The Russian challenge and the year 2000

Rd'osHa ььгчо

THE

NGE AND THE YEAR 2000

ALEXANDER YANOV

Alexander Yanov's timely book convincingly challenges conventional Western views of the So\ iet Union Against the background of the debate nitiated by Gorbachev's reforms and the new policy of glasnost, Yanov argues that a far greater threat faces the West if Gorbachev fails. He identifies this with the Russian Idea - the ideologj of the Russian New Right

The author focuses on the Russian Idea and exam nes the history of the movement from its emergence (simultaneously with Marxism") in the 1830s and up to the early 1980s, when fascist demonstrations took place n the streets of Moscow He argues that the phenomenon of Russian fascism cannot be comprehended in terms of conventional sovietology and he makes a cogent plea that the West respond to the threat posed by che Russian New Right by supporting the emergence of Russia from political and cultural isolation.

If this does not happen Yanov provides a frightening ghmpse of the Russian New Right's vision: they beheve, just as the Bolshev iks at the beginning of this century, that their 1917 is beckoning — that the twenty-first century belongs to them.

This provocative and passionate book intra duces a completely new set of ideas into Western puhH_c debate and provides much illumination on events now taking place in the Soviet Union.

$24.95

so«wf^uaoH

The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000

The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000

Alexander Yanov

Translated by Iden J. Rosenthal

Basil Blackwell

Copyright © Alexandei V»tw\ I«87

First published 1^7 Basil Blackwell Ltd

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Basil Blackwell Inc.

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation ef short p»ss«#«?s tor the purposes of cnticisin and review no part of (his publication ma> be reproduced stored m a retrieval system. or transmitted, in am form oi bv ai\\ means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise w thout the prior permission of the publisher.

Excep> in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the cond'.ion that it shall not, b\ wa\ of trade or otherwise, be lent re sold hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher s prior consent n any form of b-nding or cover other than that in w hich it is published and w .hout a siir.lai condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Bruish Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Yanov. Alexander

The Russian challenge the USSR and the year 2000

I. Soviet Union — Politics and government — l°53 — 1. Title

320.^47 J>N№3»

ISBN 0-631-15334-0

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Yanov Alexander 1^30 —

The Russian challenge and the \ear 2000

Bibliography p. Includes index

I. Sovet Union — Politics and government — 1053

² dissenters — So\ .et Union S Sobheniisvn, Aleksandr lsae\ ich, Bv I f — 1. Title.

DK2SS \ >o$7 «47 OSS So-^OS^-1

ISBN 0-63 1-15334.0

14 peset in 10 on 12 pt Astro b\ Pioneer Associates Perthshire Printed in Great Britain b\ TJ Press Ltd Padstow

To Robert and Margaret Reilly

'The West has supped more than its fill of every kind of freedom, including intellectual freedom. And has this saved it? We see it today crawling on hands and knees its will paralyzed, in the dark about the future, spiritually racked and dejected.'

. . . Alexander Solzhenitsyn

'The mess anic significance of Russia in relation to the West is beyond doubt. Slavophilism alone can still save the West from parliamentarism, unbelief, and dynamite.'

. . . Aleksei Kireev

'If we presume the coming transformation of the Communist Party into the Russian Orthodox Parry of the Soviet Union, we would obt in truly the ideal state, one which would fulfill the historical destiny of the Russian people. It is a question of the Orthodoxization of the entire world.'

. . . Gennadii Shimanov

'Without the Communist Party, by the year 2000 the Zionists will physically exterminate the Russian people together with all our problems.

... An anonymous Russian 'patriot'

Contents

Foreword

Introduction: Russia vs Russia 1

PART I THE HISTORICAL DRAMA OF THE RUSSIAN IDEA

AND AMERICA'S SOVIET DEBATE 17

The Russian Idea: Between Two Hatreds 19

The Russian Idea: Genesis and Degeneration 30

The Russian Idea and Its Critics 49

A Witness for the Defence? 59

The Western Debate and the Russian New Right 64

My Hypothesis 78

Caught in the Crossfire 82

PART II IN ANTICIPATION OF THE YEAR 2000 89

VSKhSON: Beginning of the Dissident Right 91

Young Guardism: The Beginning of the

Establishment Б ght Ю5

Veche: the Loyal Opposition on the Right 128

Enter Fascism: The Nation Speaks 155

Solzhenitsyn\ From Under the Rubble 166

Diabolerie One 185

August 1914: Solzhenitsyn vs Solzhenicsyn 192 lb Diabolene Two 209

When the Sleeper Awakened 223

The Politics of Russian Fascism 231

PART III CONCLUSION 249

Fascism Takes to the Streets 251

Is the West Ready for the Year 2000? 264

Afterword 290

Appendix 292

Index 297

Foreword

In May 1981, at a conference in Washington devoted to Russian nationalism, I was left dumbfounded by the presentation of Jerry Hough, one of the most well-known and radical revisionists in American sovietology The gist of his speech was that all Russians are nationalists. Andrei Sakharov, for example, is just as much a nationalist as Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Leon d Brezhnev. Of course, Hough continued, we must differentiate between the good Russian nationalists and the bad ones, but m principle the problem is clear: when dealing with Russians, no matter who they may be, we are dealing with nationalists.

Richard Pipes, one of the most well-known and radical traditional­ists in American sovietology, arrived late at the conference and so missed the presentation of his antipode. The reader may imagine the audience's astonishment when in his speech Pipes, virtually word for word, reiterated Hough's tirade.

On one and the same day to hear one and the same speech from the mouths of two experts who over the course of years have invariably contradicted one another on everything that concerns Russia was, it seems, the most surprising experience of my life in America — all the more so since I too was no novice in the single topic on which these two irreconcilable opponents had, before my eyes, come to terms. Three years earlier, in April 1978, I had even published my first book on this subject, The Russian New Right. The documents I presented there in great number fully excluded everything that this ideological duet composed of the leading figures of both opposing sovietological schools had pronounced in Washington.

To appreciate fully the degree of shock I experienced in listening to Hough and Pipes, the reader must imagine how, say, the author of a book about Catholicism in the sixteenth century would have felt, having heard from respected academics that all Europeans were

Catholics at that time and that the only difference between Marun Luther, the leader of the Reformation, and Ignatius Loyola, leader of the Counter-reformation, was that one was a bad Catholic and the other a good one. In other words, Protestantism was not an independent ideology in its own right that gave 'se to a precisely outlined political doctrine in opposition to Catholicism, but only bad Catholicism.

In May 1981, dupng that conference. I began to regret having published my Russian New Right as early as 1978 — outs.de the context of the Western intellectual debate on Russia. Only recently arrived from Moscow, having been nurtured in a completely different school of thought and fresh from embittered skirmishes with Russian nationalists back at home, I had naively assumed that I was speaking in one and the same conceptual language as my new American readers. 1 believed that the phenomenon of Russian nationalism meant for them the same as it did for me and my fellow-thinkers and opponents in Russia: an age-old, powerful and attractive ideology, the main antagonist to traditional Russian liberalism (Westernism). I assumed that my readers wouid know its history and its political doctrine, that they would know how graphically this doctrine repudiates the central postulate of Western political thought — the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers — offering instead a medieval postulate about the separation of functions between secular and spiritual authorities I assumed that I would not need to explain to my readers that this doctrine conceives of its political deal not as popular representation, but as a nation-family not requir'ng political guarantees; that separation of chuich from state is anen to '.t; that, in other words, the ideology of Russian nationalism is antagonistic to all the main principles on which modern democracy is based,

Hough and Pipess duet convinced me that there is a chasm between how the term Russian naiionalism is used in Washington and how it is used in Moscow. This rift seemed all the deeper to me when I learned that, m certain run-of-the-mill courses on the subject at American universities, the Westernism of the last century is calmly interpreted as a component part of Russian nationalism, thus confusing the Sakharovs of Russia's past with her Solzhenitsyns, just as American sovietologists had done in Washington, before my eyes with respect to modern times. Then, after another conference in Washington in October 1985, 1 became almost despairing when the American politicians and experts present concluded almost unanimously U was the sole exception) — and entered into the conference record!

— that Russian nationalism is 'the operative ideology' of the present- day Soviet government. The conceptual language of my readers dearly had nothing in common with the language in which my book was wrtten.

As a rule, this conceptual language does not view Russian nationalism as a particulai ideology, or even as a political doctrine. It sees it more as a feeling or seni ment which is merely expressed by ideological symbols. These symbols can either be positive (and then this nationalist sentiment is called patriot >ra) or negative (in which case it is called chauvinism). For what lies between these two emotional poles — nationalism as such, the deology of nationalism — there is no symbol. It is a kind of no one's land, a blank spot on the ideological map, lacking political substance of its own and therefore accepting any content the observer brings to it.

There is no doubt that the Soviet leadership, as long ago as the 1930s, incorporated symbols of patriotism into its own deology in order to exploit people's patriotic emotions. However, though this may have confused Western observers, it did not fool Russian nationalists. The ideological explosion of the 1960s described in The Russian New Right was the most convincing ev: Jence of the gaping chasm between the 'emotional' exploitation of ideological symbols in Soviet propaganda and the genuine ideolog} of Russian nationalism If nationalism really were serving as the 'operative deology' of the Soviet government, the revolt of Russian nationalists that erupted in the 1960s almost simultaneously in both the dissident samizdat and the officially censored Soviet press, would defy explanation. Russian nationalists graphically and unambiguously refused to recognize the official Soviet ideolog> as their own, regardless of how many patriotic symbols it expropriated. The Soviet government, for ts part, liKewise refused to recognize the Russian nationalists as their own. On the contrary, it unleashed its KGB on them, hustling some off to pi *son and forcing others to fall silent. Why?

Neither Jerry Hough nor Richard Pipes can pro\ ide an answer to this decisive question They confuse patriotic emotions (or, 'n the other interpretation, chauvinist excesses) with the ideology of Russian nationalism, and that has made it impossible for them to understand the nature of the phenomenon.

This, apparently, would explain the unexpectedly different reactions of readers to The Russian New Right. Some saw it as an attack on Russian patriotism and were duly offended. Other interpreted it as an assault on Russian chauvinism and duly rejoiced. In reality, however, the book was neither one nor the other. Generally, it was not intended to have any relation to emotions whatsoever It described the — at first glance — inexplicable resurrection of the ideology of Russian nationalism in the modern-day Soviet Union (where, according to all sovietological cliches, such a thing could not happen). It dealt with Russian nationalism's revolutionary origins in the mid-1960s, its split into a dissident faction and an establishment faction toward the end of that decade, and the transformation of the latter into the USSR's unofficial shadow ideology. It went on to describe how ihese two factions grew ideologically closer and how they were repressed by the police in the mid-1970s. The book also offered an hypothesis about the potential political consequences for Russia and the world in the event of a new, and this time victonous, resurrection of the ideology of Russian nationalism at the end of the second Christian rii llennium.

I tried to show the reader how Russian nationalism's main tiaits were formed, its militant anu-Westernism, rendering it similar to the .deology of the Ayatollah Khomeini^- ts dogmatism and ntolerance. bringing it closer to contemporary Soviet Marxism; its extremism and explosive potential, resembling Bolshevism abroad at the beginning of the century However, even those re\iewers most well disposed toward the book did not take all this seiiously. For the majority of them it was a book about a bizarre chauvinist uing (the 'lunatic fringe ) of Soviet dissidence, a kind of Russian Ku Klux Klan; interesting and even entertaining, with a mass of exotic details, but lacking any immediate political significance

Suppose, right at the start of the twentieth century, immediately after the emergence of Bolshevism, someone had written a book about the sudden birth in Russia of a potentially powerful ideological alternative to the then ruling, and seemingly unshakable, tsarist regime Suppose the author of this book had warned that, in the event of Bolshevism's triumph, it could totally transform Russia's role in the world and restructure the entire political arena of the twentieth century. Suppose, furthermore, that well-wishing critics had interpreted the phenomenon of Bolshevism described in this book as a marginal wing of contemporary Russian dissidence — unpleasant, perhaps ominous, but not of any immediate political interest. There would, of course, have been other critics too, Bolshevism's 'fellow-travellers', who might have accused the author of painting Bolshevism black and reducing it to a lowest common denominator, when in fact, they may have argued, there are good Bolsheviks and bad ones. The good ones should be supported, they might have said, because they are selfless fighters against accursed tsansm, (which suppresses human rights and organizes Jewish pogroms) and are thus our natural allies.

This was very similar to the position I found myself in after the publication of my Russian New Right in 1978. The only difference was that I had written not about Bolsheviks, whose role has become somewhat clearer over the past seven decades, but about Russian nationalists, whose role as yet remains just as dark as that of the Bolsheviks in 1903. In just the same way, those crtics who wished me well and were full of revuls ,»n for Russian chauvinism failed to take this new ideological phenomenon se ously as a real political alternative to the existing regime. At the same time, the nat'.onalist Western 'fellow-travellers' attacked me- for slandering Russian patriotism, because there are good nat.-onal.'sts too — selfless fighters against accursed Communism (wf ch suppresses human rights and hinders Jewish emigration out of the Soviet Union) and are thus our natural allies.

It is for these reasons that I have wr ten another book about Russian nationalism, in which all the i's will be dotted, and all the t's crossed, and which, hopefully, will not be so open to misinterpretation. In the final analysis, Russian national >m did not come into the world yesterday or in the 1960s. It has a long history, rich in events. It arose at approximately the same time as Marxism, a century and a half ago. It underwent its own complex ana dramatic evolution, it had ts ups and downs and its metamorphoses, which contemporary nationalists are now repeating just as unsuspectingly as tneir contemporary Western readers. Its political doctrine was worked out long before the 1917 resolution. Its response to that revolut on was fas^ sm. Its political potential has been clearly and unambiguously demonstrated. Its resurrection in the Soviet Union in the 1960s was predictable, n the same way as its emergence in the 1830s. It answered deep needs within the Russian political system in the first half of the nmeteenth century, just as it answers them today in the second half of the twent leth.

The entire historical drama of the ideology of Russian nat^:onalism, or the Russian Idea, as Nikolai Berdiaev so aphoristically named it in the twentieth century, was omitted in The Russian New Right. That book was devoted exclusively to one short episode in the h .story of the Russian Idea — the ideological explosion of the 1960s. To that extent, it is my fault that the resurrection of the Russian Idea was received as an isolated and exotic episode in the history of Sov et с ssent. Only in the broad historical perspective can it be understood that this explosion, though put down by police repression in the mid-1970s, was not, and could not have been, crushed completely. In just the same way, the Bolsheviks were put down but were never completely crushed by the repressions accompany ing ihe dramatic explosion of 1905 — 07. The year 1917 was still in store for them, just as the year 2000 may still be in store for the champions of the Russian Idea. At least they hope so, as the reader of this book will discover.

The present book is constructed ,n an entirely different way from The Russian New Right, though it does nclude several chapters updated and revised from the earlier work. Here. I describe events that took place at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s after the publication of The Russian New Right. Hut more importantly, I also try to capture the historical drama of the Russian Idea, from the point of its very conception up to ts crushing defeat in the period 1917 — 21. In presenting the subject thus, I want to make it clear that m the Russian Idea we have a phenomenon of first-order political significance which could enjoy a new and tr umphant resurrection at the end of this century, if Gorbachev's 1980s reforms come to naught (in just the same way as Bolshevism enjoyed a resurrection after the collapse of Stolypin's reforms at the beginning of this century).

Above all, this book is intended to help Western readers gain an understand'ag of the fancilul intricacies of the Russian Idea, of the complexities of is political doctrine, and peripeteia of its historical drama. It should then be less easy to confuse it with the patriotic emotions or ideological symbols that Soviet propaganda seeks to exploit. I therefore hope that reviewers will not mistake the book for e^;iher an assault on Russian chauvirusm or an attack on Russian patriotism. I, no less than they, deplore chauvinism in any form and respect each and every patriotism. But that is not my object here. My book is about the future of Russia — and quite possibly the world — should the Russian Idea be fated someday to triumph. This is the Russian challenge I am concerned with. We may not have seen the worst of it yet.

In conclusion I want to thank all my friends and readers who supported me throughout the fierce campaign waged against me by almost the entire emigre press after the publication of The Russian New Riqhi, and which, alas, the Russian Idea's Western fellow- travellers joined. I also want to thank the magazines Sintaksis and 22 for not having joined this campaign Finally, I am deeply indebted to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for making it possible for me to research the misadventures of the Russian Idea at the beginning of the twentieth century.

т

Introduction: Russia vs. Russia

My book The Russian New Right made its appearance during one of the most dramat^:c periods n modern history, when the era of detente between the superpowers was already over, but humanity d'd not yet know what kind of new era it was entering. Would there be a revival of the Cold War, or perhaps an open confrontation between the superpowers, or even another world war? Eugene Rostow summed up the mood of those years exactly when he said, 'We are living in a pre- not a post-war world.'¹ The very air was saturated with apocalyptic premonitions. Everyth lg, it seemed, heralded a new world crisis. The deployment of SS-20 rockets on the European territory of the USSR was 'nterpreted as preparation for the 'Finlandization' of Western Europe. Soviet exploits in Africa seemed to be aimed at a total breach of commui cations between the US and its allies. The invasion of Afghan stan looked like the first step toward an assault on the oil­fields of the Middle East.

In short, it would be difficult to imagine a less appropriate time tor the appearance of a book on the revival of Russian imperial na> onalisin.² What sei ous person could be expected to take an interest in the sudden rebirth of a distant alternative to Soviet Marxism in Moscow when fear of an impending confrontation between Commui sm and ant Commur sm was reaching its apogee? It is true that the resurrect on of imperial nat ma sm precipitated a split within the So\ iet diss dent movement and potentially threatened to cause one in the Sov et establishment as well. Stijj, who cared aoout mere poten als when it seemed the very fate of humankind was at stake? The Russian New Right required of ts readers a theoretical effort to overcome the stereotypes that have been hardening over decades. But in the urgency of the current crisis, what was important was practice, not theory. The book's very tone seemed irritatingly out of place against the backdrop of Shakespearian political passions then being played out across the world stage.

That is how the world looked at the end ot the 1970s and early 1980s through the eyes of the American press — both popular and intellectual. Who would have been interested in a book about the emergence of Bolshevism in Russia, say, in 1911, at the time of the Balkan crisis that eventually led to World War I? Ironically, it was the Shakespearian passions boiling in the Amencan press that were irrelevant; no Shakespearian tragedy was taking place in the world and none was foreseen. What was happening bore as much resemblance to the Balkan crisis as a gentle autumnal shower does to a typhoon. In fact, nothing was threatening humarkind in those years But if one wants to speak of threats, then the revival of Russian imperial nationalism was a hundred tunes more dangerous than Soviet adventures in Africa. But. in order to understand this, one had to have a much deeper and more sensitive conception of how the Russian political system functions than the familiar totalitarian stereotypes and cliches of American politic.ans and academics would allow. Despite the hundreds of books and thousands of arf'cles written about Soviet politics in the postwar decades, they proved unprepared for a new turn in relations between the superpowers. Why?

