In August 1978, Aleksandr Zinoviev, an academic philosopher who had spent his entire life in the Soviet Union, boarded a flight out of Moscow with his wife and daughter, intending never to return. In its earliest years, the Soviet Union had inaugurated a regime of mass killing and state terror almost without precedent in modern history, a legacy that would forever mark its reputation. But that was not the version of the Soviet Union that Zinoviev was fleeing.

For several decades, beginning with Khrushchev and ending with Gorbachev, life in the Soviet Union was, for most people, neither a reign of terror nor a proletarian paradise. It was simply mediocre, or, at best, “fine.”

People enjoyed a kind of minimum social contract and certain personal rights. But there was little reason to work hard or excel because there was no indication that doing so would significantly improve one’s position. Cutting corners and coasting became a normal feature of life at all levels. As a result, though baseline security was provided by the Soviet welfare state, the texture of everyday existence was shoddy, and occasionally absurd.

Zinoviev’s criticism of the USSR, and one of the reasons he chose the life of an exile dissident, was not principally that the Soviet system was cruel, though at times it was. His deeper indictment concerned what decades of living under that system had done to the inner lives of the people subjected to it.

In 1982, Zinoviev published a book titled Homo Sovieticus. The book offered a psychological portrait of the ordinary subject of Soviet rule, to whom he assigned a mock species name: Homosos. “The Homosos is a fairly disgusting creature,” Zinoviev wrote. “I know that because I know myself.”

Communism, Zinoviev argued, had “a tendency to make everyone mediocre,” not simply in the quality of their work, but in their moral lives as well. Unlike the ideal of the morally autonomous citizen, capable of judgment and action according to conscience, Homo Sovieticus was passive, indolent and morally disengaged. He might recognize the crimes and injustices committed in his name by his rulers, but he had learned to regard himself as powerless before them. Over time, that sense of powerlessness hardened into apathy, and, finally, indifference.

Zinoviev’s scathing portrait of the average Soviet subject was understandably popular in the United States, where the anthropological examination of Homo Sovieticus—the passive, sedated collaborator with cruelty and corruption—became something of an intellectual genre during the Cold War. “Soviet man,” another dissident wrote, “created a countless multitude of self-justifications to facilitate his collusion with total violence.”

Contrary to popular misconception, citizens of the Soviet Union did hold elections and vote. They voted constantly, in fact, for candidates who theoretically represented them in the world’s preeminent egalitarian superpower. There were local councils, workplace organizations, and a vast architecture of institutions purporting to embody the popular will.

Yet despite this abundance of formal choice, the ship of state never seemed capable of turning from its predetermined course. At some point people became accustomed to the fact that the officials asking for their vote would say literally anything during a campaign, and there was no grounds for them to expect even a word of it to come to pass once in office. They should just as readily expect them to do the opposite.

At the very top, meanwhile, the Soviet elite produced a succession of increasingly geriatric and physically and psychologically diminished leaders, men who rose largely through decades of loyal service to the institutions and people immediately above them rather than due to any intellectual or moral capacities. The system was supposedly founded on a revolutionary rejection of inherited privilege, yet by its later years it had developed its own elaborate gerontocracy.

The rot at the top permeated down through the rest of society. Other proponents of the Homo Sovieticus thesis argued that Soviet power had created an “infantilized” person who lacked moral agency. Rather than producing empowered human beings liberated from class oppression and free to live according to conscience, as communism had once promised, the Soviet Union had reduced its citizens to “cogs in the machine,” gradually transformed by the system into “mere receptacles to be filled up with cultural products as the authorities decided.”

Exit Stalin

I came across these descriptions of Soviet life, and of the influence that system exerted on the inner life of the average citizen, while reading Mark B. Smith’s recent cultural history of the USSR, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization.

Smith’s elegiac portrait of the late Soviet world could not help but remind me of some contemporary conditions in the United States, which increasingly seem to exhibit the same kinds of moral and material paralysis that Americans once confidently identified as shortcomings of their ideological rival.

