Virtues against Communism Fishman. L.G. The Age of Virtues: After Soviet Morality. Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2022

Abstract

The article is dedicated to comprehending the ideas set forth in the monograph by Leonid Fishman The Age of Virtues: After Soviet Morality, which raises the question of the reasons for the rapid destruction of “high” communist morality in the USSR, as well as the sliding of the Russian society in the 1990s into a state of “war of all against all”. Setting himself the task of tracing how “evil” is born from “good”, Fishman draws attention to the fact that the communist morality of the Soviet Union contained an internal contradiction due to the combination of what can be called virtue ethics and the ethics of principles. Virtues consist of values that are relevant to certain communities. At the same time, virtue ethics has a dual nature. Under certain social circumstances, it contributes to nurturing a harmonious individual who strives for high social goals. This happens if the ethics of principles rises above it, setting higher goals and general ideas about how to treat other members of society. But if the ethics of principles ceases to function, nothing prevents the virtues from serving pure evil, for even members of mafia clans are not strangers to heroism, devotion, and honor. Fishman demonstrates how the virtue ethics gradually replaced the ethics of principles, bringing closer the collapse of the great communist project. According to Dmitry Davydov’s conclusion, the value of Fishman’s research is greater than just historical. No communist project can exclude either its humanistic core, with the focus on the liberation of the individual, or its emphasis on the socialization of the individual in these or other communities. But any “harmonious” personality and any community that serves “the good” risk transforming into their opposites: into a selfish individual and an association of “friends”, for whom everyone “who is not with us” is an enemy.