Stalinism: a tragedy without catharsis

Contemporaries of Stalin's transformations in the USSR felt the similarity of their era and its collisions with the content of the ancient tragedy. The ancient tragedy reflected the transition of society from a tribal, communal state to a civil (polis) state, which was accompanied not only by bloody strife, but also by a general feeling of guilt associated with the rejection of the “tradition of the fathers”. Greek theater and tragedy allowed the Greeks to survive the guilt of symbolic parricide and to survive catharsis. In Russia, the patriarchal community and the clan collective, dissolving the personality in itself, survived until the era of collectivization, which was not only a class war, but also a generational war, a transition from clan society and consciousness to civil society (in their Soviet version). She, too, was accompanied by a general feeling of guilt for the "renunciation of the fathers", "symbolic parricide" and the search for a new "universal father". As a result, the repression was experienced as a fate, a blind but deserved punishment. However, Soviet culture did not give rise to the mechanism of catharsis, which predetermined the unresolved problems of tribal consciousness until now.