Homo sovieticus and the Neoliberal Legacy of Polish Dissent

Democratic backsliding in eastern Europe has been often cast in terms of the uncivility of local political culture inherited from the past. For the postwar period, the figure of homo sovieticus has embodied that inheritance, and its continued allure owes a lot to its dissident pedigree. This essay presents an intellectual history of the uses of that theme across the 1989 divide and questions its relevance today. The preoccupation with homo sovieticus signaled a neoliberal turn in addressing the dilemmas of democratic transition from Communism, which I analyze in reference to A. O. Hirschman’s typology of reactionary rhetoric. While Solidarity in 1980–1981 championed a vision of democratic citizenship in which social, political, and civil rights were mutually supportive and indivisible, after martial law these different rights came to be seen as conflicting and incompatible, and the theme of homo sovieticus proliferated as the indexical figure of that conflict. This new standpoint, which supported the neoliberal transition from Communism, brought about a critical reassessment of Solidarity’s legacy and a new understanding of the role of the dissident vanguard in the transition process, which I call pre-emptive Thermidorianism. It provided the glue that held together the liberal center, made up of self-professed neoliberals as well as the ex-revisionist Left, whose acquiescence to the neoliberal turn was instrumental. Pre-emptive Thermidorianism was disastrous both for the liberal center and for post-1989 political culture more broadly, and that is why homo sovieticus stands today as the self-defeating intellectual legacy of Polish dissent.