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Old May 14th, 2013 #29
Alex Linder
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By the time of Lenin's death in 1924, and certainly no later than the end of the 1920s, the concept of correctness was pervasive in ideology, politics, psychiatry, education, literature, history, jurisprudence, culture and economics. To be politically correct meant to be consistent with, not deviating from, the party line or any given issue. To be politically incorrect was to run the risk of being denounced as engaging in 'revisionism', 'factionalism', being a 'wrecker' or an 'enemy of the people'.[10] Even the choice of children's names was affected,[11] and a recent study of early Soviet reading habits also shows the astonishing lengths to which the Soviet state was prepared to go to ensure that the correct opinions were formed and internalised by readers (Dobrenko, 1997). The withdrawal of books published in Tsarist times, as part of a systematic policy of ideological indoctrination, clearly anticipates the contemporary feminist and multicultural approach to education at all levels. By the late Soviet period dissent or deviation was not just politically incorrect but regarded as symptomatic of some profound mental disturbance. Khrushchev, in a major policy speech to writers, whom he called 'engineers of human souls', (Khrushchev, 1959, 1) set the tone:

Quote:
Crime is a deviation from the accepted norms of behaviour in society, which is not infrequently caused by confusion in a person's psyche. Can there be illnesses, psychic disorders among individuals in a communist society? Apparently there can be. And if there are, they will be misdemeanors, which are peculiar to people with an abnormal state of mind. So one will not judge a communist society by lunatics such as these. To those, who on a similar "foundation" might start to call for a fight against communism, one can say that there are indeed people who are fighting against communism, with its noble ideals, but, evidently, such people are manifestly not in a normal state of mind (Khrushchev, 1959, 2).
Dissent went on to become a factor in determining whether an individual should be incarcerated and is a recurrign theme in the well documented abuses of dissidents in Soviet psychiatric institutions in the 1970s and 1980s (Bloch & Reddaway, 1977, Shalin, 1996).

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[10] Antony Beevor cites an NKVD [Soviet Secret Police] report, written in 1945, in which it is noted with some alarm that Soviet soldiers are talking about the obvious confort of German civilians and forming 'politically incorrect conclusions' (Beevor, 2002 34).

[11] In a letter published in The Times in 1970, Dr Nina Szamuely a specialist working on the Oxford Russian Dictionary wrote that: '[...] the craze for ideologically correct, artificial "revolutionary names was extremely widespread in the twenties and early thirties'. Girls were given names such as Lenina and Stalina or Russian acronyms such as Revdit - revolyutsionnoe ditya - revolutionary child (The Last Cuckoo, 1987, 109).

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 14th, 2013 at 10:21 PM.