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.