After the elections in Georgia, Moldova and Uzbekistan in recent days, the result of the grand American finale of the electoral process that this year has touched almost all regions and large countries is expected, in a context of warlike tensions that make the decision of the citizens contributes in one sense or another to the great “electoral world war” by placing itself in hybrid mode side by side with the soldiers on the battlefield or with the victims under the rubble, along with the drones and missiles that They fall from the sky on the cities and also destroy the houses, schools and hospitals.
The election of the president of the United States is particularly significant for the potential prospects for war or peace in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, and many other regions of the world. It remains to be seen how the affected countries will react, especially those in the Russian world, dramatically divided between East and West. In recent days there has been a debate between the two candidates in the second round for the presidency of Moldova, who have answered ten agreed questions without a moderator, because they could not find one that both contenders considered acceptable and neutral, the outgoing president Maia Sandu and the pro-Russian Aleksandr Stoianoglo, the latter coming from Gagauzia who would prefer to join Moscow rather than Chisinau, much less Bucharest or Brussels.
The outcome of the confrontation seems to have assigned minimal preference to Sandu, who tried to show the results of the efforts made in the last five years to improve the lives of Moldovan citizens. Stoianoglo, however, responded in a rather generic way that Moldova needs much more, and both avoided explicitly indicating their international references, to show concern only for the good of their citizens. A revealing element, however, clearly indicated the substantial difference between the two: the Romanian language with which they argued, the official language of the country, Sandu masters perfectly, while Stoianoglo expresses himself with a clear Russian pronunciation in the background.
This detail immediately aroused the reaction of all the Moldovan citizens who witnessed the debate, remembering times past. Stoianoglo, a 57-year-old politician, magistrate and former attorney general of Moldova from 2019 to 2021, is actually a character who resurfaces from the last century, a typical sovokas defined by homo sovieticusaccording to the abbreviation of the Russian word sovetsky. And this is the reality that is taking shape today, the effect of wars and elections: the return to the Soviet era and the universal Cold War, beyond victories or defeats on the battlefield or at the polls.
According to a definition from the London magazine New Statesman of 1993, the sovok is “a man who loves birches and believes they only grow in Russia, likes to ban everything, says no to everything, and works in offices with leatherette-covered doors.” It really seems like a description of what is happening between Moscow, Tbilisi, Chisinau and Tashkent, beyond the individual personalities of the protagonists of the political disputes. It was thought that thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, these attitudes of closure and distancing from the rest of the world no longer existed, and instead we are still tied to those times, when there were no smartphones or computers, much less connections to Internet, and the world was fixed on the “traditional values” of populations pitted against each other. From Putin to Stoianoglo, passing through the Georgian Ivanishvili, the Uzbek Mirziyoyev and many others, today those who prefer to conceive the world as a confrontation between “us and them” predominate, and this also applies to a large extent for the very civilized Western countries. from Europe to the United States.
In Russia, the sovok in reality it indicates the shovel to collect sand or garbage, and therefore it is a derogatory term in use since the fifties of the last century after the death of Stalin, when the sovki (plural of sovok) to the stiljagithose who adopted the Western “style”, wore jeans and loved rock music and jazz, unlike the Soviets, who were framed in the gloomy ways of life imposed by Stalinist totalitarianism. It is no coincidence that some Russian politicians claim today that the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the fashion of jeans, which “tighten the legs and make men unattractive to women,” as the president of the Duma says, Vyacheslav Volodin. This is where the definition of homo sovieticus of sociologists, which corresponds negatively to the boomer western.
The Soviet anthropological type was, in fact, an explicit project since the times of the Bolshevik revolution, when the People’s Commissar for “enlightenment” (prosveshchenie, actually Minister of Culture) Anatoly Lunacharsky proposed “molding” young children, “bending” teenagers and “breaking into pieces” young people to obtain reliable new generations, as today seems to be one of the main concerns of Russian educational policy, which dresses kindergarten children in military uniforms, with fake grenades on their belts. Soviet ideologist Nikolai Bukharin proposed “turning people into living machines”, and the idea of ”social engineering” spread through literature, cinema and mass demonstrations, such as those that will take place in the coming days in Russia. on the occasion of the great holiday of November 4, Day of Popular Unity, which commemorates the victory over the Poles and the West at the beginning of the 17th century, and also remembers the holiday of the October revolution on November 7, the beginning of the winter season.
The new Soviet man truly appeared in the 20th century, and it seems that he has never disappeared, not only in the personalities of those over seventy, such as President Putin and Patriarch Kirill, but also in later generations and in neighboring countries. , despite the radical changes in society in recent decades in all latitudes. There is nostalgia for the Soviet simplification of the world, which was also welcome in the adversary camp, and “make America great again“resonates as a reminder of the childhood world of Massachusetts as much as that of the Caucasus or Siberia. The man of the 20th century, re-proposed ad infinitum in digital algorithms, is not a fearless fighter for the happiness of the entire human race as it is assumed. describes him, but a hypocritical and lying opportunist, who is not capable of living autonomously and entrenches himself behind stale ideological and pseudo-religious proclamations, who is afraid of responsibilities and contamination from those who are different. This is him. sovok.
In Russia, this regression to the Stalinist era is accentuated by the crisis of social services and the distribution of basic necessities, which are increasingly scarce and increasingly expensive, to the point that butter has almost completely disappeared. from stores and supermarkets, where it is kept under lock and key to prevent theft. In Soviet Russia, butter and olive oil were replaced by low-quality, smelly peanut or seed oils, which gave the cuisine an unmistakable character that could only be tolerated with copious amounts of vodka, also low-grade. quality. The crudeness of the forms of communication of that time is reproduced today quite blatantly in the style of President Vladimir Putin, the classic gopnik Soviet (“street boy”) who solves the world’s problems by covering all adversaries with insults, and resorting to hands instead of opening any type of dialogue, which after all is the typical form of communication of modern social networks.
One of the most important sociologists of the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, Yuri Levada, maintained the permanence of Soviet-type social anthropology even after the end of the totalitarian regime and in 2004, shortly before his death, he founded the Levada-Centr , the most important center for analysis and population studies in Russia. In 2016, its members published research according to which young people who had lived in the last days of the Soviet regime, those who are now fifty years old, are not very different from the previous generations of their parents and grandparents. The Soviet Union has disappeared, but the Soviet man remains, who today takes revenge in the East and the West, in the universal war of the old and new empires, looking to the past rather than the future.
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