The answer to this question is far beyond the purview of a book about the resurrection of imperial nationalism n Russia Yet the subject presents us with a chance to examine this question in greater detail and at least to try to offer a hypothetical answer

The Battle of Metaphors

Let's first take an overview of the intellectual confrontation at the time. The prognosis of Senator Daniel Patrick Movnihan was, m effect, that once having placed Europe on its knees ('Fuilandized' it) and isolated the United States, Russia intended to undertake a fateful assault on the Persian Gulf: 'The short run looks good [for the USSR], the long run bad Therefore move. It was the calculation the Austro- Hungarian Empire made in 1914.'³ Movnihan's Austro-Hunganan metaphor was opposed by another, suggested by Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. 'The Soviet Union is similar in character to Nazi Germany: a revolutionary totalitarian power bent on establishing a new world order in which it would enjoy hegemony.'⁴ Out of this naturally followed an unambiguous prognosis world war is inevitable and therefore negotiations senseless; 'appeasement' is criminal; the policy of detente is tantamount to the Munich agreement. For those who accepted the German analogy, t. was hard to escape its logical conclusion. Thus Frank R. Burnett asserted that, 'The U.S. today is about where Britain was in 1938 witn the shadow of И tier's Germany darken' lg all over Europe.'⁵

Practically the whole intellectual debate in America at that time was reducible to the conflict between these two positions. As James Fallows explained later, 'The fundamental intellectual d ference between the sides is the historical prism through which their perceptions are bent. When the berals look at the 1980s, some of them see 1914. When the conservatives look it the 1980s, nearly all of them see 1938/6

I will return once again to this debate n my conclusion. Suff¹ ce it to say, here, that in principle the outcome of this struggle did not change the apocalyptic mood of those years: both the 1914 and the 1938 comparisons signified the terrible mminence of a final world conflict — between Russia and the West, between Commur sm and anti- Communism. The fatal 'window of vulnerab ty' was supposed to open up sometime in the mid-1980s As always, this apocalyptic mood was expressed at its most extreme by the Russian emigre press. Each minute we live,' wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 'no fewer than one country (sometimes two or three at once) is gnawed away by the teeth of totalitarianism. This process never ceases and has already been going on for almost forty years. . . . Each minute we live, somewhere on earth one, two, or three countries are b ng freshly ground up by the teeth of totalitarianism. . . . The Commur sts are already on the march everywhere — in Western Europe, and in America. And all today's distant viewers will soon be able to see it all w ithout a television set, and then they will feel it personally — but only after they've already been swallowed.'⁷

If we estimate the number of minutes in forty years as roughly twenty million and the number of countries as 150, then, arith­metically speaking, each country in the world has already been 'gnawed away' and even 'freshly ground up' by the Communists at least 133,333 times. But few care about emigre arithmetic when speeches such as the following are made on the floor of the US Senate. 'I guess Ronald Reagan is a warmonger just like V\ nston Churchill. . . . And we can find lots of examples of Neville Chamberlains, the appeasers of this world who never seem to learn the lessons of history (Jake Garn of Utah); or: 'Don't tell me there is no lesson to be learned there' (John Tower, Texas).⁸

Russia s Historical Choice

Just one detail was omitted from this impassioned debate in which the lessons of German (or Austro-Hungarian) history were discussed, the lessons ot Russian history. For this reason alone the examples cited were academic to the questions that really mattered. Had the senators followed their own advice and turned to the only history whose lessons are essential for a proper understanding of Soviet behaviour in world politics at the end of the 1970s, the picture perceived by them would probably have been different. In The Russian New Right I tried to sketch out this picture, tracing the long-term patterns of Rassian political change over the last half-millenium, since the time when Russia became a nation-state.

According to this perception, the degree of Rassia s aggressiveness and expansionism in world politics generally depends not so much on tne character of the dominant ideology (as the stereotype holds) as on the character of a particular regime. The tsarist dcologies of Russia as the Third Rome' or 'Orthodoxy. Autocracy and Nationality' did not prevent Russia from being transformed ^to a gigantic empire occupying one-sixth of the earih's land surface, any more than the Communist ideology hindered Nikita Khrushchev from curtailing territorial expansion.⁹ The Soviet government of the 1970s, which overturned Khrushchev's regime of reform but was not prepared to pass the whole way into becoming a regime of counter-reform, represented, according to this picture, merely a temporary and transitional regime of political stagnation. In this sense, and only in this sense, was it reminiscent (if we must draw analogies with other countries) of the Weimar Republic. It could have led Russia into a new counter-reform or into a new reform, but ч was 'ncapable of leading it into an all-out confrontation with the West. Historically, the only thing such a regime has been able to accomplish is to steer the nation into a profound political, cultural and economic decay at home and grab whatever is lying in temptation's way abroad

This is why, according to the metaphor of transitional or Weimar Russia, the world could not have been approaching a global crisis in the late 1970s. Instead, it was Russia which was once again approaching the same fateful historical crossroads where, as always after a regime of stagnation, she is faced with a choice — between radical reform and no less radical counter-reform.

Russia is the only European country which, time and again, over the course of her entire tragic history, has been forced to make this choxce. It began as long ago as the 1550s when her first grandiose effort to join world civilization, 'to seek and >nd herself in mankind' as Petr Chaadaev was later to say, suffered a crushing defeat and ended instead in the grandiose counter-reform and fierce garrison- state dictatorship of Ivan the Terrible.¹⁰ Since that ime, over the course of centuries both Russia's reformist efforts as well as her counter-reforms have taken on the greatest variety of ideological integuments. Her reforms have always been attempts to join civilization while her counter-reforms have always been efforts to perpetuate her split with civilization. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the choice before Russia - still the same — desj te all her ICBMs, computers, and other outward attr jutes of modernity. Russia has never come out of the Middle Ages', Nikolai Berdiaev insightfully remarked as long ago as 1923.¹¹ Therefore she may now once again try to 'open up' to the world, as China has been doing over these last years, or, alternatively, issue another challenge to civlization, escaping from her present historical decline at the cost of once more transforming herself into a garrison-state empire.

Perhaps the most widespread illusion of the past seven decades has been that the Communist metamorphosis of 1917 somehow broke the long-term patterns of Russian political change and thus struck from the agenda of world history the issues raised by Russ a as 'the sick man of Europe' and the progressive degeneration of the world's last empire. The 1980s should have brought with them the ins ght that Communism, just like Ivan the Terrible's 'Orthodox tsardom' or Peter the Great's garrison-state empire, was in fact only a postponement, a temporary remission for 'the sick man of Europe', a mere detoui by which Russia — at the price of unheard-of sacr: "ices and trials — has returned to the same 'accursed quest^;ons' wh ch 1917 had promised to rid her of for ever. Once again she is in decline and once more she faces her old traditional choice.

The world could ignore this recurrent Russ an ch< ice as long as Russia was just an obscure province procrastinating on the margins of civilization. It can no longer afford to do so in the nuclear age, now that intercontinental ballistic missiles have made this choice central to the survival of civilization. Such is the logical conclusion of the Weimar Russia metaphor.

Comparing Metaphors

The problem presented by The Russian New Right was that it did not comply with either of the contending metaphors, but instead proposed its own. Thus it landed beyond the limits of the main current of America's Soviet debate, for, from the standpoint of the metaphor it offered nothing at all dramatic was going on m the world of the late seventies. It gave no grounds for apocalyptic prognoses nor did it promise any 'window of vulnerability' in the mid-eighties. The Soviet expansion of that time merely marked the agony of a regime of political stagnation. For the actions which the West was expecting of Brezhnev's Russia, an altogether different kind of political regime was necessary. This was something which just did not exist in the Moscow of the late seventies. Therefore, the deployment of SS-20s was not a portent of Europe's 'Finlandization'; Soviet operations in Africa did not promise to cut NATO's vital communications; and the Soviet army in Afghanistan was destined to be bogged down in that country for a long time to come. Neither 1914 nor 1938 were on their way back at the end of the 1970s. Munich and Neville Chamberlain had nothing remotely to do with the situation, nor did the calculations of the Austro-Hunganan Empire on the eve of World War I In spite of Solzhenitsvn's jeremiads, Communism was not 'on the march — in Western Europe and in America', nor did US television viewers face the prospect of having to verify this prophecy only after they had

'already been swallowed

Now, in the mid-1980s, you may judge for yourself which of the metaphors offered at the end of the last decade has withstood the test of history. Who recalls the example of 1914 today? Who any longer speaks of 1938? What has become of the 'window of vulnerability', that was supposed to be opening? Where is the prophecy about Europe's Finlandization? Do we still hear so much about Soviet plans to take over the oil-fields of the Persian Gulf?¹² The hysteria s over, the drama gone. They have given way to what is almost a euphoria American politicians have been speakmg a completely different language by the m d-1980s.

'The Soviets', said Secretary of State Shultz, 'face profound structural economic difficulties, a continuing succession problem and restless allies, its diplomacy and its clients are on the defensive in many parts of the world. We can be sure that the 'correlation of forces is shifting back in our favor.'¹³ Richard Allen, former presidential

National Security Advisor, fully agreed w h this analysis If anything, the picture of Russia s decline he was drawing was even more sombre: 'The Soviet leadership is in the throes of a profound systemic crisis, one aggravated by political mstab !ity, . . . Combined with deeply rooted, some would say ineradicable, economic problems and widespread unease among the many nationalities of the Soviet Union, not to mention the mounting anti-Soviet'sm in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union desperately needs breatt 'ng space.'¹⁴

What exactly are they talking about? The all-out confrontation which both the American metaphors were predicting at the end of the 1970s? The general state of decline envisaged by the metaphor of Weimar Russia? Which of these approaches toward explaining Russia's behaviour in world politics has come off better — the one based on coincidental and superficial analogies with the behaviour of some other power in another set of circumstances, or the one which appealed to the long-term patterns of Russian political change?¹⁵

An Alternative Approach

We have examined here only one case in which both of the major approaches in America's Soviet debate (the ideological one, which seeks to explain the 1980s in terms of 1938, and the geopolitical one, which does the same in terms of 1914) have proved incapable of understanding the present behaviour of Russia or predicting its future course. (We will encounter other similar cases later.) The Russian political system has always turned out to be more complex than such explanations allow It has been developing cyclically; it has been pulsating, time and again it has entered into zones of decline, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but has never even come close to disin­tegrating Instead, it has emerged from each agony renewed, ever a greater threat, more powerful and menacing. In fact, it has been like this throughout history (see Fig. 1. in the Appendix).

The Muscovite tsardom was quietly flickering out -n the late seventeenth century on the periphery of Europe. Yet, in another quarter-century it had swiftly moved out of the zone of decline and, so far from remaining a provincial backwater kingdom, emerged before the world as the mighty Petersburg empire which for the first time tried to assert Russian control over Eastern and Central Europe he establishment of Petersburg Russia, with its officers arrayed in uni­forms with shining epaulettes and speakmg French better than they did Russian, w as just as unrecognizably different from the bearded boyars of earlier Muscovite Rus" as the elites of Soviet Russia are from their tsarist forbears Peter's revolution changed the country no less than Lenin's, and it promised Russia a night to the pmnacle of world power As early as the second half of the eighteenth century Catherine's chancellor Bezborodko boasted that, 'not a single cannon in Europe would dare fire a shot without our permission'. By the middle of the next century. Petersburg Russia had reached its apex, having become a superpower and the gendarme of Europe, the chief anti-commurist force in the world, which Karl Marx (just like President Reagan later) saw as an 'evil empire', and 'the bastion of world reactior I his was the time when the Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin exclaimed, 'I ask can anvone compete with us, and whom do we not compel to obedience? Doesn't the political destiny of the world rest in our hands, if only we should care to decide it . . . ? The Russian sovereign is closer than Charles V and Napoleon were to their dream of universal empire!'¹⁶

What happened then? Only a few decades later we sec Petersburg Russia in the same desperate straits it had once led Muscovy out of, having lost the proud status of superpower, once more provincial and agonizing. Vladimir U'ych Lenin was destined to do for Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century what Peter had accomplished at the start of the eighteenth — dismantle her political system's outdated format in order to rescue its medieval, quasi-Byzantine mperial essence Once more — this time with its communism, its International, and its single party system — it differed so much from its predecessor as to seem another country. Again it rose to the heights of military might and became a superpower. By mid-century it had achieved what Peter could not, and had swallowed Eastern and part of Central Europe, with a population of И 1 million, without so much as missing a stride And then what? A few decades later we find Soviet Russia in the same situation of historical eclipse it had once led the Petersburg Empire out of, again agonizing with the long litany of seemingly incurable diseases recited by Shultz and Allen. Truly, one has to ignore completely Russia's past if one is to believe that this is the final chapter in the history I have just been trying to sketch In fact, the farther Russia progresses on the path of historical decline, and the closcr she comes to the moment of national ensis, when once again — for the third time m as many centuries — it will be decided which path she will take to halt her current decline, the more perilous the world situation becomes. Euphoria is no more appropriate now than panic was of the late 1970s If ever in the last half-millenium the West had vital need of a precise, well thought-out, and potent strategy capable of influencing Russia's historical choice, then t is right now, in the nuclear age in the face of a nat onal crisis unfolding n Russia before our very eyes.

Therefore, this book's primary goal is to show the reader that Russia's impending crisis at the end of the twent ;th century is no less real than were those she underwent at the close of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. If Russia again fails to direct the national energy that has been bottled up by the political stagnatic n of the last decades into the channel of peaceful reform, as she has failed to do in the past, this crisis may result in the emergence on the world stage of a monstrous garrison-state nuclear empire far more dangerous and aggressive than today's skidd ig USSR.

Mikhail Gorbachev has his predecessors. Both at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, relatively young and dynamic leaders advanced to Russia's helm. Vasilii Golitsyn in the first case and Petr Stolypin in the second tried to avert the danger of a garrison-state counter-reform by ins .tuting bold reformist plans. They were both inventive and energetic ndividuals who achieved a great deal. But they lost in the end. Their opponents, the leaders of the garrison-state counter-reforms, won out, Peter in the first instance and Len 1 in the second.

Thus the second aim of this book is to show the reader that the possibility of a counter-reform in Russia at the end of this century or the beginning of the next is just as real as it was at the close of the seventeenth or the start of the twentieth centuries. Moreover, the ideology for a modern counter-reform is being ntensively developed and has been since the mid-1960s, both inside Rusr a and within the emigre community, by groups of intellectuals whom collectively I refer to as the Russian New Right.

The third and last, but by no means least, goal of this book is to show the reader that the key to understanding this peril — and consequently to avoiding it — lies in comprehenc ng the nature of the ideology of counter-reform as it attacked in the 1970s a decayed regime of political stagnation from the right.

This task is perhaps more difficult than the others, if only because in a conflict between a cynical police state and a handful of fearless opponents (as the struggle of the Russian New Right .; most often presented to the world) our sympathies are naturally on the side of the persecuted. If, in addition, one takes into account that at least the dissident (and emigre) faction of the Russian New I ght loudly proclaims its anti-Communism to one and all, then the sympathies of all the world's anti-Communists must also be with them. The fact that

I hey oppose a mediaeval system from a mediaeval position, that is, struggle not to dismantle, but rather revitalize it in a still more organic and aggressive form, might seem under the circumstances insignificant — particularly to those who espouse an ideological approach toward Russia. For, if Communism is the ultimate evil, then what could be worse? Unfortunately, neither the experience of Stalinism nor chat of Nazism has taught these people anything It is just such short­sightedness that makes it so difficult to understand the real function of the Russian New Right in the Soviet political system.

Try to explain, say, to American neo-conservatives that their support lor a Russian anti-Communist inspired by mediaeval ideas is more dangerous than Neville Chamberlain's appeasement at Mun.ch They will never understand you, nor could they be expected to. Eo comprehend what is at issue, one must first grasp Russian history as a perpetual struggle that has been going on for centuries between reforms striving to destroy the Russian autocracy and counter-reforms seeking to perpetuate it The ideological approach does not give one the opportunity even to glimpse the complexity of the issue — just as the liberals' geopolitical approach deprives them of the opportunity to see that the behaviour of Russia in world politics depends not so much on her imperial dynamics as on the character of the particular regime in power.

In other words, the role of the Russian Idea in the country's contemporary history simply cannot be understood by American intellectuals and politicians within the framework of their conventional approaches to Russia. The limits to their vision are rigidly set by these approaches, which invariably lack any historical dimension. Therefore* a book about Russian nationalism will not be properly received by them unless and until an alternative — that is, an historical — approach has acquired its legitimate place m America s Soviet debate. This is what I did not comprehend seven years ago when 1 was writing The Russian New Right

An Explanation to the Reader

It is true that the book received commentaries and reviews in many languages and, consequently, was discussed in many countnes of the world. Indeed, the list of responses it elicited, even leaving aside the storm of fury it provoked in the Russian emigre press, looks impressive.¹⁷ However, the function for which the book was intended, remained unfulfilled. This was partly my fault. I naively assumed that the tacts would speak for themselves, that documents work more effectively than intellectual stratagems, that examples are more persuasive than pi losophical concepts, and that the capacity of a free mind to accept new ideas s unlimited. I was very much n staicen.

As one who left a country dorr nated by state censorsh p, I believed that the problem ended there — that censorship was the only thing lin ting our v ew of the world. I now understand that there exist other, no less rigid limitations, which no one imposes on us from the outs de. We npose them on ourselves by our intellectual approach to problems and by the loj с of our struggle with opponents, which may have absolutely no relation to the problem at hand. That is why, in order to introduce into the public discourse a new set of ideas wh ch contradict the conventional approaches, one has to have someth lg more than facts. In the first place, the futility and shorts ditedness of these approaches must be pi nted out. Secondly, one must have an intellectual alternat've to offer

I am saying all this to 'my' reader since I assume that 'other people's' readers will already have long since slammed this book shut, never to open it again. I am saying this to my reader in order to explain why I have begun the ntroduct on to a book about the contemporary Russian reactionary opposition with an analysis of the obvious inadequacy of America's Soviet debate. Th ; simply reflects all that I have learned since 1978. It is also a promise not to repeat the same mistake. The Russian Idea will be examined here not only in the context of Russian intellectual and political history, but also in that of the American debate. I shall also address the question of what the West can do in order, in this nuclear age, to assist Russian reform rather than counter-reform.

The Lesson

There is still another reason why this book may succeed in achieving what The Russian New Right did not. The diss dent segment of the Russian New Right (I call it this to distinguish it from its establishment counterpart in Moscow) has given the Western public a series of instructive lessons in the intervening years. The most recent of these I shall now recount br' fly.

On 20 January 1981, the Governing Board of the Russ an National Union in West Germany addressed a congratulatory letter to the new president of the United States. The letter was a long one, but its essence was contained in its last paragraph: 'Communism in all its ideological and practical applications is the major and mortal enemy of humankind The paih of seeking conciliation with it leads to inevitable catastrophe. To avert catastrophe there remains one path still open - that of finding an alliance, an understanding, and an honest friendship with the Russian people' who, it iw said in another part of the letter, have nothing in common with the powers that be in the USSR, but on the contrary, represent 'the first and most suffering

victim of Communist dictatorship'.¹⁸

The call was heard. A year later the new American administration restructured the staff of Radio Liberty and the Voice of America in order to adapt American radio broadcasting into the USSR to ihe ideas of the Russian New Right. This is what resulted.

At the end of January 1985 the New York Daily News asked its readers: 'Did you know your tax dollars were being used to transmit Antisemitic broadcasts into Russia? . . And instead of spreading the message of freedom and democracy that President Reagan declared to be our contribution to the modern world, Radio Liberty is often pro- tsarist as well?'¹⁹ According to ihe Lus Angeles Times, anti-semitism and tsarist ideas were disseminated, specifically, in the broadcast of 'a passage of Alexander Solzhenitsvn's book August /914, dealing with the 1911 assassination of a tsarist prime minister by a Jewish anarchist. The broadcast picked up several phrases that have been traditionally used by Russian anti-semites ana even quoted a passage from the Protocols of the Elders of lion,'^:o

According to an editorial in The New Republic, all this began in 1982, when the Reagan administration appo'nted George Bailey, a close associate of Solzhenitsyn's, as Radio Liberty director. Bailey, in turn, the editorial continues, 'installed a group of Russian emigre broadcasters who share Solzhenitsyn's particular Russian nationalist views. To be sure, this ideology is anti-Communist Bui it also glorifies Czarist Russia and regards both Bolshevism and parliamentary democracy as equally decadent "Western" ideologies wilh no place in Russian society, and it has historically contained a strong element of anti-semitism '²¹ The Christian Science Monitor was more concrete:

During the two and a half year tenure of RI director George Bailey, the bS-funded and directed station claimed on the air that: Western democracy is corrupt and unsuitable for the Soviet Union US pressure on right-wing authoritarian regimes to observe human rights is counterproductive and unmoral.

Liberal opponents of the tsarist autocracy were in error and contributed to the Bolshevik takeover.

