Authors

Discussion

Early in the Cold War, various social scientific projects emerged in the US that sought to define the ‘Soviet mind’. The People of Great Russia (1949) by anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer and psychoanalyst John Rickman argued that the ‘national character’ of the people of ‘Great Russia’ could be understood by examining distinctive swaddling practices in the region. They claimed that Soviet society could be understood by theorising the experiences of Soviet babies. They claimed that babies in the region were typically released from their bandages in order to be breast fed, producing an oscillation between being tied and untied that had lasting psychic - and hence also social - consequences, leading to 'an absence of feelings of individuality so that the self is, as it were, merged with its peers in a ‘soul-collective’.' This paper will explore Gorer’s methods, his theoretical discussions with Rickman, their dialogues with social scientists working on similar contemporaneous projects and the furious critical reception with which the theory was met both in the Soviet Union and among Russian emigres in the US and UK.