No man, no problem Some assumptions regarding correlation of mass political repressions with mass culture and domestic crime

Abstract

The article justifies the need for the shift from the metaphysical speculations to the actual scientific exploration of the impact the tragic events of the Soviet past had on the contemporary Ukrainians’ mass psychology and behavior. In the authors’ view, a mandatory intermediate step towards this is to put forward the hypotheses that can be empirically verified. The authors make an attempt to propose a theoretical construct that links mass political repressions in the 30’s of the XX century with the facts of domestic crime in the post-totalitarian societies and samples of modern mass culture. Assassinations performed by common citizens for the sake of solving their life problems are viewed as examples of domestic crime while the TV shows which casually “suggest” that way of solving life problems to the viewers represent mass culture. The authors state a conceptual difference in the attitude to assassination in the showy practices of mass culture and in the classical literature works. They denounce murder as the gravest crime and, at the same time give evidence of the tendency of mass psychology to accept domestic crime as a way to deal with the wear and tear of life. It is assumed that being enrooted in mass psychology, political repressions of the 1930s had a “reverse” destructive influence amplifying and deepening the abovementioned tendency. The authors put forward an idea that inspired by political repressions the transgenerational rooting of domestic crime stereotypes occurs in a direct way (by means of inter-generational channels), on the one hand, and through mass culture, on the other, which is also burdened by psychological consequences of mass political repression. A mental experiment has been conducted, which proved a possibility to operationalize the proposed hypothetical construct and, thus, to verify it empirically.