Jewish revolutionaries bear direct responsibility for the destruction of the old re;.' Line.

Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine during the Civil War — however unfortunate — should be understood in the context of Jewish support for the Reds.

The SS division Galitchina, whose Ukrainian volunteers fought for Hitler in France, among other places, represented the commendable aspirations of freedom-loving Ukrainians.²²

Moreover, the same newspaper reported that, 'one of the editors of Radio Liberty (an old associate of Bailey's) asked rhetor :ally in an interview in his piesence: "And who has established that anti-semitism is wrong?'"²³

There is an old African proverb that says: 'If a crocodile wants to eat your enemy, that does not mean he s your friend.' Hitler, who in his time aspiied to devour both Communist Russia and parFamentary Europe indiscriminately, showed how true this is. But have we learned very much from it?

Russia vs. Russia

What is the point of the lesson offered by the Russian New Right to the American administration, which was just trying to make use of its anti-Communist potential? How, one wonders, was this administration to know that the Russian New Right stands not for the Russia of Pushkin and Tolstoy, but for the Russia of Purishkevich and the Union of the Russian People, which has been hostile to the other Russia since time immemorial? It was that Russia which, in the very first months of Alexander Ill's regime of counter-reform, oegan the first era of mass Jewish pogroms in modern history, and which, in the struggle against reform, launched the first mass-based proto-fascist party on to the world. It was that same one which, in its further struggle against reform, fabricated the vile and vicious anti-semitic document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Clearly the American administration was unaware of all this, since these events took place long before the Communist Revolution, in the days of the tsarist and thoroughly anti-Communist Russia which the Russian New Right seeks to restore.

Could the ideological approach to the USSR, which, one must assume, inspired the bulk of the Reagan administration, have warned it of the dangers of an alliance with the party of Russian counter-reform⁰ It could not The people who believe m this approach don't even suspect the existence of the struggle Russia vs. Russia, reform vs. countei-reform that constitutes the essence of Russian history. Could the administration's opponents have warned it ot its mistake, given that their geopolitical approach ignores this struggle ust as much as its ideologically oriented counterpart does'¹ Clearly, they could not.

In truth, without an alternative, historical approach toward Russia, the West is simply not in a position to evaluate the intellectual and political complexity of the problem that confronts it in the second half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the complexity of the problem cannot be fully grasped without coming to grips with the nature of the Russian New Right and its role in Russian history. It is for these reasons that the mid-1980s call for a new book about Russian nationalism. With each year that passes, Russia's new historical decline is becoming more obvious The path that she chooses to escape this decline as the year 2000 approaches, will affect the fate of the world

Notes

Quoted in Robert Scheei, With Enough Shovels, Random House, 1982, p. 5.

Imperial nationalism significantly differs from what is commonly understood as 'nationalism' in the social sciences It expresses the interests not of small oppressed nations struggling for liberation from the imperial yoke (such as contemporary Poland), but of the dominant 'imperial' nation — in other 4\ords. not the object, but the subject of oppression. The late Andrei Amal'iik described this difference ,n the following words 'The nationalism of small peoples is understandable as a means of self defence for the people and their culture, though e\en in these cases it sometimes takes on unattractive forms. But the nationalism of a great people is a means not of defence, hut of pressure applied both inwardly and outwardly.' (Zapiski dissidcuta).

Newsweek, 19 Nov. 1979, p 147,

U.S. News and World Report, 6 Sept. 1982, p. 35.

Quoted in Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels, p. 28

Atlantic Monthly, July 1983 p. 34.

Quoted from Veche No. 5, 1982, pp 10. 12.

Atlantic Monthly, op. cit., p. 34.

Over the course of a decade of reform (1953 — 64) the Sowet Union abandoned its military bases in Finland, Austria and China, relinquished its territorial claims on Turkey, significantly reduced the size of its armed forces, refused to take part in the strategic arms race, normalized diplomatic relations with Israel, Yugoslavia and Japan, and so forth. Not

a square inch of new territory under direct Moscow control has been added to the empire during the entire Khrushchev decade.

See Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy, Univ. of California Press, 1981.

Nikolai Berdiaev, Novoe Srednevekov'e [The New Middle Ages],Berlin: Obelisk, 1924.

In January of 1980, at the height of the panic and anticipation of disaster, one of my colleagues at Berkeley asked me whether the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion forces would last two or four weeks. I bet him a bottle of cognac that a year later, in January 1981, the resistance would still be con nuing, and in January of 1982 as well; that, in other words, the Soviet army would not only be bogged down in Afghanistan for some time to come, but also, w hout a radical change of regimes in Moscow, would be unable to make any move toward the Persian Gulf oil-fields. Needless to say, I won my cognac.

U.S. News and World Report, 18 February, 1985, p. 44.

Ibid., p. 47.

The methodology of this approach is complex and I certainly don't want to burden the reader with its theoret :al intr.ca. 'es. There s a table in the Appendix which lists all Russia's major reform attempts as well as all counter-reforms, and another which illustrates the structure of her historical cycles, i.e., periods separating one counter-reform from the other. Let me say only that this approach distinguishes between Russia's political system (which I call autocracy and which is centuries old), its subsystems (the Muscovite subsystem lasting from 1564 to 1700; the Petersburg one — from 1700 to February 1917; and the Soviet — from October 1917 until whenever), and its political regimes. The number of regimes in each cycle vaiies. In the most developed cycles, as can be seen from Figure 2 this number reaches six. But the three ma'n types of regimes — reform, counter-reform, and stagnat'on — are more or less clearly visible in each cycle. Each of these regimes has a different function and these functions, in turn, are quite independent of the intentions of their leaders. The function of a counter-reforn st regime is to perpetuate the system, that of a reformist one ? to disintegrate it, while a regime of stagnation aims to restore the system's equilibrium after it has been shaken by both extremes in turn. Thus, functionally speaking, each regime is antagonistic to its predecessor, i.e., bent on the destruction of its political legacy. This is clearly reflected in the priorities of each regime. While a regime, like Stalin's (counter-reform), distinctly prefers guns to butter, and a regime, like Khrushchev's (reform), just as distinctly prefers butter to guns, a regime, like Brezhnev's (political stagnation) tries to combine both. The de-Stalinization following Stalin, the de-Khrushchevization after Khrushchev, and the de-Brezhnevization after Brezhnev support this argument. If one looks further back into Russian political history, however, one would find a comparable 'de- Petrinization' or 'de-Katherinization' in the Petersburg subsystem as well as a 'de-Ivanization' in the Muscovite one. In other words, the major patterns of political change hold their own despite all the tremendous ideological and social upheavals of Russian history both before and after 1917.

M. Pogodin, Sochinenna, v. 4, pp. 7 10

Here are some of the pieces (those 1 know) m which The Russian New Right was discussed: 'The Left Right Stephen Cohen New York Times Magazine, 7/1/79; 'The Roots of Reaction', Leonard Schapiro, ' imes Literary Supplement, 10/11/78; The Russian New Right', Abraham Brumberg, the New Republic, 5/5/79; 'Russia's New Fascists', Peter Dreyer, Spectator, 9/9/78; 'The Russian New Right', John Campbell Fort igM Affairs, Fall 1978; 'L'Audience de Solzhenitsyn en Occident et щп USSR , Olga Carlisle, Le Monde Diplomatique, 2/9/78, 'La Nuova Destra Luciano Tas, Occidente, No. 6, 1978; 'The End of Marxism-Leninism: Anti-Semitism Institutionalized Reuben Ainzstein, New Statesman, 15/12/78; 'La Renaissance du Nationalisme Russe'. Abraham Brumberg, Le Maun, 14/2/79; 'Khomeini ante portas?' Helen von Sacnno, Siiddeutsche Zeuung, 3/3/79: 'The Russian New Right', S. Enders Wimbush The Russian Review, January 1980; 'Los Ultras Estan Conquistando El Poder En La USSR', Ignacio Carrion, ABC (Madrid), 21/3/80. L'orso russi guardera a destra L.ia Wainstam, La Stampa, 17/7/81; 'The Russian New Right' Victor Zaslavskv, Iheory and Society, v. 6, 1978: 'La cultura dell' isolazionismo in USSR Juliano Torlontano, La Voce Republicana, 4/9/81, 'Bulldoggarna slass under mattam Kremlin'. Disa Hastad. Dagen Nyheter, 9/6/82; 'Quando la Santa Russia inspira i dissidente' Rita di Leo, La Republica, 12/1/79; 'The Coalnion of Fear' Peter Dreyer, San Francisco Review of Buuks, vol. 4, No. 3, September 1978; 'Anli-Semitism, the New Soviet Religion', Reuben Ainzstein, Jerusulem Post, 28/12/78; 'The Russian New Right Jonathan Harris, American Political Science Review, vol. 73, 1979; 'The Linchpin is Anti-Semitism' Irving Louis Horowitz, Present Tense, Fall 1979; Russian New Right May Play Role', Ernest Conine, Herald Tribune, 1/9/82.

Quoted from Veche. No. 1, 1981, pp. 197, 196.

Lars-Erik Nelson 'Radio Liberty: Tax-Paid Anti-Semitism', Daily News,

January 1985.

'International Bloopers', Los Angeles Times, 28 January 1985

'Taking Radio Liberties', The New Republic, 4 February 1985

Dimitn Simes, The Destruction of Liberty', Christian Science Monitor 13 February 1985.

Ibid

The Historical Drama of the Russian Idea and - - America's Soviet debate

2

The Russian Idea: Between Two Hatreds

The Russian Idea, as I refer to the theoretical nucleus of the Russian New Right's ideology emerged at approximately the same time as Marxism, the theoretical nucleus of Bolshevik deology, in the years 1830 — 50. But it had no equivalent of Karl Marx. It was founded by a group of Moscow intellectuals, К Aksakov, A. Khomiakov, I. Kireevskii, Yu. Samarin, A. Koshelev, P. Kireevskii and others, whose opponents dubbed them Slavophiles (which, incidentally, they с d not object to being called). The philosophical, historiographical and religious aspects of Slavophilism were rather well studied in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the West. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its political doctrine (partly because the Slavophiles despised politics, relegating it to a minor place in their writings). Still less well studied are the complex metamorphoses which this doctrine underwent in the years 1860 — 80, and very little is known about its further trans­formation in the years 1 890-1910. Nothing at all'has been written on the connection of Slavophile political doctrine with the unexpected, unforeseen and wholly unexplained reappearance of the Russian Idea in Communist Russia during the 1960s.

Unlike Marxism, which has whole libraries devoted to it, the Russian Idea's political doctrine remains a relatively unilluminated subject even as far as its initial, Slavophile catechism is concerned. Its historical development from the 1830s to the 1980s has never been traced by anyone before. Perhaps this is why the addresses of its most famous contemporary spokesman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, so shook America and Western Europe between 1975 and 1978. They seemed like a fresh wind from the East, something completely unheard of, the anguished cry of the Russian soul oppressed by Communism.

Hardly anyone suspected that Solzhenitsyn was merely repeating, often word for word, the 150-year-old postulates and formulas of the

Russian Idea. Significantly, Solzhenitsyn himself did not make any particular effort to direct the attention of his listeners and readers to the source of his inspiration. For some reason he did not wish to disclose his political genealogy to the world. Nor have any of his numerous biographers done this for him The origins of his views therefore remain mysterious, at least for the general reader, and probably not for him or her alone.

Genesis

The Russian Idea emerged in the early nineteenth century, out of the noble aspiration to liberate Russia from 'soul-destroying despotism and a 'police state,'¹ and Europe from 'parliamentarism, anarchism, unbelief and dynanmc'.²

Out of the very dual character of this messianu task emerged the primordial duality of the Russian Idea's philosophical doctrine. If it's true that the problem of the devil (or, if you like, the antagonist) .s a kind of theodicy for any ideological construct, the justification of its god.³ then the Russian Idea's duality, its own peculiar trap, was that it had two devils. It was condemned to toss and turn between two hatreds, since the evil from which Russia was to be saved was completely unnke the one from which it ntended to save Europe. Russia was to be saved from too little freedom and Europe from too much of thereof.

First let s turn to the second of these devils. 'Look at the West', wrote Ivan Aksakov, 'The peoples [there] have become carried away by vain motives, [they have] put their faith in the possib'litv of governmental perfection, made republics, bu'It constitutions — and impoverished their souls, they are ready to collapse at any moment.'⁴ Similarly, 'The messianic significance of Russia with respect to the West is beyond doubt . . . Slavophilism alone can yet save the West from parliamentarism, anarchism, unbelief and dynamite.'⁵ Today [1974] Western democracy is in a state of political crisis and spiritual confusion . crawling on its hands and knees, its will paralyzed, in the dark about the future, spiritually racked and dejected . . . powerless before a pack of snotty terrorists. ⁶ This is happening because the West 'hasn't realized that freedom is rooted in religious depth in religion, and not m political institutions'.⁷ 'In our country', Aksakov complained, 'they often clamour for guarantees and see these precisely in the western European legal order. But if the latter serves as the foundation of the guarantee, then what is it that guarantees ihe legal order itself, in other words: what guarantees the guarantee? ⁸ Europe naively believes in the capacity of good constitutions to protect it from catastrophe, believes in po tical variety, in pluralism.

Dcmagoguery about pluralism grows from a political understanding of freedom. We in Russia evaluate freedom above all as a deeply spiritual phenomenon. A person must be free internally in order to become free politically. And this again comes out of the teachings of the gospele: Know the truth and the truth shall set you free.' Thus, if we find freedom in our own souls, I assure you, society will be free politically as well. If we begin with political freedom, we shall unfailingly arrive at spiritual slavery. And that is what is taking place in the West at every step.⁹

Four generations of adherents of the Russian Idea have passed before us from 1850 to the 1970s. All of them have identified the evil that is leading the West to catastrophe in the same way: as the supplanting of the religious by the political, the fatal confusion of 'external' (political) freedom with 'internal' (spiritual) liberty and the resulting faith in parliaments, constitutions and republics. This is the devil from which the Russian Idea intended — and still intends — to save the West. In short, parliamentarism was the Russian Idei s 'European' hatred.

The devil which confronted it at home, its principal Russiar hatred, looked completely different. 'Where does the internal depravity, corruption, robbery and falsehood that overflows Russia emanate from?'¹⁰ asked Konstantin Aksakov, the most remarkable spokesman of nineteenth-century Slavophilism. Why does 'Russia's contemporary condition present a picture of internal depravity, concealed by shame­less falsehood . . . why does everyone He to each other, see it, and continue to lie, and who knows what it will lead to?'¹¹ Why, on top of this 'internal discord', has a 'shameless toadyism grown up, which seeks to assure everyone we are living in universal prosperity'?¹² Because, Aksakov answers with courage worthy of Solzhenitsyn, 'th government has interfered in the moral life of the people . . . [it has] thereby passed over into soul-destroying despotism, oppressing the spiritual world and human dignity of the people and, finally, signifying the breakdown of moral fibre in Russia - and public corruption. That is why, he says, 'the government, despite all the lack of limitations on its power, cannot achieve truth and honesty ... the univeisal corruption and weakening of the moral foundations of our society has reached enormous proportions ... it has already turned from a private sin into a public one and has come to represent the entire social structure's immorality. ¹⁴

Thus 'soul-destroying despotism' (or totalitarianism, |udging from how Aksakov describes it) threatens Russia with catastrophe. " he longer the Petrine governmental system goes on,' Aksakov warns, making out of the subject a slave, the longer principles alien to Russia will continue to enter into her . . the more threatening will be the menace of revolutionary attempts finally shatter.ng Russia, when she ceases to be Russia ¹⁵

This letter of Aksakov's to the tsar differs, of course, from Solzhenitsyn's letter to the leaders of the Soviet Union. Naturally. Solzhenitsyn did not describe Russian despou'sm as 'the Petrine governmental system' nor did he refer to 'soul-destroying despotism' but rather a 'black whirlwind from the West' and .deology . The chronology does not correspond either. Aksakov says, for example, that 'the people wish . the state not to interfere in the independent life of their spirit, in which [the state] has interfered and which the government has oppressed for 150 years,'¹⁶ while Solzhenitsyn says sixty-seven years'. Given that Aksakov wrote his letter ) 20 years before Solzhenitsyn and that in his opinion soul-destroying despotism existed in Russia at least 150 years before that, he could not have described despotism as having been carried n by that same olack whirlwind' from the West. Aksakov, however, would not have objected to Solzhenitsyn's 'black whirlwind in pnnciple. Like Solzhennsyn, he too was sincerely convinced of the Western origins of Russian evil and was also a prophet of the Russian Idea. The only difference is that, according to his calculations, the whirlwind struck Russia somewhere around 1700.

However, all that is detail What is important s that n both letters despotism (tsarist in one case, Communist n the other) is leading Russia to disaster, and that in both nstances the Russian Idea, as expressed by its leading proponents, promises to save the country from this awful fate.

Could it be that Solzhenitsyn is silent today about his spiritual forebears because the Russian Idea failed to fulfil the solemn promise it gave its people and the world a century and a half ago?

The test of history

Horace White once observed that the Constitution of the United States 'is based upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvni. It assumes that the natural state of mankind is a state of war, and that the carnal mind is at enmity wich God.'¹⁷ Whether that is good or bad is beside the point It cannot be denied, however, that on the basis of this religious-philosophical attitude was founded a qu'te practical political doctrine (parliamentarism) which managed to survive all the great crises of the twentieth century — political, n li :ary and economic — and consequently escaped the calamity foretold for it by the Slavophiles one and a half centuries ago. The men who drew up the Constitution in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 . . . did not believe in man,' Richard Hofstadter notes, 'but they did believe in the power of a good political constitution to control him.'¹⁸ They didr t expect from us a spiritual rebirth or moral revolution — in a word, a miraculous transformation into paragons of virtue. 'It was too much to expect that vice could be checked by virtue; the Fathers [of the Constitution] relied instead upon check ng i\ ice with vice.'¹⁹

The American Constitution would not have come into existence f they had for a moment assumed that spiritual freedom must precede a political one. Even discussion of this topic, which has already absorbed advocates of the Russian Idea for centuries, would have seemed to them a pointless waste of time. Not a single democracy would exist in the world today — and consequently the present-day proponents of the Russian Idea would have nowhere to take refuge from the despotism of their native land — if Western leaders had once upon a time followed the advice of Slavophile spiritual forebears and considered parliamentarism a global ev ,1.

I would not presume to set myself up as a judge m the dispute between the philosophies of Calvin and Hobbes on the one hand and of the fathers of the Russian Orthodox church on the other. Perhaps the latter were incomparably more pious and 'spiritual' than the former. However, the followers of Calvin and Hobbes kept their promise to provide their countries with freedom whi'e the followers of the fathers of the Russian Orthodox church failed to keep theirs. The idea of neutralizing vice with vice has turned out to be the more practical politically, whereas the idea of a renaissance of virtue neutralizing vice has turned out to be a fruitless dream capable only of

perpetuat: ig despotism.

With all due respect for the spiritual quest of the Russian Ide, s founding fathers, it must be pointed out that the^; г primordial contempt for politics and hatred of parliamentarism punished them with political bankruptcy. It is precisely parliamentarism, the th'ng from which they intended to save Europe, that in reality did save Europe. It has proved to be the single method known to man for preventing despotism. The Russian Idea, as history has shown, was not an alternative to parliamentarism it was merely an impractical and, as we shall see later, dangerous Utopia

For the moment»let us imagine two neighbours, each of whom has managed his business according to n different prnc'ple: the one, parliamentarism, the other, the Russian Idea. The first, for better or worse, has survived the crises that have shaken his enterprise and moved forward, while the other has gone broke. What 1 ight, one might ask- do the bankrupt's heirs have to denounce their neighbour's business as 'decaying', 'ready to collapse at any nnnute' and 'spiritual slavery'?

