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Humanizing Soviet Communication: Social-Psychological Training in the Late Socialist Period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Susanne Cohen
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Abstract

Business trainings are not a post-Soviet phenomenon but developed within the Soviet Union beginning in the mid-1970s. The social-psychological training was an interactive method of cultivating communication skills that drew on western methodologies but adapted them to Soviet conditions. It is now considered one of the key sites for the birth of a new practical psychology that encompassed psychotherapy in the late socialist period. While often framed as a scientific intervention into individual communication skills, trainings acquired additional meanings in the Soviet context. For many trainers, transforming language became a way of transforming Soviet social relations without targeting the entire Soviet system. Trainings created a space for reforming the impersonal, distanced registers of “official” Soviet life and imbuing them with more “human” attention to people's emotions, intentions, and individuality.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , Fall 2015 , pp. 439 - 463
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2015

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References

I am grateful to Susan Gal, Zsuzsa Gille, Alaina Lemon, and the reviewers for Slavic Review for their insightful comments on various versions of this material. I would also like to thank all those who shared their memories of trainings with me and made those conversations possible. This article grew out of dissertation research supported by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan.

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22. According to Alberg, their approach to communication was influenced by western game theory as well as Carl Rogers's active listening, here also conveyed through an unusual trajectory: psychologist Frido Mann, grandson of writer Thomas Mann and a Swiss citizen, passed on the technique when working in Leipzig. Traudl Alberg, personal communication, August 17, 2014.

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37. Social-psychological research on kollektivy is summarized by Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999), 97-110. See also Leon'tev, A. A., “Obshchenie kak ob”ekt psikhologicheskogo issledovaniia,” in Shorokhova, E. V., ed., Metodologicheskie problemy sotsial'noi psikhologii (Moscow, 1975)Google Scholar.

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40. lurii Zhukov, interview, Moscow, May 22, 2007.

41. Galina Andreeva, who long chaired the MSU social-psychology division, described the subdiscipline as subject to much less “pressing” than her former field of sociology in a published post-Soviet interview, implying that psychology's resemblance to the natural sciences was a critical factor. She quoted a former chair of psychophysiology: “To a neuron, it is of deep unimportance what's around: capitalism or socialism.” See Pugacheva, M. G. and Iarmoliuk, S. F., “‘Voina sprovotsirovala vsiakie zaprosy o zhizni,’” Sotsiologicheckoe obozrenie 2, no. 3 (2002): 86 Google Scholar.

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47. While Vorwerg alone is generally credited for these trainings in Soviet and Russian publications, he was primarily responsible for the development of the training methodology, which in the GDR was used in several different programs. Fellow GDR researcher Jörg Schmidt, who wrote his habilitation thesis on the topic, is most accurately credited as the primary author of the content on communication, although Alberg also contributed. Their approach, like the Russian adaptations discussed below, conveyed the importance of a partnership orientation but seems to have put more weight on joint problem solving and conflict resolution. See, for example, Schmidt, , “Training der Gesprächsführung in konflikhaltigen Partnersituationen,” in Vorwerg, Manfred, ed., Persönlichkeitspsychologische Forschungen zur Regulation und Modifikation individuellen Verhaltens (Leipzig, 1984)Google Scholar.

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51. Ibid., 9.

52. In their focus on efficacy, Soviet trainers mobilized ideologies similar to those of many western trainers. However, as several scholars have observed, western trainers also sometimes framed similar interventions in political terms. Lewin's T-groups were originally conceived as means of fostering participants’ understanding of “democratic” group dynamics, as discussed by Hull, “Democratic Technologies,” 161-66; and Rose, Nikolas, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 141 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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54. Zakharov and Khriashcheva, Sotsial'no-psikhologicheskii trening, 25.

55. Sidorenko, Trening kommunikativnoi kompetentnosti, 76. See also Forverg and Al'berg, “Kharakteristika sotsial'no-psikhologicheskogo treninga,” 61.

56. Zakharov and Khriashcheva, Sotsial'no-psikhologicheskii trening, 24; Forverg and Al'berg, “Kharakteristika sotsial'no-psikhologicheskogo treninga,” 61.

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65. Ibid., 23.

66. Ibid., 24.

67. Indeed, it is worth noting here that universalistic understandings of similar trainings remain common, and a training pioneer I interviewed in 2007 deflected some of my questions about the particulars of Soviet trainings by pronouncing communication a “universal thing” that “worked” in any political regime. She also observed, however, that efficacy-oriented goals were always accompanied by “humanistic” aims.

