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Was There a “Simple Soviet” Person? Debating the Politics and Sociology of “Homo Sovieticus”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2019

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova
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Abstract

Intellectual efforts to understand post-Crimean Russian society have brought to prominence explanations that emphasize psychological and attitudinal legacies of Soviet society. The recent revival of the term homo sovieticus (or Soviet man) in the media and intellectual discourse is a good illustration of this trend. Yurii Levada's late-Soviet sociological research project on the “simple Soviet man” serves as a frequent reference point in these discussions. In this article, I explore the ideological and analytical foundations of the Levada project and juxtapose the sociological construct developed by Levada and his team with the interpretative approach developed by Natalya Kozlova, another Soviet scholar who dedicated her life to studying Soviet society. I argue that essentialist and deterministic views of individual personality underpinning the Levada project that guide the current use of the Soviet man category are more politically and ideologically driven rather than being based on the state of the art in social psychology.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 173 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to express my gratitude to Jevgenijs Steinbuks, Venelin Ganev, Stephen Norris, Serguei Oushakine, Samuel Greene, Larisa Deriglazova, Neringa Klumbyte and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions on various drafts of this manuscript.

References

1. Author’s translation.

2. For the party’s actual changing policies on party discipline, see Edward Cohn, The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime (DeKalb, 2015).

3. Dar΄ia Dimke, “‘Pamiati pavshikh bud΄te dostoiny’: Praktiki postroeniia lichnosti v utopicheskikh obshchestvakh,” Sotsiologiia vlasti, no. 4 (2014): 97–116.

4. A simple search for the term homo sovieticus in prominent news outlets in the US, UK, and the English-language sources in Russia for 2017 retrieves the following headlines (in the western media sources mostly reviewing Masha Gessen’s recent book): “In Masha Gessen’s ‘The Future is History’ Homo Sovieticus Rises,” The New York Times, October 3, 2017, at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/books/review/masha-gessen-the-future-is-history.html; “The Evolution of Homo Sovieticus to Putin’s Man,” The Moscow Times, October 13, 2017,at https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/the-evolution-of-homo-sovieticus-to-putins-man-59189; and “Putin and Homo Sovieticus,” The Guardian, November 17, 2017, at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/18/the-future-is-history-by-masha-gessen-review (all last accessed January 22, 2019).

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6. Krylova, Anna, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian history 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 119–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. See, for example, a special issue on “global populisms” in Slavic Review 76 (August 2017).

8. For a review of different traditions on the issue of relationships between personality and culture, see Poortinga, Ype H. and Van Hemert, Dianne A., “Personality and Culture: Demarcating between the Common and the Unique,” Journal of Personality 69, no. 6 (December 2001): 1033–60CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

9. For notable exceptions in the Russian-language scholarship and a sign of the growing relevance of Kozlova’s approach, see Timofei Dmitriev, “‘Perepisyvaia’ sovetskoe proshloe: O programme issledovanii ‘sovetskogo cheloveka’ N. N. Kozlovoi” (Rewriting the Soviet Past: On the Research Program of Natalya Kozlova’s “Study of the Soviet Man”), Russian Sociological Review 16, no. 1 (2017): 183–226; and Maksim Fetisov, “Narrativ i teoria v issledovaniakh sovetskogo: Znachenie issledovanii N.N. Kozlovoi dlia sovremennoi politicheskoi teorii,” Russian Sociological Review 16, no.1 (2017): 227–46.

10. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and Nevitt R. Stanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950), 709–26.

11. See, for example, Abram Kardiner, Ralph Linton, Cora Du Bois, and James West, The Psychological Frontiers of Society (New York, 1945).

12. Adorno’s theory is part of the scholarship that is sometimes referred to as the relativistic, culture-and-personality school that advanced a view according to which individuals living in the same cultural environment and undergoing a similar socialization process develop the same personality. See also n11.

13. The model was advanced by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). It became a dominant paradigm in the field of Sovietology during the Cold War.

14. For criticisms of the totalitarian model and alternative approaches to analyzing the Soviet system, see scholars associated with the revisionist and post-revisionist schools, including Arch J. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered (Cambridge, 1985); Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (Oxford, 1989); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 2000); Steven Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1997).

