REVIEWS 365 Kharkhordin,Oleg. TheCollective andtheIndividual inRussia.A Study ofPractices. Studies on the History of Society and Culture, 32. University of CaliforniaPress,Berkeley,Los Angeles, CA and London, 999. 406 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. ?40?.?:$50.00. FOR decades observers and scholars have repeated that Russians are not individualistsbut tend to orient themselves towards the collective. President Putin repeated the sentiment in his firstprogrammaticstatement.Yet during the I990S it became obvious that many Russians, on the contrary, espoused individualistideals both in theory and practice:they were ceasing to look to the stateforprotection,were settingup smallbusinessesand tellingsociologists that they believed in 'self-reliance'.How could thisbe so?This book attempts to provide an answer:Kharkhordinbelieves that the Soviet systemin fact did encourage individualism, but of a very different kind from what we are accustomed to in the West. To explain his view, he uses procedures derived from Foucaultto elucidatethe 'genealogy'of the Russiansense of the self. He assertsthat the constitutionof the individualself in Soviet Russia owed a great deal to the practices of the Orthodox Church. Whereas the western church practised private confession combined with the hierarchical surveillance of subordinatesby superiors,the easternchurch gave greaterweight to penitential ritesthan to confession and backed them up by mutualhorizontal surveillanceamong peers. The Russian church moved towards the Catholic one during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,but the old practices reemerged , refreshed and strengthened in the Communist Party ritual of requiringmembersto exercise 'self-criticism'. This meant that in Russia the notion of the individualemerged in a kind of constant counterpoint with the peer-group collective, rather than under the pressureof individual authorityfigures.The specificallySoviet notion of the kollektiv owed a lot to the pedagogue Makarenko.In the establishmentshe set up for the re-education of orphans, street children andjuvenile delinquents, he began the process of welding randomly assembled recruits by requiring them to undertakesome kind of collective action against an external threat, for example, hunger or cold. When a minimal unity had been establishedin that way, he would give the collective a socially useful goal, which would cement its inner coherence, and then finally encourage its members to introducetheirown self-government.But he and laterpedagogues found that it was necessaryat an earlystage to create an aktiv,a smallgroup of members especiallyreadyor able to internalisethe requiredgoals, and give them power to shape and discipline the activities of the others. It was also necessary to introducestrictdiscipline,which, since it was to be internallygenerated, took the formof mutualself-criticismand surveillance.Kharkhordincomparesthis arrangementto the practice of theJosephian cenobitic monasteriesfrom the early sixteenth century, in which certain 'bigger'(bol'shie) brotherssupervised and directedthe spirituallife of theirfellows.This was different,he maintains, from the hierarchicaldisciplinecommon in western monasteries and later prisons and asylums in which one superior observed and monitored the rest. In Russia 'there is no single Big Brother, but there are many bigger brothers'(p. I22). 366 SEER, 79, 2, 200I Makarenko's methodology became a model for the Communist Party's construction of obshchestvennost'. Here, however, the collective self-discipline took the form of periodic purges,that is, expulsions.Kharkhordinarguesthat it was the deadly constellation of kollektiv, self-criticism and purges which engendered the peculiarly destructive ambience of the terror. The church, after all, had moved from confession to anathematizationonly with extreme reluctance and after interposing the vital intermediate stage of admonition and penance, if necessary several times. But in the I930S Communist Party cells moved straightfrom denunciation and self-criticismto expulsion, with 'organizational consequences' (orgz)yvody)-arrest by the NKVD as the likely sequel. What had begun as an attempt at individual spiritual selfimprovement within the collective degenerated into an instrumentby whicl nomenklaturafactionsfought and destroyedeach other. In this way, the notion of the individualoriginated as a form of disguiseor dissimulationin the face of potentially murderousgroup pressure. In other words the individualwas derived from the collective and defined in terms of the collective's needs, even if by negation. In the Stalinperiod, the collective was still weakly constituted and most control came from above, but under Khrushchevthe degreeof self-policingby the kollektiv, increased.His new party programmeaimed to replace terrorwith 'socialself-government',which took such forms as comrade courts, people's street patrols (druzainniki) and the Party-StateControl...