Of course, they may object — as they often do — that today Russia would be the focal point of world civilization f it hadn t been conquered by Western communism in 1917, if Orthodoxy had been given the chance to travel the course God had charted for it, and if the proponents ot the Russian Idea had not had their hands tied. In fact, their political forebears had from the 1830s to the turn of the century and beyond, when Russia was the leader of world ant^;-communism. Orthodoxy was Its state religion and when, consequently, their hands were not tied, to try out their historical experiment and indeed attempted to do so How did it end? In such a way that today then heirs are forced to mimic the same unworkable formulas, bankrupt rallying cries and tailed prognoses.

We shall return to these issues later. First, let us summarize the fundamentals of Slavophilism s initial catechism, developed by the founding fathers of the Russian Idea and today repeated by their heirs.

Ruuie's mission

The Russian Idea proceeded, as we already know, from the belief that the contemporary world was suffering from a global spiiitual crisis 'carrying humankind headlong toward catastrophe'²⁰ (in the words of a present-day prophet). It pointed to the inability of the secularized, materialistic and cosmopolitan West to come to gups with this cnsis, whose historical source lay in the secular Enlightenment^- in the West's rejection of religion as the spiritual basis of politics and in its inahihty to realise that not the individual but the nation is the foundation of the world order conceived hy God; that 'humankind is quantified by nations'.²*

The Russian Idea pointed to the providential role of Orthodoxy, as uniquely capahle of pulling back the world from the brink of the abyss, and to Russia as the instrument oF this great mission. While the Russian Idea rejected the "government's interference in the moral life of the people' (the police state), it also denounced the 'people's interference in state power' (democracy). To both of these it opposed the 'principle of AUTHORITARIAN powers The state» it taught, must be unlimited because 'only under unlimited monarchical power ^an the people separate the government front themselves and free chemselves to concentrate on moral-social liFe [hYuVstveHnd-obskck&sit* vennaia zhizn], on the drive for spiritual freedom.

The Russian Idea did not acknowledge Ihe central postulate of Western political thought concerning the separation of powers (as the institutional embodiment of the neutralization of vice by vice). Instead, it advocated the principle of sepamtion of functions between temporal and spiritual powtrs: the state guards the country against external foes and the Orthodox church settles the nation's internal conflicts. In place of Hobbes's misanthropic philosophy it offered a naive, but pure, faith in relations of love and goodness throughout the whole hierarchy of human collectives which make up society — the family, the peasant commune (ob$kchina)> the monastery, the church ahd the nation. It cherished the ideal of the nation cum family, requiting neither parliaments, political parties, nor separation of powers. Like the family, the nation would have no need of legal guarantees or institutional limitations on state's power and its focus should not be the rights, but rather the obligations of its members. The nation's conflicts, according to the Russian Idea, must be reconciled by spiritual, rather than constitutional, authority.

The ideal of the nation as family presupposed the need fnr salvation from the sinful influences of the 'street' (tne West) and, consequently, for a spiritual rebirth and a moral revolution, in the course of this Russia would return 'home' to its pure rural roots, to the tsarist (pre-Petersburg in the old version; pre-Communist in the new), a land supposedly free from despotism, police terror, and official state lies.

Slavophilism

Such was the basis of the Russian Idea, which took many by surprise when it was resurrected, completely unaltered, in Communist Russia, more than a century after its birth. Whatever one may think of it, the nobility of its scheme and the purity of its intentions cannot be denied Essentially, Slavophilism was an opposition movement.

Although its first advocates were themselves nationalists, they hated official nationalism, the ideology of Nicholas I's dictatorship ' hev passionately opposed human oppression m all its forms, whether serfdom, censorship or official lies. They called upon people not to live by lies. Moreover, although they claimed Russia's spiritual, cultural and potential political superiority over the West, this superiority was not to be used to harm the West The Slavophiles wished merely to open the West's eyes to the ultimate truth, and in a spirit of generosity со extend a helping hand.

It is true that Slavophilism was a 'retrospective Utopia as Petr Chaadaev called it. It was also both reactionary and reactive, that is, it was at one and the same time a Romantic reaction to the bankruptcy ol eighteenth-century European Rationalism and a political reaction to the new decline of the Russian empire begun in 1830 — 50. In the event, it was incapable of fulfilling any of its solemn promises, either to save Russia from the calamity that was ndeed approaching (which, it must not be forgotten, Slavophilism was the first to sense and reflect in its impassioned writings), or — fortunately — to save Europe from parliamentarism. But, in all fatness, it should not be forgotten that the starting point of the Slavophiles political quest was freedom, even if only spintual and not political.

However, its catechism was alarmingly simple: despotism and parliamentarism at the negative pole, the pr nciple of authoritarian power' — unlimited power which somehow provides spiritual freedom — at the positive one; rationalism at the negative pole, faith at the positive; individualism negative, collectivism positive; and, linally, cosmopolitanism negative, nationalism positive. When, at the start of che nineteenth century, the formula Freedom = Rationalism + Indi­vidualism + Cosmopolitanism appeared bankrupt, proponents of the Russian Idea reshuffled it to obtain a new one: Freedom = Religious faith + Collectivism + Nationalism.

The liberal opposition

The contemporaries of the early Slavophiles, whether liberal western- l/.ers such as Alexander Ilerzen or populists (narodnixi) ike Nikolai Chernyshevskn, well understood the reactionary nature of Slavophil­ism, but none the less valued the duve for freedom that powered it (much as Western academic fellow-travellers of today's ant -communist Russian Idea understand and value Solzhem'syn and his comrades- in-arms). Herzen wrote: 'We saw in their teachings a new oil for anointing tsarism, a new chain laid on thought, a new subordination of the conscience to the servile Byzantine church.'²⁴ At the same time he admitted, 'Yes, we were their opponents, but very strange ones: we shared one love with them, but not an identical one . . . "ike Janus or the two-headed eagle, we were looking in deferent directions while our hearts were beating as one.'²⁵ Chernyshevskii, albeit more prosaically, confirmed this view: 'It's too little to say n istification of Slavophilism that its effect is [only] either relative or negative. There are unquestionably some good sides to it as well ... As far as its aspirations are concerned, one has to do full justice to them.'²⁶

By contrast there is nothing sympathelic in ihe attitude of contemporary liberal Moscow thinkers toward the present-day anti- communist Russian Idea. Andrei Sakharov,²⁷ Leonid I nskii,²⁸ Grigorii Pomerants,²⁹ Andrei Siniavsky,³⁰ Valerii Chalidze,³¹ Boris Shragin³² and Andreii Amal'rik, have all regarded the regenerated Russian Idea with suspicion, if not outright hostility. None of them would say, as Herzen did, that he and the Russophiles (as the new proponents of the Russian Idea are known) together shared 'one love' or that their hearts 'beat as one' with them. Yet they would immediately denounce the Russophiles' ideas as 'a new chain laid on thought' and protest against 'a new subordination of the conscience to the servile Byzantine church'. Why? What has brought about such a change in atl'tude?

None of those named have the slightest sympathy for Communism. On the contrary, they are all opponents of the reg me and many of them made their names in the dissident struggle. It would be tempting to explain their hostility to the regenerated Russian Idea by arguing that the Soviet liberal-intelligentsia is more intolerant than its pre- revolutionary counterpart. However, if we compare what some of the best Russian liberal thinkers of the 1880s and 1890s had to say, such as S. Trubetskoi, M. Stasiulevich, A. Gradovskii, P. Mi ukov or V. Solov'ev, surprisingly we would have to conclude that Russia's present-day liberals are far more tolerant toward the Russophiles than their pre-revolutionary forebears were.

So what was it that critics of the Russian Idea с scovered in the 1880s and again in the 1980s which people of Chernyshevskii's and Herzen's generation could not know and which its Western fellow- travellers do not understand to this day? Why were they willing to raise their swords against it so quickly and without hesitation? What happened to the noble retrospective Utopia after Konstantin Aksakov We will never manage to grasp this unless we return to the Russian Idea's genesis and the process of its ideological development.

Notes

Ivan Aksakov in Teoria gosudarstva и slavianofilov [The Theory of the State in SlavophilismГ St. Petersburg: 1898, pp. 32, 180.

Quoted from Vestntk Evropy, 1894, No. 8, p. 510.

See Alexander Yanov, 'Rahochaia tema', Novyi mil, 1971, No. 3, p 247.

Teoria . . , p. 31.

Vestnik Evropy, 1894, No. 8, p. 510.

lz-pod glyb, Paris: YMCA Press, 1974. [English translation From Under the Rubble. Boston: Little Brown, 1975J, pp. 21, 25

B. Paramonov, Paradoksv i kompleksy Aleksandra Yanova', Kontinent, No 20. 1980. p 241.

Ivan S. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochmenii, Moscow, 188t>, v. II, pp 510-11.

V. Maksimov, 'Svoboda dukhovnaia dolzhna predshestvovat s\obodt pohticheskoi' [Spiritual Freedom Must Precedc Political Freedom], Novoe russkne slnvo, 18 June 1978.

Teoria . . p, 49

Ibid., pp. 38-9.

Ibid

Ibid., pp. 32-3.

Ibid , p. 39.

Ibid , pp. 37-8

Ibid , p 41.

Richard Holstadter, The American Political Tradition, Vintage Books, 1948, p. 3.

Ibid

Ibid,, p. 7.

Iz-pod glvb p. 78.

Ibid., p. 19.

Ibid,, p 23, Emphasis in capital letters is in original.

Teoria . . . , p. 57.

Alexander Herzen, Byloe i dumy [,Wy Past and Thoughts], Leningrad, 1947. p. 284.

Ibid., p. 304.

N. G. Chernvshevskii, Pol noe sobranie sochitienii v. Ill, Moscow, 1947, pp. 85 — 6. Other opponents of the Slavophiles in this generation spoke of them in a similar vein (see, for example, Nikolai Ogarev, Izbrannye sotsml'no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedenia, Moscow, 1952, v. 1, p. 409: Vissarion Belinskii Polnoe sobranie sochmenii, Moscow: 1953. v X. pp. 17-18).

See, for example, A. D, Sakharov, О pis'me Solzhenitsyna vozhdiam SSSR [On Solzhenitsyn's Letter to the Leaders of the USSR], New York: 1974.

See N, Lepin, 'Parafrazy i painyatovaniia', Sintaksis. No. 7, 1980.

See, for example, Gngorii Pomerants, 'Son о spravedlivom vozme/.dii', Sintaksis, No. 6, 1980

See, for example, 'Solzhenitsyn and Russian Nationalism', New York Review of Books, 22 Nov. 1979.

See, for example, 'Khomeynizm ili natsional-kommunizm?' [Khomeiniism or National Communism?'], Novoe russkoe slovo, 27 Oct. 1979.

See The Challenge of the Spirit, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1978.

The Russian Idea: Genes s and Degeneration

The Russian Idea arose at the height of Nicholas 1 s dictatorship (a regime of counter-reform in my terminology). Of course, political terror was, as always, one of the means this regime used to assert itself. Another, no less important means — perhaps even more important — was its ideology It was the very deology of counter- reform that not only disarmed but even, for a time, attracted to its side almost the whole of Russia's intellectual elite. The Slavoph les were by no means behaving like radical heretics when they called Nicholas dictatorship despotism. The dictator himself took pride in this. es he said with disarming frankness, 'despotism still exists in Russia, for it comprises the essence of my rule, but t is 111 agreement with the nation's gemus.'¹

It was this notion of despotism 'agreeing with the nation's genius that was at the heart of the ideology of official nationality' wh.'ch ruled Russia for a quarter of a century. It was, n essence, a kind of powerful secular religion thrust upon a society that had been frozen up after the desperate attempt at reform in 1825 had come to grief It amounted to a deification of the state to the point of political idolatry. The very best Russian minds of that lime — Pushkin. Tiutchev, Belinskii Gogol', Viazemskii, Zhukovski. and Nadezhdin — proved unable to resist its temptation This was the time when Pushkin's "To Russia s Slanderers' and Stanzas' were published and Gogol's intensely nationalistic 'Selected Passages from Correspondences with Friends This was when Belniskii wrote, in the tsar is our freedom because from him comes our new civilization, our enlightenment, just as from him comes our life . . . unconditional obedience to tsarist authority is not |ust useful and necessary, but also the supreme poetry of our lite, it is our national trait |narodnost']'² and Nadezhdin — most declamatory of all — expressed the general mood: 'In our country there is one eternal unchanging force of nature: the tsar! One source tor all national ^bfe: sacred love of the tsar! Our history has up to now been like a great poem in which there is one hero, one character. That's the distinctive original characteris с of our past. It shows us our great future predestination as well.'³ Very obviously, an ideology of political idolatry (a cult of personality, in modern terms) was a real, and for some time crucial, fact of Russian cultural Lie.⁴

The first commandment of this relig m ran: the state s the intellect of the nation, its spiritual pastor, its consciousness. The state is all- knowing, all-seeing, all-loving and all-powerful. A Russian's principal civic virtue was his or her faith in the infallibility of the state. This pagan-like deification of authority was unprecedentedly dangerous for Russian culture because it threatened to bring with it intellectual degradation.

The mechanism of official nationalism was craftily constructed. The trio of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality artfully interwove despotism with religion, reaction with patriotism, and serfdom w th sense of nationality. In rising up against despot'sm, one r.sked striking a blow against patriotism, and in rising up against reaction, one risked challenging religion. It was a resourceful construct, an ideological trap of enormous potency. Only by basing one's argument on its particular groundwork was it possible to tear 'the nat щ з genius' away from despotism, patriotism away from serfdom, and Orthodoxy from political dolairy.

Slavophilism fulfilled just this function in Russian political history. On the basis of defending Russian Orthodoxy, it attacked the official religion as heresy. From the position of defending unlimited power, it attacked the deification of the state as blasphemy. From the position of an offended sense of patriotism it attacked 'official na onality' as a perversion. In short, it fought for the secularization of power. It fearlessly declared that 'a yoke of state has arisen over the Russian land and it has become as though conquered, and the state as though conqueror. The Russian monarch has obtained the status of a despot and his freeiy subject people that of imprisoned slaves.'⁵ If Marx was correct in asserting that 'criticism of religion s the prerequisite for all other criticism',⁶ then this was the way in which Slavophil sm fulfilled its historical mission. Its service to Russian culture must not be forgotten.

Paradoxically, however, it is from just this point that the drama of the Russian Idea begins. As long as it was lighting against the pagan­like deification of the state, it remained relevant and useful. When political-idol worship collapsed along with the rei me of counter- reform in 1855, the progressive historical function of the Russian Idea was exhausted. From what it had once been only the idea of a retrospective Utopia remained.

The proponents of the Russian Idea did not know that one of the fundamental patterns of political change in Russia is that no Russian despot has ever been able to make a regime of counter-reform outlive him. After Nicholas I another despot was impossible (just as after Stalin). After each of these despots an era of reform and political crisis had to ensue. This constitutes the second of the patterns of Russian political change, of which the proponents of the Russian Idea were also unaware, which was eventually to prove fatal to them.

A choice of evils

Slavophilism, having superbly mastered the tactics of 'deological combat in the era of dictatorship, proved to be completely unready for the reality of political combat in the epoch of reform. I ike all Utopians, the Slavophiles knew quite precisely what they sought to do away with but only very vaguely what they wished to set up in its place Their hatred was utterly concrete, while their love was woolly and abstract. Was it possible to have such a th.ng as a State of the Land (zemskoe gosudarstvo), that is, an unlimited power that didn't interfere in the affairs of the 'land' [society], which, accord.ng to their scheme, was supposed to take the place of despotism? Post-dictatonal Russia, a Russia ot reform, had no interest in this question. Instead, it split into two major irreconcilable camps liberals and conservatives. The liberals aimed at following up the social reforms of the 1860s with a constitution — in other words the parliamentarism that the Slavophiles despised. The conservatives on the other hand, fought for the preservation of autocracy, increasingly striving for the restoration of the Slavophiles' no-less hated 'soul-destroving despotism' As for the Utopian principle of authoritarianism', which comprised the nucleus of the Russian Idea's political doctrine, its only proponents were the Slavophiles themselves.

The political crisis that ensued demanded from this magnanimous, naive, and anti-political ideological movement a tough choice: whom to support arid whom to oppose. The reality of the crisis did not permit them to toss and turn between two hatreds. Slavophilism made its decision 'Now the situation is such that there is no middle ground — eilher side with the nihi'ists and the liberals or with the conservatives, As sad as it is, we have to go with the latter.'⁷ Such was the choice of Ivan Aksakov, the younger brother of Konstantin, who headed Slavophilism after its founding fathers (K, Aksakov, I. Kireevskii, and A. Khomiakov) had passed on. To a survivor of old Slavophilism and pieserver of .ts early dogmas, taking sides with despotism was s 11 a sad thing. Only with difficulty did Aksakov tear the ideal of a 'State of the Land' from his heart, but he was still laying tactical plans: first, to beat off parliamentarism, working alongside those who wished to restore despotism, and then. . . . But there wasn't to be any then. If the regime didn't want a 'State of the Land' when it was weak, then even discussion of such a thing would be out of the question when it became stronger. After making a temporary concession to devil number one in its alliance with despotism, while retaining a State of the Land as ts distant dream, Slavophilism emerged from this union with completely new ideas about the world.

Twin nationalisms

The Russian Idea's degeneration, which began wah this fatal choice, is stril ngly reminiscent of an analogous process that was taking place at the same time in another idcoloj cal movement. It too was a Romantic reaction against the bankruptcy of eighteenth-century Rationalist doctrines and might, analogous to Slavoph lism, be called Teutonophilism. At its source, animated by the purest of visions of national regeneration, were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, w rh his fiery Speeches to the German nation', and the resurrector of German folklore, Jakob Grimm. They were the respective counterparts of Russia's Konstantin Aksakov and P. Kireevskii. Schleiermacher, with his 'Speeches about religion', and Novalis, with his 'Fragments about Christianity', were comparable to I. Kireevskii and A. Khomiakov. In the same way as the Slavophiles viewed Oleg's campaigns agpinst Constantinople, their German colleagues revered Armir us's battles with the Romans and the triumphs of the medieval Teutons orders. In deifying their nation, in what Vladimir Solov'ev later called 'idolatry of the folk', the two movements resembled each other 1 :e tv n brothers Moreover, as with Slavophiles, the inndious embraces of pan-Germanism lay in store for the Teutonophues. Ultimately, it was to be a similarly tragic metamorphosis, later expressed in the form of fascist messianism, that awaited them too.

In the 1880s the proponents of degenerated Teutonophilism exported anti-semitism to Russia. As one German historian noted, 'the idea of anti-semitism has revealed the full measure of its venomousness only in Russia . . . Berlin's anti-semitic leaders provided the Russian hooligans with the [ideological] ammunition they needed Stoecker and Ahlwardt became the true fathers of Russia s pogroms Mean­while, the Teutonphiles congratulated themselves that, 'with a weapon from our ideological arsenal the Russian folk can now free itself from its mortal enemy'.

In the 1920s the proponents of degenerated Slavophilism were to repay this debt with interest to their German counterparts by exporting to Germany the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the idea of Bolshevism s identity with World Jewry.

In the 1830s the classical authors of Slavophilism were engrossed in reading Hegel and Schelling. In the 1880s their degenerate intellectual progeny were to do the same with Theodore Frnsch and Hermann Goedsche. the great grandparents of German anti-semiiism. If, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Slavophilism and Teutonophilism resembled one another but travelled separate paths, then one might say that during the second half their degenerate intellectual offsprings were reunited Fifty years further on, this collaboration had managed to bring the world to the br nk of the very catastrophe from which the founding fathers of Slavophilism had originally intended to save it

Metamorphosis

To the defenders of the restoration of despotism, into whose camp Slavophilism crossed over in the 1870s, ne ther its freedom formula nor its call to save Europe from parliamentarism were of any 'aterest In the immediate political crisis at hand, something completely different was demanded of Slavophilism s second generation: a rationale for unlimited power — irrespective of whether that power interfered in the 'moral life of the people' — and a pisi'fication for imperial expansion. The Slavophiles of the second generation willingly responded to the autocracy's political needs and tailored their doctrine to fit the required conditions.