15. I thank Venelin Ganev for bringing these authors to my attention.

16. For a more nuanced analytical exploration of Markov’s work, see Nikolay Karkov, “Against the Double Erasure: Georgi Markov’s Contribution to the Communist Hypothesis,” Slavic Review 77, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 151–73.

17. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” Living in Truth (1978): 114–16.

18. It is important to note that Zinoviev’s analysis of the Soviet system was not associated with the totalitarian model. It was a “home-grown” criticism of the system by an early participant in it who later found himself in a “love-hate” relationship with it. For an insightful analysis of Zinoviev’s various writings on Stalinism and the Soviet system, see Philip Hanson, “Alexander Zinoviev on Stalinism: Some Observations on the Flight of Our Youth,” Soviet Studies 40, no. 1 (January 1988): 125–35; and Philip Hanson and Michael Kirkwood, Alexander Zinoviev as Writer and Thinker (London, 1988).

19. Hanson, “Alexander Zinoviev on Stalinism,” 133.

20. Piotr Sztompka, “Civilizational Incompetence: The Trap of Post-Communist Societies,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 22, no. 2 (1993): 85–95.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 89. For an insightful critique of this concept, see Michael Buchowski, “The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother,” Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 463–82; and Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik. Anthropology and Political Science: A Convergent Approach, Vol. 3, (New York, 2012).

23. Józef Tischner, Etyka solidarności i Homo sovieticus (The Ethics of Solidarity and Homo Sovieticus) (Kraków, 1992).

24. Krzysztof Tyszka, “Homo Sovieticus Two Decades Later,” Polish Sociological Review 168, no. 4 (2009): 509.

25. Levada is considered to be one of the founders of the Soviet sociological discipline in the 1960s. See for example, memoirs of his colleagues in G. Batygin, M. G. Pugacheva, and S. Iarmoluik, eds. Rossiiskaia sotsiologiia 60-kh godov v vospominaniiakh i dokumentakh (St. Petersburg, 1999).

26. Yurii Levada, “‘Chelovek sovetskii’: problema rekonstruktsii iskhodnykh form,” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mnenia: ekonomicheskie i sotsial’nye peremeny 52, no. 2 (2001): 10–11.

27. Yurii Levada, Sovetskii prostoi chelovek: opyt sotsialnogo portreta na rubezhe 90-kh (Moscow, 1993), 13–21.

28. Ibid., 7.

29. Yurii Levada, “Homo Praevaricatus: Russian Doublethink,” in A. Brown, ed., Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader (Oxford, 2001), 314.

30. Ibid.

31. Yurii Levada 2000, “Chelovek lukavyi: Dvoemyslie po rossiiski,” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniia 45, no. 1 (2000): 26–27, quoting George Orwell, 1984 (London, 1949).

32. Yurii Levada, “Chelovek sovetskii,” Public lecture on Polit.ru, at http://polit.ru/article/2004/04/15/levada/ (last accessed January 22, 2019).

33. Talcott Parsons, An Outline of the Social System (Río Piedras, 1961). The temporal dimension is worth noting here. Both approaches (totalitarian model and the systems theory) articulated in the 1960s could be viewed as foundational to Levada’s intellectual development. He was not allowed to build on these theoretical innovations, and was even fired from Moscow State University (MGU) in 1969 for his political views, until perestroika opened such opportunities.

34. Vladimir A. Iadov, “Razmyshleniia o predmete sotsiologii,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniiia 2 (1990): 3–16, 11.

35. On the dynamism of the Soviet system, see for example Susan Gross Solomon, Pluralism in the Soviet Union (London, 1983). On the post-war reciprocity between the state and society, see Anna Paretskaya, “A Middle Class without Capitalism? Socialist Ideology and Post-Collectivist Discourse in the Late Soviet Era,” in Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, eds., Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–1985 (Lanham, 2012), 43.

36. See for example, Sandor Horvath, Stalinism Reloaded: Everyday Life in Stalin-city, Hungary (Bloomington, 2017); Klumbyte and Sharafutdinova, eds., Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–1985; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006).

