Socialist Bourgeois Virtues

The article attempts to answer the question: why did the citizens of the late USSR expect that a return to bourgeois virtues would not be a big problem? Why did the citizens of the late USSR assume that it would not be too difficult for a Soviet person to adopt “normal” bourgeois moral attitudes? In this regard, the author analyzes the official Soviet ideas about the moral qualities required from a person in a socialist society. The article justifies that, in terms of the totality of virtues, the objective differences between the ideal-typical socialist and bourgeois requirements for a person were not too great. One can see that bourgeois examples of moral behavior are multi-component combinations of virtues, most of which have exactly the same relation to the ideal-typical “bourgeois” as to the “socialist”. In fact, it is recognized that the norms of bourgeois morality themselves may be higher than bourgeois practice and legislation. The fact that fight for communism was the main principle of communist morality did not mean rejecting bourgeois virtues, which look quite acceptable. It was necessary to abandon the economic basis (the domination of private property) and the political and ideological superstructure that distort these virtues. Thus, the differences between the bourgeois and socialist moral codes were mainly due to differences in their ideological “superstructure”. This is confirmed by the analysis of such significant documents for assessing the official content of Soviet morality as the textbook Historical Materialism or The Moral Code of the Builder of Communism. All this has led to a relatively conflict-free transition from Soviet Russia to Capitalist Russia.

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