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73. Also see Lopukhina, E. V. and Lopatin, G. S., Videotrening trudnykh situatsii v delovom obshchenii khoziastvennykh rukovoditelei (Moscow, 1986)Google Scholar.

74. Elena Lopukhina, interview, Moscow, May 24, 2007.

75. Bogomolova and Petrovskaia, “O metodakh aktivnoi sotsial'no-psikhologiskoi podgotovki.“

76. See Kharkhordin's discussion of lichnost’ in The Collective and the Individual, 189-90.

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78. Ibid., 14-15.

79. Ibid., 123, 125.

80. Rogers himself made a well-publicized visit to the department in 1986, discussed in Cote, Russian Psychology in Transition, although Petrovskaia's intellectual engagement with his work began earlier. Theoretical and Methodological Problems also draws heavily on the work of Soviet pedagogical researcher Vasilii Sukhomlinskii.

81. Petrovskaia, Kompetentnost' v obshchenii, 185.

82. Petrovskaia, , Teoreticheskie i metodicheskie problemy, 3, 110–11Google Scholar.

83. Petrovskaia, Kompetentnost' v obshchenii, 40. The format of the transcript has been modified slightly for readability.

84. On mutual surveillance, see Kharkhordin, , The Collective and the Individual, 97–122 Google Scholar.

85. Petrovskaia, Teoreticheskie i metodicheskie problemy, 160.

86. Petrovskaia, Kompetentnost' v obshchenie, 123.

87. Solov'eva, “K 70-letiiu L. A. Petrovskoi.” The special issue proved an occasion not only to reflect on Petrovskaia's legacy but also to begin reconstructing the history of the training movement in print.

88. E. V. Lushpaeva, “Kak vse eto nachinalos'” (paper presented at the conference “Psikhologiia obshchenie: Trening chelovechnosti,” Moscow, November 15-17, 2007).

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90. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 36. On kitchen talk, see especially Lerner, Julia and Zbenovich, Claudia, “Adapting the Therapeutic Discourse to Post-Soviet Media Culture: The Case of Modnyi Prigovor ,” Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 842–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Elena Zdravomyslova and Viktor Voronkov's related discussion of the “official public” and various alternatives to it in “The Informal Public in Soviet Society: Double Morality at Work,” Social Research 69, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 49-69.

91. Contrary to stereotype, recent scholarship suggests significant efforts to invigorate official discourse and make it meaningful and creative in earlier decades, even in paradigmatically “official” contexts such as state bureaucracy and lower-level propaganda work. See Humphrey, Caroline, “The ‘Creative Bureaucrat’: Conflicts in the Production of Soviet Communist Party Discourse,” Inner Asia 10, no. 1 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Luehrmann, Sonja, “The Modernity of Manual Production: Soviet Propaganda and the Creative Life of Ideology,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 3 (August 2011): 363–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92. Cote, Russian Psychology in Transition, 183.

93. Ibid., 71,162.

94. Here, I draw from scholars who stress that creative, emergent, and historically situated ideological processes shape pronoun usages rather than fixed contextual variables and social relationships. See especially Silverstein, Michael, “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life,” Language&Communication 23, nos. 3-4 (2003): 204–11Google Scholar. In this sense, training-related pronoun use needs to be read in light of a more general history of intense attention to meanings and practices of ty/Vy etiquette in the Soviet context, which includes Lev Trotskii's advocacy of a respectful “Vy” between Red Army officers and subordinates and later party members’ combinations of comradely symmetrical “ty” with the conventionally more formal first name and patronymic. See Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 134–35Google Scholar; and Epstein, Mikhail, Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into the Language of Soviet Ideology (Washington, D.C., 1991), 62–65 Google Scholar.

95. Cote, Russian Psychology in Transition, 187. Several contributors to Solov'eva, “K 70-letiiu L. A. Petrovskoi,” also comment on usages of “ty,” as well as first names, in training contexts and beyond.

96. Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 48.

97. Bauman, Richard and Briggs, Charles L., Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge, Eng., 2003), 26–69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublks (New York, 2002), 74–86 Google Scholar; and Hill, Jane, “Junk Spanish, Covert Racism, and the (Leaky) Boundary between Public and Private Spheres,” Pragmatics 5, no. 2 (1995): 203 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 34.

99. Zdravomyslova, Elena, “Leningrad's Saigon: A Space of Negative Freedom,” Russian Studies in History 50, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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102. Zhukov, Iu. M., Effektivnost' delovogo obshcheniia (Moscow, 1988), 53–63 Google Scholar.

103. Ibid., 55.

104. Ibid., 62.

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