THE NEW SOVIETS

...Through sociology...

...You wash them out and then you'll get fresh ones...

...With this extremely alert and sophisticated new generation, the Komsomol is having second and third thoughts about Soviet youth's patriotism—simply because it is not the old style of heavy Bolshevik patriotism...

...The young sociologists are wearing out their shoes polling everybody on everything...

...Its growing up coincided with the "thaw"— with de-Stalinization and also with the announcements of the "scientific management of Communist society...

...That is why you can observe in the last five years the development of the philosophical sciences...

...They have even done research on what kind of leaders the youth demands in Komsomol and have found that the old "strict fulfiller" of quotas (this now said with disdain) is out...

...The first one opened at the University of Leningrad in 1960, and today, according to the Soviets, there are between eighty and ninety...

...One is trying to find better ways to study, to inculcate ideas...

...But what...

...If that is not a "revolution" in Soviet society, it is hard to know what is...

...The Komsomol's patriotic education has changed on all levels...

...The Editors An unusually bright and knowing young Western diplomat sat in a lunchroom in Moscow and observed the throngs of New Russians rushing by outside...

...Two other tests had been made of Soviet generations...

...One of the most interesting places where sociology is being applied vigorously is the Komsomol, the tough, old Young Communists League that historically was not known for its sentimental concern over its members' personal feelings or needs...

...I was not prepared for this enthusiasm when I began my three months in the Soviet Union...

...The styles, the conjectures about life, the forms—all belonged to the fathers' generation, to a generation that was thankful for every crumb of freedom and material progress...

...You'll get syphilis...

...where instead of the old carrot-and-stick assurance about the formation of the personality, they are bewildered and concerned about its vagaries...

...He added that two major surveys of more than 4,000 young people in 1963 and 1966 disclosed these yearnings: an appealing profession, higher education, love and family, education of children "as real human beings," world travel, and affluence...

...Kolobkov has five young sociologists working for him, investigating everything from work habits and youth's ideals and interests to why more city than country youth go on to higher education...

...Every education is always planned," Kolobkov asserts...

...These findings are particularly telling in that they show the extent to which this generation is becoming a generation of individuals...

...Still, it is a beginning...

...To the religious morale we now try to oppose a social morale...

...The answer was to find out what it was that the young people wanted...

...We can only surmise...

...For the first time it did not tell them but listened to them...

...The new leader is a "thoughtful one, concerned about the spiritual needs of his people...

...Lisovsky, the charming spokesman of the young sociologists, has been engaged in such research...

...They would find a particularly old and decrepit woman waiting in line for holy water, then demand of the young people behind her: "Are you going to drink from the same cup as that old hag...

...The ante has been upped...

...Melko, a nice-looking young man of twenty-eight who could be any American post-graduate student, is representative of this Soviet generation's concern with the "inner life," "spiritual life," and "spiritual needs"—their terms—of man...

...In Kiev State University, at the Chair of Scientific Communism, they are using comparative tests of three different generations...

...That is where sociology and psychology come in...

...The old ideas about conditioning man to react in certain ways still continue in the Soviet Union today...

...You got lipstick on your towels," she said, standing in my bathroom and holding up a towel...

...That man's personality and consciousness could be formed by the state, that man's actions could be wholly conditioned by the perfect and ultimate society, that one type of man could eventually be formed—all this was assumed in early Marxism...

...We are trying to find the golden middle between planning and their strivings...

...Sovietologist Tibor Szamuely, writing in London's Spectator magazine, pointed out that a "truly historic change" is taking place in the Soviet Union with the "emergence, for the first time since the 1920s, possibly even since the Revolution, of a genuine, independent public opinion...

...Until the mid-Fifties, our main objective was to recreate the national economy to cope with defense and living standards," commented Kolobkov, one of the main-liners...

...For what do we use modern technical things...

...Lisovsky, however, points out, "We think the method of Freud is interesting, but we disapprove of explaining social problems through the instincts...

...Another line is extensive testing on how and why young people choose careers, or why they drop out of school...

...On the other hand, young people no longer took seriously the old Marxist cliches...