Despite widespread inflation and monetary depreciation, the U.S. does not experience literal shortages of material goods as Soviet citizens did. Yet Americans seem to be coalescing around the same indolence, passivity and resignation that were once invoked as evidence of the Soviet system’s spiritual degradation. This appears to be an ongoing process or trajectory, rather than an innate feature of American life, and does not seem to have been as true in the past.

At the height of the Iraq War, the American public erupted in outrage over the photographed torture and mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, which included killings, physical assaults, and rape. As terrible as those crimes were, they were overshadowed in sheer scale by something that happened just this year: the killing of 168 Iranian schoolchildren in an American missile strike on a girls’ elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab.

Unlike Abu Ghraib, however, the Minab massacre did not produce anything resembling a mass public outcry or sustained demands for accountability from the public towards American officials. It is probably safe to assume that a majority of Americans are unaware that it happened at all.

Likewise, the decision to invade Iraq was preceded by an enormous, year-long campaign to build political consensus for the war. The administration dispatched officials to try and convince the public, intelligence claims were debated endlessly across society, Congress held votes, millions of people protested, and virtually every American understood that the country was contemplating a major conflict.

The attack on Iran, by contrast, was simply presented to a fractured and largely indifferent public as a fact. Outside communities of military families and service members actually being dispatched to the Persian Gulf, the response has been likewise muted, punctuated only by some muttered complaints over fuel prices.

Something has clearly changed over the span of a generation. The median American has drifted further away from the image of the engaged and autonomous master of his civic destiny once imagined by Soviet dissidents looking admiringly toward the West.

The U.S. spent decades defining itself against the Soviet Union and it is indeed quite common for rival systems, over time, to acquire an eerie resemblance to one another. But there appears to be several mutually reinforcing forces dissolving the American citizen into something we might call Homo Americanus, an evolutionary sibling of his former Soviet cousin.

For the past several decades, the reigning legal-political regime in the United States has privileged individual rights and choice, while much of the institutional world that once surrounded and empowered that individual has withered away in the face of direct legal, cultural, and economic assaults. Unions, clubs, lodges, churches, neighborhood organizations, ethnic associations and other forms of communal life have either weakened or disappeared, leaving behind a population that is arguably “freer” than ever to before to engage in individual choice, but which has been simultaneously rendered powerless in the face of titanic market forces, networked oligarchies, and behind them, the state.

The Soviet Union was a dictatorship, and the U.S. today is not. Yet one of the basic characteristics of dictatorships is their drive to liquidate intermediary institutions capable of organizing social power independently—a process that is very advanced in the U.S. at this point. The courts remain among the last institutions capable of placing formal limits on executive action and preserving the country from real tyranny, yet they too are increasingly subjected to attacks by elites frustrated by the last remaining restraints on their power.

“Pictures in Our Heads”

At the same time that America’s associational world has weakened, the shared psychological space Americans still inhabited as recently as 2003, and that allowed them, whatever their opinions, to at least argue about the Iraq War, has been shattered. Each person increasingly inhabits a curated universe assembled specifically for themselves, and the advent of AI strongly suggests that is dynamic is going to accelerate.

Walter Lippmann once described the public as responding not directly to the world but to the “pictures in our heads.” For a growing number of people, the pictures that they are getting are not ennobling, aimed at raising their intellectual and moral quality, or even connecting them with others, as you can witness by the staggering growth of lonely and debasing activities like online gambling and pornography.

Life in the later Soviet Union was likewise characterized by widespread alcoholism and other forms of chemical escape among a population that gradually ceased to resemble at all the heroic proletarian subject imagined by the country’s founders. The one saving grace of alcohol was that its capacity to be distributed and consumed was still limited by physical reality.

At the same time as all that, a bit of nihilism also distinctly appears to be creeping in.

The killing of Charlie Kirk was broadcast to hundreds of millions of people, prompting immediate expectations that vengeance killings, martyrdom cults and escalating political violence might emerge in the wake. We should be glad that no such retribution occurred. But there was something disturbing in the opposite response as well: how quickly an actual human death was transformed into memes, clips, jokes, arguments and ultimately just another piece of content for online infotainment.

