The Shaping of Popular Consent: A Comparative Study of the Sovie ...

It is not difficult to understand why the US and the USSR are commonly thought of as polar opposites. Both proclaimed themselves to be utterly dissimilar; the ideologies their leaders preached were at loggerheads; the economic and social structure over which they presided were starkly different; in terms of both formal and informal political culture and institutions, they were poles apart. The Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist ideology claimed to have ordered society through the elevation of the collective over the individual. The centralised Soviet state controlled the provision of education, health services and social insurance and compelled individualistic entrepreneurial spirit to be redirected back into the group.¹⁶ Quite explicit in the Soviet ideology was its claim to have ended the exploitation of one individual or group by another. There was, so it declared, no racism, sexism or labour exploitation in the USSR. In 1933, the writer Maxim Gorky distilled the essence of the Soviet Union’s ideological rhetoric in his collection of essays, On Guard for the Soviet Union. “In the Soviet Union”, he wrote, “the laws originate from below from the depths of the toiling masses.” In the Soviet Union, he continued, there is only one master, “a master of one hundred and sixty millions heads and three hundred and twenty million hands”.¹⁷ However, and seemingly without contradiction, the Marxist-Leninist ideology also promoted the need for a strong, centralised government to create and oversee the Soviet Union’s industrial, agricultural and militaristic development and to ensure the workers and peasants were properly educated/remoulded into a Soviet-style socialist proletariat. Such rhetorical and ideological musing was designed not only to promote Marxist-Leninist values, but also to emphasise the USSR’s claim to possess a natural superiority over capitalistic and “bourgeois” democracies and its inevitable right to supersede them.

The American ideology was formed through a combination of Manifest Destiny¹⁸ and Madisonian/Jeffersonian democracy and professed to have created through the Constitution of the United States (in the words of Lincoln: through a government by the people, of the people, for the people) a framework inside which would prosper societal harmony and individual freedom. The guarantor for the people’s liberty was Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” economic model. Arguing the primacy of the individual over the collective, Smith thought that individualistic action, doing what is best for oneself, led to the betterment of the whole group because it stimulated both entrepreneurial spirit and healthy competition.