...It is no accident that there are several lines of research being pursued in all the institutes and that these lines reveal a great deal about what is troubling the Soviets today...

...We don't know on what it depends...

...Was it possible, after all, that human nature was not absolutely conditionable...

...For the first time the Marxist state was going to the people to find out what their perceived needs were, in order to plan better...

...Another is working on another aspect...

...Our world outlook is that when the material needs are satisfied, then spiritual and social problems come to the front and must be solved according to social demands...

...What do they give to man...

...If this planning does not coincide with the strivings of youth, there is a danger it will be of a formal character...

...Or if it is not planned enough, the forming of the spiritual life will be of accidental character...

...The concept of the intelligence quotient was dropped, and the perfectibility of everyone was assumed to be just around the corner...

...They've got their ideology...

...In contrast, today's generation wants "interesting qualifications...

...Raised in an air of relative freedom as compared to the Stalin years, it is highly critical of the "giving in" of its fathers...

...While it is admittedly difficult to trace the development of this kind of conjecture in the Soviet Union—much of it is "underground"—it appears that the changes began with the rise of the new generation born during and immediately after World War II...

...For the first time, the Marxist state began to elicit human responses from its people...

...The story of the Soviet Union today is that of a society that is becoming a pluralistic one of individual human beings...

...When I good-humoredly tried to show her how easily it washed out, she smiled...

...The youth of the bleak 1930's wanted only minimal "qualifications" ¦—the ability to find work, to do something...

...We have changed our forms of atheistic education," he told me earnestly, "Our atheistic propaganda is based more on scientific principles now...

...How did they get to a point where a young physicist-psychologist like Valerie Melko at Kiev State University could tell me in an official interview: "The formation of the inner consciousness of man is not decided scientifically...

...A few weeks earlier I had sat in the main Komsomol (Communist Union for Youth) office in Volgograd, the de-Stalinized Stalingrad, talking to Oleg Besedin, the tall, thin secretary of the Komsomol city committee...

...Before 1934, there was some sociological research, and investigations into things like telepathy were legal...

...He smiled broadly, for he is a cheerful man and an optimist...

...It used to be—and not so long ago— that Komsomol gangs cut short the hair of girls in Sochi whose dress was considered too shocking...

...The Komsomol has started all sorts of new low-key programs...

...The importance of such phenomena lies in the claims of the past...

...You see, they have found they can build things and industrialize," he told me...

...The Soviet structures—such as the Komsomol—were smart enough to realize this...

...They voted for change by not responding to society as it was—at a time when response no longer could be induced by force...

...These tasks were mainly solved and then we began to build Communism itself...

...The new Soviet generation sees no reason to be grateful for a minimum of crumbs...

...Now they wonder what for, how to live inside it...

...It is largely question and answer and adding up the results...

...Even if you know how to do things," said Melko, "the problems of 'what for?' still remain...

...We don't know...

...Young psychologists like Melko talk about computerizing the field and about "modeling," but advanced research techniques are so far only at the talking stage...

...In 1967 Miss Geyer was honored with an Overseas Press Club award for "the best article or report on Latin America in any medium...

...The formation of the consciousness of man is going haphazardly, without order...

...Even a few years ago, Komsomol gangs still visited the monasteries on holy days to make fun of the faithful...

...Instead of saying youth is good or youth is bad, we should study youth," he told me as we talked in his office in a big, old aristocratic-looking house near Leningrad's river front...

...How will he bloom...

...One in the early 1900's, largely of aristocrats' children, revealed the youthful desires to become officers, to find beautiful women, to dance and play...

...How, then, with this kind of ritual and rote still existing, did the Soviets get to the other point of today, where human nature is not considered to be fixed...

...Afterwards, in the harsh, dull Stalin years, such things were "unwise," as were any studies of the mind or drugs or electric shock therapy...

...This was the first Soviet generation not to know war intimately...

...Today, in a generation that buys out etiquette books as soon as they come to the newsstands, these methods are considered uncouth...

...These stirrings in the belly of society are the ones that eventually rise like a rash to change the very skin of that society...