The government itself seems to be encouraging society down the path to nihilism, transforming clips of airstrikes from the Iran War into meme-fied video segments set to music in a manner that even the most unhinged proponents of the Iraq invasion two decades prior could not be imagined doing.

Discipline and Punish

Not everyone fits the mold of Homo Americanus, and indeed many people have rebelled against the passivity that is being forced upon on the American citizenry in total opposition to their history, traditions, and self-image. The unfortunate fact is that when people do care, and attempt to act upon what they understand to be their rights as autonomous citizens, they can increasingly expect to be punished for doing so.

Like the Soviet state, which formally described itself as the political expression of its citizens while regarding actual political organization with suspicion, the American state increasingly seems to view unsanctioned political mobilization as something to be surveilled and suppressed.

Those Americans who refused indolence and decided that they had something to say about the killing of innocent men, women and children in the Gaza Strip using their weapons and tax dollars quickly discovered that the exercise of conscience is not encouraged but is actually a path to inviting punishment.

For many of them, following a state-led crackdown on the dissent over the genocide, life has become akin to a mini-totalitarian state, with surveillance, strict limits on speech and gathering, and loss of employment due to to completely legal political activities. This is something that we refer to with a distinct lack of gravity as getting cancelled, but which Homo Sovieticus would recognize immediately as “being purged.”

Once people learn that political participation carries consequences, the rational mind tends to adjust accordingly. After recovering from the initial blow, and witnessing the suffering inflicted on others, that adjustment to silence and passivity eventually becomes part of their character, which Homo Sovieticus learned well within a few decades.

In that way the crushing of the Gaza protests also sent a message to those who might be aware and conscientiousness enough to oppose a needless war of choice in Iran, or the next conflict that may be planned by an increasingly radicalized political elite. The message is unambiguous: Stay out of it.

Twilight

A major characteristic of the Soviet Union was the conviction that it represented an eternal political order grounded in certain fundamental truths of history. The idea that the Soviet regime itself might merely constitute a passing phase in time was unintelligible within its own ideological universe.

And yet one day the country “committed suicide by accident,” in Mark Smith’s description. The Soviet leadership attempted simultaneously to reform the economy and institute liberal democratic measures, only to discover that the structure beneath the state had become so hollow that loosening a few of its supports caused the entire edifice to collapse. (Side note: The Soviet Union likely would have survived and maybe even flourished had it taken the path of the Chinese Communist Party and imposed market reforms without simultaneous liberal democratic ones.)

Comparisons with the Soviet Union inevitably raise the question of whether the United States itself has entered some analogous “late” phase, and whether a similarly spectacular unraveling waits somewhere in its future. Personally, I see little reason to expect such an outcome.

The more plausible trajectory is less dramatic and in some ways more unsettling. The United States may continue transforming incrementally under the influences of technology, demographic change, and deteriorating legal norms, into something increasingly alien to the political civilization that preceded it.

The nature and expectations of citizenship may radically alter over time, pushing people away from active political participation and towards the passive, surveilled, and manageable figure of Homo Americanus, with no one moment of radical break ever noted, nor formal announcement issued. I would not say this is inevitable, nor is this process necessarily being managed in a fully controlled manner. But it is a distinct possibility that seems to reflect the current trajectory of the American system and elite preferences, which partly explains why there has been such a violent reaction to the few political figures who are trying to rescue American society by advocating the reconstruction of collective ties.

Zinoviev himself left open the possibility that the creature he had described was not uniquely Soviet. “Occasions on which people behave like Homososes,” he wrote, “can be found in the most varied epochs and in the most diverse countries.” What made the Soviet case distinctive was that these adaptations had become systematic, repeated from one generation to another until they constituted what he called a “typical mass-phenomenon” of society.

Although he was mostly remembered for his denunciations of the Soviet system, Zinoviev ended his introduction to Homo Sovieticus with a warning addressed to the people in the West who regarded the Soviet citizen as an exotic and contemptible specimen: “Judge us, because you yourselves will be judged by us.”