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. <hus, as far as political doctrine is concerned, they are indistinguishable, not only from one another but also from Russia's Communists (not to mention her Fascists).
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.