...Still another line—perhaps the most important—that one finds everywhere is the research being done on the ideals and interests of youth...

...And just a week before that I had visited the Chair of Scientific Communism at Kiev State University and talked with its chairman, Vladimir Kolobkov, a devoted Marxist who firmly believes that the "new Marxist man" of Marxist thought is just about to arrive...

...The largest is the Institute of Complex Social Studies in Leningrad, under Vladimir Lisovsky, one of the most fashionable and sought-after young personalities in the Soviet Union...

...On the one hand, it was stuck with the imperative that man's "formation" must not be casual or accidental...

...Freud is studied again now...

...We suppose it depends on social and economic conditions...

...While the apparatus for force still waits constantly in the wings, there are the beginnings today of a far more humanized Soviet state...

...The new sociological institutes began to spring up all over...

...The upshot of it all is that anywhere you turn in Russia today, instead of someone always telling you what to do, some post-graduate student with a pad and pencil will be asking you what you think of this or that...

...And it found out some interesting things—such as the fact that nobody wanted to be a "worker" anymore in the world's number one worker's state...

...What do they give on a spiritual level...

...Throwing his arms up in the air with a touch of drama, Besedin said, "Sociology—we are no exception...

...Perhaps I was too inured with the simplistic but prevalent U. S. notion that all Soviets believe that the state forms the personality of man...

...At any rate, I was enormously surprised by the enthusiastic air of sociological and psychological inquiry that pries into everything in Soviet life today...

...This new interest in sociological and psychological research is both the result and cause of deep shifting currents in Soviet society...

...One is research on work—research on why groups of workers cannot get along, how workers should use their free time, and how the state can make being a worker a satisfaction in a society where nobody wants to be a worker anymore...

...The Soviet state has been experiencing a total break between the interests of its entire new generation and the meaning of the state...

...The Melkos would probably explain the new sociological theorizing in terms of a generalized, non-directed searching...

...Knowledgeable Westerners point out that sociological research in Soviet Russia is still at a low level...

...That's fine," she said...

...Do you know that seventy per cent of Leningrad was born since the Revolution, and that half is under twenty-six...

...Oleg Besedin, secretary of the city Komsomol in Volgograd, does not approve of these old methods in the new age of psychology and sociology...

...The main-line Marxists explain it in terms of traditional Marxism, even though much of what is happening conflicts with this...

...A personal example: When I walked up to my room in the elegant new Hotel Rossiya in Moscow one day last fall, the commissar-like woman who guards the hall sternly motioned me to follow her...

...I do not say we will have the new Marxist man by 1980, as some have claimed, but maybe in several decades...

...And this public opinion is being shown through the sociological surveys...

...In 1917, Lenin said that the Czarist army, in abandoning the war, "voted with its feet" against the war...

...We are all working together in the institute to form the personality of the new man," Kolobkov said, as we walked down one of Kiev's beautiful streets, the trees then golden in autumn...

...The laundry won't take them...

...The second article will appear in an early issue...

...As one Soviet magazine remarked recently, "Sociology was a Cinderella, now she is a queen...

...These three men all indicate one of the most important developments in the Soviet Union today—the blooming, the flowering, the passion for sociology and psychology...

...Most important, it is a society that is beginning to talk to itself...

...We understand now that in some cases the reason for belief in God lies not with the priest but in ideology and one's own consciousness...

...THE NEW SOVIETS by GEORGIE ANNE GEYER This is the first of several articles by Georgie Anne Geyer, award-winning foreign correspondent for The Chicago Daily News, based on her experiences during a three-months journey through the Soviet Union recently...

...In the late 1950s and even more in the 1960s, the young Russians voted with their disinterest in their society as it was...

...They want a state where the impulses of society come from the bottom up—¦ and in support they can quote Lenin, who in theory thought the same thing...

...That is why the young people talk constantly about the "spiritual needs" of man...

...Sociological institutes are springing up like weeds...

...Whichever emphasis you lean to, some of the reasons are abundantly clear...

...There was a growing estrangement between the new generation—its reality, its needs—and the forms of the rigid Marxist state...

...We are also ill with the disease...