This natural concern for the suffering of one's own people would not have elicited anything but sympathy if strangely familiar and ominous voices had not suddenly broken into the general nationalist chorus. There passed from hand to hand a leaflet — one of the first 'swallows' of samizdat — entitled 'A Code of Morals', which had come out of the depths of the Moscow City Committee of the Komsomol. It was written by a noted Komsomol functionary named Valerii Skurlatov and contained such assertions as 'there is no baser occupation than to be a thinker, an intellectual'. It called for 'orienting our youth toward the mortal struggle' connected with 'the cosm'c mission of our people along with 'introducing corporal punishment for women who give themselves to foreigners, branding and sterilizing them'.3 At first, this seemed a sinister curiosity. But in the spring of 1968, when the arrest of the nationalist Fetisov group (whose ideas represented 'criticism of the Soviet system from a position of extreme totalitarianism and chauvinism')4 became known, there were no longer any doubts that the reborn Russian Idea was casting its dark chauvi, ist shadow. In the words of these dissident nationalists 'mankind's historical development was represented as a struggle between order and chaos, embodied in the form of the Jewish people, who had been creating disorder in Europe for two thousand years, until Germanic and Slavic principles — the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin — put an end to this.' Furthermore, A. Fetisov and his confederates saw 'these regimes as historically inevitable and posit ve phenomena'.5 (It is worth pointing out that these people - just like their role models N. Markov and Yu. Odinzgoev — were Russian Orthodox, i.e., vozrozhdentsy in Dunlop's present-day terminology, and therefore good nationalists'.)
Anti-Westernism
Thus, already at the end of the l%0s, the regenerated Russian Idea, 111 its most embryonic form, was clearly demonstrating that it had two roots. One of these was descended from Konstantin Aksakov's liberating anti-despotic Utopia, while the other was from Sergei Sharapov's mi'itant imperial fantasy. Despite their differences, however, both ihese tendencies were to find a common devil. Indeed, the origins of Solzhenitsyn s devil, as events soon showed, in no way differed from those of Fetisov's. Both blamed Western ideology-, rather than the Russian empire, for the Russian people's misfortunes. Some blamed the Western ideology of Marxism and the Bolshevik conspirators who managed to conquer Russia with its help. Others blamed Western Judaization', which threatened to visit chaos upon the world. Neither, however, noticed the logical flaw in their main argument
In fact, they had as little reason to blame the West or the Jews for the plight of the Russian peasantry as. say , Turkish nationalists al the turn of the century had to blame the Armenians for the impoverishment of the native population of the Ottoman Empire. After all, wasn't the Turkish peasantry, 'ike the Russian peasantry, 'that state's main mass of slaves'? Certainly, ts situation was dire, and it was tar worse off than the other peoples of the empire, particularly the enterprising Armenians. Turkish nationalists at the turn of the century had every reason to say, anticipating Solzhenitsyn, that the Turkish people within the Ottoman Empire are emaciated and biologically degenerating. their national consciousness is humiliated and suppressed But they would hardly be justified in asserting on the basis of this that 'it is a thoughtless delusion to consider the Turks the 'ruling nation n the Ottoman Empire'.
Herein lies the very insidiousness of the traditional Eastern European continental empires: while the elite of the imperial nation dominates the empire, its peasantry is forced to shoulder the 'burden of empire' It would be just as absuid to blame W estern ideologies for this as it is to blame the Jews or the Armenians: it wasn't they who created either the Ottoman or the Russian empires. These empires were founded by Turks and Russians. The truth is something quite different, the Ottoman Empire disintegrated as a result of World War I, whereas the Russian one managed to prolong its existence after the destruction of tsansm.
This is why I speak of the political system of autocracy as an 'historical trap'. Still it is incomprehensible why the West or the Jews should be blamed for this. Were they the ones who created Russian political tradition? Was it they who founded autocracy? The hollow - ness of the argument for shifting the guilt for Russia's misfortunes on to others makes it scarcely credible. At F.rst glance, it might seem to be a logical error, if not an aberration. But studying it more closely, the observer uncovers a method: the Russian empire and Russian political tradition are thereby relieved of responsibility for what has happened to Russia With the aid of such a logical sleight of hand it becomes possible to justify the ideological nucleus of the Russian Idea (that which unites the 'good nationalists' like Solzhen .syn, and the 'bac , like Fetisov): a return of the nation 'home', that is, a return to the age- old isolationist and imperial political traaiiion represented as the ideal of true Russian civilization.
It is therefore by no means a logical error to blame the West or the Jews for Russia's misfortunes. On the contrary, il is the foundation of the Russian Idea. Without this, Russian nat.ona .sm. as any other imperial nationalism, simply could not exist. It cannot be anything but anti-Western and anti-Jewish; it must be sure of Russia's golden age, of her blessed Utopian 'home', which was destroyed by certain alien and foreign elements, but to which Russia may return if she casts off the foreign yoke. For these reasons, Russian national - >m is incapable of fighting against Russian autocracy, despite all its rhetoric of liberation. In the final analysis, it must turn into a justification for autocracy and an apology tor empire. From the very beginning it was a 'new chain laid on thought', and in the 1960s, that very same 'duality', which the classic critique of the Russian Idea idem ified, was right in front of us.
Scholarly crossfire
However, even to come close to analysing of these enigmas of Russian nationalism was unthinkable without first clearing away the obstructions presented by the dogmas of the Marxist 'class approach'. Over the course of decades this dogma, presented like Moses' tablets, had transformed the study of Russian nationalism into an intellectual wasteland. According to the dogma, 'The Slavophile movement arose among landlords who wanted to prolong their rule based on old patriarchal foundations, serfdom and all those privileges which the existing order had given them.'6 This theory seemed indisputable — so much so that when I started the debate on Slavophilism in May 1969, at first I seemed to my adversaries of the Marxist old guard to be just a whipping boy who had foolishly stuck his head under the implacable axe of Marxist logic. 'Sham enigma' was how the first of my opponents' articles was emitted. Others accused me of defending a 'landlord serf-owner' deology, ; nplying that I was not a good Soviet citizen (to whom else would it occur to defend such an obvious heresy?).