1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

Gluzman was sent to the gulag for seven years. He survived. Gluzman is now taking care
of the last thousand or so surviving Soviet era political prisoners who suffered this
psychological abuse. Gluzman’s office is in an insane asylum attached to a beautiful
monastery, St. Cyril’s. Gluzman is what is called a national psychologist, that is, he looks
at national psyche as a way of describing national character and characteristics. He points
out that the mentality of Ukrainian leaders up to the present time is still Soviet. Gluzman
asks and answers the questions: what is a Soviet person? What is the Soviet mentality,
and whether the crossover point from Soviet mentality to something else really has been
reached. Even Viktor Yuschenko’s origins, Gluzman points out, are in the Soviet period,
and his thinking was shaped in that formative period of his life. Gluzman believes that it
is still a major influence on Yuschenko, and that Ukraine will not see the real change in
the idea of freedom, of independence, of individuality, on the part of its leaders for at
least another generation.
Ukrainians are doing considerable thinking about national identity, including
psychological characteristics. National identity goes way beyond language, obviously – it
has to do with concepts of freedom, liberty, individuality, the value of work. I started with
that conceptual issue – the value of work - I go back to it because there’s no difference
between the modern period or the Soviet period: the expectation in both the past and the
present is that people would work, they would have to work, that every individual had to
work. It was part of life. So if you spend eight hours a day, nine hours a day, working,
you should know what work is for, what its value is, and how it fits into the overall
patterns of life.
Q: Of course there’s this thing of the old Soviets, the saying that came out of the Soviet
system, “You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” There’s an awful lot of
inefficiency and absenteeism, and everybody knows. .
MILLER: That aphorism was a humorous description of the corruption of the system, but
most people worked. Most people who were on the farms, for example, even the
collective farms, were from peasant stock, they were conditioned through the centuries to
be farmers, and they worked. Most were proud of their work because they not only
survived the horrors of collectivization and the mass murder of the Kulaks, and prospered
by their work, but they also had the belief that the surpluses, beyond what they needed,
fed the state. There was a somewhat similar pattern with the coal miners. The ideals were
there. The corruption which in the end destroyed the system is focused in false production
figures, in swindling the workers, taking benefits that the worker, who actually worked
should have had. The slogan, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” is of
course, a comic expression of a systemic corruption, but the fact that the slogan describes
a corruption and that the people as a whole understand that it is a corruption means that
there is a value that they hold as valid. There were instances and places, many places,
where people did their work in accord with their ideals and they did it very well, and they
were understood to have done it well and were seen as heroes as a result.
Q: Well, as you’re looking from your vantage point – and you pronounce it “Keyv”?
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