Autocracy locked Russia into a kind of a historical trap from which she, as her entire past testifies irrefutably, cannot extricate herself on her own — without the intellectual and political support of the world community. Each of the three major sectors of her poj cal establishment — the reformist, the conservative and the extremist (revolutionary—reactionary) — seems to be strong enough to neutralize the others. It was, one must assume, because of Ithis that a Russia of reform, the only one capable in princple of unlocking the trap, has been unable to fulfil her historical mission to modernize the nation. Every time a reform was about to do this it was swept away either by forces of conservatism or by those of extremism. There is no other source for it to get the additional intellectual and political weight needed for a decisive breakthrough, except the internat onal community.
Unfortunately, these lessons of Russian history have not yet found a place in America's Soviet debate. This is why neither the medieval passions of the conservatives nor the passive academic optimism of the liberals offers any kind of practical solution to the terrible problem of superpower nuclear confrontation. Negotiations have been tried as has refusal to negotiate. At times there have been agreements on arms control and at others there have been none. Detente has been tried as well as cold war In essence, all the conservatives' recommendations have been tried over the past four postwar decades, as have all those of the liberals. Nothing has worked The arms race and potential for confrontation have grown and put down deep institutional roots Now the whole cycle is starting from its beg nn.ig again: the liberals prefer new arms control agreements if not a new detente; the conservatives counter with an intensification of the arms race under the guise of strategic defence. The Western debate grows more and more reminiscent of a broken record where the needle keeps skipping over the same section of music again and again What, however, is the sense in repeating the same ineffectual strategies — on an ever growing level of technological complexity — thus prolonging the confrontation into infinity? Isn't it time to learn from our own experience, even if only the elementary lesson that, in order to resolve rhis confrontation, what is needed is quite simply another kind of approach toward Russia and another set of strategies altogether '
I am speaking about a set of strategies winch would combine the activism of conservatives, though without ts aggressiveness and militarism, with the optimism of liberals, yet without its passivity and detached scholasticism, one aimed at preventing a new systennc crisis in Russia at the end of the twentieth century. These strategies will be discussed in detail in my concluding chapter. Suffice it to say here that not to react to the Russian Idea's resurrection is a dangerous course. This rebirth marks, just as it did in the past century, the approach of the same system с crisis for Russia in which, as we know from experience, 'there is no middle ground'. Whatever extremist ideology should win out in Moscow as the result of such a cnsis and no matter which avenue of escape the empire takes, things would end, as they did in 1917 and always have in such instances .11 Russia, with a new counter-reform — this time, one capable of transforming the country into a fascist nuclear superpower.
In 1903, the world did not take notice of the formation of the Bolshevik Party in Russia. Afterwards, 11 hmdsight, volume upon volume was written about it Only later did it become evident that this had been a key event for all subsequent world politics .11 this century. Unquestionably, the liberals and conservatives in the contemporary
Western debate do not see the formation of the Russian New Right as a key event of our time. Are they repeating the same error their predecessors made in 1903?
Notes
JoseDh S. Nye Jr., ed., The Making of America's Soviet Policy, Yale University Press. 1984, p. 4.
Ibid., p. vii. ^ .
Dokumenty sovetskoi vneshnei politiki, v. I, Moscow: 1957, p. 15.
V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4th edition, v. 31, p. 274.
Leont'ev, Sochineniia, v. 6, p. 98.
Russkii vestnik, 1903, No. 4, p. 642.
Marshall Shulman, 'What the Russians Really Want', Harper's, April 1984, p. 69.
Ibid.
Timothy Co)ton, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union, Council on Foreign Relations, 1984, p. 99.
Ibid.
Ibid
Ibid., p. 79.
ф d. Testifying to the almost universal acceptance of this thesis by American liberals, S. Frederick Starr repeated it, quite independently but almost verbatim, a few years later: 'Soviet society is evolving in reform st d'rect;ons through a momentum on its own. The old Stalinists are dying out, and their replacements are better educated and less insecure and dogmatic. The information revolution is proceeding slowly but making headway against the entrenched secretiveness of official life in Russia'. (The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 June, 1986, p 31.
See, for example, Alexander Yanov, The Drama of the Time of Troubles', Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 12, No. Щ Spring 1978.
Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, IIow the Soviet Union is Governed, Harvard University Press, 1979.
Witt Bowden, Michael Karpovich, Abbot Payson Usher, An Economic History of Europe since 1750, American Book Co., 1937, p. 301.
7
My Hypothesis
As in the last century, contemporary imperial nationalism in Russia is composed of various different elements. Now as then, it has representatives in the official Russian establishment as well as among the dissidents who are irreconcilably opposed to that establishment. In the last century, dissident nationalism considered — and still considers today -- establishment nationalism t in this case Russian/ Soviet patriotism") an official lie. This none the less did not prevent Russian nationalism from itself becoming the regime s official "'deology in the era of Alexander Ill's counter-reform, fn other words, the interaction of the various components of imperial nationalism in Russia is governed by a dynamic all .cs own Its evolution has a structure. Given this, can we formulate an hypothesis to include this dynamic and structure in a concise and schematic way9 Can a single formula be found that would both explain the evolution of imperial nationalism and at the same time generalize the process of the degeneration of the Russian Idea n the last century to take <n the analogous process that seems to unfold before our eyes today? Such a formula should not substitute analysis for a comforting but naive division of its elements into 'good nationalists' and 'bad nationalists', as Dunlop does. I shall now try to offer such a formula based on the following hypothesis:
The Russian Idea arises as a nieta-ideology, i.e., as a pair of sub- ideologies, one 'upsta' s' and one 'downstairs' (let's call them the Establishment and the Dissident Right).
These two begin in confrontation with each other: at the first stage, the ideological sisters do not recognize their kmsh-p. The Establishment Right identifies itself with the establishment of the system, regarding its dissident sister not only as a competitor but also as a subversive ideology, and oppresses and silences its proponents The Dissident Right, for its part, identifies with the anti-establishment dissident movement, accusing its establishment sister of profaning Russia's national feelings and of exploring patriotism for its own ends. But inasmuch as both of them have a common enemy — the West and its agents in Russia, the Westernizers — and see the intensification of 'Russianness' as the only solution to the same historical challenge (the decline of the empire), deep down they sense their kMship, and this leads them — via a series of painful ideological and political metamorphoses — to a state of mutual accommodation. (Elements incapable of adapting are simply weeded out or become insignificant marg rial sects, as, for example, happened to Slavophiles of the immobile Aksakov cast' (or 'good nationalists', in Dunlop's language) who at the turn of the century were headed by Yu. Samarin. D. Shipov and V. L'vov).