4- The Irony of Russian
In looking for some way of understanding the perplexities of history, the concept of irony has a certain appeal. A sense of the ironic leads man somewhere between the total explanations of nineteenth-century historicism and the total absurdity of much present-day thought. In his Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr has defined irony as "apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are shown upon closer examination to be not merely fortuitous."1 Irony differs from pathos in that man bears some responsibility for the incongruities; it differs from comedy in that there are hidden relations in the incongruities; and it differs from tragedy in that there is no inexorable web of fate woven into the incongruities.
Irony is a hopeful, though not a reassuring, concept. Man is not a helpless creature in a totally absurd world. He can do something about ironic situations, but only if he becomes aware of their ironic nature and avoids the temptation to conceal incongruities with total explanations. The ironic view contends that history laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations. It is capable of giving man hope without illusion.2 Applied to history, irony suggests that there is rational meaning to the historical process, yet that man-as a participant-is never fully able to grasp it. Seeming absurdities are part of what Hegel called "the cunning of reason." History does make sense, though our understanding of it tends to come too late. "The owl of Minerva spreads his wings only at the gathering of the dusk."3 Ironically, yet not senselessly, the flow of history always seems to be just one turn ahead of man's capacity to understand it. Today's equilibration of forces is said to be an equilibrium or even a permanent solution by those who confidently project current trends forward into the future without considering those deeper forces which account for discontinuous (or "dialectical") changes in human history. Yet such changes do occur-often with great suddenness in ways not foreseen except by isolated thinkers far removed from the rational consensus of their day. Recent Russian history is full of such discontinuous change: both revolutions of 1917,
the sudden turn to the NEP, Stalin's second revolution, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the post-war psychosis of high Stalinism, and the sudden thaw after
the tyrant's death.
Looking over the sweep of modern Russian history, one's sense of the ironic is compounded. In the Muscovite period the most extreme statements of the exclusive nature and destiny of Russia came in precisely those periods when Westernization was proceeding most rapidly-under Ivan the Terrible and Alexis Mikhailovich. Indeed, the ideologists responsible for insisting on Russia's special destiny were often Western-educated figures: Maxim the Greek and Ivan Peresvetov under Ivan and Simeon Polotsky and Innokenty Gizel under Alexis. The Muscovite rulers concealed from themselves the incongruity of increasing at one and the same time both their borrowings from and their antagonisms toward the West. The pretense inherent in the historical theology of Old Russia was intensified rather than dispelled by initial contacts with the West. The manic xenophobia of Ivan the Terrible and the Old Believers had an enduring popular appeal, and provided the basis for a modern mass culture that was gilded with scientific sanction by zoological nationalists in the late nineteenth century and by dialectical materialists in the twentieth century.
Against such a background, the tsar-reformers of Imperial Russia found their careers beset with ironies. Theoretically freer than other European sovereigns to rule solely by "their own strength" (the literal meaning of the Greek autokrates and the Russian samoderzhavie), they repeatedly found themselves in bondage to the superstitions of their nominally bonded subjects. Grants of freedom and toleration often had the effect of calling forth ungrateful if not despotic responses. "Never did the raskol enjoy such freedom as in the first year of Peter's reign, but . . . never was it to prove more fanatical."4 Catherine, who did far more than any of her predecessors to gratify the aristocratic intellectuals, was the first to experience their ideological enmity. She, who launched the unending discussion in Russia about the liberation of mankind, probably did more than any of her autocratic predecessors to militarize society and freeze the peasantry in bondage. In the nineteenth century the popularity of tsar-reformers tended to vary in inverse proportion with their actual accomplishment. Alexander I, who accomplished surprisingly little and instituted in his late years a far more repressive and reactionary rule than prevailed even under Nicholas I, was universally loved; whereas Alexander II, who accomplished an extraordinary amount in the first decade of his reign, was rewarded by an attempt on his life at the end of the decade-the first of many, one of which eventually proved successful. Among the many ironies of the revolutionary tradition stands the repeated participation of aristocratic intellectuals, who stood to
lose rather than gain privilege. "I can understand the French bourgeois bringing about the Revolution to get rights, but how am I to comprehend the Russian nobleman making a revolution to lose them?" asked a reactionary former governor of Moscow when learning on his deathbed of the Decembrist revolt.5
The victorious revolution brought with it a new tissue of ironies. It is ironic that a revolution begun by pure spontaneity in March, 1917, and defended by a wide coalition of democratic forces should be canceled out by a coup engineered by the smallest and most totalitarian of the opposition forces, and one which played almost no role in bringing tsardom to an end. It is ironic that communism came to power in the peasant East rather than the industrial West-and, above all, in the Russia which Marx and Engels particularly disliked and distrusted; and that the ideology which spoke so emphatically of economic determinism should be so completely dependent on visionary appeals and on the individual leadership of Lenin. It is ironic that the revolution in power should devour its own creators; and that many of the very first elements to lend genuine grass roots support to the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg (the proletarian leaders of the "Workers Opposition" and the sailors of Kronstadt) were among the first to be brutally repudiated by the new regime for urging in 1920-1 substantially the same reforms which the Bolsheviks had encouraged them to demand four years before.
It is ironic that one of the most complete repudiations of democracy occurred at the very time when Russia was formally adopting the seemingly exemplary democratic constitution of 1936; ironic that the Stalinist war on the creative arts should occur at precisely the time when Russia was at the forefront of creative modernism; ironic that those organs of oppression that the people were least capable of influencing should be given the label "people's."
It is ironic that the USSR should succeed where most thought it would faiclass="underline" m defeating the Germans and conquering outer space. It is perhaps most ironic of all that the Soviet leaders should fail in the area where almost everyone thought they would automatically succeed: in the indoctrination of their own youth. It is high irony that the post-war generation of Russians -the most privileged and indoctrinated of all Soviet generations, which was not even given the passing exposure to the outside world of those who fought in the war-should prove the most alienated of all from the official ethos of Communist society. There is the further irony of the Communist leaders' referring to youthful ferment as a "survival of the past," and the more familiar irony of partial reforms leading not to grateful quiescence but to increased agitation.