed to idealize psychoanalysis”
But history did not end with the collapse of state socialism across the Eastern bloc. In Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (2018), anthropologist Tomas Matza analyzes the surge of interest in psychotherapy in Russia that erupted in the 1990s. He explains that when he embarked on his research in the early years of the Putin era, he intended to interpret these therapeutic practices as a “symptom of neoliberal capitalism’s arrival” and was curious to discover if the effort to create a New Soviet Person in the aftermath of the October Revolution had a post-Soviet capitalist counterpart. Would people educated and socialized in Soviet Russia suddenly become atomized, self-interested individuals? While the transition to the market economy did impact psychotherapy both discursively and materially, Matza’s ethnographic work led him to conclude that the turn to therapy also responded to “the ending of a way of life,” to uncertainty about the future and to acute material hardships in the present. Rather than discovering evidence of “the construction of the deep psychological self that scholars term neoliberal subjectivity,” he instead encountered people seeking “modes of truth telling about experience, emotional harm, or violence, and a pursuit of sociality in the privatized spaces of postsocialism.” Serguei Oushakine has similarly argued that in the absence of new unifying social frameworks, post-Soviet Russian culture was dominated by the trope of loss, which was in turn tied to the emergence of an exclusionary form of ethno-nationalism.
Many Western psychoanalysts who visited the Soviet Union during perestroika noted anxiously that their colleagues seemed to idealize psychoanalysis, a phenomenon tied to their more general idealization of what Alexei Yurchak calls “the imaginary West.” If early Soviet psychoanalysts had been at pains to demonstrate the compatibility of psychoanalysis with Marxism, received funding from the state, and conducted research into proletarian life, analysts in post-Soviet Russia had to make a living in the competitive newly privatized healthcare system and began treating patients whose neuroses stemmed not only from the past but from their current social conditions. Arutyunyan shared her office with another therapist who agonized about asking an entrepreneur client to leave his gun outside the room during their sessions, while Agrachev, who by 1997 was charging $60 for a private session, reflected on the sense of disappointment and disillusionment among his patients, most of whom were wealthy housewives:
“For 70 years . . . we idealized the West. Now we discover that wealth really doesn’t buy happiness. Intelligent women who used to work in institutes and universities find themselves alone at home, entirely dependent on their husbands. They find out that in this brave new world, their role has regressed to the 19th century.”
The Rich Also Cry was the name of a Mexican soap opera that became hugely popular on Soviet television in 1991, but most people living in most former Soviet states were not struggling emotionally because of newfound wealth but rather experiencing distress tied to new forms of poverty and hardship in the context of food shortages, high inflation, the decline of public services, massive de-industrialization, the privatization of previously nationalized assets, rising unemployment, new forms of corruption, the destruction of institutions of social care, and plummeting life expectancy. Previously shared vocabularies, institutions, values, and routines disappeared. Psychoanalysis was generally available only to the new elite; mental health services were reformed and previously forbidden approaches introduced, but the sector lost much of its state funding. Freudian analyst Volodya Kozlov, one of Matza’s interviewees, complained that the eclecticism and intellectual vibrancy of the psychoanalytic community in the early 1990s was short-lived, bemoaning that his colleagues eventually became motivated by money alone.
In the introduction to Second Hand Time, which weaves together oral history accounts of the experience of Soviet collapse from a range of perspectives, Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich notes the emergence of new kinds of subjectivity after 1991:
“There are thousands of newly available feelings, moods, and responses. Everything around us has been transformed: the billboards, the clothing, the money, the flag . . . the people themselves. They’re more colourful now, more individualized: the monolith has been shattered and life has splintered into a million little fragments: cells and atoms.”
