If the real threat to Russia is not missiles but 'satiety', then Lobanov's third — and most important — 'findmg' starts to appear rationaclass="underline" namely that the Americanization ot the spirit can be combated only by its Russrfication Here begins the, so to speak, 'constructive section' of Lobanov's program. This is also where his inevitable encounter with the VSKhSON programme occurs. Just like the VSKhSON, he starts from the assumption that 'the reason . . . for the dangerous tension in the world lies much deeper than the economic or political spheres'. It derives from the fact that 'a spiritual struggle for the individual is going on'. In other words. Lobanov also transfers the centre of the world drama from the struggle of socialism vs. capitalism to the metaphysical realm of spiritual confrontation. In the same way as the VSKhSON, he too predicts that 'sooner or later these two irreconcilable forces will collide with one another". But he gives the actors in this approaching mortal conflict different names: 'moral uniqueness and Americanism of the spirit'.15 (Incidentally, isn t Lobanov's 'Americanism of the spirit' the exact counterpart of the VSKhSON's 'satanocracy'?) It is true that Lobanov's 'moral uniqueness' is nothing like the VSKhSON's 'theocracy' (Lobanov believes in the potential effectiveness of the Soviet regime), but what interests us here is that Lobanov, like the VSKhSON, sees the only alternative to the world's ruination in a third, 'Russian", path.
Of course, noblesse oblige (and the censor too!), Lobanov's constructive recommendations do not go beyond suggesting that the regime seek its social powei base (a constituency, so to speak) not among the 'educated shopkeepers', but among simple Russians, peasants unspoiled by either satiety or education, unique — and in their uniqueness not subject to the temptations of world evil. 'These are the people', Lobanov concludes, 'who have saved Russia. Are they not the embodiment of the historical and moral potential of the nation? Is not our faith and hope to be found in them?'16
Cutting through Lobanov's rhetoric and emotional outbursts, we can reduce the 'constructive section' of his programme to the three main propositions:
The regime's social orientation should be Russified. (Reliance on the 'educated strata', on the 'diplomaed masses', represents the ruinous Western path, leading to the bourgeoisification of Russia; hence the regime's orientation toward universal secondary education and broadening the system of universities runs counter to the Russian spiri,:' and will lead to a deepening of the ciis s.)17
The regime's domestic political strategy should be Russified. (It is not 'material prosperity', wh ch lev. ably leads to 'Americanization of the sp rifl but spiritual Russification, that is the key to the nation's salvation.)18
The regime's foreign poucy should also be Russified. The country must be closed to alien cultural influences. Detente, from this point of view, appeared very much like a one-way street, an instrument for the 'Americanization of Russia's spirit'.
'InevitaDility'
Lobanov spoke mostly of the 'national sp rit' and of its 'corrupters'. However, the conclusions which seemed to follow from his article were so fundamentally opposed to the basic attitudes of the regime and the interests of a considerable part of the establishment that n practical terms no discussion of them was possible in the official press. Even in living rooms his article was spoken about for the most part in whispers. This torpid silence encouraged Molodaia gvardia to new exploits. Viktor Chalmaev's essay 'Inevitability' was met with a storm of indignation, not because it was less bold than Lobanov's, but because it seemed less immec ately relevant — because arguments about it could be portrayed as arguments about history rather than about the need for change in the currcm regime s social and political strategy. In fact, Chalmaev was attempting to lay the historiographic groundwork for Lobanov's conception of the Russific- ation of the spirit His aim was to persuade Russian youth of the historical inevitability of global confrontation between aggressive Americanization' and the only force in the world capable of resisting it — Russia.
The tone of Chalmaev's article is the same as Lobano\ s, but his vision of the future confrontation is even more apocalyptic He tells horrifving stories about 'the loss of many wonders of human civilization in the bourgeois world He argues (with the help of Ivan Bunin) that 'America is the first country • • • which, although enlightened, lives without ideas'.1" He also inveighs against 'vulgar satiety' and 'material prosperity'.20 But when he speaks with elation of the Archpriest Avvakum, (who, in the Muscovite tsardoni, performed the same function that Aksakov did in the Petersburg empire and Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet) as a 'Russian herald of the word of Christ, humbled before no one',21 when he speaks of the 'fluidity of the Russian folk spirit which in its development often runs ahead of the outward forms of the people's daily ives ,22 and — if that wasn't going far enough — adds that the 'official regime and the canons of the state ... by no means take Russia to her 1 mil'23 — i must have tried the patience of the 'official regime'. It was not at all cleai whether, in Chalmaev's view, the 'fluid Russian sp-rit' had not already surpassed those very 'outward forms it was not supposed to, and had thereby 'run ahead m its development' of the 'canons' of the current official regime'.
Chalmaev was attacked — ferociously. 'The canons of the state' represented by a powerful clique of Marxist dogmatists (Soviet Preasthood, as I call them) gave the 'folk spirit' (in the person of Chalmaev) to understand that it was they who were still firmly ui the saddle and had no intention of yielding that position to any 'herald of the word of Christ — even a 'Russian' one. This was a kind of declaration of war between canonical Marxism and the Establishment Right — a fight to the death whose finale even now is far from clear.
Indeed, Chalmaev's interpretation contradicts all the Marxist canons. To him, Russian history is essentially that of the development and maturation of the 'national spirit:' — its preparation for the last decisive battle with Americanism, for another, more glorious Stalingrad where the Russian spit it will finally triumph over the bourgeois devil. NTo gulf exists between Soviet and tsarist Russia for Chalmaev. It is not revolutions or reforms which are the landmarks of his history, but rather the battles in which the 'Russian spirit' came of age: from Lake Chud, where Prince Aleksandr Nevskii routed the Germans, to the field of Kul kovo, where Prince Dmitrii Donskoi defeated the Tartars; from Poltava, where Peter I routed the Swedes, to Borodino, where Alexander I laid the beginning of the end for Napoleon; from Stalingrad, where Stalin routed the Germans — to an unknown but impending new Stalingrad. From his standpoint, the October Revolution was just another stage in the maturing of the Russian spirit, and thus by no means the epoch-making date of the birth of socialism. To him, the actions of Ivan the Terrible or Patriarch Germogen, for instance, were just as important as those of Lenin — all of them led the 'national spirit' to feats of greatness on behalf of the state. 'This is the history of the people', writes Chalmaev, 'who, sometimes by evolution and sometimes by means of revolutionary explosions, pass from one form of state and societal consciousness to another, more progressive one '24