SOVIET TOTALITARIANISM, HOMO SOVIETICUS AND THE DEFORMATION OF THE CONTENT OF THE UKRAINIAN POLITICAL TRADITIONS

Abstract

In the article the peculiarities of the destructive influence of soviet totalitarianism are considered as its project of “homo sovieticus” and on the political culture content of the Ukrainians, as a result, the last was significantly distorted that made the serious and sometimes irreparable damage (including war losses) to the country and nation in the XXI century. Inspire enough hard and contradictory processes in the history of the Ukrainian state formation connected with the institutionalization of the political culture and forming political traditions of “rusins” form the period of the princely age till the idea conceptualization of “russion nation” in the first half of the XVII century, nevertheless, the important “steps” were done that made the foundation of socio-cultural and political way of life of Ukrainians. It goes about the medieval princely traditions of state management, becoming the Ukrainian nobility as a class, development on the basis of a political initiative social stratum of active-social (participative) political culture, making by the Zaporizhzhia community the specific civic values system (on the top of which is the supremacy of the will of the community) and re-making Ukrainian cossacks into mythologized heroes of the political narration, etc. It was proved, that contrary to these outlines of the political culture of the Ukrainian (“ruthenian”) society which began gradually crystallizing and becoming imprinted in the “genotype” of the nation, the communist regime started with the methods of violence and terror instilling a quasi-classical culture with its project of “soviet man”, aesthetics of general silence and prohibitions, where pretended puritanism is combined with Asian barbarism and total lawlessness. It needed a forced deformation of the content of the political traditions of Ukrainians and changes them into new communist norms and stereotypes that enable appearing homo sovieticus as an inhibitory factor on the way to becoming a modern Ukrainian political nation as the end of the XX beginning the XXI centuries.