Alexievich belongs to the same generation as Ernaux—they were born eight years apart—but though they both articulate an experience of living through history alongside others, Second Hand Time is a striking contrast to The Years in its retention of particular “I”s within the “common time” of the Soviet “we.” For Alexievich, the dramatic transformation of the external world had a counterpart in the psychic lives of the diverse range of people who had recently ceased to be Soviet. Neoliberal subjectivity is frequently described using the metaphors of cells and atoms that she deploys here, but this passage fails to describe how for many of the people she talked with the transition was not just experienced as a grey monolith breaking into discrete colorful parts; it was also a process that shattered people’s internal worlds, leaving them feeling riven, ruptured, and raw. Alexievich strikes a far more optimistic note here than many of her interlocutors who repeatedly describe feeling lost, bewildered, and disappointed after the fleeting promise of perestroika, a disorienting experience they often frame in psychological terms:
“‘People’s minds flipped 180 degrees. Some couldn’t handle it, they went crazy, the psych wards were overflowing.’
’Today, the museums stand empty, while the churches are full. It’s because all of us need therapists. Psychotherapy sessions.’”
Contrasting the energetic discussions about the future that took place during perestroika to the hopeless, cynical, and chaotic atmosphere in the 1990s, a young woman in Yaroslavl remarked to anthropologist Nancy Ries that “nobody has time to talk anymore, we are all just trying to survive,” while another in Moscow declared similarly: “All that lamenting was a luxury! Now we haven’t got the time!” As in the thaw period, a process of social therapy was embarked upon, but the analysis was cut short.
*
In a 1930 letter to Arnold Zweig, Freud explained his refusal to sign a letter in support of a document attacking “capitalist economic confusion” for fear it might indicate his support for Communism: “In spite of all my dissatisfaction with the present economic systems I have no hope that the road pursued by the Soviets will lead to improvement. Indeed, any such hope that I may have cherished has disappeared in this decade of Soviet rule.” In a subsequent letter he continues this thought, reflecting of the “Soviet experiment” that “[w]e have been deprived by it of a hope—and an illusion—and we have received nothing in return.”
1921, 1928, 1937, 1939, 1956, 1968: there were many moments that prompted people who had been invested in the Communist ideal both within the USSR and beyond to lose hope in the Soviet experiment. By the time the USSR finally ceased to exist the global left had long been looking elsewhere for inspiration (even as many of the anti-colonial struggles that served as sources of inspiration still received material support from the Soviet state). Freud’s remarks express regret about the way Soviet history unfolded between 1917 and 1930 but also betray a fatalism appropriate to his own self-proclaimed political identity as “a liberal of the old school.” For Freud, the hope was always an illusion.
The catchall term “Soviet history” flattens out the wildly divergent and unequal experiences of people that unfolded within that near-century-long time span and vast geographical region. The Soviet Union was never a monolith but was always characterized by internal divisions, inequalities, and violently upheld power relations, many of which were in continuity with those established under pre-revolutionary Russian imperialism. The transition to the market economy unfolded very differently in different post-Soviet states and the advent of capitalism cannot be understood as an abstract or isolated phenomenon. On August 30, 2022, the day that Mikhail Gorbachev died, Ukrainian troops were mounting a military counteroffensive in the Kherson region in an attempt to retake areas in southern Ukraine from Russia. It was 188 days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, eight years since the Russian occupation and annexation of Crimea. The Ukrainian psychoanalysts Mariana Velykodna and Petro Garmish (who paused his analytic work to take up a role as a deputy battalion commander for moral and psychological support for the Ukrainian military in Dnipro) have reflected on painful interactions with analytic colleagues in Russia who denied or down - played the scale and ferocity of the Russian attack, following the lead of Russian state media in refusing to call it a war. International colleagues, meanwhile, frequently invoked Freud’s discussion of the “narcissism of minor differences,” glossing over a long history of Russian imperial domination by implying parity between the two states.