37. Mikhail Gabowitsch, “K diskussii o teoreticheskom nasledii Yuria Levady,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia 96, no. 4 (2008): 50–61, 60.

38. Vospominaniia i diskussii o Iurii Aleksandroviche Levade (Moscow, 2010), 141.

39. Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject,” 120.

40. Vospominaniia i diskussii o Iurii Aleksandroviche Levade, 43–44.

41. Anthony Giddens’s “structuration theory” was, for example, developed in direct response to Parsons. See his “‘Power’ in the recent writings of Talcott Parsons,” Sociology 2 (3), 1968: 257–72.

42. Stanislav Govorukhin, Maya Ganina, Kirill Lavrov, and Vladimir Dudintsev, “Homo Sovieticus,” World Affairs 152, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 104–8, 104.

43. Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The Leninist Debris or Waiting for Perón,” East European Politics and Societies 10, no. 3 (September 1996): 504–35; Grigory Vainshtein, “Totalitarian Public Consciousness in a Post-totalitarian Society: The Russian Case in the General Context of Post-communist Developments,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 27, no. 3 (September 1994): 247–59.

44. Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Lenin’s Troubled Legacies: Bolshevism, Marxism and the Russian Traditions,” lecture delivered at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (2002), at http://www.cas.miamioh.edu/havighurstcenter/papers/Tismaneanu.pdf (last accessed January 24, 2019).

45. Aleksandr Bikbov, Grammatika poriadka: Istoricheskaia sotsiologiia poniatii, kotorye meniaiut nashu real΄nost΄ (Moscow, 2014); Klumbyte and Sharafutdinova, eds., Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–1985; Gleb Tsipursky, Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970, Russian and East European Studies series (Pittsburgh, 2016).

46. Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (London, 2017).

47. Leon Aron, Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987–1991 (New Haven, 2012).

48. This quote is often credited to Winston Churchill but was also used by George Orwell.

49. Kozlova defended her doctoral dissertation in 1992 and dedicated all of her subsequent scholarship to this topic. Perhaps her most important study is Sovetskie liudi: Stseny iz istorii. (Moscow, 2005). Also influential is her work with Irina Sandomirskaia, “Ia tak khochu nazvat΄ kino. ‘Naivnoe pismo’: Opyt lingvo-sociologicheskogo chteniia” (Moscow, 1996).

50. Zakharov A.V. “N.N. Kozlova: Tema zhizni (Sotsial΄ naia antropologia i tvorcheskii put΄ issledovatelia), in “Intelligentsia v obschestve riska. Sbornik statei po materialam IV Mezhdunarodnoi teoretiko-metodologicheskoi konferentsii 27 marta 2003 goda” (Moscow, RGGU, 2003), 508–17.

51. Natal΄ia Kozlova, Sovetskie liudi: Stseny iz istorii, 37.

52. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted and Patricia Kennedy Grimstead. Archives in Russia: A Directory and Bibliographic Guide to Holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg: A Directory and Bibliographic Guide to Holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg (Ann Arbor, 1997), 630.

53. Kozlova, Sovetskie liudi, 34–38.

54. Kozlova, Sovetskie liudi, 46.

55. Kozlova, Sovetskie liudi, 9.

56. Kozlova, Sovetskie liudi, 14.

57. Kozlova, Sovetskie liudi, 16.

58. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1997); Igor Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s ‘Magnetic Mountain’ and the State of Soviet Historical Studies,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3 (1996), 456–63.

59. For some reflections about this paradigm shift, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet history,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007): 77–91.

60. For an insightful analysis of Kozlova’s approach, see Dmitriev, “‘Perepisyvaia΄ sovetskoe proshloe.”

61. Kozlova, Sovetskie liudi, 487. On Soviet modernity, also see Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain, and Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2008); Anna Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 119–46. For another scholarly example of a more neutral analysis and interpretation of various Soviet practices, see Galina Orlova’s studies: “Modal΄nost΄ ili ideologicheskaia vozgonka dushi: Dvizhenie za kommunistecheskii trud v 1960-e gody,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, no. 108 (2016); “Apologiia strannoi veshchi: ‘Malen΄kie khitrosti’ sovetskogo cheloveka,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 34, no. 2, (2004); “‘Traktor v pole dyr-dyr-dyr/Vse my boremsia za mir΄: Sovetskoe miroliubie v brezhnevskuiu epokhu,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas no. 7 (2007).