Their main ideologue was Nikolai Danilevsk\ who, in the words of his younger contemporary Konstantin I.eont'ev, 'explained the essence of the Slavophiles' teachings better and more clearly than the fathers of these teachings themselves'.⁸ This essence, according to Danilevskii, consisted in the view that Russia could only fulfil her b stoucal mission after transforming herself into a giant superpower Moreover, the sense and content of all of Russian history, in his view, had been leading Russia to nothing less than repossession of Constantinople. 'The goal of the Russian people's strivings since the very dawn of the * statehood, the ideal of enlightenment, glory, luxuriance and grandeur for our ancestors, the centre of Orthodoxy — what a historic mean lg Constaninople would have for us, torn from the hands of the Turks i spite of all Europe!'⁹ Fedor 4 lutchev expressed this second generation Slavophile ideal in splendid verse:¹⁰

When Byzantium is restored to us The ancient vaults of Saint Sophia Will shelter the altar of Chiist anew. Kneel then before it, О Tsar of Russia — You will ar >e all Slavdom's Tsar!

Indeed, having taken Constantinople, Russia 'would be the restorer of the Eastern Roman Empire.'¹¹

Thus, the main requirement for Russia was not reform, let alone a constitution, but rather military power and, above all, to be stronger than Europe. Moreover, this was not someth:,\g so d fficult to achieve given that parliamentary Europe, or 'the dual-foundation Romano- Germanic historical type' as Danilevskii put it, was — through its parliamentarism — 'decaying'. This was a view the second generation Slavophiles clung to from the Russian Idea's original catechism, and its significance for Russian autocracy's imperial strategy proved priceless. Conviction in the 'spiritual decay' of the West lent a moral justification to such designs. In order to become stronger than 'rotting Europe', Russia also needed, according to Danilevsk , something else — monolithic internal order, that is, tsar and people un ed around state power for the sake of Russia's grand historical m ,;sion. The old 'freedom formula' was totally redundant to this purpose since 'for any Slav, after God and the holy Church, Slavdom must be the highest idea, higher than freedom, higher than education, higher than any earthly blessing.'¹² It was only one short step from this to the fundamental conclusion Konstantin Leont'ev reached a decade later: 'The Russian nation has expressly not been created for freedom.'¹³

This pronouncement was made in the 1880s, at a tune when a new counter-reform was trying to return the country to the dark days of Nikolaevian dictatorship. Undoubtedly, the ideas of the second generation of Slavophiles assisted the gradual slippage of the 1860s reform regime into one of political stagnai on in the 1870s. Ivan Aksakov was still alive at the time and distant recollections of the ancient 'freedom formula' still held sway among the heirs of the initial catechism. Danilevskii himself, as we shall see later, was a liberal imperialist': that is, he was ready to give his blessing to a liberalization of the domestic order as soon as Russia was isolated from pernicious Western influences and a great Slavic Federation had slammed the window on Europe' tightly shut Danilevski was essentially the first representative of chat strange amalgam of .solationism and expansion­ism which was to become the principal characteristic of the Russian Idea after his time.

The arrival of Alexander ill's new counter-reform in 1881 — after some timid reformist attempts at the start of the decade had been crushed — revealed how far the revision of the Russian Idea s initial catechism had progressed in the second Slavophile generation. Ivan Aksakov himself was suspected of seditious 1 beralism, while Konstantin Leont'ev declared of himself that he was a Slavophile strictly in the cultural sense', which, incidentally, was closer to true Slavophilism 'than semi-liberal Slavophiles of the immobile Aksakov cast'.¹⁴ It was at this time that Slavophiles pronounced that it was not with sadness that they had made their peace with despotism as the old patriarch Aksakov had said, but because they saw i* it the superior strength and wisdom of the nation The liDeral positions of the initial catechism were subsequently discarded as subversive and a hindrance to the autocracy from leading Russia toward its grand goal. Rather like a sad memorial to the Nikolaevian ideologv of 'official nationalism', the augmentation of state power was again proclaimed the nation's goal.

Now, however, this was not going to be advocated by state oftieia's or muddle-headed intellectuals whose dishonesty and official lies had been uncovered by founding fathers of the Russian Idea. This time, it would be preached by its own new prophets with new rallying calls.

Down with everything that undermines the state's power! Down with the intelligentsia (the 'smatterers', as Solzheniisyn was to call them a century later). 'The rotten West', — wrote Leont'ev, '— yes, rotten, it spatters and stinks from every quarter wherever our intelligentsia has been involved.'¹⁵

Down with mass education! 'Compulsory literacy will only bnng good fruits when the landowners, officials, and teachers are made into still much greater Slavophiles than they have become under the influence of nil rlism, the Polish mutiny, and European spite.'¹⁶

Down with Europe! The destruction of Western culture will instantly alleviate our cultural task [the resurrection of ByzantiumJ m Constantinople.'¹⁷

Long live the state which 'is obliged to be menacing, at times cruel and merciless, and must be severe sometimes to the point of savagery.'¹⁸ Long ve soc ilism, for 'socialism is the feudalism of the future . . . what ^s now extreme revolution will become conservation [okhraner e], a tool of strict coercion and discipline, partly even slavery.'¹⁹ 'What in the West signifies destruction, for the Slavs will be creative endeavour.'²⁰

Never before in Russia had slavery been preached by such august voices, so boldly and with such remarkable power of foresight. The syllog sm was complete and the trap snapped shut. The tsar and people merged in an apotheosis of the 'Slavic cultural-histo: ical type'. The Russian Idea, wh ;h only a generation ago had so passionately repuc ated po tics, had f'.ially acquired politics of its own — those of despotism and riperial expan; on.

A new crusade

However, the h siorical cycle of its ideolog :al evoluuon did not conclude there. Alas, a still more gloomy end lay n store for it. Danilevskii, himself history's revenge on Slavophil ;m for its roman c­ist utopianism, was to suffer retribution of 1 s own. Had he relied more on political reality and less on Slavophile dogma, he would have seen it coming. Contrary to this dogma, Europe was not in the least decaying. Furthermore, it had no use for the Russian Idea or Danilevskii's theory about the superiority of the 'Slavic cultural- historical type' over the 'Romano-Germanic' one. It had managed to arrive at its own racist conceptions w ihout SlavophJe help. According to the conclusions reached Ъу the Teutonophiles from their own anthropological inquiries, the Slavs were by no means God's chosen people (that is to say, the most advanced cultural-historical type) — quite the reverse. The Slavs, the Teutonophiles believed, suffered from a manifest lack of Aryan credentials. Thus, in the area of theory, Slavophilism had run into a brick wall.

In practice, would Europe really have surrendered Constantinople without a fight? Moreover, there was every reason to suppose that the prerequisite lor capturing Constani nople would have been the all-out conquest of Europe. On the evidence of the historical experience of Teutonophilism, we see that Anschluss, (the reunification of all Germans b> means of seizing all the terr ories which they inhab'ted) proved possible in practice only within the framework of the Nazis 'new order' in Europe. In other words, Europe truly did have to be conquered first to enable t to succced.

The Slavic Anschluss preached by Danilevskii offered much the same prospect. But such a perspective was hardly realistic for Russia in a period of her historical decline — even if all the wishes of the degenerate Russian Idea were fulfilled to the letter: even if the whole population was as one in its suport for the tsar and the objective of Anschluss, and the heretical intelligentsia were eliminated Even at a higher point of new historical ascendancy, in the era of Stalin s 1940s counter-reform regime, Russia was unable to realize fully Danilevskii's pan-slavic Utopia, Yugoslavia defected from the empire while Constantinople, the Utopia's central focus, proved unattainable. In the 1880s such plans were all the more naive. Thus, the third generation of Slavophiles proved incapable of fulfilling Danilevsk'i's dream, and the Russian Idea's new pan-Slavic catechism found intself in need of revision

In particular, the traditional dogma about 'rotting' Europe proved completely unrealisitic and it vanished from Slavophilism s third catechism Whereas for Danilevskii 'both France and Germany are, ^;n essence, [Russia's] ill-wishers and enemies',²¹ for third-generation Slavophiles there existed only a beautiful France and a sinister Germany, maliciously baring its wolf s fangs.

In order to comprehend the full implications of this revision, one must remember that precisely France, accordi> g to Leont'ev, was the 'worst of Europes', and Pans had to be destroyed along with Russia s annexation of Constantinople. To the second generation of Slavophiles, Paris was the world centre of 'liberal-egalitarian putrefaction'. Leont'ev had said- "our luck s that we are im Werden, rather than at the peak, like the Germans, and, moreover, we haven , started to decline, like the French."²² Daniievsk; had asserted- Russia is the head of the world that is advancing, France represents the world that is falling back.'²³ Nothing of this remained -in the Russian Idea's new, third, catechism. Though the first 4vh te general', Skobelev, with a general's directness, called for instill ng France with 'an awareness of the connection that exists today between the legitimate resurrection of Slavdom [read: the seizure of Constantinople] and the return to France of Metz and Strasbourg and perhaps the whole course of the Rhine',²⁴ the ideological leader of the new generation, the editor of the journal Russkoe Delo (Russian Affairs), Sergei Sharapov, revised Danilevskii's catechism more profoundly and "lterestmgly.

Accord-tig to him, it is simply the case that, 'The French have already outlived their Latino-Germanic civilization.' For them it is in the past Moreover, .nsofar as a ray is shining from the East, the heart is warmed, and this heart opens up trustingly', so that, 'in

France we will encounter no til will towards us.' But, 'Germany is another matter. A later chi d of the Latino-Germanic world, possessing no ideals except those it has borrowed from Jewry, [Germany] cannot but hate the new culture and new light of the world.'²⁵ The Russian Idea, the noble romantic Utopia which dreamed of a 'freedom formula' and of smashing despol 5m, proved to be flexible enough to adapt to che pragmatic calculations of imperial expansioi sm as well. A theoret ;al basis had been formed. The rest remained only a matter for pract ioners, who generally considered 'civ. an theories out of place here', s nee 'it's time to finish once and for all with all sentimental :y [read: Slavophile utopianism] and remember only our own interests.'²⁶ Coming from Skobeiev, such a tirade could mean only war: War with a capital 'W'; War as a crusade; War with Germany. 'The path to Constantinople', stated the catech jm of Slavophilism's third genera on, 'must be chosen not only through Vienna, but also through Berlin. . . . There is one war which I consider holy. It is necessary that the devourers of the Slavs be in turn themselves devoured.'²⁷

Anti-semitism

Strange as it may seem today, the Russian Idea began the twentieth century looking into the future with confidence. Though its advocates still called themselves Slavophiles, not so much as a trace remained of the original catechism's first — and main — hatred, that of Russia's native despotism Whereas Ivan Aksakov had felt some regret in allying with despotism in order to defend 'Russian originality' (samobytnost) and 'original culture' from the encroachments of the Westernizers, the third generation already poked fun at this timid defensive tactic:

Not very long ago Aksakov had to fight for originality What originality is there [to fight for] when the whole West has succeeded in under­standing that the Russian genius shall not be defending itself from Western attacks but will itself turn around and subordinate everything, introduce a new culture and new ideals into the world and breathe new spirit into the decrepit body of the West,²⁸

The third generation, militarist and pragmatic, has already forgotten even to think about retrospective Utopias. They were totally absorbed by their grandiose dreams of a future in which they saw Russia stretching out over half of Europe and dominating the remainder, which at that time found itself 'in complete subordination to the Jews'.

In this degenerate Russian Idea, nothing remained even of the second of the Slavophiles' original hatreds, parliamentarism. Its devil became 'The Protocols of the Riders of Zion'. Its rallying cry became smashing the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. To the new Slavophiles the principal confrontation of the contemporary world, seen by Danilevskii in the second generation as 'Russia versus the West seemed hopelessly outdated. 'Not in the past', wrote Volzhskii, n what is finished and done, but in what's to come, in what the future holds, is Russia, according to common Slavophile thought, called upon to reveal the Christian truth about the earth.'²⁹ This truth consisted in the view that the fundamental confrontation of the contemporary world was Russia versus Jewry

Sharapov's vision

There is an astounding document at our disposal which leaves absolutely no doubts as to how Slavophile ideologues of the last pre^ revolutionary generation saw the 'Christian truth about the earth. The most vivid and prolific among them was Sergei Sharapov, who expressed his vision through a novel entitled Cherez polveka {Fifty years on), which was published in 1901.

'I wanted,' the author explains, 'to give to the reader in imaginary form a practical collection of Slavoplv'e dreams and ideals, to show what could be if Slavophile views became the guiding ones in society.'³⁰ Here's how Sharapov saw Moscow in the year 1951. A Muscovite of the 1950s meets a person from the past and answers his amazed questions

'Is Constantinople really ours?'

'Yes, it's our fourth capital.'

T beg your pardon, and the first three are?'

The government is in Kiev The second capital is Moscow, and the third is Petersburg.'³¹

'What are the borders of this new Russia?'

'Persia is our province, just as Khiva, Bukhara, and Afghanistan. The western border is by Danzig, fit includes 1 all of F.ast Prussia further [along] Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, [it runs] past Salzburg and Bavaria and then goes down to the Adriatic Sea, surrounding and including Trieste. This Russian Empire contains the Polish Kingdom with Warsaw, the Western Ukraine and Galicia with L'vov, Bohemia with Vienna, Hungary with Budapest, Serbo-Croatia, Rumania with Bucharest, Bulgaria with Sofia and Adrianople, and Greece with Athens.'³²

Doesn't one get the feeling from this astounding prophesy that — paradoxically — the true heir to the degenerate Russian Idea proved to be the Communist emperor Josef Stalin? We will return to this later. For now, let's just say that in some details Sharapov was, of course, in error. Austria and Greece were off the mark, as were Se^bo- Croatia and Trieste. Iran was never part" of the Soviet Slavopl le empire, and as for Afghanistan, measures were undertaken only later. However, the general vision of an empire dominai ng Eastern and Central Europe as well as central Asia, proved exact, but how does this compare with Danilevskii's lea of a Slavic Federation?

'We dreamed', says the Russophile from the past, 'that a Slavic Ur on would form and the Russian empire would be dissolved in it.'

'Listen, that's laughable. Look how immense Russia's greatness is and how tiny an appendage western Slavdom is to it. Would it really be fair to us, to the victors and folk first in Slavdom, and now the world, to have to squat for the sake of some kind of equality with the other Slavs?'³³

It proved to be so easy for 'the folk first in the world' to d icard not only the Slavophile but also the Pan-Slavic mask And behind that mask turned out to be the naked drive for world hegemony. It is hardly surprising that 'autocracy not only was maintained, but was extraordinarily strengthened and finally acquired the appearance of the most freedom-loving and most desirable form of rule ' Of the ancient Slavophile devotion to the one-time 'freedom formula' a single vague recollection was all that remained: 'Our historical road is the harmonious combination of autocracy and self-government.'³⁴

But by way of compensation, a large part of the novel is devoted to the battle that would be raging in Moscow in 1951 around the most urgent problem of the modern world. 'The topic was the inordinate growth in Moscow of the Jewish and foreign element which was turning the old Russian capital into a completely international Jewish city.'³⁵ It had become so bad that 'at all institutions of higher and middle education the percentage quota for the number of Jews permitted to study there was abolished.'³⁶ Even set in an imaginary future such liberal depravity horrified the author. As we now know, however, there was no need for him to be appalled. In accordance with the first commandment of the degenerate Russian Idea, the percentage quota was in fact piously restored in Moscow. Even more importantly, if we recall the campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitan­ism' and the Jewish 'doctor-poisoners" that truly did shake Russia in 1951, then the main part of Sharapov's prophecy really did come true. The Communist emperor did indeed transform the Jewish question into the most urgent issue in Moscow a half-centurv later. As we now know, only death prevented him from implementing its 'final solutior in Russia

The key point, however, is that for Sharapov as well as Stalin the solution to the Jewish question in Russia was only the obverse of the global struggle against world evil To both. Russia s Europeamzation, which her 'smatterers' had been carrying on over for an entire century, meant in fact its Judaization. The fundamental postulate of the Russian Idea has emerged again as before. Russia stood n opposition to the rotten West. Only, in the new reformulated doctrme of world evil, the West's rottenness was rooted not in its pai'iamentarism, as the naive first generation of Slavophiles had imagined nor even il capitalism, as the naive Bolsheviks had believed, but in Jewry, which had been responsible for forcing parliamentarism and capitalism upon the world.

According to Sharapov, the final solution of the Jewish question was to be achieved rather simply, by a gigantic na on-wide boycott of all of Jewry on the part of 'native Russian people, who finally had come to feel themselves masters in their own lane .³⁷ Jews were simply not to oe hired for any kind of work except undei the table. The degeneration of the pre-revolutionary Russian Idea was at last complete It had merged with the Black Hundreds.

Hitler s mentors

How did such people react to their resounding defeat in 1917? Earlier, they had been full of euphoric anticipation of the empire's mininent and final victory over what they considered to be the last ban ler to world supremacy — Jewry. Not surprisingly they felt their defeat to be a disaster of apocalyptic proportions that portended the end of the world. But, above all, they saw what had happened as a tr umph of the world Jewish conspiracy They simply were incapable of interpreting it otherwise without having to reject their own doctrine, from which it logically followed that Russia had been conquered by Jewry. The following extract by one of the emigre earners of the Russian Idea is not untypical.

Now Russia in the full and literal sense ot the word, is Judea, where the ruling and dominant people are the Jews and where the Russians are allotted the pitiable and humiliating role of a conquered nation that has lost its national independence ... To summarize everything that has been argued up to this point, one can plainly say that the Jewish yoke over the Russian people is an established fact which can be denied or unnoticed only ei.her by perfect cretins or scoundrels who are completely md:'tferent to the Russian nation, its past, and the fate of the Russian people . . . Vengeance, cruelty, human sacrifice, and streams of blood is how one could characterize the methods the Jews use to rule over the Russian people. There can be no hopes for humaneness compassion or human mercy for the victims of Jewish despotism, for these sentiments are beyond the Jewish people, who for centuries have nourished an insatiable hatred toward other nations, a folk whose whole essence thirsts for blood and destruction.³⁸

The belief that the Russian Revolution was the 'action of the Antichrist in the form of Israel is as beyond doubt', wrote another champion of the defeated Russian Idea, 'as will be the brutal awakening after the crowning of the Antichrist, in the person of a Urn fersal Despot from the House of David, foretold to us by the Apocalypse and now manifestly being prepared to enter the scene by the Jew-Freemasons with the worldwide support and complicity of "Christian" govern­ments, three-quarters composed of representatives of the "chosen people" and their Christian hirelings, the proteges of the an+i-Christian Freemason-Ь ke secret alliance!'³⁹

As we see, after almost a century of change in the Russ in Idea catechism that spanned three generations, its supporters remained politically chaste. Even into the 1920s, they still did not comprehend that the solution of the land ques. on was incomparably more important in peasant Russia than the Jewish question — however 'final' its solution — and that, after three years of carnage, what the country thirsted for most of all was peace, not the realization of imperial ambitions. The great adversary of the Russian Idea, Russian Marxism, did understand this. A young dynamic, and fie: ble Utopia of left-wing extremism, unencumbered by prejudices or a reac onary political constituency, it promised Russia what the old, moribund utopianism of right-wing extremism and imperial fantasies could not. The Russian Idea could not offer land to the peasants (it supported the landlords), nor peace to the people (that would contradict its sense of patriotism and the dream of Constantinople), nor self- determination to the national minorities (because of its dogma of the 'unified and indivisible' empire), nor, finally, even one-party dictator­ship (because of its traditional hatred of political parties and attachment to absolute monarchy). Therefore it was doomed from the moment the leaders of Russian Marxism offered, and were able to deliver, to Russia all these things (not for long, it's true, except for the dictatorship).