The question of how possible it is to overcome the inheritances of the past is central to psychoanalysis. Confronting the material and psychic legacies of historical relationships of brutal domination and violent oppression is crucial but it can risk eternalizing or essentializing those relationships, a risk to which leftwing readers of psychoanalysis have long been alert. In the conclusion of Collapse, Zubok cautions against adopting analyses of the relation of the Soviet past to the post-Soviet present that cling to some notion of an “eternal Russia,” characterized as somehow essentially and thus permanently anti-democratic and authoritarian. Writing in March 2022 shortly after the full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian artist and writer Oleksiy Radynski turned the Freudian concept of “minor differences” on its head, arguing that the Russian imperialist mindset that refuses to recognize Ukrainian independence implicitly acknowledges that the anti-authoritarian rebellions and democratic elections that were possible in Ukraine are actually also possible in Russia, which is precisely why the Russian state needed to crush them at all costs:
“The truth is that all of these Ukrainian things are actually possible in Russia because, after centuries of shared colonial history, Russians have become a little bit Ukrainian . . . any relationship between metropole and colony— like any master-slave relationship—is dialectical and reciprocal.”
This is an argument against the Russian Federation that is also an anti-essentialist argument that rejects inevitability. Radynski insists on the possibility of retaining hope for a future reality beyond the “despotic, colonialist Russian state.” In a follow-up essay written the following year, Radynski discusses the West’s role in the trajectory of the Russian Federation towards a particularly extreme form of monopoly capitalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union, arguing that a different kind of mirroring and disavowed identification is evident in the West’s support for Ukraine in the war: “in the case of Russia, the West is not opposing some kind of exotic orientalist Other. It is opposing its own ugly double, which simply took Western racist, extractivist colonialism to its extreme.”
Writing in the early 1990s, in an essay that treats Alexander Sokurov’s extraordinary 1988 film Days of Eclipse as a geopolitical allegory, the late, great Fredric Jameson articulated the profoundly melancholic political conjuncture of perestroika for those still committed to revolutionary transformation. In the 1976 Soviet science fiction novel on which the film is based, Jameson argues, the bureaucracy of the Soviet system can be read as the impediment to building “true” socialism, but by the time of the film adaptation this explanation is no longer tenable. The 1988 film registers what he describes as a “convulsive shift of reference, a radical change in the historical dilemma,” which raises a more poignant political question: “why in spite of all these changes, when we no longer have the old pretexts to blame, is it still not possible to achieve social transformation?” At this very late moment in Soviet history, Jameson treats the transition to the market economy as a choice rather than an inevitability. He also insists that the possibility had existed, however faint and fragile, of creating an alternative society beyond both the brutality and bureaucracy of the Soviet state and of the capitalist world-system.
“Is it possible to articulate a hope to achieve social transformation after the global triumph of capitalism or is that just an illusion?”
Is it possible to articulate a hope to achieve social transformation after the global triumph of capitalism or is that just an illusion? Early Soviet debates about psychoanalysis wrestled with a tension in psychoanalytic thought between the timeless and primal qualities of the unconscious, which it was feared undermined the possibility of revolutionary social change, on the one hand, and Freud’s understanding of human subjectivity as socially and historically formed and hence open to transformation, on the other. If this dialectic between fate and will, the unconscious and the conscious, the eternal and the historical, the death drive and the life instincts, the inevitable and the contingent, is internal to psychoanalytic thought, it is also helpful for thinking about how people live through history and how they might seek to change its course.
[1] On French Lacanians and the Tbilisi symposium, see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985. (London: Free Association Books), pp. 642–647.
[2] V. N. Buzin, “Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union: On the History of a Defeat,” Russian Social Science Review, 36,6, 1996 65–73, p. 72. Western humanitarian organizations were heavily involved in treating survivors of the Armenian earthquake, which killed over 25,000 people, a disaster that led to Lacanian approaches being introduced in the republic that continued post-independence. A study conducted by psychoanalysts and psychiatrists working with French charity Médecins du Monde concluded that 40% of people in the disaster zone were suffering from traumatic neurosis, after which a network of Lacanian psychoanalysts across Armenia and a rehabilitation centre in Yerevan were established. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. by Rachel Gomme (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 169.