62. Natalia Kozlova, “Stseny iz chastnoi zhizni perioda ‘zastoia’: Semeinaia perepiska,”Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology 2, no. 3, 1999: 126.

63. Kozlova, Sovetskie liudi, 45

64. Kozlova and Sandomirskaya, “Ia tak khochu nazvat΄ kino.”

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 2008).

67. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1988); Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, 1998); Paul Ricoer, Time and Narrative Vol. 3 (Chicago, 2010); Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1976).

68. I thank Serguei Oushakine for bringing these concepts to my attention as another lens through which one can evaluate flexibility or duplicity.

69. I purposefully focus on “late Soviet” studies, omitting a very rich recent literature on Soviet subjectivity that focuses on the Stalinist period. See Anna Krylova, “Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (May 2014): 167–92; Eric Naiman, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them,” The Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 307–15; Serguei Alex. Oushakine, “The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity,” in “Aftershocks: Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War,” a special issue of Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 3 (August 2004): 392–428; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-era Autobiographical Texts,” The Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 340–59; Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000); Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh, 2008); Aleksandr Etkind, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 171–86.

70. Diane Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream (Ithaca, 2013); Klumbyte and Sharafutdinova, Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism; Robert Edelman, Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State (Ithaca, 2009); Lewis Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, 2008).

71. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven, 2005), ix.

72. Ibid., 15. For a similarly nuanced analysis of the communist era social issues in Czechoslovakia, see Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, 2010).

73. Levada was profoundly influenced by Orwell’s 1984 already in the 1950s, when the first carbon copies of translations just appeared in Moscow. See for example, his very elaborate engagement with Orwell’s ideas and his recounting of the effect these ideas had in “Sovremennost΄ Oruella: Analogii i analiz,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia 68, no. 2 (2003): 70–73.

74. Lev Gudkov, Abortivnaia modernizatsiia (Moscow, 2011).

75. “The Long Life of Homo Sovieticus,” The Economist, December 10, 2011.

76. Gudkov, Abortivnaia modernizatsiia, 7.

77. Ibid., 12.

78. Ol΄ga Sedakova, “O fenomene sovetskogo cheloveka. Inter΄viu Elene Kudriavtsevoi,” January 2011, at http://www.olgasedakova.com/interview/903 (last accessed January 31, 2019).

79. Iurii Pivovarov and Leonid Vinogradov, “Pochemu my prodolzhaem zhit΄ v sovetskoi Rossii?,” 22 October 2013, at http://www.pravmir.ru/my-po-prezhnemu-zhivem-v-sovetskoj-rossii-video-1/ (last accessed January 31, 2019).

80. For insightful observations of the signs of the Soviet past brought back, especially in language, see Andrei Arkhangelski, “Maining konflikta i katastrofy. Chem putinskii chelovek otlichaetsia ot sovetskogo,” Moskovski Tsentr Karnegi, February 2, 2018, at http://carnegie.ru/commentary/75408 (last accessed January 31, 2019). For an alternative interpretation of the meaning of the Soviet forms and style returning in Russia, see Serguei A. Oushakine, “We’re Nostalgic but We’re Not Crazy”: Retrofitting the Past in Russia,” The Russian Review 66, no. 3 (July 2007): 451–82.

81. These are some of the few remaining non-for-profit organizations that promote open expression and liberal views in Russia.

82. “‘Budet luidiam schast΄e, schast΄e na veka’: SSSR kak zapovednik spravedlivosti, miloserdiia i dobra,” 24 March, 2016, at http://sakharov.gaidarfund.ru/articles/2569/ (last accessed January 31, 2019). See also Viktoria Voloshina, “Liudi zakrytogo obshchestva,” Gazeta.ru, April 10, 2016, at https://www.gazeta.ru/comments/2016/04/07_a_8165105.shtml (last accessed January 31, 2019).

83. Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (New York, 2017). Gessen’s book received massive publicity in the United States and glowing reviews from such influential periodicals as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and received a more critical assessment from The Economist (“Masha Gessen is Wrong to Call Russia a Totalitarian State,” November 2, 2017, at https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2017/11/02/masha-gessen-is-wrong-to-call-russia-a-totalitarian-state (last accessed January 31, 2019).

84. Gessen, The Future is History, 434.

85. For more recent conceptualizations, see for example Albert Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory of Personality” in Lawrence A. Pervin and Oliver P. John, eds., Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (New York, 1999), 154–96.

86. The Russian government employed this potential very skillfully after the 2011–12 protests when it sought to pursue the politics of national consolidation, cutting off the intellectual and creative classes mostly centered in the big cities and relying on less educated, more state-dependent strata in the population. For more on this, see Regina Smyth and Irina Soboleva, “Looking beyond the Economy: Pussy Riot and the Kremlin’s Voting Coalition,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 4 (2014): 257–75; Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, “The Pussy Riot Affair and Putin’s Démarche from Sovereign Democracy to Sovereign Morality,” Nationalities Papers 42, no. 4 (July 2014): 615–21.

87. Jan Kubik, “Cultural Legacies of State Socialism: History-Making and Cultural-Political Entrepreneurship in Postcommunist Poland and Russia,” Ab Imperio 2 (2002); Jody LaPorte and Danielle N. Lussier, “What is the Leninist Legacy? Assessing Twenty Years of Scholarship,” Slavic Review 70, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 637–54; Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua A. Tucker, Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton, 2017).

88. Pop-Eleches and Tucker, Communism’s Shadow; David Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (New Haven, 2011).

89. Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago, 164.

90. Ibid., 301.

91. Pop-Eleches and Tucker, Communism’s Shadow.

92. Martina Klicperová-Baker, Ivo K. Feierabend, and C. Richard Hofstetter, “Post-Communist Syndrome,” in Budapest: Open Society Institute (1999, 5–6). There are two very helpful tables where the authors collected references to the research done on the “equivalents” of post-communist syndrome in other post-communist countries and have tried to list the most striking symptoms of this syndrome.

93. Robert Shiller, Robert J., Maxim Boycko, Vladimir Korobov, Sidney G. Winter, and Thomas Schelling, “Hunting for Homo Sovieticus: Situational Versus Attitudinal Factors in Economic Behavior,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 1 (1992): 127–94.

94. Klicperová-Baker, Feierabend, and Hofstetter, “Post-Communist Syndrome,” 16.

95. Venelin Ganev, “The Spectre of Homo Post-Sovieticus,” New Eastern Europe, October 19, 2017, at http://neweasterneurope.eu/2017/10/19/spectre-homo-post-sovieticus/ (last accessed January 31, 2019).

96. Kay Deaux and Mark Snyder, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology (New York, 2012), 804–27.

97. Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory of Personality,” 154.

98. Hazel Markus, “Self-schemata and Processing Information about the Self,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, no. 2 (February 1977): 63; David C. McClelland, Human Motivation, CUP Archive, 1987.

99. Gian Vittorio Caprara and Daniel Cervone, “A Conception of Personality for a Psychology of Human Strengths: Personality as an Agentic, Self-regulating System,” in Lisa G. Aspinwall and Ursula M. Staudinger, eds., A Psychology of Human Strengths: Fundamental Questions and Future Directions for a Positive Psychology (Washington, 2003); Gian Vittorio Caprara and Daniel Cervone, Personality: Determinants, Dynamics, and Potentials (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), 4.

100. The recently published research relying on the “Big Five” in the Russian context demonstrates that the major findings of the studies exploring the impact of personality on politics in the western, democratic context does not translate directly into the non-western milieu. See for example, Samuel Greene and Graeme Robertson, “Agreeable Authoritarians: Personality and Politics in Contemporary Russia,” Comparative Political Studies 50, no. 13 (November 2017): 1802–34.

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