But even such an elementary political analysis did not occur to the supporters of the emigre Russian Idea. The shock of their defeat, which seemed final at the time, disposed them rather toward an eschatological and metaphysical explanation of their calamity. For them, the Bolsheviks" victory

testifies with irrefutability that a force is operating in the world . . that is steadfastly striving to realize its dream — the affirmation of the worldwide supremacy of the 'chosen people', and which now already heads Russia officially and covertly runs all other states. For there is literally not a single state in the world where behind the representatives of official power aren't standing kikes, the true power-brokers of international politics and inspirers of internationalist socialist forces [which include the] representatives of all socialist parties, without exception, and of the working class — blind executors of the will of the 'Internationals' — tool of the Freemason-Kike potentates.⁴⁰

In his book Russia and Germany, in a chapter 'Hitler's Mentors Walter Laqueur provides documentary evidence to show that the very 'idea of anti-Bolshevism as a central plank in Nazi ideology and propaganda and [the equation of] Bolshevism with World Jewry'⁴¹ was adopted by Hitler from Russian emigres ^,:ving in hopes that, Russia too would one day be able to boast ot a Hitler movement.'⁴² Entire fortunes taken out ot Russia were disposed of by the inhabitants of 'Russian Koblenz' to support right-wing extremism in Germany.⁴³ All that, in Laqueur's opinion, gives us grounds to speak about the 'Russian sources of National Socialism ⁴⁴ Advocates of the Russian Idea, having suffered an epoch-making defeat in iheir own country, scattered throughout the world and doomed, t seemed, to political extinction, nevertheless managed to find themselves a surrogate homeland in Germany as it marched toward fascism — that same Germany which not too long ago they had characterized as 'possessing no ideals except those it has borrowed from Jewry' N E. Markov, a deputy of the Russian Duma famous for his pogrom speeches and one of the apostles of the degenerate Russian Idea, ended his days as a consultant for ihe Gestapo on Russian affairs.

There is, of course, a cruel irony in this, all the more so because, in a certain sense, the emigre proponents of the Russian Idea were right to mourn over Russia. Nothing good could be expected for her under the left-extremist Utopian regime tor which, as for any Utopia, degradation was in store. It too was to degenerate and its ideology be transformed into one of political idolatry. It is no coincidence that Moscow in 1951 — at the height of a regime of counter-reform — was more reminiscent of Sharapov's vis>on than Lenin's. Yet, none the less, unhkc the Russian Idea, the left-wing ideology found in itself the strength for fierce self-criticism, for the destruction of its own cult of political idolatry and for a desperate new attempt at reform in the 1960s. But that's already a different story, 6ne with other heroes and one which is the subject of another of my books.⁴⁵

For now, let's just say that for anyone who agrees with the historical approach toward Russia that forms the basis of my analysis of the evolution of the Russian Idea, the mistake of its emigre proponents is obvious: eschatology had nothing to do with what began in Russia in 1917. As for the Antichrist, I can only paraphrase the answer of Laplacc to Napoleon: an historical explanation of the Russian tragedy does not require this hypothesis. In fact, in none of Russia's historical cycles, beginn ng with the m ddle of the sixteenth century, has her reformist potential been capable of more than two efforts at reform. Furthermore, after both of these had ended in defeat, a brutal counter- reform »variably took their place, transforming Russia nto a dictatorsl p, and at times a fortress state. (The difference between Russia's counter-reforn st regimes is nportant and we will come back to it in the conclus on.) By October 1917, alter the failure of both reformist attempts (one n 1905—07 and the second in 1917 from February to September), a counter-reform was, in essence, predetermined. The only tb'ng that wasn't clear, and was only dec ded in the course of a bloody civil war, was wh'ch of the two extremist Utopias, left- or right-wing, Commur st or fascist, would win the titanic struggle over who should determine the ideology of Russia's new counter-reform (and thereby to decide her fate in the twentieth century). The left won, the Commumst Utopia. However, metaphysics were not to blame for this, nor were the machinations of an approaching 'Universal Despot from the House of David'.

We know now that the victory of V. Lenin and L. Trotsky's Communist government was indeed a great misfortune for Russia. What we don't know is whether the victory of a N Markov and V. Purishkcvich fascist government would have been a greater or lesser misfortune. Wouldn't such a government have restored Russia to a garrison-state empire under the banner of the world-wide struggle against the Freemason —Kike conspiracy? We can obtain some kind of idea of the possible program of such a government just from the following prophecy of Yu. M. Odinzgoev, which should not be forgotten.

The same path is in sture for Europe . . . The day of reckoning lor mindless complaisance toward the scum of the earth approaches, and the peoples of Europe, who have been deceived by their own leaders, shall not be long in realizing from their own experience the nightmarish future that's been prepared for them, the Socialist-Bolshevik Eden, under the power of the Jewish Sovnarkom, which will, without a doubt, not delay in revealing its true essence — that of an inhuman, misanthropic and anti-Christian super-government striving to reduce everyone to a common denominator, to turn them into slaves of the 'chosen people' and its tsar-despot of Zionist blood. The catastrophe is near, it is at the doors ^4Л

However, inasmuch as the Russian Idea was not fated to lead the salvation of Europe from the 'despot of ziomst blood' that threatened it in the 1920s and '30s, the only practical function it could serve was to help Nazism achieve victory in Germany and unleash it on the New Judea' (Russia) and the rest of Europe (ruled, as you recall, by the Freemason—Kike secret alliance). Thus the noble retrospective Utopia of Russian nationalism, which arose out of a dream of saving Russia and Europe from historical catastrophe, completed its first century by- being transformed into an instrument of that catastrophe

Notes

M. Lemke, Nikolaevskie zhandarmv i ateratura 1826— 1885 gg.. St. Petersburg, 1909, p. 142.

Quoted from Voprosy literatury, 1969, No. 5, p. 115.

M. Lemke, op. cit., p 598

'Calling his Majesty an earthly god, although it has not become a title, is. however, tolerated as an exegesis of the tsar's authority,' wrote Konstantin Aksakov indignandy. 'His Majesty is [referred to as] somt kind of mysterious force that may not be talked or thought about and which, in addition, supplants all moral forces. Deprived of moral forces, a person becomes fcckless and, with an instinctive guile, s able to plunder, rob, and swindle . . .' Things reached such a poi.it, Aksakov fumed, that even'm the form of written regulations . has been added something strange for Christian society. Namely, that "For his subjects, his Majesty is their supreme conscience," as though fthelr] personal consciences were idle.' (Tenr^!a . . . , pp 40, 49)

Teoria . . . , p. 36.

Karl Marx and Friednch Engels, Polnoe sobranie suchinenii, Moscow, v. 1, p. 414

Moskovskii sbornik, Moscow, 1887, p. 81.

K. N. Leont'ev, Vostok, Rossia i slavianstvo, Moscow, 1886, v. 2, p. 156.

N. Danilevskii, Rossia i Evropa, St. Petersburg, 1871, pp. 407 — 8.

[bid., p. 338. [The stanza is from a poem entitled 'A Prophecy'. The English translation is from Jesse Zeldin, Poems and Political Letters of F. I. Tiutchev, University of Tennesee Press, Knoxville, 1973, p. 132].

Ibid., p. 406.

Quoted from A. Volzhskii, Sviataia Rus' i isskoe prizvanie, Moscow, 1915, p. 36.

Russkoe obozrenie, 1895, No. 1, p. 264.

K. N. Leont' ev, Sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, 1912 —14, v. 6, p. 118.

K. N. Leont'ev, Vostok, Rossia i slavianstvo, v. 2, p. 13.

Ibid., p. 24.

Quoted from Vestnik Evropy, 1885, No. 12, p. 909.

PamiatiK. N. Leont'eva, St. Petersburg, 1911, p. 157.

Russkoe obozrenie, 1897, No. 5, p. 400.

Leont'ev, Sobranie sochinenii, v. , p. 500.

Nikolai Danilevskii, Sbornik politicheskikh i ekologichesckikh siatei [Collection of Political and Ecological Articles], St. Petersburg, 1890, p. 23.

K. N. Leont'ev, Sobranie sochinenii, v. 7, p. 203.

Ibid., v. 6, p. 76.

V. Apushkin, Skobelev о nemtsakh [Skobelev on the Germans], Petrograd, 1914, p. 92.

Moskovskii sbornik, p. xxvi.

A. Volzhskii, op. cit., p. 86.

Ibid.

Moskovskii sbornik, p. xxv.

A. Volzhskii, op. cit., p. 23.

S. F. Sharapov, Cherez polveka [Fifty Years on], Moscow, 1901, p 3.

Ibid., p. 23.

Ibid., p. 45.

Ibid., p. 59.

Ibid., p. 60.

Ibid., p. 24.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 36. In fairness I must add that other representatives of the degenerate Russian Idea differed from Sharapov in the methods they proposed for the 'final solution'. Whereas Yu. M. Odinzgoev supported the idea of a total boycott against the Jews — 'Boycott by Christians of all press organs with a kike slant, boycott in industry and trade, boycott of the kike element in all the decisive spheres of human activity, coupled with the cleansing of it first and foremost from the organs of authority' (V dni tsarstva Antikhrista: Sumerki khristianstva [In the Days of the Reign of the Antichrist: the Twilight of Christianity], p. 225) — V. M. Purishkevich proposed resettling all the Jews to the Kolyma region of Siberia north of the Arctic Circle (an idea which was subsequently picked up and modified by Stalin). The most radical, however, was N. В Markov who once declared in the Duma that all Jews, 'to the last one', would be exterminated in pogroms. (See Alexander B. Tager, The Decay of Czar ism, Philadelphia, 1935, p. 44). This idea was subsequently picked up on by Hitler, also with certain modifications. The variations in these differeni approaches however, as one can see, were strictly tactical.

Vasiln Mikhailov, h'ovaia ludeia tli razonaemaya Rossia [The New Judea or Russia Being Ravaged], Trudovaia Rossiia, New York, 1921, pp. 6, 15, 9.

Yu. M. Odinzgoev, op. cit pp. 204, 225. Unfortunately, this book does not contain either a year, place of publication, name of a publishing house, or even the author's real name (Odinzgoev is clearly a name made up from the Russian for 'one of the goys' — odin iz goev), It can be deduced from the text, however, that the book was published after the defeat of Wrangel and before the Genoa Conference, i.e., apparently in 1921. Incidentally, the same ideas expressed in the very same words can be found in a small two-volume work by N. E. Markov Voiny temnykh sil [The Wars of Dark Forces J (Paris, 1928) and m the book bv G. Bostunich Masunstvo v svoei sushchnosti i proiavleniakh \Masonry in its Essence and Manifestations] (Published by M G. Kovale\ Belgrade, 1928). About Bostunich, Walter Laqueui had this to say. 'He became a confidant of Himmler and a friend of men like Heydnch, Ohlendorf and Karl Wolff and a fairly high ranking member of the SS ' 'The Bostunich case

shows ... the kinship between the Black Hundred ideology and Nazi thought' (Russia and Germany, A Century of Conflict, Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 1965, pp. 122, 125).

Yu. M. Odinzgoev, op. cit., pp. 204, 205.

Walter Eaquer, op. cit., p. 57.

Ibid., p. 75.

Ibid., p. 62. There is a solidly rooted cliche according to which Russian Koblenz' consisted entirely of homeless writers and former colonels who all drove taxis. The evidence, however, shows otherwise. For example, the wife of one of the pretenders to the Russian throne (Prince Kynll of Coburg), Viktoria Fedorovna, set at the disposal of General Ludendorf an 'enormous sum' between 1922 and 1924 for distribution among German right-wing extremist organizations. Others too donated to the struggle against the worldwide Jewish conspiracy — Gukasov, Nobel, I.enisov, to mention only a few. Baron Koeppen spent his entire fortune in contributions to these causes.

Ibid , p. 51,

The Drama of the Soviet 19b0s: A Lost Reform, Institute of International Studies, Berkeley: 1984.

Odinzgoev, op. cit., pp. 207, 213.

The Russian Idea and its Critics

This short chaptcr deals with the evolution of the Russian Idea from 1830 to 1930 and is intended to answer the questions which ended the second chapter. Wh^ don't contemporary Russian liberal thinkers in Moscow and the emigre community share the same feelings towards the present-day Russian New Right as the generation of Herzen and Chernyshevskii did towards the early Slavophiles? Why did the most prominent liberal thinkers of the 1880s and 1890s feel so differently towards proponents of the Russian Idea of their day — even to the extent that a respectable person in Moscow at the time would nave refused a Russophile his hand? The shortest answer to all these questions is that Slavophilism as an ally in the struggle against 'soul- destroying despotism' no longer existed by the 1880s.

No one has explained this better than Vladimir Solov'ev, himself a former Slavophile and leading religious thinker:

Russian patriotism; they all join together too in the most graphic

application of this pseudo-nationalist principle — anti-semitism.[1]

The most striking of Solov'ev's articles dedicated to the nationalities issue in Russia is even called 'Slavophilism and its Degeneration'. The term degeneration' applied to Slavophilism became standard usage in the Russian liberal press in the 1880s. This is testimony that Russian ihinkers at the time superbly understood the essence of this process and wrote about it with a lack of inhibition that far exceeds anything present-day critics of the Russian Idea permit themselves They used expressions Ьке 'tooth-gnashing obscurantism' (V. Solov'ev) and mysticism with a crude predatory lining' (M. Stasiulevich).² We can find nothing similar among today's opponents of the Russian Idea.

The cr.tics of that tinee naturally wished to understand the sources of this degeneration and thus carefully examined the Russian Idea's initial catechism, trying, as Solov'ev said, to find 'in old Slavophilism rhe imp) .nt of today's jingoism'³ They unanimously discovered this 'imprmt in the duality of the Slavophile catechism As S Trubetskoi said for example, in his article 'A Disillusioned Slavophile', in Slavophilism 'there were both progressive, highly humanistic and universalist tendencies as well as conservative retrograde nationalism

. . The Slavophiles' ideal was a Panslavic Orthodox culture of the future that would renew the world and, at the same time, pre-Petrine Russia ... in her a.'ienation from Europe.'⁴ In Slavophilism and its Degeneration' Solov'ev says essentially the same thing, only in religious terms 'The contradiction is between the universal ideal of Christianity and the pagan tendency toward aloofness. ⁵ He denies the Slavophiles even the genuineness of their Orthodox faith, accusing them of being a 'tribe of Russian Orthodox heathens He puts Slavophile Orthodoxy in quotation marks because, he says, 'according to its psychological motif, [it] was more a faith m the people than a people's faith.'⁶

S. ''rubetskoi dedicated another article, Protivorechiia nashei kul'tury'⁷ ['The Contradictions of Our Culture'], to this same duality in Slavophilism's initial catechism, as did Pavel Miliukov in his famous lecture 'The Disintegration ot Slavophilism'.⁸

The duality problem

The hypnotic power ot the classical critique of the Russian Idea, based on its 'duality formula', was strong When in 1969 I began a debate about Slavophilisn in a Moscow academic journal, this formula still seemed to me not only adequate, but the only possible approach to the problem. It formed the basis of my fi st art ;le, 'Zagadka slavianofil'skoi ki tiki' [The Enigma of the Slavophile Cr ique'], wh (jjfe opposed both orthodox Marxists and proponents of born-again Slavophilism insp: ed by the Russian Idea.⁹ However, already in the course of the debate I understood — and this was reflected in my concluding article, 'Reply to My Opponents' — that such a meta- ideological cr^{1 1} [ue of the Russian Idea, lumping together sociology with historiography, and politics with religion, is unsatisfactory. It proved to be too easy for my Marxist opponents to stretch the argument of Slavophile political doctrine nto the realm of soc^;'^logy ('they were all landlord serf-owners'), and for the Russophf'es to argue on grounds of cultural philosophy and religion ('Slavophii-sm was not a political but a religious and cultural doctrine'). Switching back and forth ^1:ke this, the debate soon lost its focus, which the duality formula did not help, but rather hindered it from finding.¹⁰ Obviously, something very important — perhaps even decisive — was lack ig, but at that time I did not know quite what it was. I was therefore not in a position to formulate precisely my object on to the class¹ jal ci.¹ que.

Only in tne course of working on my three-volume A History of Political Opposition in Russia, which saw the light of day — if one could call it that — only in Soviet samizdat,¹¹ did I manage to define what seemed to be lacking in the classical duality formula: it was devoid of a political dimension.

Of course, the classical authors were right. The duality of inii lal Slavophilism (as of today's Russian New Right that follows in its footsteps) is beyond doubt. Trubetskoi proved its philosophical duality and Solov'ev its religious duality. It also contained a duality, as Miliukov had shown, in its ideological goals as vvell. Yet in its political doctrine this dual у was missing.

From the very beginning (and completely unambiguously), it opposed to both native despotism and Western parliamentarism its 'principle of authoritarianism', which repudiated the doctrine of the separation of powers, that is, the only mechanism known to human­kind for limiting the state's arbitrariness. Thus from the very start it was reduced to having to rely on the Russian Orthodox church as the sole guarantor of this constraint. It thereby supplanted, in essence, politics with religion, and the separation of powers with the principle of separation of functions between spiritual and temporal authorities. This, in turn, rendered it incapable of developing a political mechanism to prevent either the occurrence of periodic catastrophes in Russian history or its own degradation. From the very beginning it considered political parties, constitutions, republics — everything that was focused for it in the hated term parliamentarism' — as unconditional evils. Thus from its inception it built a political trap into its own world view J Its arguments served it superbly m the deological struggle, but proved useless n the political arena In fact, what was such a doctiine supposed to do when in a crisis situation it was faced with a purely political choice and was lirmly restricted to only two possibilities — either for or against parliamentarism? In such an event wouldn't it naturally prefer despotism as the lesser evil?

Thus, despite the formula of the classical critique, it was precisely the absence of duality in Slavophilism's political docti ine, precisely its singularity (as opposed to duality), that proved to be the decisive factor that lay behind its degeneration. II this is so, then the drama of the Russian Idea was first and foremost a political d^rama. In a land where the combat between despotism and liberalism had dominated the political tradition for centuries, it sought to be the deology of the authoritarian 'middle'. Sooner or later there had to come a time when it would become clear that, at the height of a national crisis in Russia, «11 Aksakov's famous expression, 'there is no middle. For early Slavophi'ism, this moment of truth occurred n the 1870s. Thus the real enigma of the Russian Idea is that i»:s own political doctrine invariably paralyses it just when it is faced with the k'nd of political choice that proves imperanve at a moment of crisis. Here hes the seed of its degeneration. And, once degenerated, it is transformed into its own opposite — an ideology of 'soul-destroying despotism' and counter-reform.

Contemporary critics of Russian nationalism cannot know when such a moment of truth will come for Ш present heirs the Russian New Right They only know, on the basis of historical precedent and analysis of its political doctrine, that this moment will one day come. They have no reason to suppose that today's New Right will behave any differently when it does than Slavophiles have done in the past

Critics and fellow-travellers

It should now be clear to the reader why contemporary critics of the Russian Idea are much closer in attitude to Solov'ev and Trubetskoi than to Ilcruew or Chernyshevskii (or Western fellow-travellers). Moreover, they know something about the Russian Idea that Solov'ev and Trubetskoi could not have. They know about its transformation into Black Hundreds-ism and Fascism. They know that even with its last breath it blessed Hitler's crusade against Russia and Europe. It is for these reasons that they do not allow the liberating anti Communist rhetoric of the Russian New Right to push the 'tooth-gnashing obscurantism' of its political doctrine into che background. Understand­ably, they do not trust this rhetoric in the mouths of those who, like che first propnets of the Russian Idea, toss and turn between the same two hatreds.

When Western academic fellow-travellers applaud Solzhenitsyn ; passionate declamations of freedom, as He * zen and Chernyshevskii in their time applauded those of Aksako\ and when they gently chide him for anti-parliamentarism, contemporary Russian crkics see in the duality of his catechism the disastrous potenl al that Solov'ev and Trubetskoi saw in the duality of Slavophilism. They know that Konstantin Aksakov was replaced by Danilevskii and Leon' ev, and they fear that when today's Danilevskii and Leont'ev declare them­selves the true spokesmen of the Russian Idea they will be replaced by a latter-day Sharapov and Skobelev. Moreover, as the reader of this book will soon see, in the compressed times we live in all these personages are already there, at the very heart of the Russian New Right. Its fateful evolution has already begun. The degeneration is gathering speed.

