SOCIO-COGNITIVE STRATEGY OF “SOCIALIST HUMANISM” AS A SYSTEM OF REPRESSIVE SOCIAL ACTIONS

Abstract

This article presents an authored version of socio-cognitive modeling of repressive social action – as one of the political pillars of the Soviet state, rooted in its political discourse. The urgency of such modeling can be attributed both to the importance of a deep understanding of social processes and the obvious complexity of the “collective memory” of society and the continuity and non-linearity of cognitive reconstruction processes that go on. The sources of the research include reliable data of historical and sociological nature (“The GULAG History”) and documentary and fiction texts the reliability of which is universally recognized (the works of the former GULAG prisoners V. Shalamov and A. Solzhenitsyn). The author substantiates his methodology by turning to the traditions of the “sociology of knowledge” and modern interdisciplinary research. The marked significance of cognitive systems that construct the very reality of various social groups and kinds of social behavior can be considered as general supporting principle. Based on the material of Stalin’s era, the article explores the instrumental-operational strategy of the social activity of a single or collective subject. This cognitive-mental structure operates within the framework of a destructive-affective cognitive-pragmatic program, the main principles of which are internal inconsistency, dogmatism, simulation, mytho-ideologization of both external reality and the consciousness of the subject of social action. Simulative mytho-ideological virtualism (duality) of “socialist humanism” is the only “correct filter” for the political consciousness of the Soviet person for defining reality, their place, role and cognitive-mental status in it. The “depersonalized subject” of social action perceives the “orders” of the dominant cognitive-pragmatic program as a system of “socio-cognitive axioms” that guarantee harmonious functioning of all social systems. The social action itself is recoded. Thus a repressive social action is perceived by the performer of the “will” of the program as the best way to strengthen social stability. The author distinguishes four groups of repressive social actions: preventive-prophylactic action (agitation, self-control, surveillance, informing, etc.); repressive-investigative action (arrest, complex of investigative actions); repressive-transformational action (forced labor in the mode of “remoulding” of consciousness); and repressive-liquidation action. Neither the subject nor the object of such an action is a source of social action, since they are reduced to the status of “tools” that fulfill the “will” of the program.