Denial of history

Of course, nothing on this earth is inevitable. Pernaps the coming degeneration of the Russian Idea can be prevented if an effort is made to do so. The attitude of Russian critics toward it might change if the New Right would admit its grave ideological heritage and acknowledge that its political doctrine is prone to degeneration no less than Marxism or Teutonophilism; if its spokesmen were prepared, frankly and dispassionately, to discuss the vulnerable points of their ideology, in order to try to ameliorate its weaknesses and offer new solutions to old problems; or, finally, if they would approach their own views with at least as great a degree of self-criticism as Russian neo-Marxists in Moscow and the emigre community do. They don't attempt to hide the fact that their initial catechism has become scandai.zed the world over. They seek dialogue and argument, in an effort to explain the reasons for its degeneration, to figure out its ideological and political mechanism and to offer new solutions. They would never try to follow Marx or Lenin mechanically, in the way Solzhemisyn repeats Aksakov and Shimanov repeats Leont'ev. Neo-Marxist doctrine has net become any more convincing becausc of this, but at least its critics are persuaded that they are dealing with sincere people who are prepared to defend their convictions in argument against criticism from outsiders or each other. Critics of neo-Marxism aren't presented with outmoded dogmas that are held up as the ultimate truth, nor are they declared to be cretins or scoundrels when they express doubts about Marxism.

By contrast, no one has ever heard a single word of self-criticism from any ideologue of the Russian New Right They are absolutely certain of the infallibility of their own moribund catechism. To get an idea of the style of their polemics, let us return to the jeremiad of V. Mikhadov quoted earlier

To summar ze everything that has been argued up to this point, one can plainly say that the Jewish yoke over the Russian people is an accomplished fact which can be denied or unnoticed only either by complete cretins or scoundrels who are completely indilfereni to the Russian nation its past, and the fate of the Russian people.

If you replace the word Jewish with the word Communist you will have the standard response of Russian New Right ideologists to their opponents.¹²

While they fiercely attack the degeneration of Marxism, they never speak about the degeneration of Slavophilism. They fulminate against Lenin but have nothing to say about Leont'ev. History, in their opinion, is good for exposmg the past failures of Marxism but ceases to exist as soon as the discussion turns to their own ideological roots. One of these preachers, V Maksimov, explained that the Soviet system isn't of 'materialistic, but rather metaphysical, origins and we must approach it as such. If we do not, Western civilization is doomed to extinction.'¹³ But didn't we hear this very same argument and the identical prophecy from Yu. M. Odinzgoev in 1921?

To find the perfect example of someone to whom Santayana's remark he who forgets history risks repeating it' would apply, one need look no further than the contemporary evangelists of the Russian (dea. I hey catcgorically deny their own past. But it is not, I suspect, out of forgetfulness or ignorance that they refuse to touch upon it themselves or let anyone else do so, but rather out of fear.

Russian extremism

If the critics of the Russian New Right cannot hope to receive a reply to their questions from the movement's ideologists, then perhaps their academic fellow-travellers will answer for them — even if they answer only the most essential of the quest. >ns. One of these is the following: if the old Russian Idea didn't save Russia from historical caiastrophe, as it solemnly promised to do and which was, щ essence, its very raison d'etre, why should we suppose that the new one will do any better? Why should we expect that it, like its spiritual mother, will not degenerate into Black Hundreds-ism and Fascism?

Indeed, the fellow-travellers try to respc id in various ways. One proposes as a guarantee against this metamorphos s the Orthodoxy of che Russian people;¹⁴ another emphasizes its presumed attachment to monarchy.¹⁵ What are we to make of these arguments, however, when we note that all the proponents of the old Russian Idea were to a man Russian Orthodox and all were attached to monarchy to the 1 tter end? By the same token, all pre-revolutionary Russian tyrants were just as Orthodox and, one must assume, just as attached to monarchy. But did this circumstance prevent the Russian po tical system from periodically falling into horrors of 'soul-destroy lg despotism', or prevent the metamorphosis of the old Russian Idea into Black Hundreds-ism? Did Orthodoxy and monarchy succeed in protecting Russia from historical catastrophe in 1917? Of course, the answer to all these questions is 'no

Alas, to an equal degree they failed to protect her between 1560 and 1580, when a cruel dictator, over the course of a quarter-century-long reign of terror, forced autocracy and serfdom upon her. They didn't protect her from catastrophe in the 1700s either, when another dictator forced total militarization upon her, transformed serfdom into legal slavery and placed a guards colonel in charge of Russ.4n Orthodoxy. They didn't protect her from Paul I's disastrous counter-reform in 1796 Nicholas I's in 1825, or Alexander Ill's in 1881 (any more than the Communist Party, I might add, which, under Soviet conditions, fulfils the traditional role of the Orthodox church, was able to protect Russia from the catastrophe of Stalinism in 1929).

Perhaps the problem is therefore not with Orthodoxy and monarchy, but in the theoretical foundation of all Russian extremist Utopias, whether Russian Marxism or the Russian Idea, both of which repudiate the doctrine of separation of powers. Maybe the spiritual power' embodied in the institution of the Orthodox church or the Communist Party is simply incapable of fulfilling the function of curbing an autocratic state. Perhaps that is the reason why the replacement of the Orthodox church by the Communist Party has led to no fundamental change in the prevailing patterns of Russian history. If so, then how can we reasonably expect things to be very different from the reverse operation, if the Comniur.st Party is exchanged for the Orthodox church?

It is an elementary rule of arithmetic that the sum of an addition is not changed by rearranging the order of its components But isn t this rearrangement of components the crux of the entire political program of today's Russian nationalists?

It has not occurred to any of the fellow-travellers to ask whether the Russian problem might simply be incapable of a resofution by mechanically rearranging institutions and deologies that preach an identically extremist political doctrine. Could it be that the problem has nothing at all to do with ideology, but everything to do with the fundamental postulate concerning the separation of functions between temporal and spu tual powers which determines the political platforms of both the Russian Idea and Russ an Marxism?

Unfortunately, Russian nationalism's fellow-travellers (like Russian Marxism s fellow-travellers before them) are quite unaware of such considerations For even to notice the similarity between the two extremist ideologies is mpossible if one ignores Russian history — something which the fellow-travellers do just as scrupulously as their patrons. Consequently, they arc forced to reason in the same black and white categories (Communist vs. anti-Communist) as the fellow- travellers of Russian Marxism before them. Only the attitude to the Russian problem has changed: what to some was a good, to others has become an evil. The methodology, however, has remained the same,

Russian nationalism s fellow-travellers argue that there are many faces¹⁶ to the movement, that it is divided into hawks and doves or Orthodox and heathen or liberal 'Mensheviks' and 'national Bolsheviks' — in short, good nationalists and bad nationalists, patriots and chauvinists. In other words, they revive the classic duality formula, though not in an ideological, but in a. so to speak, personalized context. We shall examine this argument in detail in the next chapter. Suffice it to say, here, that the fellow-travellers are repeating the mistake of Trubetskoi and Solov'ev in ignoring the decisive fact that in Russian nationalism's political doctrine there is no duality, that both its hawks and its supposed doves despise Western parliamentarism and — most importantly — reject the doctrine of separation of powers.

It is no accident that among Russian Communists, there is no shortage of keen advocates of the Russian Idea. Irreconcilable enemies on the surface, the hawks and the doves of Russian nationalism, and Communists arid anti-Communists, would all seem to stem from the .arne root — Russian extremism. They are not simply enemies, they are fraternal enemies, 'ihat is where the danger in the present-day political situation in Moscow lies. Once again, as on the eve of the Civil War, these fraternal enemies stand against one another: the Russian Idea arid Russian Marxism, Sadly, like in the Civil War, any future open confrontation between them will not benefit Russia or the world, whichever of them wins. Of course, к may not come to open confrontation, but the fellow-travellers hope it will.

Notes

VI. Solov'ev, Sobranie sochinenii, St Petersburg, 2nd edition, v. 5, p. 356.

Vestnik Evropy, 1894, No. 10.

VI Solov'ev, op. cit., p. 356.

Vestnik Evropy, 1892, No. 10, p. 777.

VI. Solov'ev, op. cit., p. 173.

Ibid., p. 169.

Vestnik Evropy, 1894, No. 10.

Pavel N. Miliukov joined the liberal attack on the degenerated Russian Idea later than others (in the 1890s). Initially 'The Disintegration of Slavophilism' was a lecture read on 22 January. 1893 in the auditorium of the History Museum in Moscow. Afterwards it was published in issue пмтЬег 2 of the journal Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii [.Problems of Philosophy and Psychology'] of the same year and reprinted n a collection of articles entitled Iz is torn russkoi intelligent sii [From the History of the Rur,cian Intellegentsia] (St Petersburg: 1903).

This article wa<; reprinted in English in the International Journal of Sociolrygy (Summer—Fall 1976;. Another of my articles relating to this discussion, Slavianofily i Konstantin Leont'ev, was published in the journal Voprosy filosofii (1969, No. 8) and reprinted in English while I still lived in Moscow in the journal Soviet Studies in Philosophy (Tall 1970) and in Polish in CztosAek i Swiatopogted С1973. No. 10). The debate was continued in issues 5, 7, 10 and 12 of Voprosy uieratury (1969). In the last issue of that year my concluding article entitled Otvet opponentam ГReply to My Opponents] was published.

10 When this debate from the 1960s was unexpectedly continued in the West ''after the publication of The Russian New Right in 1978), the emigre epigones of V. Kozhinov and A. Ivanov, who represented the Russian Idea in the .Moscow debate, again tried to escape discussion of their political heritage by the same old method, that is, by scrambling together different aspects of Slavophile catechism. B. Paramonov wrote, for example, 'Slavophile nationalism was not politics, but cultural philosophy — a lesson about the organic roots of culture.' Already in the next paragraph Slavophilism proves to he a lesson about the supra- cultural and supra-historieal sense of human existence' (Kontinent, No. 20, 1980, p. 247), and in a few more lines it is asserted that 'the religious problcmatique of classical Slavophilism was substituted by cultural philosophy' (Ibid., p. 248, my emphasis). Apparently, this author was not troubled even by the fact lhat this whole confusion in terminology ('cultural philosophy', 'lesson about the supra-cultural and so on) completely contradicts the absolutely clear postulates of the founding fathers of Slavophilism themselves. Like Konstantin Leont'ev, he seems to know better than they did just what it is they wanted to say: 'The astounding terminological helplessness (if not incapacity) of the Slavophiles (who failed to even think up their own name) did them a disserviee this time as well. Where he needed to say 'eulture', Aksakov said state'; where he needed to say 'sky', he said 'earth What was, essentially, an esehatologieal doetrine, was expressed instead in political terms.' (ibid., pp. 247 — 8). I do not know^- whether it would please today's evangelists of the Russian Idea if tomorrow some other B. Paramonov tried to explain, say. Solzhenitsyn's hatred for the state structure of present-day Russia by attributing it to his 'terminological incapacity' (he said 'Communism when he should have said 'hell', and 'authoritarianism' where he meant to say 'sky', thus expressing an essentially esehatologieal doctrine ... in political terms'.) This all seems to me an intentional — and tactless with respeet to the forefathers of the Russian Idea — attempt to distraet the reader from the eonerete problems that exist with Slavophile politics.

My book The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History, published only ,n English (University of California Press, 1981) and Italian (Edizioni di Communita, 1984) contains sections from this samizdat manuscript.

See, for example, A. Solzhemtsyn, 'Nashi Pluralisty' ['Our Pluralists'], Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia, No. 139, 1983.

Novoe russkoe slo\>o, 18 June 1978.

M. Agurskii in Novyi zhurnal (No. 118, 1975).

John B. Dunlop, The Faces of Contempurary Russian Nationalism, Prineeton University Press, 1984.

John B. Dunlop, 'The Many Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism' Survey, Summer 1979, v. 24, No. 3, p 108.

5

A Witness for the Defence?

John Dunlop, one of the most devoted fellow-travellers of the Russian New Rignt, wrote a book entitled The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism. It is permeated with sympathy for the Russian Idea and sets itself the goal of defending its aspirations before the American administration (the book contains recommendations to the government) and public Of course, it follows the fellow-travellers standard methodology in dividing contemporary Russian nationalists into Menshcviks' and 'Bolsheviks' For the former, however, Dunlop has coined a new term vozrozhdentsy (from vozrozhdenie: renaissance), while the latter he just refers to as 'National Bolsheviks'. He freely admits that

the similarities between National Bolshevism and fascism are striking: a strong impulse toward deification of the nation; the desire for a strong totalitarian state; a powerful leadership impulse . . . ; a belief in the necessity of the existence of an elite; a cult of discipline, particularly discipline of the youth; heroic vitalism; an advocacy of industrial and military might . . . ; a celebration of the glories of the past; and a militant, expansionist dynamic.¹

Based on this, Dunlop concludes, very logically, that, 'in National Bolshevism we have an essentially fascist phenomenon, a radical right movement in a state still adhering nominally to a radical left ideology.'²

Although the whole point of his book is to prove that: the vozrozhdentsy critically differ from the fascist National Bolsheviks, Dunlop none the less admits that there exists no Great Wall of China' between them: 'the two tendencies are often able to recognize a communality of interest, as in Solzhenitsyn's generally approving comments, contained in his literary memoes, on Viktor Chalmaev and the Molodaia gvardia [Young guard] orientation of the late sixties.'³ In general, from a political standpoint, the difference between the vozrozhdentsy and the National Bolsheviks consists, in Uunlop's opinion, in the fact that the former possess a mass base of support (having in'mind 'their close ties to the fifty-million-member Russian Orthodox Church'), whereas 'the National Bolsheviks would seem to be better positioned actually to assume power.'⁴ Dunlop thinks that. 'An implementation of their ideas would probably lead to what French sovietologist Alain Besani;on has called a "pan-Russian police and military empire" A military dictatorship directed by a |Unta or a party dictatorship (with the CPSU becoming a fascist-style Russ an Party").'5

Such a tuin of events I call Russian counter-reform: one of those periodic catastrophes ^;n Russian history mentioned earlier, to which Russia if particularly susceptible in an era of historical decline. The extremist tendencies of both degenerate Utopias, that of Russian Marxism and of the Russian Idea, would combine into a single fascist monster, capable of restoring not only mass terror in Russia, but also the threatening pre-war atmosphere of the 1930s, full of hysteria and uncertainty. In a nuclear age, such global hysteria could, in the light of the perpetual nuclear arms race, last indefii itely, destroying the whole foundation of international relations and, in essence, of civilization as well. It is this potential for just such a calamity before the year 2000 to which all my books are addressed. If I could persuade at least one Ameucan scholar to perceive this threat as I do, I should be well pleased with my efforts. So far, however, that pleasure has been denied me.

Though Dunlop describes the contours of this threat very realistic­ally, he fails to perceive the threat itself. In fact, he argues that such a turn of events would be highly desirable: 'if the National Bolsheviks were to come to power, they would be much more vulnerable to the arguments of the intellectually more sophisticated vozrozhdentsy, with whom they have numerous ideational and emotional links ... A possible scenario, therefore, would be a brief National Bolshevik interregnum followed by a vozrozhdencts period of rule.'⁶

¹ hus, Dunlop's cheerful scenario promises us a happy ending. A revolution occurs in Moscow — with, one must assume, all the attendant bloodshed and strife of civil war that accompanies revolution. Somehow, as a result, a fascist Russian Party takes power Yet, having proven strong enough to crush everything in theii path to power, the hawks suddenly defer to the arguments of the 'intellectually more sophisticated' doves and voluntarily hand over to them the power they have won From ihis moment a golden age begins. This scenario has one obvious drawback, we have only Mr. Dunlop's word for it. I shall not at this point dwell on the fact that the vozrozhdentsy have plenty of their own hawks, as we will see later, or that both factions of the Russian New Right are permeated by a spirit of fascism. Indeed, Dunlop himself admits that the vozrozhdentsy 'have numerous ideational and emotional links' with the fascists and, if for only that reason, it is difficult to accept that they are as polit ically virtuous as he assumes. But leaving that aside, what chance would they really have of wresting control from a 'National Bolshevik' Russian Party that had just seized power?

Did the Russian Mensheviks have any chance of wresting power from the Bolsheviks after October 1917? Were not the Mensheviks also 'intellectually more sophisticated' and did they not have 'numerous ideational and emotional links' with the Bolsheviks? Did this then make the Bolsheviks 'vulnerable to their arguments'? Hardly. Didr t the Mensheviks — precisely because of their ideological closeness — end up among the first victims of the Bolshevik dictatorship? It could not have been any other way. In all revolutions, without exception, the extremists, after having seized power, have always decimated and terrorized first and foremost their closest rivals — those most closely related to them politically. So the Jacobins did with the Girondists, the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks, the Stalinists with the Bolsheviks, and Khomeini extremists with Khomeini moderates. There has never been an instance — in revolutions in Asia or in Europe — where extremists, having established their dictatorship, suddenly turned around and voluntarily handed power over to moderates.

There is a wealth of documentary evidence which testifies to the genuine hatred of Dunlop's National Bolsheviks for the vozrozhdentsy. Some of these documents will be presented later. For the time being, it is worth citing two cases. Nikolai Yakovlev, whom Dunlop counts as a leading National Bolshevik,⁷ both wrote a book entitled 'The CIA vs. the USSR' (in the opinion of Michael Scammel, Solzhenitsyn's biographer, 'a textbook of the cold war which strives to show that . . . all unofficial literature and art [in the USSR] is the product of CIA infiltration and manipulation'⁸), and spoke out as the most frenzied of Solzhenitsyn's 'academic' persecutors. Sergei Mikhalkov, also accord­ing to Dunlop a National Bolshevik, was among the initiators of a smear campaign against Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet press. Nothing these people have written gives us the slightest cause to suppose that once they had taken power they would be 'vulnerable to the arguments'

of the Orthodox doves.

Thus, the logical conclusion to be drawn from Dunlop's book is irreconcilable with his declared intention to defend the noble anti- Communist aspirations of the Russian New Right. His painstaking documentation is evidence of iust the oppos'te — the unprecedented threat postid by the New Right. For, if having seized power in Moscow, the National Bolsheviks whom Dunlop himself describes as open fascists remain in power, the West will be confronted for the first time in history with a fascist nuclear superpower.

Even though Dunlop's thesis doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, the scenario for a Russian counter-reform he describes — albeit unsuspectingly — is truly alarming. For the first time an American scholar, a product of Western training, has presented his readers wilh a possible scenano for Russia's future (in accordance with all the standards of modern political science) of a kind which before Dunlop no one, aside from myself, had tried to introduce into the currency of Western political thought — a scenario for counter-reform, something which neither the conservatives nor the liberals 111 the Western sovietologieal debate wanted to hear about.

As for John Dunlop, a man who sincerely believed he was speaking as a witness for the defence of the Russian Idea in the court of history, I hope the reader is now satisfied that in reality he is taking the stand in the opposite capacity, as a witness for the prosecution.

Notes

Dunlop, op. cit , pp. 256 — 7

Ibid., p. 257.

Jbid., p. 264.

Ibid., p. 265.

Ibid., p. 262.

Ibid, p 265. The reader may encounter some difficulties in connection with Dunlop's classifications (.inasmuch as the single dividing line between vozrozhdentsy and National Bolsheviks in his scheme of things is profession of the Russian Orthodox faith). How would we categorize, say, the 'Union of Christian Socialists', first mentioned by Maxim Gorkv ('Novaia zhizn" ['New Life'], 20 May 1918)? On the one hand, this organization touted the physical and moral supremacy of the Aryan race and its slogan was 'Antisemites of the world unite!' From this standpoint, it would have to be counted among the ranks of the National Bolsheviks. On the other hand, all the members of this union were Russian Orthodox, which obliges anyone adhering to Dunlop's system of classification to group them with the vozrozhdentsy The participation of such obvious vozrozhdentsy as Antonn, Bishop Volynskii. Gcrmogen, Bishop Saratovskii, Ilidor (Sergei Trufanov) and I. I. Vostorgov in the Black Hundreds in no way helps us resolve this problem. Nor, moreover, does the fact that the

Black Hundreds' 'emblems and banners are kept in churches, so it's clear to everybody that the Holy Orthodox Church fully approves of and blesses the lofty patriotic sacred cause of the Union of the Russian People and takes its activity under its own protection'. I am quoting this from Walter Laqueur's Russia and Germany (p. 85), which Dunlop, judging by his book, has also read. Nevertheless, this did not prevent him from lclud. lg all Russian Orthodox adherents of the Russian Idea in the camp of the vozrozhdentsy, whose future 'rule' he portrays as a victory of good over evil.

Ibid., pp. 261-2.

Michael Scammel, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, W. W. Norton, 1984.

6

The Western Debate and the Russian New Right

The time has come to turn to the Western debate on Russia and see what our study of the degeneration of the Russian Idea has to add Does the historical approach toward Russia that lies at the foundation of this study strengthen or undermine the main arguments, of, for instance, liberal sovietology in the debate? Does the historical drama of the Russian Idea interrelate with the main arguments of conservatively oriented sovietology? At first glance, the answer is 'no However, first impressions can be deceiving.

First, let us look at the argument that links the scale and intensity of Russian expansionism with Communist ideology It's true that only a Communist dictatorship managed to realize (at least m part) the expansionist program of the degenerate Russian Idea. It's also true that it succeeded — by means of very brutal counter-reform — in restoring serfdom to Russia and even for a time in making slave labour the foundation of Soviet production relations. Furthermore, in 1951 it made a 'final solution' of the Jewish question the most urgent problem in Russia. But what does all this prove? Is it not evidence that degenerate left-wing Russian extremism turned out to be a tool for implementing ihe program of degenerate right-wing extremism; that the deMitated form of Russian Marxist ideology proved to be the reverse side of the debilitated Russian Idea?

If this is correct — that any Russian extremist ideology has a tendency to degenerate and, once degenerate, proves to be an ideology of imperial expansionism — then, one might ask, why draw a connection between expansionism and Communist ideology? Where is the sense in supporting one form of Russian extremism against another (which is the de facto policy of the Reagan administration)? We may recall that the program of the pre-revolutionary Russian Idea required the domination of 'Judaized' Europe, in essence a 'New European

Order'. The full realization of this program proved beyond the means of even a Communist dictatorship at the height of counter-reform. Wc cannot know whether it would also prove to be beyond the capacity of a fascist dictatorship in a similar situation, should, God forbid, Dunlof 5 scena- о come to pass. In any event, no policy could be more absurd than one wh ,;h helped to bring about a new historical catastrophe in Russia by supporting Fascism against Communism — if only because, as the Russian proverb says, horseradish is no sweeter than radishes (six to one and half a dozen to the other).

he ideological approach toward Russia (.extremist anti-Communism) taken by the conservatives in the vVestern debate deprives us of the opportunity to view the present political situation in its historical context, to adopt a perspective that relates the past to the future. It lives only in one dimension — the present. But to neglect the past means not to think about the future. As we shall see, the liberal geopolitical approach toward Russia suffers from the same shortcoming.

In order to show this, I shall examine here two main arguments of each of the two schools which dominate America's Soviet debate. In addition, I shall try to show that only an historical approach teaches us no1 to place our trust in any Russian extremist Utopias, however much goodness and prosperity they may promise Russia and the world. Most important, however, is that only an historical approach can uncover the fundamental patterns in Russian political behaviour — and so help Western leaders not to slumble about in the dark, or, at the very least, save them from such errors as occurred in the Radio Liberty scandal.

An h storical approach opposes in principle the conventional wisdom shared by all sides in America's Soviet debate, which holds that 'the secretive nature of Sov iet society makes t something of a "black box" to us,'¹ and because of th s the 'Soviet Union will remain both an enigma and an inescapable fact. ² Although such a defeatist and self- deprecating position indeed logically follows from both of the conventional approaches, n fact we have no need to blame the Russian political system or 'the secret've nature of Soviet soiJety' for this. We ourselves have restricted our vision of Russia to only the two or three generations since 1917. We ourselves have refused the broader perspective that is opened up by analysis of the political behaviour of at least twenty generations of Russians (we shall discuss this in greater detail later). From the standpoint of an historical approach, we are the ones who have transformed Russia into a 'black box'.

The conservatives' flawed argument

The first, and main, argument of conservative sovietology I would formulate thus: successful resistance to Communist totalitarianism can be achieved only by a policy of actively undermining Communist regimes, and ultimately by overthrowing Russia's Communist regime. In the prc-nuclear age such a policy, if consistently conducted by an American administration, would have led to a new world war. Had the West won such a war, it could then have occupied the Soviet Union, broken apart its empire and forced upon occupicd Russia a more or less liberal constitution, That would be the 'Japanese modei for forcibly transforming military autocracy. To put it another way, in the pre-nuclear age such a policy would have made some sense, if, of course, the West were willing to take the risk and pay the price of a new world war in order to break the centuries-long patterns of the Russian political system's behaviour. But what sense does such a policy make in the nuclear era? Now that a new world war and occupation of Russia are unthinkable, the possibility of breaking these patterns by imposing a new regime does not exist, and, even if Communist power were overthrown internally, Russia would continue to function according to the same old pattern

Have the conservative ideologues ever pondered this perspective? How do they picture Russia's future in the event of the policy they propose being successful? We simply do not know, because they have never provided any answers. The most cursory glance at Russian history, however, should be enough to convince us that Russia responds to a situation of supreme danger created by a hostile international environment by turning itself into a garrison-state dictatorship In other words, the only conceivable result of the policy proposed by the conservatives, if it were successful, would be Dunlop's scenario, a terroristic counter-reform leading to Russia's transformation into a Fascist nuclear superpower. Is this the result the conservatives are amiuig for?

In this, more than anything else, they paradoxically resemble early twentieth-century Russian left-wing extremists and in particular the Bolsheviks. They too were blinded by their hatred for tsarism, seeing it as the ultimate evil, and thought that the liberation of Russia from tsarism would bring prosperity to their country and to the world. If we recall the ominous imperial fantasies of the Russian Ideaipat the height of its expansionist ambitions and those of the Black Hundreds, there was probably more substance in this extremist anti-tsarism than today we are ready to admit. Its great mistake, however, was the same as that of contemporary conservatives: it planned to quench the inferno w'lh more fire, to replacc one form of extremism with another. We know what came of this.

Two extremes

"he degeneration of extremist ideoloj ics and the fact that, once degenerate, they are transformed nto their opposites, represents one of the fundamental patterns of political cbangc in Russia. For the reader who was not convinced of this by my outline of the degeneration of the Russian Idea, I shall try to show briefly how the same thing happened to its antithesis, Russian Marxism.

Con; der the enormous gulf that separated Sergei Sharapov's Russopf Ле Utopia from Vladimir Lenin's original vision when he first took charge of the Russian emp re. Sharapov's Utopia foresaw an empire that had trampled dozens of nations underfoot who were obliged to Russia for hav^:ng saved them from the threat of 'Jewish slavery' and 'a Universal Despot from the House of David'. Lenin's catechism, on the other hand, procla ned the end of ernoire:

The equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia.

The right of the peoples of Russia to national self-determination up to and including secession and the formation of independent slates.

The abolition of all privileges and restrictions based on nationality and national-religious affiliation.³

Sharapov's utop a, anticipating H'tler, saw the world's liberation n the final solution of the Jew sh question. Lenin's catech. ;m opposed to this the liberation of the proletariat from alienated forced labour. For Lenin, the resolution of the nationaln.es' question was merely part and parcel of eliminating man's exploitation of man. In this sense, the Jewish question as such did not exist for h m. In any event, it was not supposed to exist any more by 1951. By that time all nations were supposed to have joined together into one noble humane family. Such was the promise of Communism. Also by .1951, according to Lenin, Communism (with a capital C) was supposed to have triumphed in Russia as the final and perfect phase of human history. 'The generation whose members are now around fifty', sa.d Lenin in October 1921, 'cannot count on seeing a Communist society. This generation will die off before that time But the generation which is now fifteen years' old, it shall see a Communist society' ⁴

The generation to whom Lenin promised that they would see the completion of history, the generation born about 1905, was in power m Russia in 1951 Brezhnev, Kosygin, Suslov and Ku.lenko were all born around 1905. And what was it they saw? They saw the re- establishment of the Russian empire, once again, as before the revolution, tightly buttoned into military and paramilitary uniforms with shining epaulettes, medals and marshals' stars. They saw a patriarchate of the Orthodox church, reinstated along with serfdom, something not even the last tsars had managed to do. They saw the Jewish question on the eve of a 'tinal solution', and a soldier-emperor leading his nation to world hegemony.

The Leninist Utopia, so decisively and (it seemed) for all lime having done away with Sharapov's vision, yielded to i* totally |ust three decades later. The generation that was fifteen years' old at the time of Lenin's solemn promise saw, not a miraculous and unprecedented historical leap 'from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom', but the apotheosis of miper.al slavery foretold by the prophets of the Russian Idea. The ongmal catechism of Russian Marxism truly did degenerate and become transformed into its very opposite. In this sense, its fate was very much the same as that of the Russian Idea's original catechism.

An historical hypothesis

This brings us to yet another conservative argument, used mainly by the Russian New Right and on occasion by their Western academic 'fellow travellers'. It runs as follows: Russia would have avoided all those misfortunes and not been transformed into an 'evil empire' (would not have suffered a counter-reform, ы my terminology) if that black whirlwind' of Western ideology had not caught her unawares in 1917: if this malevolent whirlwind, at first 111 the form of the pack of irresponsible liberals who toppled the tsar, and then as a gang of Bolshevik conspirators funded by German money and leaning for support on Latvian bayonets, had not treacherously seized power n Russia.

However, the centuries-old patterns of political change in Russia testify to the contrary. The terroristic counter-reform was brought about by the collapse of reform and not by the intrigues of any 'whirlwind', black or otherwise. It would have occurred even if there had been no German money, Latvian bayonets or Bolshevik conspirators, even ii' the contemporary prophet of the Russian Idea, Purishkevich, had ended up in power instead of Lenin. His government would have still needed terror n order to halt the disintegration ol the empire, curb the spontaneous seizures of landlord estates by peasants and factories by workers and deal with the anarchy and demora)Nation that gripped the country after three long years of slaughter. They would still have needed an ideology to justify this terror and the restoration of the empire, and to ustify так ng war on the peasantry, the working class, and any national minorities wno tried to secede from the empire. They had no other deology suited to this role at their disposal, apart from the 'tooth-gnashing obscuranf'sm' of the degenerate Russian Idea. No other means besides terroristic counter- reform would have saved the emp re. It suffices to recall the most famous prediction of Konstantia Leont'ev.

My feelings tell me that someday a Slavic Orthodox tsar shall take the socialist movement in hand and, with the blessing of the Church, set up a socialist form of life in place of the bourgeois-liberal one. And this Socialism will be a new and severe threefold form of slavery, to the communes, to the Church and to the Tsar.⁵

Vasilii Rozanov insightfully remarked on this point, 'One who knows and senses Leont'ev, has to agree that, given free reign and the power (with which Nietzsche wouldn't have done anything), he would plunge Europe by fire and bloodshed into a monstrous political turn of events.'⁶ So much for the fellow-travellers' assurances that the Russian Idea could not give birth to a Stalin.

The laissez-faire argument

At first glance, the liberal arguments look much more rational and, if I may say, secular. The liberals do not keep talking about crusades and they don't bring the religious and ideological dimensions of superpower confrontation to centre stage. Their geopolitical metaphors cast Russia as a new superpower which, like imperial Germany on the eve of World War I, is challenging the old world order (or, like a new Austria —Hungary, is trying to save itself from disintegration by means of imperial expansion). This form of the Western debate lacks the flavour of the medieval dispute of the conservatives' argument. Indeed, liberal sovietology recognizes the problem of political change as 'absolutely fundamental for our conception of the Soviet Union. ⁷ Moreover, it believes that 'it is precisely here where our stereotypes are the most str kingly outmoded.'⁸

All this notwithstanding, if one listens closely to their discussion, it is difficult not to feel lhat such arguments belong more appropriately in the mouths of Enlightenment philosophers or the fathers of the American constitution. Certainly, after the heated medieval atmosphere of conservative disputes, it's pleasant to find oneself in the cool climate of detached rational doctrines of, say, the Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, with their unshakeable faith n the panaceas of enlightenment and progress. However, i: is hard to imagine such doctrines leading to a concrete set of policies appropriate to ihe nuclear age.

Their basic argument can probably be summed up thus: if we do not embark upon an active crusade, as advocated by the conservatives, but instead leave the Soviet Union in peace, limiting ourselves to the containmenl of its expansionist tendencies and of the arms race, then Russia will somehow, all by herself, not only overcome her historical decline, but also gradually liberalize her regime, thereby resolving for us the fatally dangerous problem of confrontation with a totalitarian superpower In contrast to the feverish anti-Commun.st activism of conservatives, this postulate requires from the West simply caution, exactness and tact (plus, of course, the wish to stop the insane nuclear arms race by means of control agreements). Progress and enlighten­ment will take care of the rest, either with the help of generational change within the Soviet leadership or because the ^;mperative of modernizing the economy will sooner or later force the leadership to move toward political liberalization.

Timothy Colton epitomizes this abslract beliel in progress with the following statement: 'The ultimate Western resource for influencing the Soviet society is . . . the slow-acting magnet of Western culture.'⁹ He understands that 'altered attitudes and values take generations.'¹⁰ Yet we simplv can do nothing more to move Russia 'in the direction congenial to Western 'iiterests.'¹¹

Sue! is the thiust of all liberal arguments. Let us examine them one by one. beginning with 'the slow-acting magnet of Western culture.'

Didn't this magnet exist throughout all the five centuries of Russia's imperial history? It did. Why ihen did it fail, over the course of twenty generations, to move Russia in the direction congenial to Western interests? What grounds do we have to expect it to accomplish in future generations what it faiied to do in all the preceding ones? Even more to the point, does humanity have at its disposal these future generations in the nuclear age? Let us turn to Colton's own prediction that n the event a new reform in the 1980s fails, Russia would face an unprecedented с sis as early as the next decade: 'If conservatives or reacdonai es gain the upper hand in the 1980s, or if bungled reforms come to naught ... the likelihood would then be high that the 1990s would bring a crisis of legitimacy and far more searching dilemmas for the regime, with its core structures and values open to question and under attack as never before'?¹²

It appears that the 'slow-working magnet' would be too slow to prevent such lamentable developments. So what does libera) sovietology recommend in tl s case, besides a remedy which surely wouldn't be ready in time, f ever? What would happen to Russia, and to the world, if its leadership finds itself 'under attack as never before'? There are no answers to these crucial questions in Colton's book. It is here where the qu'ck generational change comes to the rescue of the 'slow-working magnet.'

The engine of charge is the emergence of new generations, with new expectations and experiences, . . . The younger elites are well educated and competent. Not liberals in a Western sense, their thinking is nevertheless far more sophisticated than that of high-level party members, which has been characterized by parochial fundamentalism. They are free of the formative influences of the Revolution and the Stalinist terror and are relatively knowledgeable about the outside world and prepared to learn from it.¹³

This implies that, as a result of the gradual trans ,:ion of the Soviet elite, and consequently the government, from socialist fundamentalism to, let us say, socia st enligntenment, polit'cal change in Rus; la v 11 progress in a positive, nberal direct m.

The problem with th s argument is that, unfortunately, it does not adequately describe political change even in the Soviet period of Russian history (insignificant though this may be on the chronological scale). The present-day Soviet government is ndeed younger and more educated than its immediate predecessor. It is not, however, younger or more educated than the first Soviet government, its predecessor's predecessor. Lenin did not live to reach the same age at which the youngster' Gorbachev became general secretary, and Lenin was significantly older than his colleagues. In reality, the first Soviet government probably was the youngest and most educated one in Russian history. This circumstance in no way prevented it, however, from presiding over a regime of counter-reform.

Subsequent Soviet governments were increasingly older and less educated, until, at last, they lapsed into the aforementioned parochial fundamentalism, which nevertheless did not prevent some of them from presiding over a relatively liberal regime in the 1920s and others over a regime of terro, istic counter-reform in the 1930s and "40s Once again, irrespective of age and level of education, the post-Stalinist governments presided over a regime first of reform in the 1950s and early '60s and then of political stagnation in the 1970s. Nikita Khrushchev was significantly older than Leonid Brezhnev, something which did not hinder him from being a bold and colourful reformer, whereas Brezhnev and his generation, the very same one to whom Lenin had promised the Communist dream fullilled, landed the country m a quagmire of stagnation.

In other words, facts show that the rhythm of political change n Russia has never corresponded to generational changes or changes ,n the age and level of education of the political elite — even ,n the Soviet period. All the more so, the theory of generational change proves a completely unreliable guide to the labyrinths of the Russian political system once we reject the postulate of Soviet Russia as a 'black box' and move beyond the boundaries of the Soviet sub-system of Russian autocracy. Here it turns out that our study of the degeneration of the Russian Idea (as well as Russian Marxism) has a very direct relation to America's Soviet debate History, in essence, strips us of the optimistic hope that everything in Russia will take care of itself with the mechanical change of generations, that biology will serve as a substitute for sound policy, which is what the liberal thesis ultimately comes down to One generation of Russian political ideologists after another has passed before us and each was less and less liberal and more and more bellicose and expansionist than the one before. If KonstantMi Aksakov were to be called a fundamentalist of the Russian Idea, who would argue that Danilevskii was more liberal than him, not to speak of Leont'ev or Sharapov?

' here is no doubt that the generation which replaced the one to whose lot it fell to live under the quarter-century terroristic dictatorship of Ivan the Terrible came to power with 'new expectations and experiences' and was 'more educated and competent' than its predecessors. It too truly did make an effort to reform the Russian political system, just as Khrushchev's generation tried to. Yet it was defeated, and the generation which succeeded it, still more educated and competent one must assume, none the less landed the country in a political quagmire, as did Brezhnev's generation The same scenario was almost totally re-enacted after the generation that lived under the dictatorship of Peter the Great,¹⁴ and after Paul I and Nicholas I, This pattern has continued to operate right up until the end of Stalin's dictators!: p — and beyond.

Hence, we would seem to be dealing with a model of political change n Russia that includes two further patterns. According to one of them, generational change does not influence the archetypc of this change. Accord ig to the second, the political history of Russia over the last eighteen to twenty generations has in effect been a story of faded and reversed reforms. Each of these either gave way to political stagnation or provoked a terroristic counter-reform. Even if everything else did in fact radically alter in Russia with the change of generations, the patterns of political change did not — either before or after the Revolution. That is the answer to the first argument of liberal sovietology.

An ahistorical approach

We recall that, according to the second liberal argument, Russia must gradually liberalize because of the imperative of economic modern­ization and the growing complexity of administering its economic system. The most optimistic representalivc of liberal sov otology, Jerry Hough, devoted a sigi ''.cant portion of his textbook, How the Soviet Union is Governed, wrnten during the Brezhnev era to offering evidence that Russia was taking serious steps in the ( reciion of liberalization.¹⁵ Unfortunately, the most cursory glance at Russian economic history is enough to convince us that such opumism is groundless. Over the course of the 400 years that separate Ivan the Terrible's terror from Josef Stalin's, the complexity of administering Russia's economic system ncreased without interruption — yet с d not lead to political modernization. Among the nations of Europe, Russia alone underwent three consecutive and tortuous attempts at industrialization and economic modernization — under Peter I, Alexander III and Stalin. According to the classic textbook on European economic history, Russia after the first of its modernizations, was economically the most advanced country ш eighteenth-century Europe.¹⁶ This, however, did not preclude the counter-reforms of Paul I or Nicholas I from again steering her into an era of historical and economic decline.